joon can read!

paperback; © 2007 by melville house publishing

i'm poor, and libraries have strange, inconvenient hours, so sometimes i read books in sporadic one-hour installments during trips to the union square barnes & noble. the barnes & noble has four floors. on the second or third floor, there's a café with a big sign at its entrance prohibiting patrons from bringing in food from outside vendors, but on the fourth floor, where the fiction is, i can sit on the floor or in a folding chair in the section where readings are held and eat anything i want. that’s not true; technically, i'm not allowed to eat in these places, but no one has ever stopped me. once i brought in a sandwich and a beer and sat on the small stage in the front of the room, because i liked the way the light was coming in through the window over it. it’s as if by acting with enough confidence and nonchalance, i can persuade the people around me that i know more about the rules than they do. but all i know is that sometimes, even though there are people everywhere who might object to it, i want to be the way i would be if no one else were around.

is that more? or is the rule that i should be trying to act as if other people are around even when i'm alone? when i act like no one can see me, does it become self-fulfilling?

anyway, i have decided that this is the only way to read this book—in erratic and unannounced bursts, alone in a place that is not my home, in flagrant and yet utterly unchecked violation of the rules of social conduct, surrounded by strangers who are having hushed and incredibly serious conversations about things that strike me as wholly meaningless. really, i think it’s the only way to understand this book.

in eeeee eee eeee’s two hundred or so pages, characters drift in and out, with little or no fuss made over their entrances or exits. some of them have extensive back stories; some of them seem to have no history whatsoever. some of them play main roles for a chapter or two, dominating the entire plot, and then vanish and are never mentioned again. some of them are children. some of them are bears. some of them are so unspeakably isolated and untethered that they can’t visualize their own thoughts or desires clearly enough in their own minds to devote an action to them and instead wander numbly from one stationary object to another, looking, turning away, seeing nothing, responding to nothing. this is a lot like the reading room of a popular manhattan book store, and every public space is a microcosm representative of the broader, surrounding population. so eeeee eee eeee is about twenty-something-year-old pizza-deliverymen who have ironic and seemingly purposeless conversations with their friends, and it is about dolphins who live in an underground city and sometimes bludgeon celebrities, and it is about hamsters trying to explain the underground city to strangers in a park. but through these things, through their randomness and disconnectedness and the flatness with which the characters in the novel receive them, it becomes a spot-on telling of the state of society. it may be my generation's catcher in the rye.

we think we’re bored, but maybe we aren’t, and either way we aren’t sure how to fix it. we try things that don’t work, but we think they should have worked, so we don’t admit that they didn’t; then we are bored and depressed, and we can’t admit that either. we don’t know what to say instead, and we aren’t sure who to talk to, but we’re afraid to stop talking. sometimes we do terrible things and don’t know why; we regret them, we cry about them, and we do them again. sometimes the only way you can think of to tell your sister that you love her and you’re lonely and you want to be her friend is to sit on her head. sometimes people die and no one talks about it at all, and it feels incredibly strange, to know that someone has died and no one is talking about it, and you want to ask everyone why they aren’t talking about it, but you know that you will never ask and that no one will ever explain it, and it makes you desperate. it makes you so desperate that you cover a moose’s head with a blanket and punch it in the face, and when it says, “thank you,” you want to give it a cookie and kill it and drown, you love it and envy it so much.

eeeee eee eeee is about an invisible person in the center of a crowd of millions of people listening to one person nearby saying, “i’m so tired today. every time i try to think about something, i forget and think about something else,” and wondering, “am i tired? is that what’s wrong?” and writing, “i’m so tired today,” and knowing it isn’t the answer, and thinking about someone who isn't there, and moving to a different seat. that person disappears for two weeks and then comes back, and no one mentions it. someone stands on a chair and throws a bottle, and someone starts to cry, and other people look up and think, “i wonder if that would make me happy,” and then go back to their books.

you, all alone in the corner, with the untied sneaker and the hat hair—this book made me want to offer you my sandwich. i wanted to give you a hug. but you never looked up.

what will i do with all these leftover pretzels?

i know that for a select few, the new yorker festival just goes on and on and on . . . they have their seminars and dinner parties and galas and elegantly lit corner booths, and the conversations and debates spin out endlessly into the twinkling, mirthful night. but there is nothing select about me, and my expendable income for the month of october is more or less used up, and so my party is all over. i'm so sad that i don't live in an era of public conversational salons and roundtable fêtes; even in college i could feel the loss, but i wasn't in despair. there was still one coffee shop that people sat around and discussed ideas in, there was an art gallery down the street that hosted biweekly potluck suppers open to anyone in the neighborhood, and i could always corner someone at a party and pick a fight about the estate tax or the bohr model or whether there is such a thing as a nonmisogynistic french film (i still can't decide). now everything happens in chat rooms or comment threads or text messages, you can't get anyone to engage in three dimensions, and it's dreadful. the internet will be the death of artistic movements, i'm sure of it. something happens when you put people with a common interest or goal together in a room that just can't occur when they aren't face to face. a spontaneous and immediate reaction to an idea or statement will always lead to a more rewarding discourse. there are more coffee shops all the time, and they're always full of people, but those people are all sitting at their own tables, talking on their cell phones or clacking away at their laptops, and it's a completely dead atmosphere. for me, anyway. i guess the people in the coffee shops feel o.k. about it. but my heart will always long for the communal, intellectual atmosphere of the belle époque, and i know that all of those folks were fairly select, too, but at least they were trying. if i had more than twelve square feet to host them in, i might try to start up some gatherings of my own. well, if i had more than twelve square feet and a chair, and maybe some kind of table, even if it weren't round, you know, an end table or something, or a tray table, and more than one glass. *sigh* someday.

anyway.

