02.27.16

phyllis rose's the shelf (in which she reads her way through the LEQ-LES shelf at the new york society library, a subscription library on the upper east side i'm ashamed to have never visited) has been sizzling across my synapses for the last few weeks. her curiosity is a thing of beauty—i adore how she develops extratextual relationships with some of her authors, hunts down answers about cover art from a designer, and watches and rewatches footage from one author's funeral on youtube—and i thrill to the way she accepts responsibility for keeping literary culture alive (and urges other readers to do the same). i'd love to curl up and make myself inconspicuous in a wrinkle in her brain for a day. a smattering of favorite passages:

A friend of [Rose's daughter-in-law] attended high school where the drama teacher was a megalomaniac control freak. Although everyone knows that musicals for amateur performance should be chosen to provide the maximum number of easy singing roles, he chose to do Phantom of the Opera, which has relatively few parts and difficult music. The drama teacher himself played the Phantom, and the best singer in the school played Christine. All the other kids played candlesticks in the chandelier.

[...]

I remember taking a ship from Naples to Istanbul in the summer of 1974 and seeing a man reading Fear of Flying in Spanish, laughing out loud. I never saw such universal appeal again until a Samburu warrior in Kenya asked me to send him tapes of the Harry Potter movies.

[...]

A woman who was hired as an editorial assistant at a major publisher in New York in the early 1960s recalls how, on the first day of work, the twelve new assistants were separated into male and female groups, the men set to reading manuscripts, the women to typing. Another woman recalls learning that she had scored the highest on a chemistry final in college, asking if that meant she was getting an A, and being told that only one A could be given and a boy needed it more than she did. Others recall days when Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth didn't admit women, to say nothing of the Century Association in New York and Mory's in New Haven.* Someone else reminds us that in France, women could not vote until after World War II.**

[...]

I asked a friend who works for a small public library how they choose books to get rid of. Is there a formula? Who makes the decision, a person or a committee? She told me that there was a formula based on the recommendations of the industry-standard CREW model.

CREW stands for Continuous Review Evaluation and Weeding, and the manual uses "crew" as a transitive verb, so one can talk about a library "crewing" its collection. It means weeding but doesn't sound so harsh. At the heart of the CREW method is a formula consisting of three factors—the number of years since its last copyright, the number of years since the book was last checked out, and a collection of six negative factors given the acronym MUSTIE, to help decide if a book has outlived its usefulness. M. Is it Misleading or inaccurate? Is its information, as so quickly happens with medical and legal texts or travel books, for example, outdated?*** U. Is it Ugly? Worn beyond repair? S. Has it been Superseded by a new edition or a better account of the subject? T. Is it Trivial, of no discernible literary or scientific merit? I. Is it Irrelevant to the needs and interests of the community the library serves? E. Can it be found Elsewhere, through interlibrary loan or on the Web?

[...]

Since every system of elimination is based, no matter what they say, on circulation counts, the number of years that have elapsed since a book was last checked out, or the number of times it has been checked out overall, if you feel strongly about a book, you should go to every library you have access to and check out the volume you care about. Take it home awhile. Read it or don't. Keep it beside you as you read the same book on a Kindle, Nook, or iPad.**** Let it breathe the air of your home, and then take it back to the library, knowing you have fought the guerrilla war for physical books.

[...]

Traditionally, fiction assumes that an event like the death of a wife and child should be dramatized at a length appropriate to its gravity. [Alain-René Le Sage, author of Gil Blas] pivots from one state to another with no more than "But, alas!" and although Gil Blas tells us he couldn't eat, fell into a deep depression, and might have died if Scipio had not forced him to sustain himself, there is no plumbing the depths of his soul. We are left to imagine his anguish: "Let the reader conceive...the sorrow with which I was seized."

There is a certain wisdom to this approach in fiction, as in life. When a child dies, when a spouse dies, one feels the grief that one feels when a child dies or a spouse dies. There's no point in trying to describe it. How much does it hurt to have your arm pulled from the socket? It hurts as much as having your arm pulled from the socket.

rose writes that she enjoys hearing from readers of her books when they contact her to offer praise and is rather displeased when they pepper her with inquiries, which makes sense; i'd be pretty displeased if someone wrote me just to ask me to prep for their book club on their behalf. it has been brought to my attention that i tend to ask a lot of questions when i meet people, so it's probably not a good idea for me to reach out to rose—but i might not be able to resist a fan letter. the shelf has wound me up.

it's been a good year for reading thus far, so good that i have yet to make much progress in 2015's version of BOOKS I READ, IN ORDER OF HOW INTERESTED I WAS IN SLEEPING WITH THEM BENEATH MY PILLOW (STRONGEST CANDIDATES FIRST), AND HAIKU DISCUSSION. i forced my sister to take the first of elena ferrante's neapolitan novels back to california with her last week; i'd have insisted on all four, really, but it's impolite to inflict that much ballast on air travelers. if you, dear internets, have yet to read them and can endure the phase shift they could precipitate (i found myself reading for an extra three or four hours a night, which meant that for most of january i turned off my light and rose again in the morning with the people of hawaii rather than my neighbors in new york city), get on that.

i'll be turning in a piece on my third half marathon this friday. how did i get here?



*stanford has been thoroughly coed since it admitted its first students in 1891, by the by.

**a full timeline of women's suffrage is here. in 1919, belgium extended the right to vote in national elections to "the widows and mothers of servicemen killed in World War I, to the widows and mothers of citizens shot or killed by the enemy, and to female political prisoners who had been held by the enemy." other gals weren't welcome at the polls until 1948.

***similarly, ye olde charity bookstore cafe doesn't accept donations of textbooks, tech manuals, or travel guides.

****don't read it on a kindle. fuck amazon, now and always.

06.29.15

the dirty dozen {twelve notable excerpts from the decade-spanning comment thread i discovered when i turned to the internet after a melon at my father's house started hissing and foaming*}

01 If I find anything, I'll post again, I go by the pseudonym SealMan, by the way.

02 Better a $5 watermelon lost than a broken washing machine.

03 My husband is very supersticious and believes this was a super-natural incident. Thank goodness I found this blog, I was starting to believe him.

04 Am I the only one that heard theirs pop? It was a pop and then a fizzling sound. The watermelon is still fizzing four hours later and leaving a yellow bubble like liquid behind. Ewh, I'm glad I had some kind of notice before I tried to eat the thing. I was thinking today was going to be the day.

