Ulysses

This gorgeous, knockout excerpt from the last chapter (the Molly Bloom chapter) of Ulysses, by James Joyce, showed up in my co-worker's inbox yesterday, in the daily Writer's Almanac email. Get a little sensuousness up in you, how 'bout:

"O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Mr. Obama Goes to Cairo

This morning I woke to the calm, measured tones of President Obama giving a speech addressed to “the Muslim world” at Cairo University in Egypt. It was a good way to wake up. I wasn’t able to listen to the whole speech this morning, as I had to get ready to go to work. But I just now, at lunch, read the entire speech, which can be found here; I highly recommend that everyone give it a look.

The speech is pure genius. Its purpose was, as the president said, “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition.”

If the previous administration’s mission statement was, “You are either with us or against us,” here the president was laying out a new mission statement for the U.S. and the Muslim world, one that Obama has been preaching for many years now: We are all in this together. In his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama—then a state senator from Illinois, and a candidate for the U.S. Senate—eloquently expressed this view as it related to Americans. He said:

“The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?”

What Obama was advocating today at Cairo University was a politics of hope for the entire world; what Bush and his administration advocated for the past eight years, and what former Vice-President Cheney, along with other outspoken Republicans, continue to advocate today is a politics of fear and cynicism.

The president made his case in part by using a very powerful rhetorical tool when communicating with people of faith: by deploying key passages from that group's chosen holy book—in this case, the Koran. For example, in one part of the speech that dealt with terrorism, Obama noted that, “The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.”

This rhetorical trick didn’t seem cynical because Obama, of course, has personal experience with Islam. As he said in today’s speech, “Part of this conviction [‘that the interests we share as human beings are more powerful than the forces that drive us apart’] is rooted in my own experience. I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith.”

But the finest deployment of scripture came at the end, when Obama quoted from the holy books of all three Abrahamic faiths. He said:

“We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning, keeping in mind what has been written. The Holy Koran tells us, ‘O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.’ The Talmud tells us: ‘The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.’ The Holy Bible tells us, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.’ The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God's vision. Now, that must be our work here on Earth. Thank you. And may God's peace be upon you."

I agree wholeheartedly. God’s vision is for all people to live together in peace; not for all people to be Christians; not for all nations to be democracies; not for one nation to dominate any other. I think that all men and women of faith—whether Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, or any other—should be able to get behind that sentiment. Provided, that is, that they truly follow and believe in the teachings they claim to.

Facebook and Twitter Are Eating the World; also, Lewis & Clarke

Lately I've noticed something: I'm posting way less to this blog, yet I'm posting way more to Facebook and Twitter (notice the new Twitter feed just to the right of this post; also, you can find me on Twitter here). Which is fine, I suppose, though I get the feeling—at least with Facebook—like I'm working on Maggie's farm, providing Facebook with free content for its advertisers to sell against. Has anyone else out there in TV Land been getting this feeling?

The problem is this: It's so easy to post content to Facebook. On practically every web page one might come across these late days, "Share" is an option (right alongside "Print," "Email this Story," and the like). You click the Share button and a selection of sites on which to share the story pops up; Facebook is always on there, and Blogger never is. So you click the Facebook button and then you're inside Facebook, which provides a few lines of the story, a headline, and even a photo tied to the story in question. Modern science! But it makes me neglect this blog and then, when I return, post self-indulgent junk about how, lord have mercy, I find myself posting on some sites more than others.

Sounds like I'm in need of retooling.

At any rate: In the meantime, here's a link to the links I've been posting on Facebook lately, many of which have some nice discussion from friends of mine under them. A sad substitute, but it will have to do until I figure out some way to quit feeding the Facebook machine. Anyone out there know a blog site that more easily allows you to share or post stories from other sites?

Before I go, though, one quick recommendation from Yr. Faithful Correspondent:


The other night, as I often do before bed, I was listening on my radio to NPR's New Sounds show, which is all over the place in terms of content, but is consistently good and affecting and beautiful. But so the theme for this particular night's broadcast was "new folk," and in the show I heard an amazing, delicate song that bloomed midway out into cacophony before falling back to earth and subsiding. After, I waited to hear who it was, and I'll be damned if it wasn't the band Lewis & Clarke, with whom my good friend Karen has been playing cello as of late. The song is called "Comfort Inn," and it's off Lewis & Clarke's latest album, Blasts of Holy Birth (it came out in 2007, and the gently psychedelic album cover can be seen above). Lewis & Clarke's Myspace page does not have the song, but I found it here on Last.fm. You should absolutely give it a listen, preferably late-ish at night and when you're in a contemplative mood. It's very worth it.

That's all for now, but coming soon to fighting fire with unlit matches (or, hell, maybe Facebook): A discussion of President Obama's stunning, insightful biography Dreams from My Father, which I will shortly be finishing.