the closer to the word-nerd party, featuring ira glass as the ringmaster and susan orlean, chuck klosterman, and malcolm gladwell as themselves, was not officially a new yorker event, though there were, obviously, a high number of references to the magazine and its practices and contents. not to disparage the festival, but i think last night's talk was better than any of the other literary events i attended this past weekend, because it was so lightly mediated and loosely themed, and because ira mostly wanted the writers to talk to each other. the event was both promotion for ira's new book, the new kings of nonfiction (which actually contains a lot of not-new nonfiction that apparently had been piling up on glass's desk long enough for him to feel compelled to do something with it), and a benefit for 826nyc, the local branch of 826, a national nonprofit organization that offers free after-school programs and tutoring in creative writing for school kids from kindergarten on up. i love that 826 exists. i love that dave eggers, john scieszka, and sarah vowell are heavy presences on its board and keep it a little wacky. i love that a young, broadly lauded writer with a good amount of clout chose to start up a wacky nonprofit to help kids instead of buy a $7 million brownstone so each of his own kids could have a private floor (man, foer, you really turned out to be one glaring disappointment after another). and i love susan orlean and fidgety lefties who bite their nails and scrape the labels off of their water bottles and pick at the untucked tails of their shirts (aww, my secret boyfriend fiddles with inanimate objects, too! we're so perfect for each other). until tonight i just kind of felt all right about ira, but now i love him too, and i don't think i'd ever heard of or read anything by chuck klosterman until a few days ago (sorry, dude, but i stopped flipping through spin when i was about 16), but what the hell—i love you too, man! i love your sweeping hand gestures that have probably proven dangerous to passersby, i love that you babble and flail like a vertiginous speed freak, i love that you love what you do. structured, mediated, q&a-type discussions are great for what they're worth, and sometimes they're the only way you can get things done. but ira just threw a handful of smart, eccentric spazzos together and let them gab about why they love writing about smart, eccentric spazzos, and it was brilliant. and i learned some things, too:

• susan orlean and chuck klosterman both think the word "sequelae" is pronounced "suhkweelia." i don't have a problem with this the way i do with "nucular." i had a conversation with my uncle once about which is worse, someone mispronouncing a word but placing it in an appropriate context, or someone speaking a word beautifully but using it inaccurately. we decided that misusage is a greater sin, because someone who knows what a word means but not how it sounds is someone who reads and retains knowledge and wants to enhance his or her working vocabulary, but someone who has heard a word and repeated it without taking the time to find out exactly what it means is basically a blowhard. and "suhkweelia" isn't an unpleasant-sounding word. "nucular," however, is an abomination, especially now that the incorrectness of the pronunciation has been a topic of public discussion for a while. i'll never fold on that.
  
• malcolm's working on a book about, um, something . . . cultural identity? something unbusinessy, i think, anyway, and it doesn't sound as if anyone will be able to use it to sell more chairs or records or crappy movies,* so that's nice. of course, i could be mistaken; all he really told us was that there's one chapter that he interviewed his mother and aunt for, and i have chosen to grab up that nebulous ball and run all the way to juneau with it. i'm open to most any subject matter, really, as long as little, brown prints it in the same font as the first two. the typeface and leading are so refined, and yet also so approachable and calming. very thoughtfully laid out, those books. so there's no birthday article for me this year, but i can totally live with that.
  
• it's entirely true that most people think of men first when they're asked to name people they admire for intellectual or artistic reasons. my cousin asked me the other day for some music recommendations, and i had listed about twenty artists when he stopped me and said, "it's weird that you don't listen to any girls." but i do listen to girls, and am wild about plenty of them. i just didn't remember them until i was prompted to do so. and then i was very disappointed in myself, because no one should ever forget mirah or ani difranco or mary timony or chan marshall. but i had. it's true for writers and visual artists, too, i think of faulkner and ibsen, chuck close and françois truffaut, but when i sit down and concentrate, all kinds of amazing chicks pop into the foreground. it's really strange, that women don't leap out, or really even lodge. i have to dredge them up, even the ones who've kind of changed my life. but i thought maybe it was me, and now i think it's everyone. isn't that troubling. i mean, i'm not a feminist, exactly, and i don't always get along so well with girls, but there are plenty i'd rather remember than forget. and now i'm worried that i won't.
  

susan touched on the difficulty of being a woman and a reporter, as opposed to a novelist or columnist or food writer, something that didn't require travel and weeks of immersion in a subject's life, and i thought, why should it be harder for a woman to travel than it is for a man? but it isn't necessarily; it's just harder for a woman with a home and family, and it's harder for that woman than it might be for a man with a home and family. it's easy to write it off as the result of women's desire to stay closer to home when they have a family, and to then write off such a desire as something inherently female, but what you're implying when you say a thing like that is that men don't love or miss their children as much as women do, and i doubt that. but in the end it's a personal choice, and all of my tiny x chromosomes aren't enough to enable me to muster up much sympathy for women who choose to have a child and then miss their lives. it's their choice, isn't it? you can decide that the other parent should give up a life instead, or you can decide that you will both carry on as usual and hire a third party to raise your child, but someone will have to sacrifice something on one or the other front. it's impossible for me to believe that women who are working at jobs they enjoy and then decide to have a child don't have a rough idea, one way or another, of what's going to happen once the child arrives. you want one thing most, right? and you pick it. it isn't gender-based, it's person-based. susan's still a writer, and an excellent writer, she just writes less. and maybe that's difficult for her, but she has the career she wanted and is positioned pretty highly within her admittedly male-dominated field. (no one was rude enough to ask ira why only two female writers were included in the current anthology, but i'm sure he was feeling the heat for a minute or two.) am i an awful woman? am i a heartless woman? maybe i'm an ignorant woman. it seems that people of both genders whine a lot about how they can't have it all, but nobody has it all. my sympathies are with the people who don't have enough, or who aren't free to make a lot of choices about their own lives, and i think that susan is not that kind of person. i mean, i'm not that kind of person, even without a chair or a table, so what is she complaining about? i like you, lady, but suck it up.

in the same vein, as much as i hate having to jab malcolm in the kidney with my pointy stick, he occasionally drives me to it, and it really irks me when he mocks the wealthy. i mean, the man ain't broke. he's not digging through the couch cushions for enough change to buy a box of spaghetti at trade fair. he isn't on the wrong side of any tracks. rally for the underclass, sure, but don't sling mud at the rich. again, i think that most people have more than they need, but maybe someone with way, way more than he needs will actually be more willing to hand some of it off in a charitable manner, because that handoff is so unlikely to impact his quality of life. someone in the middle class might decide that he shouldn't have to help anyone else, because he still has a lot less than the people with the most. but if what ultimately matters about wealth is how it's allocated, i'm going to side with the obscenely wealthy people who are donating a fifth of their income to social programs and charities before i'm going to side with the people making $30,000 or $40,000 a year who glare at homeless people and toss the jimmy fund can over their shoulder when it's passed around the movie theater. the residents of southampton may or may not ever have done much of anything at all in terms of supporting worthy causes. i have no idea, and i don't think malcolm does, either. what i'm sure of is that i'd rather align myself with the people who are doing something, even if it's only for the tax deduction, than side by default with the people in my tax bracket, because they certainly aren't always the same people. some people make their assets a central part of their character, but i don't think there's any call to do it for them. the rennert saga was moronic, and more than worthy of extensive pointing and laughing, but i want to laugh, you know, at the case, and not the individuals. maybe there isn't a way to do that. i'm kind of struggling, lately, with efforts to prevent my hatred of certain aspects of people from emerging as hatred of those people, period, and i don't know yet how effectively it can be accomplished. i'm looking for the gray areas. and i know that malcolm is also primarily mocking the acts and not the individuals, but sometimes it's just so hard to visualize a firm line. don't worry, though, i'm not going to stop hating people. god, can you imagine? what a boring, wasted life that would be.