05 I bought a pack of 2 mini watermelons from the Altamonte Costco on Aug 22nd. On Aug 23rd I came home from work and exactly the same thing happened to me. It smelled like vomit on dead people all over my kitchen. I dont know how a volleyball sized mellon managed to have sprayed gallons of fluid and chunks all over my kitchen, but there was at least an 8 foot spray. All the fruit next to it rotted instantly.

06 I couldn't even talk this morning I was so horse, (and I have a bad back so I have been sleeping on the couch about 10 feet away from the watermelon all weekend)!!!

07 It was dark and I only saw something that seemed to be coming from inside the melon...and trying to get out. I swear I even saw some sort of light emanating from my melon. I was so freaked out!

08 wow! we just cut open a watermelon purchased from walmart in thornton,co tonight. Right when i cut it open it spilled about two cups of clear liquid all over the counter. But what really caught my eye was the inside of the melon. It was growing so weird, kinda spiral looking with 4 red circles inside. The rest was light pink not consistent at all. i know this was not normal this is about our 10th watermelon this year.

09 I bought a mini-watermelon from Fresh & Easy in Burbank yesterday and tonight when I came home from a party, I saw it was foaming and smelled fermented. My husband keeps telling me to cut it open to see if a bug comes out, but I have declined.

10 It's 2015 and I'll be the first to continue this discussion. We just had this in a mini watermelon, a stream of white foam coming from the end of the watermelon. I have never seen this in nearly 40 years of eating watermelons. I now have a special connection with this group of fine people.

11 I think they were honeydew, my least favorite melon. No matter how long I waited, they were never going to look like a cantaloupe.

12 I will cut new watermelon today, but am a bit apprehensive!

*it seems likely that said melon had bacterial fruit blotch.

06.21.15

ROAD TRIP UPDATE: III {13:45, phoenix)

i called my dad at nine o'clock this morning, chest-deep in an amoeba-shaped pool in the middle of a thoughtfully xeriscaped yard in downtown phoenix. by half past ten the sun had melted the glue binding my mass-market copy of a clash of kings; the chapter on tyrion's nightmares after the battle of the blackwater detached from the book's spine and fluttered to my lap. i'm now the color of the little she-cardinals in the canary island palm behind our old bungalow (they sound like ben). i don't know that i'm interested in being ben-colored, but i'm not sure i have a choice at this point.

03.03.13

In the first few days [of his winter alone in western antarctica in 1934, admiral richard byrd's] only complaint was that he had forgotten to bring a cookbook. Never having had to cook anything for himself before, he was hamstrung. He wrote in his diary about the 'Corn Meal Incident' in which he overdid the amount of corn meal in a pan and induced a volcanic reaction. 'It oozed over the stove. It spattered the ceiling. It covered me from head to foot. If I hadn't acted resolutely, I might have been drowned in corn meal.' He grabbd the pan, rushed it to one of the storage tunnels and slammed it down, where it continued to spew until it froze.

Byrd recounted these incidents insouciantly to the men back in Little America on his thrice-weekly radio calls. He could hear their actual voices but he had to reply laboriously, spelling out his messages with the dots and dashes of Morse code. His men teased him about his incompetence with the code, especially when he was asked to broadcast a message live to the Chicago World's Fair, to be relayed via Little America and then somehow translated into a firework display. 'If the fireworks are supposed to spell out what you send,' his friend Charlie Murphy told him over the radio, 'then Chicago is in for the wildest display since the fire.'

(gabrielle walker, from antarctica: an intimate portrait of a mysterious continent)

02.28.13

101 in 1001 {III}: 093 learn to make bagels at home [completed 02.22.13]



a few things one should know about making bagels: the process is in no way arduous (a mere hour of rise time! you could decide to make bagels at nine in the morning and be eating them by like 11!*) and virtually idiot-proof, one can sub flours and toppings in and out at will (the heartbreak of poppy seeds between your teeth need never happen again!), and you can eat more than one when you're done (because they're much smaller than the carb bombs you'd buy from someone else, and also listen, you just made your own bagels and can do whatever you want).

this zenlike-in-its-simplicity recipe got to me by way of my college roommate jen, a brutally talented baker who, for example, rejiggered her famous-in-multiple-metropolitan-areas pie crust recipe with algebra and vodka to eliminate the need for crisco (that post features weight, volume, and ABV charts; it's a thing of beauty). she, in turn, picked it up from jennifer reese's make the bread, buy the butter, a book on when cooking from scratch is and isn't worth your time (her blog is here). ye recipe, with my adaptations and notes:

homemade bagels

- 3 1/2 cups flour (i made my first batch with ye olde white flour, and my second with 2 cups white and a cup and a half of whole wheat; both were great)
- 4 1/2 tsp. instant yeast
- 3 tbsp. cane sugar (i used vegan cane sugar)
- 1 tbsp. kosher salt (i kicked this up to more like 5 tsp, as the dough was a bit sweet)
- 1 1/2 cups warm water
- neutral vegetable oil for greasing (i used a can of pam organic olive oil spray i found at work)
- 2 tbsp. barley malt syrup or dark brown sugar (i had neither and used tupelo honey)
- cornmeal, for sprinkling
- 1 egg

combine the flour, yeast, sugar, and salt in a large bowl. add the water and beat hard for a few minutes. if the dough is too wet, add more flour, but just a bit at a time until you have a stiff dough. knead for 5 minutes. place dough in a lightly greased bowl and cover with a clean, damp towel to rise about one hour and double in size. preheat oven to 400 degrees F and bring a large pot of water to boil. while water is heating, lightly oil one baking sheet and sprinkle another generously with cornmeal. divide dough into 12 pieces.** roll each piece into a ball and stick your thumb through the middle to coax it into a bagel shape. let bagels rest on the greased baking sheet for 10 minutes (or not; i've skipped this step and the bagels don't seem to care). once the water is at a rolling boil, add the brown sugar or barley syrup (or honey). drop the bagels into the water, three at a time. let them simmer for a minute and flip them over to simmer for another minute. remove with a slotted spoon back to the greased baking sheet. repeat with the remaining bagels. move all the boiled bagels to the cornmeal sprinkled baking sheet, flipping them over when putting them down so the drier side sits in the cornmeal. give the top of each bagel a wee egg wash (one beaten egg was enough for the whole dozen), then sprinkle on the toppings of your choice; i used grey sea salt, penzeys dehydrated onions, and five diced garlic cloves.*** bake for about 30 minutes, until golden brown. serve with cream cheese and the satisfaction of fresh bagels acquired without the application of pants.

we split our first batch of carb DIY with our sweet downstairs neighbor who's been stuck at home since foot surgery a month ago. we brought our second batch along for yupster brunch on our train trip to washington last weekend.





yeah, those are faux-bois paper plates and napkins. not pictured: vanilla skyr, my quilting supplies (quilting and homemade bagels on the train: this is how childless cat ladies spend their time), joe biden (though i feel he was there in spirit), the $300 we had to spend on the much-less-genteel ride home on sunday when we missed the 6:20 train by five minutes. but this is not the story of that sadness; this is the story of bagels, and the story of bagels ends happily. go forth.