Turning onto Rodney

Rodney Street looks brightly lurid
as I turn north onto it from Broadway
at 1am. Not that Broadway,
which I was on earlier, slowing through
the crush of crowds after seeing Waiting
for Godot, the Shrek crowds, Times
Square tourists; but rather the busted Broadway
under the JMZ trains, screeching overhead.
Trash flattened, pancaked into pavement,
an overgrown lot above the B.Q.E.,
which, passing, I thought I could set up a tent in.
The traffic lights staggered down Rodney
bathe the asphalt in reds and greens,
the streetlights' sodium-lamp yellow
and all of the things I will never do.

Weekend Roundup

Let's kick off this week with this amazing picture, to which I was alerted by my friend Katie:

The kid wanted to see if his own haircut felt like the president's haircut. (For more great daily pictures of Obama and others in the White House, see the Official White House Photostream, which currently features a picture of the president talking to a pirate.)

At any rate, this picture of the kid resonated with me all the more because right now I'm reading Dreams from My Father, Obama's first book.

Here's a favorite passage of mine from the book, which I highly recommend:

For the rest of the day and into the next, I thought about Ruby’s eyes. [Obama had noticed that Ruby, a black woman, was wearing colored blue contacts, and he kind of called her out on it.] I had handled the moment badly, I told myself, made her feel ashamed for a small vanity in a life that could afford few vanities. I realized that a part of me expected her and the other leaders to possess some sort of immunity from the onslaught of images that feed every American’s insecurities-the slender models in the fashion magazines, the square-jawed men in fast cars-images to which I myself was vulnerable and from which I had sought protection.

I love that Obama gets it about "the onslaught of images." That's why I want to start a band called The True Iconoclasts. Smash images. It's like Sex and the City and Friends, like magazines and movie stars; even though you know that the images are glossed and styled and Not Real, they provide a nonstop background noise against which, reflexively, you measure your own life and look and, of course, find them lacking.

Then there are these lines, from a story in this Sunday's Times about good deals for first-time renters now being more available than before in the city:

Maggie Hawryluk, a freelance publicist, graduated from Hofstra University last year. She decided to look in Astoria because she knew some Hofstra alumni who had settled there. She shares a $1,600 two-bedroom with another Hofstra graduate, a dancer who works as a waitress when she’s not auditioning.

“I guess it’s the same idea as immigrants — they find ways to stay near one another,” Ms. Hawryluk said. “When I’m out on the weekends, I’m constantly running into people that I know from college, and it’s nice to see a familiar face.”

I like that take on things. It's much more forgiving and clear-eyed than most of the vitriol that gets spouted and hand-wringing that gets done over gentrification. People want to live near others who are like them, simple as that—Trinidadians with Trinidadians, Russians with Russians, liberal arts school graduates with liberal arts school graduates.* No one ever complains about the former two groups clumping together, so why the latter?

Also RE: gentrification—I'm pretty much 100 percent over feeling at all bad about it, because A) That's the way the market works and B) What's the alternative? That no one should ever be allowed to relocate from the town in which they were born? Or, if you are a college graduate and you do move to New York City, that you should be required by law to live in the West or East Villages and disallowed elsewhere?

It's just not workable. People have to be able to move wherever they feel like. That's kind of an essential American value, I think. Now, of course, the government does have a role in preventing or mitigating some of the inherent predations of the market, in real estate and in all other areas. But swinging the pendulum too far in the direction of regulation is a bad idea.

Finally, I'm now on Twitter. If you want to follow me, my name is hrslaton. Here's a link to my page.

* Whether or not this—people desiring to clump together with others like them—is a good or bad thing is another story entirely; but I do think it's a very human thing. And arguing against human nature is a losing battle.

Robots Are Disappointing Me

Last night, in a fit of misguided hope, I OnDemanded the movie Transformers for an hour or so before bed. I'd never seen it before. What I saw of it, though, was hilarious. Literally within the first 30 seconds Michael Bay deploys no fewer than six cliches about American military men: There's one guy who speaks Spanish (everyone reprimands him, "English!") and talks fondly about his mother's cooking; another who says all he wants to do "is hold my baby girl for the first time"; and another who waxes rhapsodic, in a you've-gotta-be-kidding-me Boston accent, about a ballgame at Fenway, "a cold hot dog and a flat beer." At any rate, it's kind of hilarious how rapidly the movie hurls its stereotypes and cliches; it's like a kid gorging on candy because he's afraid some adult is seconds away from taking it from him. So I turned it off and went to bed.

This summer, like every summer, is a big one for big, dumb movies. Some are dumb and fun, but most are dumb and insulting, and make you feel sad and disappointed for even hoping against hope that maybe a summer movie could live up to its firecracker hype, maybe make you feel how seeing Independence Day at the dome theater that one summer in Little Rock made you feel: frisson, sexy, excited; cordite on the air, rolled-down windows, wind whipping, girls.

Mostly they are not like that. There are reasons why. Guess who knows them: David Foster Wallace (I know, I know). Here's the first two paragraphs from his excellent dissection of James Cameron's T2, which is apropos given the imminent arrival of the fourth Terminator movie:

1990s moviegoers who have sat clutching their heads in both awe and disappointment at movies like "Twister" and "Volcano" and "The Lost World" can thank James Cameron's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" for inaugurating what's become this decade's special new genre of big-budget film: Special Effects Porn. "Porn" because, if you substitute F/X for intercourse, the parallels between the two genres become so obvious they're eerie. Just like hard-core cheapies, movies like "Terminator 2" and "Jurassic Park" aren't really "movies" in the standard sense at all. What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes -- scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff -- strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative.