chuck, um, didn't say anything that i feel strongly about or moved to comment on. he seemed smart and funny, and fun, and a bit manic. mostly he seemed just plain happy, with his life and what he's able to do with it, and that's such a lovely thing. but, it's just, i mean, he didn't want to write about the strokes, but he did, and i don't want to read about the strokes, and i won't. and i can only keep up with one magazine at a time, and he writes for about nineteen, so i don't know how often we'll cross paths. alas and alack, but there are only so many hours in the day.

i guess i'm assuming everyone knows about ira glass, but for anyone who doesn't, here. love him or hate him, but don't hate him in my house.

so, yeah, the end of this party. but all is not lost: reviews are forthcoming on other festival events, i swear. you'd never know it to scroll through iaaph these days, but i do care about things that are not malcolm gladwell. not many, but enough to shut the hell up about him every so often, and i'm going to. honest. tomorrow. i think i'd like to talk about mark danielewski for a while, too, if anyone wants to stop by, and the new mcsweeney's collection of very, very short stories is filling my heart with love and blood and other assorted substances of varying densities. i know there isn't much room in this place; go ahead and climb on the bed if you want, and i'll perch up here on the counter, and if everyone brings a glass i'll make sure there's enough to drink. it won't be the start of a revolution, but i think we'll all get on just fine.





* update, 10/10/08, 1:21 PM: i was, um, really, really wrong about this. the eternal optimist meets with eternal slaps in the face, i guess. this book is more about the creative process than the process of marketing creations, though, i think, and its projected release date is awfully close to my birthday in 2008; he's trying.

a latchkey kid is still loved

when my mother was young, in her teens and early twenties, when she was a girl in love and then a young bride and then a new mother, she made things, pottery and jewelry and paintings, she crocheted scarves and cross-stitched wall hangings and redesigned dresses. and then she became an adult with a full-time job outside of the house and a family to keep running within it, and she didn't do those things anymore. in fact, when the choice was hers to make, she didn't do anything at all. she sat very still with a paperback romance in her hand, open but not really being read, and shushed us over her coffee or diet coke. our job was to pretend she was not there, because that was what she was trying to pretend herself. when i was old enough to understand that the woman i knew as my mother was not the only woman who had ever occupied that body, i wondered why she had let that particular transformation take place. why would you give up all of your interests and hobbies and passions? how could you let the world compress you into such a drab, hard, uninspired shape? why would you choose to put your free time toward doing nothing rather than something?

well, i get it now. for the first time i have a full-time job that requires that i do honest work all day, every day, and sometimes even longer, and i'm not unhappy with that. but i am not looking for something to busy my hands with when i finally get home, and i am putting more and more of my ideas inside of a little mental box, swearing that i will come back to them later . . . the odds of my doing so aren't even hopeless, because i don't have a husband and children to tend to, so my last few sparks of energy and vision are always actually mine. but you, my little chickens, between my scrabbling wall-to-wall workday and my thoroughly unreliable home internet connection, are likely to walk into an empty house more often than not. and i'm so sorry, for you and for me. sadly, this is the state of things in my modern world. of course, if you need help with your diorama or halloween costume or clay sculpture of mark twain, i will always be here for you, no matter what kind of day i've had. that's what love is all about.

i do want to let you know that the office tries very hard to reward us for our hard work and encourage our professional progress, and in that spirit they chartered a bus for about twenty of us this week and drove us up to a courier printing plant in massachusetts. i won't regale you with the intimate details of the book-binding process, but i was very excited to come across a pallet of unbound book blocks for stephen colbert's new book, i am america (and so can you!), due to come out october 9. i haven't had cable here in new york, and i am missing colbert and the daily show in a big, droopy way, so i was not shy about grabbing up one of those blocks and flipping through it hungrily. spoiler alert: there are two pages of stickers, making the book somewhat interactive, and the page edges are spray-painted a very fetching, all-american shade of flag-stripe red. i didn't steal a copy, seeing as how i was representing my company and all, but someone's book may be, um, missing a sticker. just one. think of it as finding the golden ticket, only in reverse. if you get that copy you can dust it for my fingerprints, and when you track me down i will give you the sticker, and maybe a cold drink too, depending on how far you've had to travel. if you live, like, three blocks up the hill or something, i mean, come on. i had to wake up at 5:30 in the morning and spend nine hours on a bus for that sticker.

and that is why i didn't post anything on tuesday. or wednesday. but i was thinking of you. i left some tvp chili for you in the fridge. and there's grapes, did you find the grapes? come on, sweetie, don't sulk, o.k.? it's hard for me, too.

words trailing off . . .

"The thing about David Halberstam was that he stayed the course and he kept the faith in the belief in the people's right to know," said George Esper, who spent 10 years in Vietnam with the Associated Press.

Neil Sheehan, former Saigon bureau chief for United Press International, said he had lost his best friend, a man of enormous physical and mental energy who had "profound moral and physical courage."

"We were in Vietnam at a time when we were being denounced by those on high," said Sheehan, who went on to write A Bright Shining Lie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Vietnam War. "There was tremendous pressure. David never buckled under it at all."

-lisa leff, ap

i like to tell myself that i'm very reasonable and not at all one for superstition, but life has consistently proven that my mother and other old wives are far from wrong to fret about things like this happening in threes. i doubt my mother would recognize halberstam's name, and she was never big on vonnegut, so today i am doing the sniffling and hand-wringing for both of us. it would have been enough to be so terribly sad, but now i am terribly sad and terribly anxious. ah, well; we do our parts and shuffle on, i suppose. we can only hope, at the end, that we've gotten at least some of it right. not this right, perhaps, but close enough that we can be proud of it. so a toast to the people who've managed it, because in this particular triad, one of them is going next.

