I just sat down with the best intentions

To blog a little while I ought to be doing other work as promised, i.e. reading Mew’s doctoral dis, but instead I plopped down with the express intention of taking the blog express to self-expression, until more recently I’ve come to suspect that my roommate and her bf do not realize that I’m home! And that’s the reason they’ve turned up the plaintive acoustic-guitar-driven rock love song on the little radio in the kitchen and briefly, haltingly, begun singing along. Maybe I’ll beat my hastiest retreat yet!

Significant Projects

Two things I’ve enjoyed of late:

1. This “flash fiction” (or something) site.

2. This singer/loop pedal player. Sis and I saw her perform last summer, opening for a single-monickered Canadian songstress, outdoors on a hill in Vermont. Caught her again last night at Summerstage (and was more than slightly distracted by all the loud talking. It’s free, but does that mean you should shout through the whole show? I kept thinking that just a little closer to the middle and the front, people were actually listening. But every time I edged closer to the stage, I came within range of another loud, irritating conversation. Sheesh.). She’s really something. Catchy and fairly mesmerizing. Surprising and inventive. It’s possible that she might also be a shorty. Next U.S. appearance is in SF, 8/22.

Two things I expect to enjoy:

1. Mr. Dream, playing 7/10 at the Charleston in W’burg. I guess I’ve spent long enough looking at this bar warily from the pizza place across the street.

2. This sci-fi thriller looks promising. Never seen it, myself.

The pleasure of both

Misère nim, the game played several times in the course of Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad is a combinatorial game–that is, a two-player game with no hidden information and nothing left to chance. Last Year at Marienbad, a combinatorial game for cinema, might be a source text for a type of narrative that I find compelling but hard to talk about–that is, not painful or embarrassing, but maybe a little hard to put into words. They’re narratives in the shape of puzzles–ideally, puzzles that have no solution, or that have multiple solutions. Or maybe it’s that they hesitate, not resolving themselves, authorizing multiple readings simultaneously.

Of course this kind of ambiguity often surfaces in the middle of a story, only to be resolved by the ending (this is the pattern we’re accustomed to as viewers/readers: confusion/doubt/uncertainty contributes to tension, which is eventually relieved by explanation or action and the release of tension). In these cases, I’m really happier with the story up to that point–that is, until the story unambiguously tilts in the direction of one possible meaning, foreclosing its other forking paths. Here I’m thinking particularly of The Third Man, which is beautiful through and through except I always sort of wish that Orson Welles would never show up. Vertigo is another very good example of finely balanced creepiness completely spoiled by an overabundance of dramatic irony–we know too much after the ruse has been revealed in that awful letter-writing scene.

Only a very few stories care to hold onto their multiplicity (among films, there’s Lost Highway, maybe, or L’Avventura, although in the latter film the question of whether the young woman died or ran away simply fades away to nothing as the movie goes on. Hitchcock’s Suspicion, recommended by JH, is one of my favorites of this type, though I think the chilling ambiguity of the final scene is unintentional. Perhaps in Suspicion the delicious ambiguity is created by dramatic irony, because my preferred reading of the situation–that we still don’t know, one way or the other, if her husband is the murderer–is at variance with the main character’s reading–she believes he’s innocent. In literature I suppose Borges is at the root of all this). We’ll also have to distinguish here between the kind of stories I’m describing and stories that wallow in mere randomness for its own sake, or that bluster portentously without getting to any particular point, or whose point is more atmospheric than narrative. Arty movies have a reputation for this kind of thing (Coffee and Cigarettes either mocked this stereotype or confirmed it). But in the stories I’m referring to, something does happen–we just can’t be sure, by the end, exactly what.

Of course, it’s possible in many cases that what I read as ambiguous is a simple roman á clef whose clef I don’t happen to have. I prefer it that way, and in this instance I’ll embrace my ignorance.

Ill Winded

Nasty, grit-carrying wind whipped down Seventh Avenue, carrying away hats and garbage can lids, ahead of some tar-tipped cumulonimbus clouds rolling in from NW NJ apocalyptically on our walk home from the workplace tonight (we have a workplace now, where women come and go talking of Michael Jackson. This is the best piece we read about MJ today), and it has turned our thoughts bloggishly, via melancholy and dread.

A gloomy Gowanus

This week has been a little hard on poor Petty’s self-image: first, a professional comic who came by the workplace ribbed us for having gray hairs and still working for free. Then, at a very tweedy bar under the JMZ tracks, the frontman of a local literarily minded indie-rock outfit that’s been getting some press kneed us in the groinal area.

On the plus side, Rimpletide has been keeping us company. On a recent jaunt through W’burg with Rimps, we spotted this holder of matchbooks:

No Suze for sale

The barmistress had never tried Suze, and indeed the bar didn’t stock it. But I liked this tiny cooler.

We just went outside to find the kind of light you only see when a late-afternoon storm gets it together to leave the house before sundown:

Udders over the West Village

Just last week we learned this kind of cloud formation is called “mammatus” (“udders”), thanks to this new favorite. To us it looks more like stomach lining, but heck. </OVERLITERAL ATMOSPHERIC METAPHORS>

Last night felt grim and nihilistic after a very uneven literary reading hosted by a journal that has grabbed “headlines” “worldwide” for its millenarian cover gimmick (Rimpletide handily deflated our enthusiasm for this gimmick by [correctly, we reckon] diagnosing its essential anti-humanism: “So no one will be alive to read it?”). (“Ooooh, yeah.”)

