Blocked

I set a new rule for myself: create. Don't link, don't borrow, don't quote; create. Write. Translate. Tell stories.

So I stayed in tonight with a mild fever and the intention of writing an essay. I hadn't yet decided on a topic. Maybe an essay on which fiction is best to read when running a temperature. Or on the urban/rural tug-of-war in Louis Bromfield's novels. 12 Angry Men was on TV; maybe I'd finally write up my month long social experiment on jury duty. I made some jasmine tea, opened a blank document, but first decided to read some things I'd been meaning to get to.

And I read this.

And it was so well written that all the writing was knocked right out of me.

Well there goes that rule out the window.

Nothing To Read

I've moaned on here previously about the dilemma I face every time I finish a book. Les agont du choice*. What's next? Out of the stacks and stacks that grow and shrink, who comes out champion for the coveted prize of a place in my handbag?

Some people seem to enjoy taking photographs of their TBR piles; for me, this doesn't even begin to illustrate the way my mind approaches that tempting stack of promised pleasures. So I made this video.


*Mercy buckets.

Blinks

Seriously, someone help me come up with a name for these link dumps. Or else that subject line is going to keep getting worse.

• Prisma books
  A few great modernist book covers. (via ISO50)


• 1950s Latvian "Books By Post" poster
  Sends books and affixed C.O.D. form to all cities and country regions. As long as the title is approved by Stalin (or, in the case of this poster, as long as one of the books is about Stalin). Also: Books for the Masses.


• Time to Buy Stock in X-Acto Knife?
  The Kara Walker effect on books. (via Design Observer)


• Lonely Buds
  I'm really enjoying designer/photographer/blogger Jon Armstrong's photography lately. Someone needs to make a book cover out of this. Or this. UPDATE: THIS ONE! This one. Seriously.


• The Salinger of Indie Rock
  The Husband once met a bearded fella at a party in London and spent most of the night in a corner talking to him. Turns out he was a member of Neutral Milk Hotel. But he's not this guy. The end. (via largehearted boy)


• Depuis Le Jour vs. The Box
  I've been fascinated by Tilda Swinton ever since I first saw the Derek Jarman short "Depuis Le Jour" in college, but somehow I missed realizing that she was the star of this fantastic Orbital video too. (via kottke)


• Magnetic Fields: Stephin Merritt Goes Heavy on the Deadpan
  Looks like I'm not the only freak who loved Ethan Frome. WARNING: Spoilers! As if you'd ever read it anyway... Haters. (via largehearted boy)

Dispatches From the Ladies Room for the Too Hip

― You know who's here tonight? The bass player from Yo La Tengo.

Silence from her friend in stall three.

― Did you hear what I just said?

― Yeah, but I don't really care about those kinds of things.

Orange Boots

My overlong convalescence from the cold that won't quit trapped me indoors for four days, just long enough to finish some books I'd been floundering in the middle of. Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time was the prize — my track record with non-fiction is not a thing of which I'm proud. This book of dust storms, of farmers, of Model-Ts and centipedes crawling up the walls of dirt huts in Oklahoma, though, had me engrossed to the point where, in my tidy corner of blankets on the living room couch, I felt as if the dust had seeped through the white pages and covered me, battered my eyes, left a lingering scratch in the back of the throat.

Or was that just the cold.

I forget sometimes that non-fiction can move me as well. That quite often it moves me at a more visceral level. I also forget that I'm involved in the creation of my own non-fiction here. Picking up pieces, scraps, to put together a history, a personal narrative. Trying to tell future me what past me used to be like. In the olden days.

For instance, three years ago today, I wrote the following elsewhere:

In November I walked the streets of Riga in yellow rubber boots. As I turned down Peldu Iela, two men laughed and shouted: "what do you think you are, an artist or something?" I shrugged and carried on. When Gustavs saw me, he sang a song about "me and my big yellow boots" that he remembered from his childhood. Anna and her friend kept saying how cool they were, so when I left, I gave Anna my big yellow boots. I returned to New York, and bought myself a pair of orange rubber boots. Walking up Broadway in them today, conquering puddles, I expected to hear someone call out: "what do you think you are, an artist or something?" But no one did.

Orange rubber boots? Artist indeed. These days the closest I get to color are the red buttons on my Campers; the rest is almost always exclusively, deeply, and predictably gray. (And apparently, I'm not alone in my monochromism.)