'tis better to have loved and lost . . .

you will be missed so terribly. sleep well, hon.

juniper pearl's rockin' month in rock review

so, the move, as you may by now have surmised, was a success. i'm unpacked and furnished and equipped with nearly all* the necessary utilities and amenities (including internet service; thank you for your concern), and i'd like to share a little something with all of you:

living alone rocks.

it rocks hard. it rocks like your first pair of combat boots. it rocks like dethklok. it rocks like you and your air guitar/drums always knew you were rocking. it does not rock like this:

and all this rocking has pumped me full of more enthusiasm than a sublingual meth injection. i've become an honest-to-goodness doer, and while it's taken me some time to shake off the mania of it all and achieve some balance between doing and thinking (which i've been a lifelong fan of and, quite frankly, have begun to miss), i'm at a point now where i can begin to allow a little of the outside world into my four-room nest, and maybe a little more of me into your nests, if you'll still have me. while i'm taking some deep breaths, for those of you who are interested, here's a run-down of some of the things i've been so ardently immersed in the doing of over the past few weeks.

1. the somerville theatre, within walking distance of my new happy hideaway, is a stellar place to catch fairly new movies and some great, if frequently lesser-known, musical acts. every thursday in september the theater screened four eyed monsters, a charming, astonishingly honest, no-budget movie created and being self-distributed by susan brice and arin crumley, who are also the film's stars and who have financed the entire endeavor on their credit cards. the movie is largely autobiographical and chronicles the couple's meeting, subsequent disbanding, and ultimate inability to resist each other's pervasive, beautiful oddness.** they shot the movie on some sort of fancy digital camera which arin explained the workings of very succinctly during the q & a following the september 14 screening, but that was weeks ago, and i don't even own a regular camera, so if you want details you'll have to ask him yourself. (don't be shy, i think he'd be happy to tell you all about it.) there's also a lot of animation cut in, courtesy of susan. the overarching theme is communication and how the hell anyone figures out how to engage in it successfully. arin and susan chose to try not speaking, and it worked so well on their first date that they kept it up--for four months. anyone who knows me knows how much i love not speaking, and while not everyone has been willing to humor me about it, a stoic few have been incredibly indulgent. i love them best, and i'll be buying each of them a copy of this film the second it's released. the piece is apparently in constant production--the version we saw was different from the one that was first released, and the dvd version will be different from both of those--but i imagine each incarnation is a little bit better than the last.

2. the middle east is not within walking distance, but i could ride a bicycle there in practically no time, if i could ride a bicycle. instead i take the train, and that suits me just fine. more or less all of the club's shows are $12, no matter how phenomenal the bands are (and they're usually pretty spectacular). the interior is just the right size and perfectly climate controlled; there's even an elevated area off to the side where i can lean on the banister and read a book between acts, allowing me to avoid any unnecessary, nonrocking social interaction. most recently (september 16) i went to see say hi to your mom and craig wedren, who were opening for the wrens. i had never heard of the wrens, but the two openers were more than worth the $12 for me, and after say hi to your mom played "blah blah blah" and "let's talk about spaceships" and craig wedren played about two-thirds of pony express record, possibly the best album by his former band, shudder to think, and a collection of songs that i spent many, many, many dimly lit teenage evenings writing heinous poetry in my bedroom to, i would have felt fine about walking out the second the wrens hit the stage. i did no such thing, though, because THE WRENS ARE ROCK GODS. here's me as the wrens took the stage:


and here's me fifteen seconds into their first song:

look! the wrens have decreased my age by 50%!

my radiant expression of tufted glee didn't fade for an instant throughout the rest of the set, and it broke my heart to have to walk out during the (hopefully) last song of the encor to catch the final train back home. i will say this once and never again, but know that i am repeating it to myself day in and day out like the world's least centering mantra: boston's public transportation system is lame as a penguin with a peg leg. it shuts down far too early, and i am teeming with resentment over it. stopping the runs before 1 AM makes the city almost useless to anyone but the students who live in dorms built on top of clubs and bars and people with enough disposable income to be able to afford both a night out and the obscene cab fare and/or parking fees that accompany the drive to the chosen venue. granted, these expenses might not be so off-putting to someone who didn't travel in such persistent solitude, but still. we can't run the trains until 1:30? seriously? that's bunk.

enough of that, though. the wrens: embrace them. and as for other people and things you know nothing about, well, i'd maintain a safe distance, but also an open and inquisitive mind.

3. mcintyre and moore is a killer used book store whose inventory covers almost every imaginable topic. they're open until 11 PM every night and have lots of quiet corners for you to hide in while you read one of the dozen books you decided you couldn't let yourself buy that day, like a less austere library. they also host a monthly philosophy cafe, which i've yet to attend. a thing like that could be wonderful or brutal, but i'll never know unless i try, i guess. i'll probably check it out this month, and odds are you'll get a vivid report either way. this bookstore is now second in my heart only to the shire, the musty, floor-to-ceiling-shelved eden of my youth, whose proprietor still remembers both my face and my name. she's a special, special woman, whose business i would not at all mind inheriting one day.*** sadly, i haven't been able to find an unwritten-in copy of the katherine woods translation of the little prince at either place. a former roommate had a copy that i loved near unto death, and when i asked recently if i could maybe borrow it for a little while, he said he had "gotten rid of it." in my shiny imaginary world no one ever throws books away, especially not this one, but, well, i think he probably threw it away. needless to say, no one i know will be leaving their magical book palace to him any time soon.

4. the paradise, ever so aptly named, is far and away my favorite venue on the planet. not only does it have a second-floor balcony that wraps around the entire club, it has seats and sofas right up against portions of said balcony, so when i'm reading my book in between bands i can relax without ceding my vantage point. there's always a free place to park, even, so i never have to walk away with those "i know the second i hit the sidewalk they started playing the one song i've been dying to hear them play for the past ten years" blues. the paradise lounge, in the front of the building, is teensy-tiny and generally filled with a lot of people who aren't necessarily interested in the musical performance, and sometimes the security guards will try to hit on you, but the coziness of the room is unbeatable when it comes to acoustic acts, like evan dando when he's sans band or jay clifford, (former?) swoon-inducing vocalist of jump, little children (newly beloved of zach braff and oldly beloved of me) and rosebud and lovely, lovely, lovely man who once held a bathroom door for me at the iron horse in northampton, ma, and who played the lounge on september 24. he walked on stage and immediately asked the audience members what they wanted to hear, which was so precious and chill, and then he played every song we'd asked for, which was just fucking shocking. he was quite impressed with our knowledge of his back catalog, and he played us some new things, and the early sunday show ended in time for me to get home and watch metalocalypse, and i fell asleep thoroughly rocked and immensely contented.