"T2," one of the highest-grossing movies in history, opened six years ago. Think of the scenes we all still remember. That incredible chase and explosion in the L.A. sluiceway and then the liquid metal T-1000 Terminator walking out of the explosion's flames and morphing seamlessly into his Martin-Milner-as-Possessed-by-Hannibal-Lecter corporeal form. The T-1000 rising hideously up out of that checkerboard floor, the T-1000 melting headfirst through the windshield of that helicopter, the T-1000 freezing in liquid nitrogen and then collapsing fractally apart. These were truly spectacular images, and they represented exponential advances in digital F/X technology. But there were at most maybe eight of these incredible sequences, and they were the movie's heart and point; the rest of "T2" is empty and derivative, pure mimetic polycelluloid.

Here's the link to the full thing. You'll need to be prepared if you plan to plunk down $12 (that's New York City prices) to see the new Transformers or Terminator FXtravaganzas this summer.

On the Poles

When people learn that I worked on Antarctica for a while, the first thing they usually ask, with a hint of incredulity, is "Why?" I usually tell them that I've always been obsessed with the place, and that it's probably the closest thing to being on another planet I'll ever get to experience ... but beyond that I don't really get into the metaphysics of Antarctica, and its psychic pull on me.

But Tim Wu, in a great piece published today on Slate, does. Here's a couple of key (and beautiful) paragraphs that come after he compares the North and South Poles to Eden:

The signs of Eden are everywhere in Antarctica. The penguins and seals don't seem to have learned, as most animals have, that humans are fallen creatures, best avoided. In the far south, the penguins spring out of the sea and waddle over to meet you, acting more like kindergarten children than wild birds. You feel you're at a reunion with lost friends and wonder why we have such bad relations with most animals.

That's very true. The penguins will just walk right up to you, and the skua birds (scavengers) are totally fearless ... they will divebomb you if you are carrying a blue tray from the galley, which they have learned means food.

Every so often, an iceberg floats by that is grander and more beautiful than any cathedral, though it lacks any history or even a name. What's almost as shocking as its appearance is its anonymity: beauty untainted by fame. Most of these perfect objects will never be seen by human eyes. They float around and slowly melt by themselves, unappreciated and utterly indifferent to that fact.

Again, very true, though I didn't see any icebergs (I was on land). But I did sit atop Observation Hill in the lee of a rock and look out onto the frozen sea with the sun hanging in a sentient, old way over it; and the quiet of the sea ice and the quiet of the mountains, the boundless white, hypnotized me.

Kitchen Conspirators

Back last September, my friend Michael Cirino, along with a newer friend, Danielle Florio, and two of her "co-conspirators" (keep reading) hosted a Panamanian-themed dinner at their loft apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The dinner was filmed for a new Food Network show called Kitchen Conspirators (in which Danielle and her two co-chefs star; Michael, who some of you may know from the pig roasts I've talked about on this blog, was the guest chef for the evening). Below is the dinner portion of the episode, in which I and my friend Jessica Wurst, who I brought with me, can be seen several times. Check it out—It's a great video, and was a lovely dinner: peach gazpacho, shrimp and risotto served in half a coconut, and for dessert, iced coffee served with tobacco-infused whipped cream. Here's the home page for the Kitchen Conspirators series, where you can find the recipes for these dishes, and here's a link to a video of the dinner (I had to take down the embedded video I had up earlier because it was automatically playing whenever you loaded this page).

Boise

The way you pronounced your home town—
boy see—still sticks with me
half a decade later
when my boss stops by my cubicle
to suggest a city—boy zee—for my story.

I don’t correct her; rather
I allow myself a brief reverie
of saying goodbye on the ice runway
on a sun-wracked January Monday,
when someone took a picture of us
"because we looked so sad."

All of the Beer and All of the Cupcakes

Last Friday was my niece Emma’s first birthday. I spent a good portion of it doing one of the favorite Little Rock activities: running errands. But after the party, which was at the park across the street from my parents’ house, where I lived throughout high school, I went to see my friend John Beachboard at his restaurant, Zaza, a salad and wood-oven pizza joint in the Heights, Little Rock’s progressive and old-money enclave.

I first met John at Dunbar Junior High, where we both went but didn’t run in the same crowds. I vaguely knew of him since then, but didn’t hang out with him until college, when I met him again through my best friend and roommate Joe, with whom John’d been in a band in high school. John was overweight then, and his party trick was to flex his glutes and let people to touch his bottom, which, as a result of carrying around his bulk, would be hard as wood when flexed. John could drink copious amounts of beer, and was mostly a gentle giant, but when messed with could fight like grizzly bear.