But after reading a book about dust, and as the bitterness of February sinks in, causing me to grumble about how my bangs are too long, how the bathtub drains too slowly, how time seems to be moving too fast for me to keep up, how much 2008 just plain sucks, I'm starting to feel the need for color to creep back into my wardrobe. A soft purple top dug up from the bottom of my closet. My old cozy green wool jacket teased off the hanger. There's even one dress, my deep dark secret: bronze, red, blue, and green.

But orange rubber boots? I'm afraid that these days, those to me are nothing more than old fiction.

(This was meant to be that promised post on soil conservation, until it became something else entirely. Still, I wouldn't want you to think I came away from reading this book with only superficial thoughts on the palette of my wardrobe, so I point you in the very incredible direction of the database of photographs from the Farm Security Administration — one of the most exciting visual histories to come out of early 20th century America.)

Sunday Zen

The Toboggan King

It's time. The toboggan pulled down from the rafters of the garage, we weave our way through the woods to the hill. The light is dim; it's close to bedtime.

The hill is full of students with cafeteria trays, kids from other neighborhoods with plastic discs in primary colors. But we are the royal family of the hill, we with our toboggan. Dad sits at the back of the great wood sled, weighing it down, boots dug into the snow, and invites us to hop on in front of him. "All legs in?" We nod and hold on tightly to each other. Trying not to laugh too hard.

Tonight my dad is the Toboggan King.

He pushes off —

The thrill. The air hitting our teeth.

We climb back up the hill. A few of the students cast aside their trays, shake hands with Dad, ask us if they can have a go on the great wooden sled. In the darkness I can barely make out the eyes of these strangers, their faces obscured by scarves. The boys are tall and thin, dressed in corduroy and denim; the girls frosted blonde and bundled in purple wool. Anyone.

Racing down the hill, holding on to strangers in the moonlight. Our fingertips growing numb.

"One more time, Dad?" The bare branches of the trees at the top of the hill, surely haunted, begin to shake, blessing him with a crown of snow.

For our last run, someone has the idea to form a chain. The purple wool girls giggle and squeeze in front of my sister. My brother, energized, climbs over the boys at the back. One kid grabs onto a rope at the back of the toboggan with his disc, then another, then — "Wait for me!" — the rest. Surely the largest sled this world has ever seen, we are certain.

Our Dad, the Great Toboggan King, takes charge, calling out to the scrambling mass of bodies struggling to hold on to whatever they can: "Ready?" We shout back "Ready!" in one voice and then the hill is quiet, holding its breath. All of us: holding our breath. The snow creaks as we push ourselves to the precipice, packing under the bulk of twenty-odd sledders, then —

— and we fall into a heap at the bottom of the hill.

The boys in corduroy pat Dad on the shoulder and, whipping snow at each other's backs, head to the top of the hill and their waiting cafeteria trays. Dad picks up the ropes of the toboggan, and points the sled home.

Back at the house, we burst indoors, calling out to Mom, casting off wet mittens, boots crusted with ice, oversized knit hats. The dog leaps into our debris, sniffing our pockets for scents of the outdoors, but finds only wet wool and melting ice. With pins and needles the warmth returns and we shout over each other: "You should have seen it, Mom!"

Outside, Dad lifts the toboggan above his head, and slides it back into the rafters.

(How I wish I could go outside today. Instead I sit indoors, waiting for a cold to pass, peddling nostalgia and watching the snow melt.)

Thank You, Internet

For making my sick day far less miserable. (Throat, you get no thanks. No thanks at all.)

• The Top 10 Albums of 1987
  Andrew Womack, spot on as always. I got choked up on hearing the first few notes of each song, being that I was a geek for every single one of these bands in high school. (Even G'n'R. I grew up in Ohio.) It reminded me again how awesomely awkward those times were — The flowery dresses! Play practice! The pictures of Johnny Depp in my locker! — and how we'd play "Catch" over and over into the night. (And, yes, I was 11 when these albums originally came out. Always five years behind the times.)


• The 2008 Tournament of Books
  The return of The Rooster, the only competition that matters. Place your bets.


• Translating my novel has given birth to a fiend
  [W]hen the translator didn't recognize a quote from Britney Spears masquerading as an ancient Kalmyk folk saying, something was definitely lost.


• Sticky Pages: Italo Calvino
  Melissa Lion appreciates the appeal of Calvino — and Ice Cube — at Bookslut.