5. september 27 was john hodgman at the b. b., and i'm sure you've had just about enough of that, so i won't say any more. i have decided, though, to lob a third pitch at the booksmith and see if it can at least foul its way onto a plate--tonight i'm going to do everything i can to both see and hear david rakoff, author of don't get too comfortable and fraud. my bar is now painfully low, so maybe i won't leave in tears. we'll see.

6. the last september event was yo la tengo at avalon, but i think i'm going to give that a room of its own. you'll have it in your trembling, sweaty hands before i get around to summarizing the jon stewart experience i'm looking forward to this friday, but that may not mean much in terms of expedience. i am doing all i can, kids, and even when what i'm doing has zero to do with this blog, you are never far from my thoughts. much love, people, much love.

over and out.










* there are still no curtains in the front room. please don't peep.
** i've succumbed to it as well and would beg them to take me in as their pet--if i didn't know how hard living alone rocks.
*** HINT

the brookline booksmith is my enemy

and i'll tell you why.

some of you may remember my last run-in with the b. b.* and what a ghastly wreck of a literary experience it was. it very nearly put me off the whole reading/signing/bookstore/standing-in-line experience—but i'm no quitter, kids; i persevere, especially when it comes to the pursuit of personal gratification hinging on other people's artistic genius.

so today i went back to the scene of my most recent writer-based disappointment to give john hodgman an opportunity to redeem it. i went with no fear in my heart, as hodgman is the kind of writer i would gladly face down floods and college students and other perils for, and i was certain there was no way he could ever disappoint me. i'm still certain of that. the booksmith, on the other hand, seems incapable of doing anything but.

when i arrived at 6:40 for the 7:00 reading, the place was packed, which didn't make me unhappy, because of course hodgman deserves crowds that spill out into and across the street. for those of you unfamiliar with the booksmith (and i assume this is, well, all of you), the readings are held in a room below the store itself, which you get to by means of a two-lane staircase to the left of the main doors. i couldn't get into the room or even past the stairwell, but i didn't care all that much about that, because all i really needed was to be able to hear hodgman talking and jonathan coulton playing guitar. they could do it from behind a screen or inside of a large piñata for all i cared, as long as i could hear them. it was just very, very important to me that i could hear them.

and they came out, and everyone clapped, and then everyone got quiet because hodgman started talking. and then everyone laughed because hodgman said something funny. i know this because i'm adept at reading social cues and interpreting the moods and intentions of the people around me. i do not know it because i heard hodgman's voice. there was niet hodgman in the stairwell. none. nada. zero. and then more laughter came up from the people in the room who could hear hodgman (who, apparently, was knocking them dead) quite well, and then there was all kinds of noise in the stairwell.

there was the sound of about eight people behind me saying, "i can't hear anything. can you hear anything? why can't i hear anything? hey, excuse me, can you hear him? wow, no one can hear him." there was the sound of an older woman standing in the doorway to the store saying, "john went to high school with my son; he had long hair then. i didn't even know he was a writer, but my son called and told me he'd be in town today, so i came over to say hello. i didn't expect anyone to be here. how did you hear about him? the daily show? what's that? is it on in the morning? comedy central? what channel is that? yes, i know, comedy central, you said that, but what channel is it on?" there was the sound of the girl talking to the older woman, explaining that jon stewart was really popular with college kids and that was why the place was so crowded.** there was the sound of wave after wave of elated giggles emanating up from the floor, which only exacerbated the disgruntled muttering of the people on the stairs, and there was the sound of two junipers inside my head: one crying softly and despairingly at the brutal punishment i was being dealt for having chosen to work a full day instead of running off early and staking out a plot in the front row, and one yelling at the first one to shut the hell up because she couldn't hear hodgman over my stupid whining. once jp2 started yelling, jp1 only went to pieces more rapidly. it didn't help any that all three of us were crunched under the stair railing in such a way that the lower half of our body was being torqued at a right angle to the upper half and 65 percent of the muscles between our sternum and kneecaps were beginning to cramp and/or spasm. one girl in the far, far back (of the stairwell, not my head) finally hollered out, "mr. hodgman, we can't hear you back here! can you speak up?" but mr. hodgman, it would seem, couldn't hear us any better down there, and no up was spoken. here is everything i heard over the course of the first half an hour or so:

"good evening. i'm john hodgman. . . . the full title is . . . six . . . i will not touch my teeth . . . oils . . . sharp . . . more duties . . . jonathan coulton . . . feral man-child . . . black thursday . . . december . . . secretary of the treasury . . . in chalk . . . polio . . . to their waists . . . [coulton playing guitar] . . . not a children's song . . . [coulton playing song about children working in mines(?)] . . . and now we're going to start the q & a."

now, i've been in the booksmith when readings were going on in the past, and i know that you could have heard those authors if you'd been sitting in the stairwell, because i could hear them inside the store. sometimes i could hear them from the sidewalk outside the store. but the brookline booksmith is my enemy, and tonight, when it was absolutely imperative to me that i not miss one sparkling word, an invisible sound-deadening wall was constructed from floor to ceiling about two and a half feet in front of the place i was able to elbow my way to. this was bad. this was so, so bad.

and then it got worse.

for the q & a, hodgman broke out three walkie-talkies: one for him to speak into, one to be passed around the audience, and one for coulton to hold up to his microphone so that some, but not nearly all, of us could hear the delightful banter being transmitted back and forth between the other two. the gag in itself was lovely and exactly how i would have wanted it to be done. no, you know what, damn it? it is exactly how i did want it done. it was just right, a smart, quirky, adorable way to keep a potentially awkward process from overshadowing hodgman's smart, quirky, adorable tone. it was also almost completely inaudible. i think someone asked hodgman how he came up with one of the 700 hobo names, and someone asked him something about science fiction and water (?), and someone forgot to say "over" at the end of his question and had to ask it again. and then it was time to go.

the brookline booksmith is my enemy. but john hodgman, bless his tweedy little heart, is a peach, and i know now that the promise of even every twenty-fourth word will be enough to bring me back time and time again.