But it wasn’t until after college, after Fayetteville and Oxford, that I really got to know John, in New York. He and his longtime friend and bandmate David Slade came up to New York around when I did, right after we all graduated from school. I lived in the East Village my first year in the city, and John and David and another guy lived on the northwestern edge of SoHo. Right after they got the apartment, which was a beauty (though small), I was over at their house and we were up on their roof, and John was marveling to me about where he lived.

“All my life I’ve heard about SoHo,” John said, “and now I fucking live here.”

I knew how he felt. Though I hadn’t lusted after New York for much of my life at all—I hadn’t even really thought about it much until my senior year of college, when I was trying to figure out what to do—when I got there I got swept up quick in the romance of it all, a humming city that lived out on the street.

We spent a lot of nights on John’s roof. I came to think of it as John’s roof more than John’s and David’s, since John and I hung out much more. We’d sit out in chairs on the roof and drink beer and smoke cigarettes and look at the Empire State Building, which dominated the northern view. Sometimes we would cook up on the roof, on a little grill John had, and would sit on a piece of cardboard and eat barbecued chicken and get real messy and roll around drunk.

That was a good time. I was working a couple blocks away on Hudson Street and oftentimes I’d come right over after work, in that first late summer, and sit up on the roof with John. After a few beers I’d walk home to the East Village.

Then September 11th happened. While the planes were hitting the Twin Towers, I was in the shower. I walked out onto East 7th Street and turned west, to walk to Hudson Street, when I saw a fleet of emergency vehicles, fire engines, and cop cars scream down First Avenue. I turned south onto First and saw, way down south, smoke way up high. The Towers themselves were obscured by other buildings, but I knew that nothing downtown was that high up, and that it must be the Trade Center. When I got to where I could see the Towers themselves, I saw massive burning holes in both buildings.

I kept walking to work because I didn’t really know what else to do, and my cell phone wouldn’t work, so I wanted to be able to use the landlines at my office, which I figured would be better. So I made my way over southwest, toward SoHo. Near NYU I passed the upper deck running track, which is in full view of the towers, and was shocked to see someone working out, running around the track as if it were just another blue fall Tuesday. I stood at the corner of Thompson and LaGuardia Place and watched as the first tower fell. Everyone in the street was crying, myself included, and some were screaming. Everywhere cars were opened to the street with their radios on, with groups of people gathered around, listening.

After the first tower fell I went on in to work, to see about my co-workers and to use the phones. A few people were there, including my British boss, Martin Dunford, who looked gray-greenish and like he was about to be sick. Martin told us to go home.

So of course I went over to John’s. I didn’t know what else to do, couldn’t imagine being alone at that time, and didn’t know how to get in touch with anyone else. I buzzed the buzzer and John came down, and we went up onto the roof, to see what we could see. While I was in my office, the second tower had fallen, and the southerly view from John’s roof was blocked by other buildings, so there wasn’t much to do but speculate on what had happened and look at the dark plume of smoke that towered toward Brooklyn. We hung out on the roof for a while in the bright sunshine, looking down over the edge of the building onto the street below, when an eighteen-wheeler, like a sparrow blown off course in a tornado, appeared below us, on Charlton Street.

The truck seemed to be stuck, and this caused the nearby cops to freak out and order the driver from the cab at gunpoint, fearing the out-of-place truck to be part of a second wave of attacks, via truck bomb. The driver laid facedown on the pavement and cops swarmed John’s building, guns drawn, telling everyone to get out, which we did, hustling down the stairs and across the street with everyone else, fearful ourselves of a bomb—it seemed like anything could happen that day, as I suppose it did.

We decided we would go over to my apartment in the East Village, because I had a TV where we could see what was happening. We walked over there and got 40-oz. beers along the way. I needed a drink. When we got to my apartment we went inside the cave of a studio room, which I shared with a friend of mine, and turned on the TV. I only had a few channels, on account of no cable service, but we saw that all of the non-news channels had suspended their programming. I remember the Food Network being just being a static screen announcing that programming had been suspended. We clicked to the New York 1 news channel and cracked the beers. But after the first few sips of beer, which normally I never turned down, it began to feel wrong to be drinking, and John agreed. So we decided to leave and go up to Beth Israel to give blood.

But this isn’t about September 11th. It’s more about John, and his leaving New York for Arkansas, and his success now, and my missing him and those days.

More TK (that means "To Be Continued")

The Fight Over Aggregation, and TimesDigest

Today on Slate, Jack Shafer has an interesting story about the online “newspaper” The Huffington Post, and how “the media giants have put the Web's journalistic ‘parasites’—blogs, aggregators, Google—on notice that they will no longer allow them to pinch their copy without reimbursement.” Check out HuffPo here.

What Shafer is talking about is the practice of excerpting news stories and other content, with attribution and a link to the full story. Oftentimes, though—at least in the way The Huffington Post practices it—the excerpted stories can appear, to the untrained eye, like original content. And some are up in arms about this.

Shafer goes on to outline the long and colorful American tradition of stealing stories and rewriting them (I am aware of the irony in what I am doing right now), citing the turn-of-the-century newspaper wars between the New York Journal (led by William Randolph Hearst) and the New York World (ditto Joseph Pulitzer).