• Animal Magnetism
  A look at the covers of dairy and poultry trade magazines from Design Observer.


• Lizzie Skurnick's Fine Lines
  Normally I'm loathe to link to anything associated with G**ker, but Lizzie's look back at the young adult novels we all grew up with is as comforting as the teddy bear holding cinnamon-flavored lip glosses my mom gave me when I was sick on Valentine's Day way back in 1989.

I feel a nostalgia post coming on...

I guess the assault of banjos worked

While I'm busy with my rock tumbler, taking pleasure in turning out and polishing gems like this...

None of life’s fresh smells inhabit a summer cottage, the acerbic smell of uprooted field potatoes, a burning stove and the fumes of not yet dried-out socks.

... other people are also breathing new life into things. In a very literal sense. I couldn't go another day without congratulating the Junipers. Glad you're here to open your eyes, kid. What awesome things there are to see. Listen to your folks; they'll teach you where to start looking.

There Will Be Brunch

We had the whole "milkshake" thing ruined for us.

It's our own fault, really, waiting so long to see the film everyone was raving about. In a society that latches quickly as it can to catch phrases once the old ones start fraying at the edges, it's no surprise that you hear "I drink your milkshake!" around every corner. We didn't know over the course of two-and-a-half hours of oil-slicked celluloid when the famous line would be spat, but we spent the entire time waiting for it.

Say no more. We've been down this road before. I refuse to be a spoiler.

Instead I could tell you about brunch the day before, about slipping the Bioy Casares book and a camera into my tailor-made bag and heading to Chelsea for coffee, mimosas, pork sandwiches.

This brunch thing! I've lived here for eight years, and yet still brunch seems like an illusion, something you do when you're pretending to live in New York, pretending to be adults, pretending to be awake at noon. And all of New York is there with you, pretending, laughing at the right moment, dropping a fork, leaning in with the check and opening the door to let the winter draft in. A whole city conspiring in some grand illusion.

So we brunched, we laughed. We talked about books and music and life and love. And then, later, spontaneous store-hopping (always shop in groups of three — to prevent accidental fashion-victimicide), when I became detached from reality.

My mother and I both suffer from a particular type of migraine — not the kind that keeps women like Joan Didion locked in a dark room with a washcloth pressed to their foreheads in fear of loud noises, but rather one that causes a person to suddenly see the world as if you are detached from it. A form of temporary blindness, often brought on by a unique combination of bright lights, caffeine, and the overstimulating atmosphere of clothing stores, grocery stores, restaurants. I stand there, in the spice aisle, trying to locate something as simple as cinnamon, and suddenly everything around me seems hollow, miles away, like I've entered my own dreams. Whatever it is that keeps my grip on reality is suddenly yanked out from under me.

I put out my arms as if to steady myself. I warn my companions: "I have one of my migraines coming on." They feign a reach for a washcloth.

These magical headaches my mother and I are cursed with, blessed with, taking us outside of reality. Showing us what an illusion it is to exist here in this body, on this earth. Shopping for these clothes. Eating this brunch with these women. Drinking your milkshake.

The illusion of life.

For those of you who might read Adolfo Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel one day, it would be slightly cruel of me to tell you what this has to do with anything, but it does. It has to do with a lot. And at one point today in the cinema, before we even got to the line about drinking milkshakes, when hundreds of New York eyes were transfixed on Daniel Day Lewis leaning over a campfire, I followed the glow of the fire up through a shaft of light to its source, to the little window above our heads, and rather than ruining the illusion, seeing where the light came from made it all the more magical.

As if the simple of act of realizing what a grand illusion life is makes the whole thing all the more grand.

Sunday Zen

Things I've Been Dying to Tell You About All Week

(My link dumps need a catchier, more cohesive title, but the good ones are taken.)

• Open Letter Fall 2008 Catalogue
  Chad Post, as expected, has put together a great fall roster for his new press—with impeccably designed covers—including a novel from the Lithuanian Ričardas Gavelis. There's hope!


• Literary Perspectives: Estonia
  At Eurozine, they wait for the great Estonian novel and wonder why there is so much Nora Roberts in Estonian libraries. (via Three Percent)


• Little-known risks of reading Bolaño
  Maybe this is why I was never able to finish it; I must have my own internal prison guard censor.