there was no bowing out of the autograph line today, boys and girls. i stood in that line, my left side pinched and twitchy, the eager boy behind me stepping on my heels every time someone five people ahead shifted from one leg to the other, jp1 still sniffling and gasping in a rear corner of my skull, because my love is that strong—and i was rewarded. as i handed him my copy of the areas of my expertise (the paperback edition, noteworthy for its extra dose of hobo monikers and lobster fur), he said, "hi, i'm john." i said, "hi, john, i'm juniper." and he said,

"juniper from the web?"

now, you weren't there, so you couldn't see, but i know that you trust me with your life and your house and all your stuff, and so you'll believe me when i tell you that when he looked up into my eyes, his expression of boredom and detachment and crushing indifference flawlessly masked the passionate yearning he felt within. this, tragically, is the way of the secret romance—doomed to deny itself until even those living through it seem unaware of its very existence. i, too, fought to maintain my cover, and i like to think i didn't let hodgman down. he apologized several times for his failure to project, and while this was sweet and good-host-y of him, i told him it was unnecessary and assured him that i would never hold him responsible for the shoddiness of the booksmith's sound system. his graciousness does prove beyond any reasonable doubt, though, that he absolutely would make a smashing roommate, especially compared to my last one, who didn't give a crap what i could or couldn't hear*** at any hours of the day or night.

and that was that. he gave me back my book and told me it was good to meet me, as though i were just one more fan whose face he would forget before i had even reached the door. in a room full of strangers, unable to reveal ourselves, we simply shook hands and parted. but when i reached my car, i saw what was written below the autograph:

"just 999 more please."

and we all know what that means.****






* this now stands for a number of things in my mind that are not "brookline booksmith" but are strongly associated with the store, such as "bloody bastards," "barnacle-encrusted baboons," "blundering biblio-peddlers," and, most of all, "my enemy."

** i don't believe this for a second, as everyone i could see down there looked way too old and stodgy to be staying up all night watching comedy central. i think they were more likely pie-chart enthusiasts, come to thank hodgman for bringing more attention to their cause.

*** this was generally her beastly bird making a horrible, screeching, crashing racket and silence, respectively.

**** don't we? i do. if you don't, please reference this post. also, please see my disclosure statement.

my chemical un-romance

since part of my job now is to collate news briefs related to the subject matter in the journals i work on, i get to spend the first two hours of every morning sipping my coffee and edumacating meself re whatever's on the wire, stretching contentedly in the rhombus of sunlight that beams down throught the skylight. oh, i am a happy little girl these days, my honeys—but not so happy that i forget to get angry about the bad news, and you know there's no one i'd rather rant to than you. today i would like to shake my tiny fist about groceries, and don't change the channel yet, because it's really more important than you think it is right now.

we all know that it's important to pay attention to what we eat for the sake of our own health, but it's easy to forget that your food choices have an impact that extends far beyond your personal experience, and it seems that without a fairly extensive amount of research even the best intentions can be thwarted by what food retailers probably can't tell you and food manufacturers would rather not. i was surprised that my (now much-loved) nemesis, zp, didn't comment on steven shapin's new yorker article on the organic-food boom, since she's such a farm-stand junkie and seems to appreciate a higher than average degree of awareness in that realm. perhaps she'll grace us with a perspective now (*HINT*). i enjoyed it, even though it didn't tell me much i didn't already know and some of shapin's points were things i've mentioned here myself (albeit in a far more petulant tone). i'll always buy organic when i can for the chemical-fertilizer-sparing effect alone, but i don't kid myself about it being the solution to any significant global problems. i do feel good about being vegan, because industrial farming is dreadful for all things great and small, but i understand that the lifestyle is very much not for everyone. the cost alone is prohibitive, and if you don't take the time to teach yourself how to balance things appropriately, it can be more than a little harmful. but it was the right choice for me, and i don't need anyone else to make it as long as they're taking the time to make some kind of well-reasoned decision about why they choose the foods they choose. if your own health isn't important enough then i suppose it's unlikely that you'll be moved by the pathophysiologies of others, but if you disagree (and there are some saintly beings who are honestly more concerned about the rest of the world than about themselves), i, like shapin, would like to recommend michael pollan's the omnivore’s dilemma, which, while at times on the preachy side, has a heart that is very much in the right place, and i would also like to ask you to read this article on how an artificial flavoring is likely doing a lot of irreversible damage to a lot of people. go ahead, take as much time as you need; i'll wait.




welcome back. i missed you.

diacetyl is naturally occurring in a number of foods and is a common additive in many, many processed foods, used to impart a buttery flavor. it isn't more harmful to ingest than any other unpronounceable item in a list of ingredients, but chronic inhalation exposure appears to be pretty gosh-darned dangerous. the massive quantities of the chemical used in the manufacturing of superbuttery foods like microwave popcorn naturally lead to the worst harm being done to employees dealing with those foods, some of whom have airways so badly scarred that they're on lung-transplant lists. it's just something to think about; if you try not to buy from companies that take advantage of pennies-a-day overseas labor and check to make sure your coffee is fairly traded, you might want to scan the side of your snack food's packaging for this substance. of course, you might also want to write a letter to your favorite popcorn manufacturer and ask it to please, please inititate some safer exposure regulations for workers handling diacetyl, and maybe one to OSHA asking that they dedicate a few more resources to establishing exactly how long-term exposure to diacetyl affects human health, seeing as how that's more or less their job. it might also be a good idea to ponder the full ramifications of this spooky statement, found in the news article referenced above:

we don't know if diacetyl is the agent (causing lung disease). when you get into the world of flavorings, there are so many flavorings it's difficult to determine which chemicals are the causative agent.

gives you the chills, a bit, doesn't it? it's an admission of guilt (i.e., they know that something they're using is dangerous) being used to deflect attention from the thing they are guilty of. curious. meanwhile, i'll keep, you know, shaking my tiny fist and rinsing out the cups and not knowing what the hell to do about anything.

thanks for putting up with all that.

let's have a pity party.

this is john hodgman. he's my new favorite imaginary roommate. you may know him as the pc in the "i'm a mac, and i'm a pc" commercials. or you may have seen him in one of his quasiregular appearances on the daily show, in which he is consistently hilarious and absolutely darling. he is also both of these things in his book, the areas of my expertise, said areas reaching far and wide across the ever-expanding ocean of human experience. john grew up in brookline, massachusetts, all of ten minutes from where i'm sitting right now, but by the time i got here he had long since left for new york. that's why he's my imaginary roommate and not my actual roommate. i suppose there could be some other reasons, like that he's been married for four or five years, but that first one is the real root of it. new york takes all of my boys from me, makes them monstrously famous, and then waves them over my head. she's like a cruel-hearted babysitting older sister who tells me i can't have dessert and then breaks out a tray of tiny, delicious cupcakes and says i can have as many as i want . . . if i can reach them. it's so unfair! she's, like, ten miles taller than me. oh, alas and alack. oh, sigh.