Shafer then discusses how print media titans like The New York Times could learn a thing or two from The Huffington Post, and even points to an example in which The New York Times already has an in-house answer for this: the TimesDigest.

Unfamiliar with what the TimesDigest is? Well, I was, too, until I went down to Antarctica for six months to work as a dining attendant (read as: dishwasher) at McMurdo Station. Every day in the galley (dining hall) at McMurdo, there would be copies of the TimesDigest, an eight- or nine-page digest of the top stories, opinion pieces, and more (including the crossword!) from that day’s New York Times. We all read it, and failed, as the week progressed, at doing the crossword.

It was a lovely connection, while marooned down on the Ice, to the outside world and the U.S. It contains the same stories as in The New York Times, just slashed and cut down. For Jack Shafer’s review of the TimesDigest, see here on Slate. Apparently the TimesDigest is mostly distributed to cruise ships, hotels, military bases, and the like, but you can download a sample copy of today’s issue (in PDF format) here.

I have been thinking about interiority

This all arose or re-arose, bubbled back up, on the C train the other day, when, pulling out from the station, we passed the platform entrance and the station agent booth, which was strung on the inside of the glass with a strand of multicolored Christmas lights. The colors looked supersaturated, like old big good glass-bulb lights, and the interior of the booth looked warm and bright—at least it did as I glimpsed it through the windows.

How lovely to be sitting on a high, cushioned chair in that warm booth, with all the workers streaming past in their rain-flecked black, and to be nodding off, chin on chest and hands folded across stomach. A radio on, a stillness—But a peopled, a warm stillness, a cozy outpost in the middle of the chilly, wet city; Not like the stillness at home, home sick from work, when the daytime TV is bad and sad and it feels like everyone has left. Nor tapping a knife on one’s wrist, Law & Order a sick muddle. The couch.

But this dream of interiority began longer ago. The first time I remember was when in junior high I would ride with my dad in his red Mazda hatchback to school. We took the back way out of the neighborhood—which was a little rough around the edges and from which, within a couple of years, we moved—past the brick square that used to seem so high and that we used to climb on and which, from a valve on its front, sometimes gushed water; past the road that ran down to the low-rent pool and the poisoned pond beyond; then up the hill and a right down the hill, past the Easter Seals on the right.

The way I remember it, it was always cold. The car was small, its metal thin, the seats vinyl, and by that early point in the weekdaily trip the heat hadn’t yet kicked in.

From my place in the passenger seat, I could see across the Easter Seals parking lot and into the building through a portrait window. The room had overstuffed armchairs and sofas, and a TV. It looked very bright and warm, a little tableau vivant. I do not remember ever seeing people inside. (If I had, it might have depressed me, as Easter Seals was an organization that worked with the physically and mentally handicapped.) Before it was an Easter Seals, it was a roller-skating rink, called, I believe, 8 Wheels. But that was when I was way younger. I don’t remember skating at 8 Wheels.

So we would drive on, past Easter Seals and onto Cantrell and then I-430, which connected to I-630 which connected to downtown where my dad worked and I went to school. I imagine rainslick streets, a mist of gray rain, not a thunderstorm because a thunderstorm has its own excitement, when an electrical excitement is small and giddy in the middle of your chest, thrilled, like the leaping electricity at the center of one of those globes on which you put your fingers and the lightning leaps to your fingers.

No: This was a different rain I remember, and the junior high was a sad place on days like that, a damp, brown, hard place of marble, brick, and stone, and the hallways and classrooms felt like the end of something.

All I wanted was to be in that room at Easter Seals, or in my dad's Mazda after the heat'd kicked in, the oldies station on the radio, the smell of my dad's aftershave and the leather or vinyl of the car's seats. Inside, contained within, warm.

Another time I had a dream of interiority. Freshman year of college, and I'd driven in my 1974 sky-blue Volkswagen Bug up to Columbia, Missouri, to visit my girlfriend, who was going to school at Mizzou. It was a long drive up, in the fall I think, through the severe ridges and pines of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri, highways slashed across the land and feeling very on my own, in a thrilled way.

I visited my girlfriend and did not behave as I would have liked. I was jealous and said dumb things about the length of a bathrobe. I met her roommate and friends and was very judgmental and self-righteous.

But pulling into town was something else, on my own, one of the first few times I'd ever done such a thing, and it felt like arriving, coming over the bluff and seeing the city and feeling very separate from everything, seeing a place I'd never seen before on my own.

On the way home it was raining, hard. The highway in a VW Bug in a hard rain is not a place to be. The eighteen-wheelers scream by and buffet the car, and you have to keep a steady grip on the wheel, ready to correct, so you don't get blown off the road.

After a while my car started to stop working. I misremember what exactly happened, but I made it to a auto repair shop on the side of the highway, up on a hill (which seemed like a counterintuitive altitude at which to erect an auto shop). Raining hard and the auto shop was dark inside, though open. It was cold. They could fix my car but it would be a few hours.