*if you're baking before nine in the morning, most of this website will not be of use to you.

**the original recipe is for 10 bagels, but i like mine slightly smaller, and, let's be honest, 12 is the best number.

***i am not usually a gadget fan, but my life changed for the better the day i found a garlic chopper at the office. i have and love a microplane, but a chopper is great for dishes which call for bigger chunks and social occasions which don't call for garlicky hands.

01.22.13

so it seems i could use a pair of glasses. it's not the sort of dire need with which i deserve to need glasses after years of wearing empty frames recreationally - o college - but it is the sort of need i probably should have addressed before attempting to see all of 2013's best picture/director/actor/actress academy award nominees (i am nearsighted in my left eye, apparently, and while i don't need glasses to drive, my optometrist noted that i might consider them if i was, you know, super-into film or theatre). i'll be getting a big old black pair from moscot's, for 1) they have been selling specs in our neighborhood for a century and 2) my four-eyed idol is marcello mastroianni in 8 1/2. joe says tortoiseshell frames would look better, and i say compromising one's vision for piddly aesthetic reasons is unforgivable. there will be time to sort these things out, for saving up for a pair of prescription moscot glasses is going to take four thousand years.

i'll be on a train somewhere between new york and washington dc as the oscars are actually distributed next month, - o vacation-planning without one's datebook at hand - but i'm taking this nominee-watching business very seriously this year; i've got just four more to go, in fact. joaquin phoenix, i'll see you in hell.

CONSUMED AT THE BEGINNING OF 2013: A PARTIAL LIST.

amour (film). i saw amour at film forum, a west village indie house known for its banana bread (beloved of derrida, apparently) and its horrible older patrons (after abandoning the 3:30 showing because the only seats left were in the front row, several couples emerged from the 4:00 theater to abuse the manager for heating it too slowly ["it has been freezing in there for several minutes!"]). i went from quietly despising them before the lights went down to squirming on their behalf once the film began, for it's their nightmare: this is the feel-bad movie of the year, a devastating story of infirmity's thefts (in a nutshell, emmanuelle riva and jean-louis trintignant are an octogenarian invalid and her husband/caregiver, respectively). if you're already aware of how it ends or don't mind spoilers, read through richard brody's negative review and how readers have responded to it; amour, as it were, gazes also into you.

django unchained (film). quentin tarantino... can photograph the hell out of a southern landscape (+) but botches a key scene at the end of his movie by front lighting a character who's supposed to be facing a blank wall at dusk (-). he gets away with dropping jim croce's "i got a name" into an antebellum buddy scene* (+!) and spoils the mood of a retributive bloodbath by yoinking a character out of the frame with a vaudeville hook (stylized violence could be fine, but the style should be consistent: this character dies in part because another character is torn apart by dogs, realistically, earlier in the movie). christoph waltz and leonardo dicaprio are great and really really great (+); samuel l. jackson as an old man and QT himself as an australian are distracting and really really distracting (-). can an egomaniac be afraid of his own talent? get out of your way, boss.

the impossible (film). more of a science fair project than a movie in some ways: HOW DO WEALTHY TOURISTS REACT TO A NATURAL DISASTER? a father will run around for two days without a shirt or shoes, even though they are probably offered to him. a mother will save all little boys in her path despite horrific wounds. little boys will grow up fast. the actors responsible for these reactions are all doing good work, but they're a bit stuck when it comes to developing dramatic tension. the impossible's scenes of the 2004 tsunami hitting thailand are fantastic - the CGI deserves a slew of technical awards, and the editing is top-notch - but when we realize fairly early on that every member of the family has survived (the impossible is based on a true story, and it's called the impossible - one could argue that we know this going into the movie, really), all we're left to wonder is how long it will take them to reunite and why the filmmakers spend so little time with the tsunami's domestic victims. the first question isn't especially interesting, and the second - well, that's another sort of movie.

les misérables (film). i did my darndest to give les mis a fair shot, o my brothers. i avoided reviews, i made a point of seeing it at the mighty ziegfeld, i tried to attribute my hatred for the london stage version to the fact that i saw it over spring break when i lived in oxford and was exhausted and kind of ill as i whispered silent prayers for someone, anyone, to shoot the insufferable gavroche. after all that, i think i appreciate the film even less than i appreciated the musical: the female characters are flat and feeble (helena bonham carter's madame thénardier is the only one with significant agency, and she's a grotesque), the history is maddeningly vague (does anyone leave the show knowing what the june rebellion was actually about?), the singing is all over the place (russell crowe's mush-mouthed inspector javert might actually be a somnambulist, poor hugh jackman is obliged to chant like a country vicar, and toothless anne hathaway chews so much scenery in "i dreamed a dream" that she creates an emotional vacuum at the beginning of the movie, forcing everyone else into endless, affectless refrains like singing waiters in times square). i hated les mis so much i'm actually kind of angry at poor old victor hugo, which i realize is like blaming david bowie and freddie mercury for "ice ice baby" and yet i can't stop the feelings. thank god i didn't have glasses.

silver linings playbook (film). the lovely and talented jennifer lawrence is the pork chop hollywood tied around bradley cooper's neck to get me to play with him, and i am okay with that transaction; he's a pleasant surprise in silver linings, more charismatic than i've seen him since the good old alias days. he's no jimmy stewart, mind you, but this is solid romantic comedy, and he and lawrence have fine flawed-boy-meets-flawed girl chemistry. that said, jacki weaver (as cooper's mother and robert de niro's wife) is the only character who consistently presents as more than a collection of symptoms. a cookie for her (and, okay, for the set decorator who name checked the midnight meat train via a neighborhood marquee).