• Carla Bruni as a member of a dead poets' society
  Paul Muldoon looks at the lyrical poetry of Yeats-influenced Carla Bruni (via The Morning News)


• Look Around You: Maths
  Whenever I'm looking for something in the kitchen, The Husband will say to me "Look around you" in that funny newsreader voice and I'll fall on the floor and roll around a bit. And then I'll get up and continue my search for the elusive thermos.

So Much Better Than Flowers

*Pant.* *Pant.* *Pant.*

― Eeeeeeeee! You're insane.

― Don't write in your blog about how out of breath I am after carrying you around the apartment. All 140 pounds of you.

*Blink.*

― 125?

*Stare.*

― Surely you're not less than a hundred pounds...

― A HUNDRED AND TEN! I'm a hundred and ten pounds.

― Still, I shouldn't be out of breath.

― You ran. Maybe if you had walked at a leisurely pace with me tossed over your shoulder like a sack of potatoes then you wouldn't be out of breath. But you ran. That's pretty normal.

― Then tell everyone. I AM MAN!

Making Me Proud

This Saturday I was given the impossible task of choosing between seeing my brother play, and seeing the band of a friend I hadn't seen in 12 years. The choice was made slightly easier by the fact that I forgot my brother was playing until after I had already bought the tickets for the other show.

So I went. With a torn heart. And I watched.

If you can claim to be proud for the talents of someone else, then am I ever proud. There's nothing like seeing people you know and respect hypnotize crowds. Watching them go from idea, to idea, to idea — even from a distance — until they hit on the one that the world can love. The creative process in slow motion: from person to album to poster on the bedroom wall.

"I'm so proud of you!", though, is such an odd expression. It implies some sort of involvement, as if your existence or input somehow contributed to a person's success. When really, you have nothing more invested than a bit of your time, maybe some encouraging words. If that.

But I'll say it, because I can't help it: I am proud. I am proud.

And I am proud, even when I can't be there.

Sunday Zen

In Stitches

This is me on many a weekend night. But no longer! I have decided to throw down a chunk of change and get myself a sewing machine. I've mentioned this before, and I might still mention it for a few more weeks before actually getting up the nerve to press "purchase," but my friend Lex convinced me that it's worth it by reminding me how much I'd save in tailoring costs. I translated that into "think of all those clothes sitting in your apartment unworn because you're too lazy to take them to a tailor" and realized she's right. Lex recommended a Singer, a recommendation backed by my grandmother, the quilting expert, in her most recent letter (which I carry around with me in its pale blue envelope):

The machine I mentioned is the Singer Featherweight. I bought mine for $140.00 (new) in 1941. It hasn't been in production for many years. If you happen on to one (2nd hand) it will no doubt be several hundred dollars.

So maybe not the Featherweight. Anyone else want to recommend a model?

Until I begin fashioning bedspreads out of old coats, here are some other things that have been on my mind and on my screen.

• Pre-owned bookmarks
  Continuing the theme of found items from last week. (via Design Observer)


• David Baddiel struggles with fiction in translation
  But I did at least assume that what Flaubert meant to say in French would be rendered in English. Since the Frankfurt incident, I realise that non-native readers really are in the hands of the translator: a translator who may be tempted to think, after 430 pages of hard mot-justeian slog: "You know what - I think I can rather improve on Gustave here."(via Bookninja)


• Soft Focus
  Ian Svenonius, formerly of old college favorites Nation of Ulysses and The Make-Up, interviews some amazing musicians, including Graham Coxon and Kevin Shields.


• I Don't Care What Anybody Says. There Was Something About The Nineties And One Day We'll Know What It Was.
  Young Manhattanite appreciates Mary Timony.


• Quelqu'un m'a dit
  I'm currently appreciating Sarkozy's main squeeze, Carla Bruni.


• What makes a great portrait?
  Photographers examine their favorite portraits. (via kottke)

I've been making my way through The Worst Hard Time, so you can expect some riveting thoughts on soil conservation next week. I just know you can't wait for that.

My heart cried out for you

There's a place on the Pacific Coast Highway where the road cuts the rock, and a large monolith juts up on your left as you drive north. The steep hills of the west coast steady you on your right, hills that appear to be pushing back against the rest of the country, keeping it from leaping into the Pacific. This stretch of road has become part of our collective image database, used in car commercials and travel brochures. In September we saw it for ourselves. The sun was setting over the road as we approached, forcing its rays through the crevice, screaming all shades of yellow onto the road and the hills beyond.