I went into the waiting room of the shop, which was dark and empty, save for a few chairs and a TV. It was drowsy warm in the room, and there were no people. I turned on the TV and Mission Impossible, with Tom Cruise, was on. I watched it and I was maybe as happy—"not hating anything, not wanting anything"—as I have ever been, quiet, warm, and safe inside during a rainstorm in a waiting room in an auto shop on the highway home to Arkansas.

On Coffee

All across the city, everybody is making coffee.
In the shops, the bodegas, McDonald’s, diners,
apartment kitchens, depreciated condominiums:
Turning on kitchen lights with a clack or click
and reaching down the filters or French press,
then grinding the beans or uncapping canister,
slinging grounds, swishing sound, into the filter.

Then a scent which is like a presence or person
appears as everyone stands, sleeping, eyes shut
waiting for the coffee to perc. Going back into
half of a dream, dream epilogue, denouement,
the flutish sound of the Vltava River receding
in Smetana’s “Moldau,” night visions receding.
Wrapping things up and the day getting going.

So a person comes into the room, as in winter
when home for Christmas, coming downstairs,
the coffee’s already on and your house is full
and alive. Living alone, one can set the maker
the night before, but the effect is hollowed out.
Still it is some sort of sacrament, the moment
coffee is tasted: One rare undegraded example.

An Oldie But an Oldie

Austin Poem

And what it all came down to was
faces sheened with sweat and beer cans,
cigarrettes held dangling and hesitant,
eardrums pulsing and heads throbbing
while the waves washed over and into
and through bodies in tight jeans worn
with years and snuff cans, wallets
and token key trinkets given by girlfriends
long gone and friends miles away,
for remembering.

The way light reflected from shoulderblades
and shadows marked cheekbones with hollows
and high points that could be read like Tarot,
the shape of hips and tanning, sandals,
and uncertainty – where go? what do?
Listen: it will explain itself, in time,
if only you shun earplugs and sunglasses,
if you let yourself believe you can be witness
to something big, that something big, even if it’s small,
is still possible, like the fixin’ to die rag,
or a gong and different camera angles:
don’t watch the TV, on the screen up there,
because it’s not real, even if it looks close:
your angle is the best, much better than all the rest,
don’t you know that? And how many times
have I told you I love you? And how many times
won’t you believe me? How many times
will you shake off and turn left, 90 degrees from me,
and fold arms, slipping them, one, after, the other,
under and above each other, until they come to rest,
like a sigh, like a dream, layered and comforting
each other, when I’m left here holding a tired joint
and glasses whose frames you used to like,
flicking a lighter, on, off, flame, no-flame,
with a snick each time, our relationship’s metronome.

Here are sideburns frayed like newsprint,
red hair close-cropped and boyish, but in the style,
flower prints on summer dresses and old shirts
with patterns and holes and bits of paint and white-out,
and eyes drifting like smoke, like empty river rafts,
hunting a place to put in for the night,
find some saltback and a biscuit,
a campfire and a scarred guitar, and later on,
embers and the smell of trees, the haunt of crickets
and nightbirds, coming from everywhere, surrounding
from all points and permeating until the tingle comes
and the first rays of the rising sun break.

Streetlight humming and heightening,
light from the Tower spilling down and shaking,
still nervous after these several decades,
but also, still there.
Talk and blonde hair and eyes furtively met,
the glint of green or hazel and thinking of cats
creeping at night through dark alleyways full
of stumbling and linked arms and silly songs
sung by friends, off-key and maybe not remembered
in the morning – let’s not consider years from now,

No, let’s be now.
Skipping and lions and tigers and oh my
when he kisses you for the first time, unexpectedly,
against redbrick and white cement crumbling,
but wanted oh so badly for so long,
for all your life it seems, ever since you were in the womb,
longing for a twin, doesn’t even have to be identical,
fraternal even, just somebody to be there and hold
your hair back when you’re drunk in the street
and steadying a concrete curb with a shaking wrist,
or when your dad dies and your mom drinks whiskey,
bottles of it, in his honor, as a tribute, she says,
with mascara running and hair graying and you
pulling away, twisting in your head side to side
with arms out, flailing, looking for a doorjamb
to steady yourself under and hide from the falling plaster
and asbestos: your fault’s quite overdue.

And for you, somebody to be there so you can feel,
and not be afraid, somebody to touch your hand
in that way and have it speak encyclopedias and dictionaries,
when two decades of preachers haven’t filled you
with anything but nervousness
and a contingency plan.

Breeze through bushes and light off freshly-washed cars,
seeing the moon big in the sky, like in a movie
set in the Pacific, starring a volcano and sex.
Bicycles and cardboard, skateboards,
held hands and married couples far too young
to be anything but clutching.
Smells of beer, cops, pizza, Chinese food,
take-out in those boxes that you’ve always wanted
to have in a fridge to share with that girl
who’s never yet appeared, but the poster that flutters
across the pavement and smacks flat across the street,
on a telephone pole, just so you can read it,
makes you hope that maybe, maybe.