*i am ready for a quentin tarantino v. wes anderson dj battle.

12.12.12: the dirty dozen

{twelve more snippets of amy stewart's marvelous wicked bugs: the louse that conquered napoleon's army & other diabolical insects*}

01 "The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electo-Mechanical System (HI-MEMS) seeks to implant computer chips inside caterpillars before they undergo metamorphosis into moths or butterflies. They hope to use that circuitry to remotely control the flight paths of insects so that they can someday be used to fly into enemy locations and transmit intelligence without ever being detected." (21)

02 "Mayans had been using [bees and wasps as weapons] since 2600 BC; their legends describe the use of human dummies with a gourd filled with stinging insects for a head.

[...]

One of the most intriguing uses of bees in warfare was recorded by a contemporary of Socrates named Xenophon. He described the use of poisoned hives in Greek warfare around 402 BC: 'All the soldiers ate of the combs, lost their senses, vomited, and were affected with purging, and none of them were able to stand upright; such as had eaten much were like mad-men, and some like persons at the point of death.' The soldiers had, apparently, been given beehives filled with the honey of bees that had feasted on rhododendron and azalea, plants that produce neurotoxins so potent that they remain active in the honey. Those who eat the honey succumb to honey intoxication, also called grayanotoxin poisoning."** (21-22)

03 "Pliny the Elder wrote in about 77 AD that the scorpion was 'a dangerous scourge, and had venom like that of the serpent; with the exception that its effects are far more painful, as the person who is stung will linger for three days before death ensues.' He added that the sting of a scorpion was 'invariably fatal to virgins, and nearly always so to matrons.' (23)

04 "In 1939 the London Zoo killed its black widow spiders, along with its venomous snakes and insects, as a precaution against the possibility of their being liberated during air raids." (44)

05 "Don't be fooled by the fact that [the puss caterpillar] looks just like a tiny Persian cat. The so-called flannel moth or asp moth is one of the most toxic caterpillars in North America. Anyone who rubs up against its long, silky golden-brown hairs will find those hairs embedded under the skin, where they cause severe burning pain, a rash, and blisters." (50)

06 "'One day,' [Charles] Darwin wrote, 'on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! It ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.'" (53)

07 "Although it sounds too horrible to be anything more than an urban legend, in fact, cases of German cockroaches crawling into people's ears and getting stuck there have been well documented in medical literature. Emergency room doctors can pour oil in the ear to drown cockroaches, but often have a hard time extracting them afterward. Some doctors swear by a squirt of lidocaine, which irritates the roach so much that it can send it running out of the ear and across the room." (88)

08 "[P]erhaps their most horrifying quality is the way in which aphids reproduce: some species are actually capable of "telescoping generations" in which one female aphid contains within her the beginnings of another youngster, which is herself already pregnant with yet another generation." (95)

09 "Justin Schmidt, an entomologist who studies venomous stings, created the Schmidt Sting Pain Index to quantify the pain inflicted by ants and other stinging creatures. His surprisingly poetic descriptions*** give some order to the hierarchy of ant stings as compared to those of bees and wasps:

  1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
  1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
  1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
  2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
  2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.

  [...]

  4.0 Tarantula hawk: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
  4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like firewalking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel." (137-138)

10 "A team of researchers in Venezuela found one of these giant centipedes hanging upside down from a cave wall, happily munching away on a small bat. After observing the same behavior several times, they realized that the centipedes were hanging from the cave by their last few legs and catching bats in midair as they flew by, demonstrating a rather frightening level of forethought and ingenuity." (146)

11 "A French research team recently discovered that mosquitoes are more attracted to beer drinkers." (165)

12 "And then there was the tarantula pie. [Would-be murderess] Carole [Hargis] kept a pet tarantula and at first she considered [killing her husband] by putting the hairy spider in bed with him, hoping he would get bitten. But then she had a better idea: she removed the tarantula's venom sac and hid it in a blackberry pie. Mr. Hargis's luck held out a while longer: he took a few bites of pie but never touched the venom. It was beginning to seem like he was invincible.

[...]

[T]he bite of a tarantula is really no worse than that of a wasp or bee. It will certainly sting—in fact, scientists recently discovered that the bite of the West Indian tarantla Psalmopoeus cambridgei goes to work on nerve cells with the same mechanism employed by habanero peppers." (234-235)

13 {bonus, non-insect-book-related} joe went out to put some trash in the chute last night and saw a young guy he didn't know leaning against the table outside our apartment door. when the guy saw him, he jumped up guiltily and disappeared into the stairwell. joe called down to our doorman to say there was a random guy on our floor. "oh," said the doorman, "him? he's drunk and hiding from his grandma."



*highly recommended; everyone should ride the f train with a book cover that shouts BEWARE! THE SORDID LIVES OF BUGS BEHAVING BADLY.

**this came up at a holiday party on saturday night, when my friend dan told me several useful things and i exclaimed that i would have to tell him several things about bees in exchange for what i had just learned. ah, said he, but my parents have kept bees for years, so you can't tell me much about bees i don't know. i said, well.

***combining the insouciant tones of an upscale wine list and the conclusions of choose your own adventure plot lines.

08.27.12

[The balloonist John] Wise had made roughly four hundred flights "and had had all manner of thrilling adventures," [the Swedish aeronaut S.A.] Andrée wrote. "He had flown with [balloons] in sunshine, rain, snow, thunder showers and hurricanes. He had been stuck on chimneys, smoke stacks, lightning rods and church spires, and he had been dragged through rivers, lakes, and over garden plots and forests primeval. His balloons had whirled like tops, caught fire, exploded and fallen to the ground like stones. The old man himself, however, had always escaped unhurt and counted his experiences as proof of how safe the art of flying really was.

"In order to convince a few fellow citizens who had been inconsiderate enough to doubt his thesis, Mr. Wise once made an ascent in Philadelphia, and while in mid-air he deliberately exploded his balloon. Then using the remains of the bag as a parachute he landed right in the midst of the doubters. What effect this had on them I do not know, but the old man himself felt better."

[...]

