Before Lunch

I knew there was something I liked about this Diesel cafe place. Saturdays the thrumming drum and bass gives way to the Decembrists. Boston as a whole feels like less of a sonic black hole now as well. That said, I'm sick of ruminating about Boston and Thanksgiving and all that crap, so I'll shift gears and say nothing more of this town or that holiday.

Ethan Hawke needs to eat a sandwich. Richard Linklater needs to let his existential dilemmas rest for a while. I guess he did that in School of Rock, whatever. Julie Delpy needs to get herself cast into more movies I see. I guess I could work on seeing more of her films.

Before Sunset, real-time sequel to the well regarded Before Sunrise, is a conversation movie; it's a getting to know you again movie that wastes no time in the intellectual void of non-dialogue. It is, literally, all dialogue. Not all of it is good, a lot of it is inexplicable. The movie succeeds, by and by, despite its clunkiness, verbosity and the kind of metaphysical subject matter that has no place in a getting reacquainted kind of conversation.

I think it succeeds, primarily, because Hawke and Delpy, essentially the only two people in the movie, have bought into the concept, they co-wrote the script, they played in the movie shot nine years ago that was about the encounter that happened (in movie time) nine years ago. They have a familiarity with the characters that allows Linklater to pull off the gorgeous tracking shots. There's no doubt that Linklater has bought into the concept. There's nothing flashy or pretentious about the direction of this movie. There are essentially three shots: The long tracking shot, the closeup on Delpy, and the closeup on Hawke. That's it really. This is a movie about two people Linklater wants nothing, especially tricky directing, to get in the way of their rediscovery.

Hence, Before Sunset, lives and dies by its dialogue. There's considerably more living than dying. Linklater and company are most successful when they put away the angst and liberal proselytizing and let the characters explore their lives with and without each other. In those moments, which get better and more numerous as the film comes to a close, Hawke and Delpy look more comfortable and earnest about the words they're saying. Before that you have a lot of insecurity and uncertainty, which is a natural outgrowth of not having seen someone in nine years, but more often than feeling like nervous expectation, it comes off hackneyed.

Rather than disbelief that they're finally seeing each other again, it seems like disbelief that they're talking about freedom fries, globalization and nihilism.

Linklater has harvested the ether of modernism better and more pointedly in The Waking Life, which is a more ambitious film, but ultimately one that doesn't hit the emotional stride Before Sunset does, precisely because of the primacy of philosophic pursuit.

Then, just when Before Sunset finds itself, it's over, which is just how it should be.

occurring in realtime and coming in at 80 minutes, it's a terse but vivid exploration of human desire, expectation, longing, and reclamation. Hawke has a plane to catch, and only has about an hour with the woman that has ruled his imagination for nine years. Like its characters, Before Sunset connects powerfully, but only once it gets serious about rediscovering itself.

Read the full thing here.

Jeremy's Iron

Thanksgiving was a strange bird.

I spent it away from my family for only the second time ever really. Neither time even moderately approximated a traditional Renz/Baumgarten evening. The first time I was shitfaced, nearly falling off a triangular abutment of one of the Ponte Vecchio's less famous and consequently less tourist-choked cousins. There's a lot to be said for a holiday spent drowning in 49 cent table wine and Florentine lasagna.

Last night it was cases of 49 dollar wine with the family of a roommate of a girlfriend, traditional squash and celery root faire, as cooked up by an expatriate Martha Stewart in Shannon's half-unpacked house. The house is not yet broken in and it lacks some essential cooking accoutrements, so the most elaborate and gourmet Thanksgiving meal I've ever eaten came to be known as a "camping holiday" by most of the people eating it. Other-worldly.

The Coldiron matriarch was marthaesque for her food, chosen as much for color aesthetics as for taste, certainly, but also for the effortlessness of the preparation. All dolled-up with a kerchief, she cooked a dozen-odd dishes without having to re-apply her foundation. A fitting mother-figure for this diasporic human American family, these world travelers, these epicures, these anachronisms--this clan of hairless apes, unlike any creatures I've ever encountered.

The rest of the clan displayed similar surface perfection--the underside being perfect as well for all I know--with his or her own little thing that made he or she eminently unique in exactly the way you'd expect them to be.

Little sis is a history major who studies the barbarian invasions as rigorously as she studies the Nick and Jessica debacle. Her boyfriend sails. As in, he's a sailor, on a team of persons who also sail. Presumably, he does so in regattas--but not anymore, because of a falling out with the coach over the direction of the club. Drive.