anyway, john's very smart and will probably make you laugh, and if that sounds like the kind of boy for you, tough. he's taken. but you can read his book and then hang his picture on the back of an armchair that you're sitting across from and have a fictional conversation with him about it. i mean, i don't do that. but you could. if you wanted to. i don't care, it's your armchair.

stop looking at me like that.

how i didn't meet chuck palahniuk

yesterday i read in the local newspaper that chuck palahniuk would be visiting the brookline booksmith, one of my favorite local stores, to read from his new novel, haunted. here's what i thought about that:

SCORE!!!!!!

i do love me some palahniuk, and some brand-spanking-new, potentially autographed palahniuk sounded even better than the rest. so i made absolutely certain that i left work (where i am suddenly a senior editor, which is beautiful and bizarre, like the indigenous fauna of australia or the deep sea) exactly at five, knowing what should have been a twenty-minute drive would take me at least forty-five in evening traffic and wanting to be at the store by six, when the reading was scheduled to begin. i assumed that i'd have to stand around at the far edge of the room, if i could even get inside, so i was elated when i reached the store at 6:05 and saw a fairly minimal crowd. and then i was not thrilled anymore, because i realized that the minimal crowd was actually a single(ish)-file line winding up and down the aisles to the table chuck was already sitting at. here's what i thought about that:

hmmmm.

i asked the trendily nerdy boy at the counter if the reading was going to take place later on, since the sandwich board out front said chuck would be there from six to nine, and three hours seemed like an awfully long time to sit in a folding chair huffing sharpie fumes, especially for someone who doesn't need the press. but the boy said no, it was just a signing, until nine or they ran out of books, whichever came first. here's what i thought about that:

screw you guys, i'm going home.

but i didn't really leave, of course. not then. i got in line and did my best to tune out the cluster of giddy, chirpy nineteen-year-olds directly in front of me, whose idolatry of trite adjectives could be rivalled only by that of tom cruise and katie holmes, particularly when they're raving numbly about each other (GREAT! THAT'S GREAT! YOU'RE GREAT! THAT BOOK IS GREAT! SWEET PICKLES ARE GREAT!). i was standing directly across from chuck, and, as we happened to be about a foot in front of the endcaps of the main aisles, and people who become accustomed to waiting and moving in lines cling to walls and don't stray from aisles, there was no one between us. so i watched him.

i had seen and heard him on television and in interviews, but never in person. he always seemed extremely animated to me, almost hyperactive, with a lot of hand gestures and elongated vowels. he tends to explain himself with the wide-eyed vim of a little boy who is working triple-time to impress people by convincing them that he doesn't need to impress anyone. from his folding chair behind the low table, his voice was the same, the rhythms and intonation, the volume, all his standard "people are listening to me" patterns, and maybe that's the way he sounds all the time, alone in his kitchen or bathroom or car. who the hell knows. but his face was not the same. he looked like he had been awake for about three days, and every time he had started to nod off over those three days someone had lobbed a chilled water balloon at his face. he looked startled and aged and lost and unnervingly eager to please. he looked small. really, really small.

i thought about the exhausting dichotomy of being a professional writer. the work is, by necessity, utterly reclusive. you have no choice but to set up house in your head and turn up the volume of your own thoughts until they're all you hear all the time, sometimes for months and months, sometimes for years. and then you have to go out on a publicity tour and convince crowds of strangers that they really, really want to know what you were thinking about. so either you love the writing and dread the crowds, or you live for the crowds and loathe the writing, but either way, you are made a little bit sick by about half of your life. it could have been that he was feeling under the weather, or maybe all of the people in this particular line were as lovely to chat with as the ones adjacent to me, but chuck was looking like he was hating the half i was in. here's what i thought about that:

poor guy. he just wants us to listen to his story.

and then i did go home. but on the way i stopped at a book store closer to my apartment and picked up haunted. if you aren't familiar with the premise, it involves eighteen writers who respond to an ad for an artistic retreat, hoping to isolate themselves from all of the distractions that have been preventing them from completing the masterpieces that will undoubtedly win them international fame and lifelong security. so, things get a little weird, and there may or may not be a titch of cannibalism… well, here's what i think about that:

maybe chuck's decided he doesn't love either half.

tag has always been my worst athletic event . . .

. . . as i'm a poor distance runner and relatively unenthusiastic about any sport that doesn't involve hitting things rather hard. (in my experience, while tag can potentially involve a decent amount of force, most people would prefer it didn't. sallies.) so i started off at a disadvantage, and when you add to that the fact that i was practically asleep when the rest of the players started darting around you'll understand how unfairly fish-in-a-barrel things were. anyhow, i've been snagged by phila and drawn into one of these never-ending web webs of getting-to-know-you goodness, and while i'm touched that he would choose me, especially since he's one of my favorite faceless friends, i don't exactly live for the spotlight. but he asked nicely, and i didn't have too much better to do, so i'll suck it up and talk all about me for a minute or two.

seven things to do before i die

1. have a job i love every aspect of
2. scuba dive with sharks—maybe in a cage, maybe not
3. finish the life-sucking story i've been trying to write for the past six years, and feel good about it when i'm done
4. remember and acknowledge the birthdays of every person i care about for an entire year
5. move to some place where i won't feel guilty about having a big, goofy, boisterous labrador retriever, and then get three of them
6. convince one person that homeostasis is inevitably more important than self-gratification, no matter what the situation
7. find out where my recycling actually goes

seven things i can not do

1. ride a bicycle
2. play the piano with both hands
3. think about milk without making a face
4. not gasp (at best) or shriek (at worst) at the sight of a centipede or millipede, even when they're only cartoons
5. envision the amount of trash produced worldwide in a single day
6. stop wanting to wallop bush, cheney, santorum, stevens, etc. with orange-filled socks (see, phila, i'm not so even-tempered as you thought)
7. abide hypocrisy

seven things that attract me to . . . chester

1. his musical talent
2. his deep thoughts about solitude
3. his absolute freedom from self-consciousness
4. the snail costume he wears to his job at the pet store, where he cleans the fish tanks from the inside with his great suction
5. his boundless, ecstatic enthusiasm
6. his disarming lack of any and all ulterior motives
7. the cereal in his pocket

seven things i say most often

1. "hello, babies!"—spoken every time i walk into the nuclear medicine cat ward at work, and every time i come home to the psychiatric cat ward in my bedroom
2. "fucking w."
3. "who watches this crap?"
4. "who eats this crap?"
5. "no, no, don't! don't wake up with the king! he'll eat your soul!"
6. "juniper! you're my enemy."
7. "coffee . . ."