Not long after that Andrée fell sick with an intestinal complaint that he believed was caused by drinking ice water, but may have been from his living mostly on cake, candy, and ice cream, according to his journals. Having stayed five months in Philadelphia, he went back to Sweden.

(alec wilkinson, from the ice balloon: s.a. andrée and the heroic age of arctic exploration)

07.24.12

multigenerational text messages {sweet tooth edition}

LMO: licorice in a cart otherwise full of vegetables. why did you curse me?
dad: Curse? It is a gift, and if you are around for the end of the wor
dad: ld or anything else comparably important, I guarantee you it will
dad: come in handy -- could even save a civilization or two. Just be s
dad: ure to check back with me when that happens, and I will share a fe
dad: w more secrets with you.

06.11.12

THUNDERTOME II: ROUND 10
SURVIVOR: the long ships (frans g. bengtsson)*
CHALLENGER: the ask (sam lipsyte)

i was, i will admit, a bit worried that the many months between the one in which i finished the ask (october, maybe?) and this one had somehow distorted the way i feel about sam lipsyte's writing. then, as if assigned by the universe's own deputy fairness editor, lipsyte's short story "the republic of empathy" appeared in the new yorker's science fiction double feature and became my subway reading last week. a refresher! what luck! a snippet:

I took Philip for a walk. He tired easily, but his gait was significant. He tended to clutch his hands behind his back, like the vexed ruler of something about to disintegrate.
"How about a brother or sister?" I asked.
"How about I just pooped," Philip said.
"Thanks for your input."
Peg always said I shouldn't model sarcasm for the boy, but who will? Everybody's so earnest around children. Besides, I've always wanted to model. To strut down the runway under all that strobe and glitter, while the fashion aristocrats cheer on my sarcasm.

if you relish the prospect of a book-length version of this - a verbally-confident narrator who does little donuts in his word-jalopy, a creepy child, paragraphs in which returns diminish - the ask is for you. but i'm getting ahead of myself; let's begin again.

it has been argued that it's incredibly difficult to write long-form satire. i agree; i vaguely recall liking the harvard lampoon's bored of the rings, but that probably says as much about my surplus of affection for j.r.r. tolkien as it does about the caliber of the poonies' vietnam jokes (and either way, i was exceedingly tired of the name "dildo bugger" by the time i put that book down). moving higher up the brow, it's no accident that "a modest proposal" is, well, swift, or that the new yorker's "shouts and murmurs" humor pages top out at two pages of ha-ha, max. being funny at length is no mean feat, and being funny at length while telling a meaningful story is, i would imagine, very nearly impossible. unsuccessful book-length satire, moreover, is bad like a cobra: i hated david lodge's nice work (a self-satisfied rumpity-bumpity novel about university politics and corporate shenanigans and crap) so much when forced to read it in college that i re-read elizabeth gaskell's north and south (the earnest, industrialism-can-grow-a-heart! 1855 novel which gave rise to lodge's book, sort of) so that i could write a twice-as-long-as-required essay in which i did my best to beat the former to death with the latter. david lodge makes richard whitely look like lenny bruce.**

deep, slow breaths. in, out. at the other end of the spectrum, i think gary shteyngart (the russian debutante's handbook, absurdistan) marries satire and sentiment pretty well, though he sometimes takes awhile to get there (i'll talk about that if i ever manage to THUNDERTOME super sad true love story, speaking of taking awhile to get places). if lydia millet in the times book review is to be believed, sam lipsyte does, too:

What makes “The Ask” work so well is the way it dovetails its characters’ self-loathing with their self-consciousness. For instead of making its characters blind — a strategy upon which much farcical writing since “Don Quixote” has depended — it gives them 20-20 vision but endows them with perfect impotence. Milo and Don and Maura and their colleagues have more depth than many of the celebrated satirical characters of the past, and Lipsyte’s great accomplishment is to pull this trick off without trumpeting it. His characters are intelligent, even hyper­intelligent — they’re nobody’s fools, clearly — but finally their weakness is near-infinite.

[...]

It’s as if publishing is afraid to be both literary and funny anymore — as though, in hedging its bets against the competitive advantage of other media, publishing fears the literary comedy and even more the literary satire. And we’re a weaker intellectual culture because of it: other forms simply don’t do the same work that great satirical literature does. It takes fiction, with its subtlety and interiority and sentence rhythms and essential made-upness, to marry the individually uproarious to the systemically tragic in a way that can be laughed at without, finally, also being laughed off.

she could be right about publishing. she's totally wrong about lipsyte. impotent characters are fine with me when they're instrumental; i don't necessarily need them to teach me things about how the world works, as, say, kafka's do, but i need them to move me, or at the very least to make me laugh. lipsyte's milo, an overeducated and -fed toddler-father living with his wife in queens and leering his way through throwaway jobs in higher education, does none of those things.

Back in high school, I remembered, a soothing way to fall asleep after picturing tremendous breasts in burgundy bras (yes, the image pre-dated Vargina) had been to conjure the crimson blossom of bullet-ripped concert tees, the hot suck and pour of flamethrower flame over pep rally bleachers. Typical teen shooter fluff, though I was worried I'd inherited my grandmother's nutcake gene. I was fairly popular. Why did I slaver for slaughter?
The visions had stopped in college. Some huge and dainty hand peeled them off my skull walls.
I became a painter, at least at parties. I was happy for a time.
But now, riding the trains, or else home sitting with the bills, the old terrible feeling returned. Whenever I checked my bank balance the terrible feeling welled up in me. The goddamn asks, I'd sweep them with a Maxim gun or some other wipeout device whose history I learned of late at night on the war channels, a glass of Old Overholt rye on my knee. I was not bad off compared to most of the world. Why didn't anybody do anything? We could get a few billion of us together, rush the bastards. Sure, a good many of us would die, but unless the asks popped off some nukes, eventually they'd get overrun.
What was the holdup?

passages like these make me feel like the house centipedes that blunder out of the drain in our bathroom once every six months or so. they try so hard to scramble up the sides of the drinking glasses with which i catch and release them to the balcony; as those legs and legs and legs catch on nothing and nothing and nothing, i imagine their little mugs look like i did as i reread the first four chapters of the ask on the way to columbus circle this morning. where am i expected to get with this? why am i so angry?