Shannon's roommate, the Russian Literature major, whilst ruminating about this or that movement in classical music or modern theater, would drop a staccato expression of what I would eventually realize was French. By the time I'd realized what language she was using, everyone would be wiping tears from their eyes. She played rugby at Dartmouth.

Jesus, these people are smart, I thought, feeling like I'd met a whole group of intellectual superiors.

Lisa: Hi, Alison, I'm Lisa Simpson. Oh, it's great to finally meet someone who converses above the normal eight-year-old level.
Alison: Actually, I'm seven. I was just skipped ahead because I was getting bored with the first grade.
Lisa: You're younger than me too? [look worried, starts breathing into her paper lunch bag]
Alison: Are you hyperventilating?
Lisa: No...I just like to smell my lunch.

Thankfully they left their trophies at home.

In the mode of a Jane Austen heroine, which is how I felt, I'll say this: the conversating was of a perfectly splendid variety. They were neither vainglorious nor needlessly self-effacing. They did what they did with a complete lack of self-consciousness or arrogance. In short, despite feeling hopelessly lost and knowing not a fraction of that which they spoke on at length, I liked them. I felt like a goddamned debutante.

The matriarch told stories of hamlet-hopping through Europe, conversations and photo ops with Belgian transsexuals; Her daughter talked of the social disappointment that is modern Egypt and Mubarack's cult of personality. Not simply textbook lernin', these people had seen some shit, but also interacted with that shit. Such was their life that these were just things that happened; these were just things they knew.

When I realized that, I realized also that it wasn't an issue of brute intelligence, it was an issue of intense worldliness and the dogged pursuit of an intellectual life. Her father consumes literature gluttonously and watches Kurusawa films for their portrayals of Asian military tactics. Of his own Thanksgiving tactics, he confided, "when they're in the kitchen, you learn to stay out of the way." As Sun Tzu said, know the enemy and know yourself.

Of my own reaction to them, I'll say this: I don't think it's class-envy, it's admiration for the desire to understand and interact with the world around you, something I don't often see in America anymore (how's that for liberal arrogance). It's something I rarely see in myself--something I recognize as a tragic shortcoming.

With that also comes the mitigating realization that it's the kind of thing that requires a shitcan of experience bankrolled by a shitcan of money, and thus it's something totally foreign to even worldly old me. It's the bevy of world-learnedness I can only hope for my children to have, if I ever get off my ass and get a job or more book-lernin'.

***

After dinner, with everyone stuffed on pumpkin tarts, marzipan and hand-injected chocolate-covered cherries. The patriarch sat us down for a round of celebrity anagrams.

"Alec Guinness," He began.

Instinctively I returned: "Genuine Class."

Read the full thing here.

Art in no way imitating life

-- And is Charlotte still having her naked pictures done?
-- Well, she's had her pictures taken and her portfolio has been given to the appropriate people.

I went and saw Joyce Carol Oates last night at the Boston Public Library. I've never read her work, and she has the unenviable stigma (and matching spike in book sales) of having been an Oprah's Book Club selection. Even Shannon, feminist Shannon, who makes it a point to read people who have vaginas, if for no other reason, has only read one solitary short story by Oates. But that one story, Shannon liked. She has generally good taste, that Shannon. Further, Oates teaches at Princeton.

Again: I've never read her books, much less studied her, never heard her mentioned as a beacon of contemporary female prose the way people talk of Margaret Atwood or Toni Morrisson. That said, people seem to really like her work. In that vague context she always seemed inoffensive and safe, a Mitch Albom with breasts.

Listening to her speak and read last night just about totally confirmed everything I'd previously thought--every contradictory thing.

Joyce Carol Oates is like two people, the scholar and the writer. The scholar, I feel like I got a pretty good grasp of last night. Of the writer, though . . . I got parts of three chapters.

Those excerpts were filled with florid descriptive elements, statistical data and dialogue that didn't seem real, or even possible for human beings to create without some scholarly humonculus manipulating their vocal chords. Her insights into marriage seemed trite, but the elderly women around me laughed. I say trite because, despite never being married, much less to an empowered menopausal woman, I'd heard all these sentiments before. The horrors of the honeymoon for virginal women in the 50's, the ubiquitous marriage push overshadowing love and even the human male with whom these people betrothed themselves. It all seemed done, played out, tired to the point of exhaustion.

The reading was, though, only excerpted from the first three chapters, and the book (The Falls) apparently takes an abrupt turn after that.