Neon and argon and pitchers of beer collecting drops
while lungs collect tar and nicotine ebbs and flows,
stilling the seas of turbulent growing up
and giving the flotsam and jetsam a time
to be what they are, and be good for that.
Pool cues and blue chalk and the echoing crack
of the break and the thunk-thunk of a lucky shot,
two stripes solid in the hole, quarters stacked,
chinking, chinking, plans made, broken, made again,
feeling good about having a friend who drives a stick
and drives your car okay, so you don’t have to worry.

Will to Blog Apparently Rising

One:

All this brief bus ride I have been writing
two poems in my head: One a screed against
our fame-drunk nation—I feel sorry
that Natasha died, but she is no more
than anyone; she is not some blonde god—
and the other a thing addressed to You,
and the semi-sexual sound you make—
mmff—when I put my hands on your hips
and you sling your slim arms around my neck,
clinging like a baby animal to its mother.

Two:

This morning I was whistling in the mirror and noticed
how, though the sound changed dramatically—slid up and down, filliped
over the notes—my lips, poised in an "O," did not move one bit.
I thought of how much my tongue was flipping and flicking inside
the dark, small cavern of my mouth while I whistled,
how it's like the unseen flopping of thoughts behind placid faces
waiting on the early-morning subway. And on the subway, the read-out
that shows the next stop and the current time was scrambled, a chaos
of red, green, and yellow LED lights as we crossed over the bridge.

And then at work I found out that a man
I emailed with and interviewed two weeks ago
had been killed in a car crash, at 57. He was nice to speak to,
had a good email manner, and seemed like a friendly sort.
If I emailed him again
there would no longer be anyone at the other end.

The Obamas + Where the Wild Things Are

This is a great story in the Times about the Obamas getting out in Washington, going to basketball games, restaurants, parts of the city not often visited by former presidents. Of course, theories are put forth as to why they are doing this—Is it just because that's how they are, or is it for political capital? I, for one, would like to believe it's just how the Obamas are; they've always lived in cities—Why wouldn't they want to get out and enjoy one of America's greatest metropolises?

At any rate, it's a cute article. I just really like that family.


Another thing I really like: The trailer for this fall's live-action Where the Wild Things Are movie, which was just released and is available in a variety of formats here. The trailer uses what sounds like a different version of a great Arcade Fire song, "Wake Up," and, though it (the trailer) gets a little bit "In a world where... ," I am confident the movie will be much weirder than it looks. Why? Because it's directed by Spike Jonze, of Being John Malkovich fame, and the big main monster is "played" by (his movements and facial expressions were recorded, and then digitally transferred onto the monster—or at least I think that's how it went, according to a friend of mine who did some camera work for the film) James Gandolfini, aka Tony Soprano, who is a supremely weird and complex actor. I want to go see him in this new play on Broadway, God of Carnage, which just got a killer review (scroll down to the jump in the middle of the page) this week in The New Yorker.

Too Long

My will to blog seems, slowly, to be dying. Oh well.

Three things:

One: Wednesday is the two-year anniversary of my apartment building burning up. I had a scare last week: I woke up in the middle of the night to a smoke alarm going off, and my room filled with what appeared to be smoke. I opened the door from my bedroom out into my apartment and I couldn't see a thing—The whole room was filled with white. I was confused, didn't know what to do, wondered if the whole building was going up, and if I should try to go down the stairs or out the fire escape, what to grab, what to take ... then my mind starting piecing stuff together—the wet, the loud hissing noise; it wasn't a fire. The cap on the radiator in my living room had blown off, and the radiator was gushing steam into my apartment. So I ran downstairs and got my super and he shut off the boiler and we opened the windows and let the steam escape and eventually the pressure died and the gushing stopped and the next day he fixed it and none of my stuff was ruined. A bit of a scare, though. 1am smoke alarm wake-up calls aren't fun.

Two: Not sure if others of you have discovered this, but Gmail's search function can really ambush you. The problem? Nothing goes away, ever. So today, when I searched for the seemingly innocuous word "GPA," trying to discover if I'd written what my college GPA was anywhere in an email, Gmail dredged up an exchange between myself and an old girlfriend of mine, one who I'm not entirely over. Which of course led to me reading that email, and then more, and dots of water in my eyes. "Jesus Christ," I said, kind of having to laugh at it.

Three: Last week a friend of mine who's recently been experiencing some romantic relationship-based psychic pain related to me what his friend once told him about the pain of break-ups and lost loves. "The pain doesn't ever get any smaller," my friend's friend said. "You just get further away from it."

I like that, and I think it's very true. Only problem is when Gmail, in a flash on an unfairly cold March afternoon, finds some old bit of ocean-lost pain and holds up a funhouse passenger-side mirror to it: "Objects in the mirror appear closer than they actually are." And this will just go on, for the rest of your life—Think about it: If you stick with Gmail, theoretically you could be searching for some word 20 years down the road and instantly be tossed back into that old upheaval.

Hunter Is Interviewed Part 2

A friend of mine recently interviewed me for her and another woman's blog, Whateverishly: The Greatest Blog Ever Hula'd. Here is the link.

And if you REALLY want to know more about me, here's a link to a similar thing another friend of mine did back in July of '07.