in a breathless review for the guardian, the novelist geoff dyer points to "strong traces of...Don DeLillo" in lipsyte's writing. "Characters are recruited and scenes contrived solely for the pleasures of setting up a two- or three-person groove, to riff on and report back from the leading edge of language." never mind the interchangeable voices, the particle-board personalities, the ditties that never really begin or end; the riff's the thing!

forgive me for referring you once again, dear readers, to infinite jest, the big boss battle waiting for all post-modern writers who fancy themselves masters of humor and structure - but you see, one doesn't need to flip back through it to remember what madame psychosis sounds like, to be reminded of what happened to don gately, to know whether or not the jokes buried in the endless footnotes were funny, to get the point. it's been years since i last read it all the way through (i'm overdue for a reread, actually), and i'm still dead certain the chapter headings alone could take the ask in THUNDERTOME. am i saying sam lipsyte doesn't do it for me because he's not david foster wallace? yeah, i guess i am; i need satire with a big old bleeding heart, a punch line with actual punch. not characters with character - i can handle the fact that milo is a schmuck - but a reason to stick around for three hundred pages. there isn't one here.

VICTOR: the long ships; the ask should be abandoned in shark-infested waters.


imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 how many times have you heard the trolley song? could you stand to hear it again?
02 when was the last time a book made you hulk-mad? what was it?
03 have you ever had to deal with a house centipede?
04 have you read the ask, or lipsyte's recent piece in the new yorker? do you think he's funny?
05 is it fair to expect chewy emotional nougat at the center of satire?
06 is it fair to expect pomo writers to be better than david foster wallace?
07 how do you feel about jazz?

*previous battle here.

**the only other time i got that angry in the middle of an assignment was when i filled the last two pages of my film class's final blue book with vitriol about judy garland's stupid eyebrows after having to watch "the trolley song" from meet me in st. louis ten times in a row. i got a gentleman's B.

04.02.12: RIP, pinky the flip phone



for five years you were a doughty and noble 2G companion, pinky; even your audibly carcinogenic buzz, far more intelligible than any of the calls i received through you, was a dulcet tone of friendship. sleep the sleep of the just.

01.24.12

THUNDERTOME II: ROUND 8

SURVIVOR: the long ships (frans g. bengtsson)*
CHALLENGER: louisa may alcott (harriet reisen)

louisa may alcott enthusiasts are a spooky bunch. little women was a pleasant enough childhood read, but the little women (and little men, and jo's boys, and so on) scene is an intense one: like anne of green gables fangirls and little house on the prairie reenactors, the alcott admirers i've met tend to brag about growing up without television and, like, refer to their hair as their glory. while there's nothing formally terrible about either of those tendencies, i'd rather not get trapped in an elevator with someone who exhibited them.

it would be superconvenient re: THUNDERTOME structure if, having read harriet reisen's painstakingly-researched alcott biography, i now felt differently about little women women, or was at least able to tell you that alcott herself wasn't spooky at all. i'm fairly sure i don't, is the thing, and she...is?

by all accounts, growing up alcott was pretty miserable. louisa's father, bronson, a transcendentalist who ran with nineteenth-century luminaries like emerson, thoreau, and hawthorne in massachusetts, had little interest in conventional living arrangements or employment (or, eventually, property**). principles like bronson's are well and good for single, unmoored fellows whose bones are finished growing, but they're pretty lousy for dependent wives and little girls; louisa's long-suffering mother, abby, scrambled to pay the family's crippling debts with help from her relatives (including, at a frighteningly young age, louisa herself; she was her family's principal breadwinner from her late teens until her death), and all of the family starved and froze when he decided they would both adhere to his strict vegetarian principles and subsist on what they could grow and forage at the various utopian communities he attempted to establish (and from which they were perpetually in danger of being evicted).

"but he was a dreamer," you say, "and we should treasure and indulge and nurture our dreamers!" he was also an insufferably self-important pedagogue who, in his attempts at educational reform at various experimental schools in boston and elsewhere, "invited students to defy him and then punished them by public shunning—making visible what it meant to lose god's love" and handed down "lordly dismissal[s] of any views but his own."

papa alcott was a piece of work, is what i'm saying, and in some ways his is the central personality in reisen's book; abby orbited bronson, the girls orbited their parents (whose gravity was immense - abby would read and comment in louisa's diary), and the alcotts' financial responsibilities tethered louisa's writing to the commercial realities of her day.

to say that reisen (also a writer-producer of an alcott documentary) is wildly sympathetic to her subject is, if possible, a huge understatement; in the preface to her biography, she explains that she herself is an alcott addict, and that her hope

[...] is that readers of this book will be inspired to track down the dozen or more of Louisa May Alcott's works whose titles are known but whose whereabouts are not, to bring them forth from obscure periodicals in the backs of old library shelves, attic trunks, even from inside the walls of old houses, as pages of Louisa's Fruitlands diaries were, so they may be published and read as widely as their most recent predecessors have been. If they do, I may never have to run out of new work from the prodigious pen of Louisa May Alcott.

damn, louisa; your biographer so ardent! i'm tempted to admire alcott's devotion to her family for reisen's sake - the latter is a graceful, deft, compelling storyteller, and the story she tells of louisa's refused marriage proposals and truncated trips abroad is nearly heartbreaking - but the truth is that, quoth louisa, "i'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe." behind the pen name a.m. barnard, she wrote pulp fiction about "spies and transvestites and drug takers" - but she didn't seem to have much interest in the world beyond the family hearth (her brief and disastrous stint as a nurse during the civil war notwithstanding). she sure could fictionalize that hearth and make it sound toxic idyllic, though! what a woman!

i'm aware that louisa may alcott inspired hordes of girls who went on to become accomplished writers. i'm aware that i am in all seriousness a terrible person for disliking her; i console myself, gentle readers, with the thought that if you've been reading kidchamp for long, you knew that already. reisen i like very much (i'd have loved to have taken one of her film classes at stanford), and if she'd managed to work a viking ex machina in at the end of her biography in lieu of louisa's crippling headaches and doping, i'd have considered letting her kilos of research pile-drive bengtsson's fanciful man-book. in its absence, i can but say that i'd happily read another reisen bio, and that i wish her well.

VICTOR: red orm & friends (the long ships), of course, with a sickening squelch. would a book about creepy martyrdom even want to win?***

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 with whom would you like to be trapped in an elevator?

02 would you rather be trapped in an elevator with kanye west, anthony bourdain, or kirk cameron? death is not an option.