But we ended the night by launching a new glossy lifestyle/real estate magazine. So things are looking up.

Suze and Moxie

Mew has introduced us to a new aperitif called Suze, which comes from France. It’s billed as an “Apéritif Élaboré,” although no one here seems to know what it elaborates on. It’s sweet and contains the usual mysterious “assemblage de plantes aromatiques” as do most aperos. But what distinguishes Suze is its main flavor: gentian root. The label asserts that 50% of its gentian is wild (or, evocatively, “sauvage”).

Un Apéritif Élaboré

This ingredient of course put us in mind of Moxie, that queen of Maine restoratives. Moxie contains “gentian root extractives,” whatever that means. And, on reflection, Suze does taste quite a bit like Moxie, especially when mixed with two parts club soda and served over ice. Both Moxie and Suze were born in the 1880s, evidently a good decade for bitter roots. Of note here: the similar burnt-orange color scheme.

Moxie in the can

We’re pretty sure that Suze won’t replace Moxie in our personal pantheon, but it does offer a much more palatable alternative to the lamentable “Moxtini” for sociable drinking. While quaffing, we might pour out a few drops in memory of E.B. White, who wrote from Belgrade, Maine, in a letter to a New York reporter:

It’s cold here in camp but I swim anyway, because the air is so cold it makes the water seem warm. There is a certain serenity here that heals my spirit, and I can still buy Moxie in a tiny super-market six miles away. Moxie contains gentian root, which is the path to the good life. This was known in the second century before Christ, and it is a boon to me today.

Be careful, please!

I’ve really been enjoying these warning sawhorses in the Montreal Metro. Their little cartoon man has slipped and is falling keister-over-teakettle, his hat flying off in the other direction. They’re painted the same color as the trains and the lettering looks like Futura. For some reason, I never noticed them when I lived here. Not sure why getting near this crane would cause a fall, exactly, but the general message seems to be: “Watch out! Be wary!”

Don't fall on your head

Also, it’s fun to get on the Metro after getting used to the MTA system–Montreal’s cars are a lot narrower, making for a more cozy feel. And besides the extraordinary quiet afforded by their rubber tires, the Metro trains  accelerate very, very quickly.

Rubber tires. (Image: Wikipedia)

Whale vertebrae, W52nd St.

A bright idea

Interpellated, again

Out in a part of Bushwick I’d never visited for a friend’s show last night at Starr Space, I got off one stop too far and so trudged back Northwest along Wyckoff Ave and then Southwest on Starr, past Bushwick Park and to the corner of Knickerbocker Ave., generally feeling like I had orienteered and navigated pretty handily–not feeling overly cocky, I think, just smug and a little self-congratulatory, as always when I find my way without my usual amount of hunting and circling. But as I neared my destination, unhurriedly watching the address numbers tick down, I heard an assertive voice call out from the darkness: “Starr Space?” the voice asked. I took a moment to realize that the voice was directed at me, and that, in fact, its owner was the doorman or bouncer of the place I was headed. He had picked me out instantly as headed for this show: knew from half a block away (maybe from the corner?) what I was all about.

I know I should stop being surprised by getting pegged like this.

Conscience breaks out

I decided to go with the paperback. Moral considerations aside, the paper quality is truly wretched: rough, pulpy stuff that smells like sawdust and contributes to a dismayingly light product. But I did the “right thing” and bought it from the bookstore.

And what a book! I’d read “Canal Street” already but “Someplace in Queens” has already obliterated a story I’ve been working on for a few weeks.

I leaned on the railing of a large, unexplained concrete pool thick with floating trash and watched a sparrow on a soda can do a quick logrolling number to stay on top. No matter what, I could not get out of my mind “D. D. Dong, D.M.D.”

The whole essay is that good. Or better. Buy this book (in hardcover, if you can find it).

Fair trade/free trade revisited (or, hardcover lust)

So here it is: I wanna buy a copy of Ian “Sandy” Frazier’s Gone To New York, a collection of New Yorker pieces from the writer Lawrence Weschler calls the best of his generation. Thing of it is, the library copy is out (that’s no big deal b/c I’d like to own this honey), Shakespeare & Co. has 7 paperback copies four blocks from me at the usual trade paper price ($14 I think). But a certain online retailer named after one of the world’s great rivers is offering remaindered hardcovers for under five dollars! Now, I normally would not be tempted by this online retailer, no matter how much of a discount they’ve extorted from publishers–as a former bookseller, I will staunchly march to the nearest local store and buy a book at full price, fortified by a righteous expenditure, rather than order a little brown box with a smile on it. Still, and here’s the thing, I would eagerly snap up this book off the remainder table at, say Bear Creek Books in Montpelier or the Biography Book Shop on Bleecker, (or used! I found my hardcover copy of Joe Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel at a South Florida thrift store for $2, and it gives off a deliciously musty basement odor whenever I crack it open), and count myself lucky to score the hardcover at a bargain price, even though neither publisher nor author really benefits from that sale. The bookseller does profit from it, but in used or bargain bookstores we’re talking about a different domain of retail that is already sort of competing with regular trade stores (or, in the case of Biography, with the full-price shelves of the same store).

Here’s my question: Is it less wrong to buy a book on Limpopo.com if it has been remaindered?

Here's the paperback (Picador)

The FSG hardcover also has handsomer cover art