Longest Letter to the Editor Ever

Dear Esquire,

I loved Tom Junod's recent ode to Waffle House, as part of your magazine's "Best Breakfasts in America" round-up. He hit the nail on the head with his "multiplicity within the homogeneity" observation. I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, which had its share of Waffle Houses. There was one on Bowman Curve, which me and my high school friends frequented, and one on Shackleford Road, where my college buddies, who went to different high schools and who I hadn't really known then, went.

But we all came from the same town, so when we would come home from school (in Northwest Arkansas) for Christmas or Thanksgiving, we would invariably get sick of our families and all go out drinking. More often than not, these nights ended at Waffle House.

You might see what's coming: We'd be at the bar, finishing up, or on the way home, humming down I-630, and we would get into a pointless yet fierce argument about which Waffle House to patronize.

Junod is right: All Waffle Houses are exactly alike. But the two of us who went to Catholic High and the Bowman Curve Waffle House would argue with the two who went to Central High and Pulaski Academy and the Shackleford Road Waffle House about which to go to. I don't even know why; the Bowman Curve one was just "our" Waffle House, and so we naturally loved it and hated theirs—it's similar, I think, to the pride and loyality assigned to local sports teams.

Somewhere along the way during college, though, my friend and I from Catholic began to relent and go to the Shackleford Road Waffle House. The reason was that, in the interim between my leaving high school for college, a quasi-bohemian clique had taken over the Bowman Curve Waffle House, where I used to go after Marine Corps JROTC events with fellow cadets.

Once, home from college, I walked alone into my Waffle House and felt utterly alienated. The place was packed with proto-hipsters. Facial hair, fedoras and porkpie hats, clove cigarettes (this was around 1999/2000, mind), and all manner of pretention had invaded it. One kid was even sitting at the counter playing a goddamned violin. I walked out and rarely returned. Now you can't even smoke in there anymore. The boho clique has cleared off. The fickle wheel of Waffle House history has turned yet again.

In our college town, there was one Waffle House we could agree on. That's because there was one Waffle House. It was out on Sixth Street, near the highway and the tiny liquor store where my roommate, with his fake ID, used to buy us beer, which we would sneak into our dorm in an empty box for a computer printer. The Waffle House was situated in a near-desolate lot that looked like it used to house a Wal-Mart. It was tiny, as Waffle Houses go, and near the road. We used to go in there, sober, and get the All-You-Can-Eat special. Like the baseball rule that you have to touch all bases when running around them, we said that you had to eat a hash browns with each plate, or else it didn't "count."

Count toward what, I don't know.

Once a few of us went and ate there, freshman year, All-You-Can-Eat. I think I did "four laps," which in the parlance meant four entrees plus four plates of hashbrowns. My friend Joe always used to say that, if you were working on an All-You-Can-Eat effort, you wanted to finish with the waffle, because the waffle was like "an expand-cake," and, if eaten first, would swell uncomfortably in one's stomach, limiting the amount one could consume.

You also were kind of required to end with a waffle; it was like sticking the landing.

After this gluttonous effort—which we really did just because we were bored, and had that delicious expanse of free time particular to college life, and which really never comes again—I went out into the parking lot with my friends and leaned, doubled over, groaning against my sky-blue VW bug. I thought I had damaged myself. They asked if I needed to be driven the 0.5 miles home. (I declined.) Keep in mind we were stone-cold sober.

I got back to my dorm, curled in a fetal position on my bed, and waited for the end. At some point I went into the bathroom and tried to make myself vomit, fearing what would happen if I succeeded. (This remains the lone time I have ever tried to make myself vomit in which alcohol was not involved.)

But so that ended, and I got better. Another time, a spring afternoon during my sophmore year, Joe and I went to Waffle House by ourselves. It was a contemplative visit. School would be over soon, and I would move to Austin for the summer, and thence Oxford, in England, for the following year. Our little band would be breaking up, in some ways permanently. All leavings are like that.

Joe and I got the All-You-Can-Eat, but our hearts weren't really into it. I think we had two laps apiece. It was too nice a day, with that spring smell of fresh in the air, to gorge oneself. We talked laconically, easily, in the way of friends who don't have to say much to have a good time with one another. The door to the Waffle House was open out onto the spring day and Sixth Street. I was looking out of the door when I saw a chicken walk calmly and with no great hurry across the parking lot and across the road, entirely untroubled by traffic.

Sincerely,

Hunter Reaves Slaton

We Have a Serious Problem

According to the Nielsen Co.'s "Three Screen Report" for the fourth quarter of 2008, the average American—average, mind you—watches 151 hours of TV a month, or about five hours a day.

Think about that for a minute: More then one fifth of an average American's day is taken up by sitting and watching a screen. Thirty percent sleep, 35 percent work, 20 percent TV—leaving just 15 percent of one's time free for actual human interaction.

That's the worst thing I've ever heard. I'm very glad that I basically don't ever watch TV, and so am totally outside of that particular statistic. Lately I've been watching, like, one episode of The Simpsons on DVD before I go to bed, and that's virtually all I ever watch.

Take heart! Turn them off!