I'm going to remember this for the rest of my life, I said.

I had just collected J at LAX. The flight was delayed, and I found myself sitting in a vinyl seat next to a Hungarian man who was there to greet his daughter on her return from a summer in Africa. I had been planning on taking the 405 to the 101 straight up to Santa Barbara, but he put his finger on my map and traced a different line, his accent punctuating the proposed route.

Through Maleeboo, he said. Maleeboo is so be-yooteeful as the sun sets.

We stopped just beyond the clapboard-backed houses in Malibu for apricot and almond granola bars from the pharmacy. The supermarkets were all shut. Families piled out of minivans and into strip mall restaurants; the sounds of car doors closing and rubber shoes on tarmac scored the calm turnover of day shift to night.

Further north, crouched behind camper vans, they lit bonfires on the beach. There was a hum — in the road, in the air — as the sun tucked itself over the horizon. The hum and crash of waves. We hit the crack in the road and the sun fell, and then the only lights were the oil rigs in the distance. To my left.

To my left. I had to keep reminding myself that I was driving north, being so unused to water on that side. I remember having a distinct fear that it would be so easy to turn the wheel the wrong way and steer us into the Pacific.

Now what would you want to go and do that for.

We hit Oxnard at dark. The fields opened up. These flat fields, covered at night with tarps. I lost the ocean. The traffic veered off to the left, but for some reason we kept to the right. Access roads and semis. Wide lanes and the noise of distant traffic. The 101 up ahead.

Behind us we dropped the crumbs of apricots and almonds. The hum and crash of waves.

(Written months too late, inspired by late Tuesday night, when, like the rest of the country, my mind was in California.)

Listen to Larry

Lawrence Venuti's Frankfurt Book Fair speech, Translations on the Market, is published in this month's Words Without Borders.

I met Lawrence Venuti a few years ago after a PEN World Voices Festival panel on Crime Fiction in Translation featuring Venuti, Boris Akunin, and the very macho Henning Mankell. I knew that Venuti was a key figure in translation studies, having come across his books and articles on several hunts for resources. I had some pressing questions for him, which he very generously took the time to answer one on one. It did me a world of good to talk with him about the process, about what was required of me if I wanted to call myself a translat*r.

At one point in our brief conversation, he said to me: "You have to let go of the original language." It was exactly what I needed to hear, the best advice I could have received at that point, and helped me get past a very serious stumbling block that had been hindering my attempts to complete a translation. The rough patches were everywhere, and they all seemed to appear when I would get defensive: "but that's what it says in the Latvian!"

I can only hope that publishers of fiction in this country will be as open to accepting his advice.

Today, fittingly, I came across a near complete first draft of a story that I'd started translating a couple years back, but never finished. It was so long ago, I didn't even remember getting as far as I had with it. Back to work, I think. It's a good story. It just needs a bit of "letting go."

(My next serious stumbling blocks? Completion and submission. I don't want to talk about it...)

Early Morning Workout

I voted today. And I've never been so certain. I woke up certain, after months of being undecided. Sleep on it, they say. I've never woken up so certain of anything.

I'm keeping my vote quiet (not like in 2000, when, perhaps a bit naive of electioneering laws, I wore my Gore-Lieberman shirt to the polling station), mostly because I will happily campaign for either Democratic candidate who wins the party's nomination. But I will say that I was certain. That, suddenly, I'd never been so certain.

The only thing I regret is that I didn't take a picture of the booth, as many others are doing. I had my camera strapped around my shoulders, but I was too excited to snap anything. The lovely ladies running things for my district were all smiles as they tried to pronounce my name, and ushered me through the synthetic curtain before I had a chance to think of photo opportunities.

A few years back, during one of the local elections, The Husband came to watch me vote. He wasn't allowed to touch the machine, but he got to watch me in action. He remarked that it takes a bit of strength to pull that lever. He even put the image in my head of a little old lady flung into the air by the giant voting lever, the hem of her slip exposed, wiggling her toes trying to reach back to the ground.

It does take a lot of strength to pull that lever. It's a necessary strength.

Please, if your state is holding primaries today (I'm looking at you, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho Dems, Illinois, Kansas Dems, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana Republicans, New Jersey, New Mexico Dems, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and, yeah, even you, West Virginia Republicans), go and exercise that lever arm. Go and exercise your right to vote.

Sunday Zen