03 at what age is it reasonable for a child to make his or her own decisions about, say, whether or not he or she is a vegetarian?

04 having at that from the other direction: must a parent edit his personal philosophy for the sake of his children? how much?

05 ladies, did you once see yourself as jo march?

06 biography-readers, do you choose your texts for their subjects or their authors?

07 to what tale would you like to append a viking ex machina?

*previous battle here.

**louisa's uncle sam in a letter to emerson about the alcotts: "it is very important that...my sister [abby] and her family might have a shelter...without implicating [bronson] in the sin of living upon soil appropriated to his exclusive use [...] not that I think the plan practicable....but he is so sincere, so devout, so full of faith, that i long to have him try his experiment to his own entire satisfaction."

***"from 1888 until 1950 there was no full-length biography of louisa may alcott, not surprising given her utter lack of critical cachet," reisen writes. "her readers never knew or cared." i'm reminded of a passage of john jeremiah sullivan's, read last night as i waited for the long-suffering m14 bus to take me and my sprained ankle down grand street:

Llewis taught me something. At high school in Jamaica, he said, when your team lost, it was traditional to chant, on your way out of the grounds, "We feel no way! We feel no way!" Meaning essentially, we're not sweating it, we didn't really give a shit anyway.

01.19.12



the first time it happened i was in a sun-drenched piercing studio in laguna beach, waiting to have a new hole punched in my cartilage; i drank a little paper cup of water, pulled myself together, and went ahead with it. a few times after that, i felt it coming after a long dinner at a cuban restaurant with joe and my dad; we watched a pair of dancers fling each other across the floor beneath a dirty skylight, ate yeasty rolls with garlic butter from a cigar box, and talked politics, then i slithered to the ground in the middle of the plaza. once it happened in the middle of the night, and i woke up in the moonlight with my cheek against our san francisco kitchen's old linoleum floor.

in my late teens and early twenties, i fainted about once a year. to tell you the truth, i tended to forget that it had ever happened until, you know, it happened again. both my mother and sister have had similar experiences; mom once fainted while handing in a college assignment, and emily once hit her san francisco kitchen floor (and maybe part of her counter on the way down - as i recall, there was a head-whacking in that story). the takeaways back then were that since extremely low blood pressure runs in our family, i should be sure to have at least one cup of coffee in the morning - and if black fireworks flared up at the edges of my vision, i should sit down. otherwise, since the episodes had no constants (time of day, level of hydration, time since last meal, mental state - each swoon had a unique combination), there wasn't much i could do.

i had a span of several years without episodes here in new york, and then joe and i met newly-engaged friends for mexican food down in union square late one afternoon. as we waited for a table, i started to feel sick to my stomach; a buzzing kicked up in my ears, and the room began to curl at the corners. i made it to the sidewalk outside the restaurant before falling into joe's arms, and when i came to, i had no idea where we were. i became obsessed with the idea that passerby would think i was drunk - though i was sober as a judge, i was slurring my words - so i insisted we go ahead with the dinner. i think i made it halfway through a piece of cheese crisp before asking to go home and folding myself up on the floor of a cab.

that was the first of the two really lousy swoons. the second came after a night at our local bar in hell's kitchen: with a few beers in me, i was easy prey for the black fireworks. joe heard a horrible crash in our bathroom and came in to find me on the floor. though i'm usually limp and weak after an episode, that one went through me like lightning; i promptly tried to take a shower, fainted again, and became a slippery, flailing, senseless thing. as he called for an ambulance, i remember clinging desperately to our mattress as though gravity had forgotten me and i'd spin off into the ceiling. i was sure i'd never control my body again.

i was up and talking by the time the paramedics arrived, and i gave them the long, boring history of the pressure and makeup of my blood ("she donates a lot of blood," joe explained). fluids at the hospital felt like a cold shower under my skin, and i finally knew how our little cat must have felt when we gave him injections (though i always warmed his IV bags). the attending doctor doubled my drink count in his head, diagnosed me with vasovagal syncope, and sent me on my way. we shuffled home down ninth avenue, five hundred dollars poorer, as the sun rose, and i paused in front of the OPTIMISM sticker on a bodega's vending machine. "apparently the universe is in its first semester of film school."

early this monday morning, joe heard another terrific crash in the bathroom. i woke up able to tell him that i hadn't hit my head (wrong; i'd knocked both my temple and the back of my head, though they were light knocks and i wasn't concussed) and that i couldn't walk (right, unfortunately; i sprained my left ankle, and my foot looks like an artisanal sausage).

why do i tell you this? i'm not entirely sure. i don't want or expect pity; swooning ladies are too coddled in our and previous societies, if you ask me. my case isn't especially edifying; fainting and getting a diagnosis of "fainting" is pretty open-and-shut, really. perhaps i simply want to share a vulnerability; i grew up with the firm conviction that little girls who underwent injury or sickness without tears or complaint were braver and nobler than little girls who didn't, and that's an idea i've thought about setting aside. perhaps, having told you about strangers' books all month, i just wanted to tell you something personal. don't worry about me! but maybe, you know, don't lend me your wedding china.

01.13.12: i said consummate Vs

 

peoplewatching is great, but detritus-watching is the best.

01.05.12

[...] Usually when we rode in Roman's car, he played American rap and rock music on tape cassettes that you might find in the 99¢ bin at an American flea market. He sometimes talked to me about the music he played. One afternoon as we were bouncing and zooming in his little car on a Vladivostok street broken to pieces by ice and thaws, he put on a cassette by Kid Rock. I would not have recognized the artist, but Roman told me who it was. "I love Kid Rock's music," he said, "but I don't know what his words mean."
    I listened for a while to the song. "Well, here he's saying that he wants money in order to make his life better," I explained.
    "Oh, I understand," Roman said. Then, "Kid Rock is a scandalist, yes?"
    "Yes, I think so. He was married to Pamela Anderson, of Baywatch."
    "Ah, yes. I know Baywatch. Pamela Anderson—she is also a scandalist, I think."
    Just then the car hit a big bump and all of us ricocheted off the ceiling. Roman said, "Oh, these roads!"
    "Dorogi, i duraki" (roads, and idiots), I said. (This is a famous saying, attributed to Gogol, who once noted that in Russia the two biggest problems were the roads, and idiots.)
    Roman laughed. "Yes," he said. "And they never repair either one."