And the reading itself was almost an afterthought in what was a wildly entertaining Oatesian evening. It began with a man and woman seated behind me having the conversation I've quoted above, talking with detached ambivalence about inter-familial pornography the way someone might talk about posting his or her resume on monster.com. "It's been given to the appropriate people." Tickled pink.

When Oates came out, she was introduced by someone who rattled off all of the writer's awards and acclaim. Oates responded that introductions like that always seem posthumous, like she shouldn't be listening. Down-to-earth, self-effacing and morbid. All things I like. She then commented on how nice it was to be back in a city as "civilized" as Boston. She said she'd been speaking in a lot of red states lately. Saying nothing more, she let the audience do the correlating ourselves. Good comic timing.

As a scholar she was so much more lively and pointed than her prose suggested. She evoked more in casual references to social norms than she had in pages and pages of turgid prose. I'm not being fair to her body of work, of course, but she spoke and read for the same amount of time and chose the contents of each, so I have to think she was giving her best on both counts.

She told a story about her [Oprah-sullied] book, We Were the Mulvaneys in response to a person who asked about her inspiration. The following is a paraphrase:

. . . and I put my cat in there. I think it's natural to eulogize animals in books, so I put Muffin in there, and her name was Muffin in the book too. When I told my husband about it he shook his head, "Jesus Joyce." The implication was, of course, "Would Henry James have put his cat in a novel?" I thought, well, Proust would have.

I don't often use this word because there are enough people in the world who secretly wonder if I'm gay [not to mention those who do it aloud], but she was delightful.

Her speaking had a brilliant and off the cuff snap; in person she's a quick and incendiary wit. Her words flow with her memory, an anecdottal and tangientially-connected series of asides that somehow all converged on each other at the end. Strange then, that she should say she's never started a novel without having 100 pages of notes on the subject first, and an idea of where she wants to go. She said she always has the ending written, the first sentence, the last and the title having a kind of triangulating effect on the book itself.

Maybe that's what this dichotomy owes itself too. How this fantastically circuitous and slapdash personality forces herself into the confines of novelistic formula. I'll have to actually read her to find out.

So I'm going to pick up one of her novels, but probably not The Falls, because something of the passion she exudes in person, the wit and worldliness has to be in at least one of them. Maybe I'll just read the short story Shannon has.

Read the full thing here.

At my most beautiful

I sit here, gnoshing on a delectable lobster bisque while my ass vibrates to some thrumming eurotrash house.

Call it therapeusis.

GREs are done. They were actually done on Saturday at around 8 am, Spokane Savings Time. Moving Shannon to her new place, which began concurrently upon finishing the GRE, is almost done as well. Yesternight we hoisted the last boxspring the final 30-odd feet onto Shannon's private balcony. Private balcony. Hoisted because the stairwells are 20 inches wide and double back on themselves twice. Like so much of Boston, this house is austerely beautiful and a pain in the ass to navigate.

To enumerate, that's one old, serpentine house, three roommates--three separate lives enfleshed and made meaningful by lots and lots of heavy possessions-- and one human male boyfriend.

And now, Bisque, Macchiatto. Tranquility drum and bass, the fashion eagle has landed. Diesel Cafe. This place is a little too neo-Italian for my taste. That is: self-consciously, conspicuously and cheaply European. All too familiar, like there should be greasy men in Roberto Cavalli snake-skin pants masturbating in the bushes outside.

Still, I'm sipping pureed lobster from a cappuccino cup. Classy.

Classy and solitary.

Participating in solitude. After four days the trip is beginning to feel like a vacation.

Remind me to remember this when I start panicking. Should be any minute now. Tell me to find my place, my power animal. Remember, hipster cafe and lobster, respectively.

You see. I have no personal statement, I have no writing sample. I never took a class in literary theory and criticism, I haven't yet taken the GRE Subject Test. And now it looks like I might be having a job handed to me. A newspaper job. A beautiful wonderful challenging thing I have no time for.

A month, a week and counting until human beings with advanced degrees begin judging me. Until I'm found wanting.

Because your grasp of new-historicism is half-baked, and neither intelligent nor insightful, I will spew you out of my mouth. -- Bible, Revelation 3:16; American Standard Version, Graduate Academic Edition.

***

Because I wrung my hands and kveched for a month, I should report the following: The GRE was good--the score itself was good. It would have been great if I hadn't lost track of time on the math. The writing sections were good. I used words like nascent. I kept my arguments short and pointed. I made jokes. I became, briefly, a wordsmith. The verbal ended up 200 points better than my practice tests led me to expect. Thank God. One less thing to worry about. One less way I fail to stack up.

Read the full thing here.