(ian frazier, from travels in siberia)

11.15.11

101 in 1001 {II}: 041 get a bikini wax [completed 11.15.11]

That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.

(h.p. lovecraft, "from beyond")

06.24.11: the dirty dozen, part III

08 from helen simpson's "night thoughts," granta 115:

3:48 a.m.

And the media is so disparaging of men over forty, he thought; the way it zooms in on our paunches and spindle shanks, our pendulous earlobes. Another real worry was, he was developing turkey wattles. Ella had noticed it too - she'd called him jowly the other day, she'd pinched an incipient fold of flab while ostensibly chucking him under the chin.

Why can't there be some positive older role models for a change? he fretted. Wherever you went, images of young men in next to nothing were in your face, making you feel bad about your body. His route to work was tyrannized by giant posters of ripped abs, honed six-packs, buff biceps.

In a pathetic attempt to fight back, he'd recently been engaging in a spot of newsagent guerrilla warfare. Now when he bought his paper he made sure to stick some of his pre-prepared Post-it notes to the naked boys on the covers of the women's magazines - notes he had felt-tipped in advance with the words: WHAT IF HE WAS YOUR SON?

09 {sub-list: twelve sorts of person-spackle which are worth what one hands over for them}

i benetint rose-tinted lip & cheek stain ($28)
ii guerlain météorites pearls ($57)
iii lush ocean salt cleanser ($35)
iv chanel rouge allure ($32)
v l'oréal paris telescopic mascara ($10)
vi deborah lippmann nail lacquer ($16-$20)
vii revlon colorstay liquid eye pen ($9)
viii lather ultra light face lotion ($16)
ix tokyomilk absinthe no. 84 lip elixir ($7)
x maybelline colorsensational lipstain ($7)
xi estée lauder double wear ($32)
xii essie nail polish ($8)

10 from eudora welty's letter to the new yorker, march 15, 1933:

As to what I might do for you - I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15 cent movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse's pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. That shows you how my mind works - quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards.

[...]

There is no telling where I may apply, if you turn me down; I realize this will not phase [sic] you, but consider my other alternative: the U. of N.C. offers $12.00 to let me dance in Vachel Lindsay's Congo. I congo on. I rest my case, repeating that I am a hard worker.

Truly yours.

06.09.11

From: 1
To: 2

someone is on the geeky blog that i read...

http://gizmodo.com/5809926/shooting-challenge-infinite-loop

yep. be prepared for nerds, yo.


From: 2
To: 1

wait. what will the nerds do?


From: 1
To: 2

You know.... nerdy things that... nerds... do?
(This statement is best imagined accompanied by vague hand waves)


From: 2
To: 1

In mildly related news, getting that USB card reader like you suggested was LIFE-ALTERING.


From: 1
To: 2

Excellent!

ps - Sodium Pentothal is LIE-FALTERING
pps - Terribly sorry for that pun.

ppps - no, i'm not.


From: 2
To: 1

You know, I’d never seen that spelled. Now you’re responsible for the thing I learned today, too.

Vaguely, vaguely related nerdy thing: No one (surprise) fact checked Cherie Currie’s memoir about being in the Runaways. She mentions being given “Patosin” to induce labor when she was pregnant, which appears to be a phonetic version of Pitocin? Maybe her editor just figured she knew her drug names (actually kind of a good bet).


From: 1
To: 2

To tell the truth, I had to double-check the spelling.

ps - OMG ANOTHER PUN.


From: 2
To: 1

I’d never heard the T, so I’d never have thought about the prefix being spelled that way at all. D’you think it’s because after you give it to someone and you get the information you need, you high-five your partner? FAKE SCIENCE


From: 1
To: 2

I was going to respond with an email that dropped all humor, and gave you a very technical explanation of the name. That rapidly became exhausting. So...

YES HIGH-FIVES FOR SCIENCE.

06.05.11

my month of no purchases is over, gentlemen.



this is not an illustration of triumph, mind you. this is how i admit that i broke down with like three days to go and bought a helium tank.

guy on fourteenth street: it's balloon time!
LMO: i know!

05.23.11

we entertain small knots of people on a reasonably regular basis, but i can count the actual parties i've hosted on one hand: the jen and i had an alice's adventures in wonderland party in our room over the high street when we lived in england, joe and i accidentally threw a new year's eve party at our place in hell's kitchen when everyone met up at our house and never got around to leaving, and we had a poker night which sort of functioned as a housewarming for our new place about a year ago. neither of us is fond of making a big deal of birthdays, see, and our friends are such fine holiday-party-organizers that i'd hate to disappoint them with, like, inferior halloween counterprogramming. harold camping's rapture, though - that could be mine.

date: Wed, May 18, 2011 at 10:54 AM
subject: the end is nigh

good morning, all! the joe and i have been kicking around the idea of having a thing at our apartment for awhile now; i've also been reading about the rapture and have learned that many civilizations consider our having a party to be one of the last signs of the apocalypse. i was just telling steve the other day that kirk "left behind" cameron and i are birthday buddies, and he responded by reciting thessalonians in a guttural voice:

For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are on the Lower East Side and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall have wine and cheese and those weird cookies you make. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and probably we'll have a good view of something spectacular happening to Brooklyn, what with this balcony.

what: beholding the rapture at joe and lauren's
when: this saturday, 5/21; texts vary on whether festivities begin at 6pm PST or 6pm everywhere, so let's split the difference and say 8pm local time
where: [our apartment]

per steve, we'll have wine and cheese and a variety of baked goods; we've also supplemented our bar with apocalyptic spirits. feel free to supplement that in a world-ending manner of your choosing, or to bear faith and faith alone. hope to see you there!

be pure, take a tour,
LMO and JMS

all of the people came to our party, internet! okay, our friends who were still in barcelona didn't come to our party, but two friends-of-friends came unexpectedly, so i'll claim perfect attendance anyway! i got to use all of my creepy glassware (who knew i'd been thrifting for a rapture party all this time?) and everyone liked the cookies and steve didn't eat anyone! we watched a monsignor who looked like a honey-baked ham and interpretive dancing on the (muted) catholic channel, the moon rose into the mist over the same old brooklyn, and i was very happy.





{homemade kirk cameron and debbie harry votives & blessed mother candle (courtesy of amanda) by me; peeps on our roof by george}