seven books that i love

1. the little prince – antoine de saint-exupéry
2. the sound and the fury – william faulkner
3. everything is illuminated – jonathan safran foer
4. the world of pooh – a. a. milne
5. fillerbunny – jhonen vasquez
6. alice's adventures in wonderland – lewis carroll
7. jesus saves – darcey steinke, and because i'm a sucky cheater i can't not include lolita. there.

seven movies that i watch over and over again

1. i *heart* huckabees
2. swimming to cambodia
3. the purple rose of cairo
4. the princess and the warrior
5. happiness
6. bloodsucking freaks
7. ponette

seven people i want to join in, too

are you kidding me? i don't think i even know seven people. here, i'll tell you what: i'll leave this one open, and anyone who wants to play can go ahead and do so. i know we're not all big on the games.

all right, now what the hell did you just say?

on hannity and colmes, bill bennett just said that mass abortion in various communities (namely those filled with black and hispanic people) being a means of lowering the crime rate is the subject of freakonomics, which it 100% is not. freakonomics, as other people have pointed out, suggested that legalized abortion has lowered crime rates because those aborted children would likely have been born into homes that would not have offered them enough affection and guidance to keep them on the straight-and-narrow. while the book does point out that the children probably would have been born to poor, unwed teenagers, it doesn't refer to any specific race. if bennett chose to infer that sort of racist slant, then that's what he chose, but it wasn't stated by the authors of the book he has repeatedly cited, and he really needs to knock that the fuck off.

wow, i've never watched this much of this show before. it's deranged, even being notably hannity-free this evening. the reverend jesse lee peterson just said that democrats are on a mission to destroy the unborn, and they're about to run a piece about another person who believes katrina was god giving the gulf coast what it deserved. this person happens to be a united states senator. rock on, alabama.

so, i'm going to crawl between my mattress and boxspring and weep softly for a few hours. i hope all you lovelies have a delightful friday night.

buy this book:

boycott this movie:

outstanding. really, bravo.

it's good to know everyone's on the ball. water's been diverted from the thirsty, rescue workers from those in need of rescue--we thought these were acts of new stupidity. but the folks at the top have been steadily herding resources as far away from their true targets as they could get them since, quite possibly, the beginning of time:

Sept. 11 recovery loans loosely managed

By DIRK LAMMERS and FRANK BASS
Associated Press Writers

The government's $5 billion effort to help small businesses recover from the Sept. 11 attacks was so loosely managed that it gave low-interest loans to companies that didn't need terrorism relief - or even know they were getting it, The Associated Press has found.

And while some at New York's Ground Zero couldn't get assistance they desperately sought, companies far removed from the devastation - a South Dakota country radio station, a Virgin Islands perfume shop, a Utah dog boutique and more than 100 Dunkin' Donuts and Subway sandwich shops - had no problem winning the government-guaranteed loans.

Dentists and chiropractors in numerous cities, as well as an Oregon winery that sold trendy pinot noir to New York City restaurants also got assistance.

"That's scary. Nine-11 had nothing to do with this," said James Munsey, a Virginia entrepreneur who described himself as "beyond shocked" to learn his nearly $1 million loan to buy a special events company in Richmond was drawn from the Sept. 11 program.

italics mine; what dunkin' donuts anywhere deserves government assistance? these things are spreading like a supervirus without anyone's help. i can't believe this crap.

well, yeah, i can. but i wish i couldn't.

update, 8:25 pm, 9/11/05: as a somewhat related aside, kenneth feinberg is on book-tv right now talking about his work with the september 11th victim compensation fund, which he's written a book about. he managed the fund pro bono for 33 months, in and of itself a tremendous act, but listening to him talk about some of the people he met and stories he heard, i'm really quite taken aback, and a bit desperate to wrap him in something fleecy and feed him tiny cupcakes. he seems genuinely confused about why there was no public outcry at the massive compensation offered to these victims when there was no such offering from the federal government for victims of other terrorist actions, such as the oklahoma bombings and the 1993 attack on the world trade center. he also spent a lot of time discussing how incredibly difficult it was to extrapolate the financial value of each lost life (he was not permitted to give everybody the same amount, and had to take the victims' salaries into account as a starting point for compensation), when, in his mind, all lives should be of equal value, and he suggested that in the future, if this sort of thing is ever attempted again, everyone involved should receive a flat sum. (i agree with him, but i do not think that that flat sum should be $2,000; this is most likely irrelevant, since i also agree with him that the odds of congress approving another program like this are slimmer than an olsen twin.) in an interview from july 10 of this year, he had this to say about the surprising amount of support the program received from the american people:

AMB: You did talk about Senator Schumer sidling up to you at one point and saying, can you get me some money from the ‘93 bombing of the World Trade Center? Now what kind of pressures like that did you have and how did you deal with them?

FEINBERG: Not much pressure. As I said earlier, I would have thought going in that the families who lost loved ones in the World Trade Center in ‘93, Oklahoma City, the African embassy bombings, the USS Cole, anthrax, I would have thought all of those people would have been demanding similar generosity on the part of the fund. No.

There were a couple, I would say a handful from Oklahoma City. One from Kenya. One, Senator Schumer, for the ‘93 World Trade Center. I think 9/11 was different. It was certainly different from the perspective of the American people, of that I have no doubt.

But I think most families, for whatever the reason, didn‘t come running to me asking for similar treatment. The public certainly was behind the program.

LAMB: Why shouldn‘t all of those have gotten the same kind of consideration as the 9/11 people?

FEINBERG: From the perspective of the victims, I don‘t see any distinction. If you try and justify my program on the basis of the victims lost, I can‘t convincingly explain why 9/11 yes, ‘93 World Trade Center no.

I think the only way you justify this program as a special carve-out is from the perspective of the nation, a recognition that 9/11 was, along with the American Civil War, Pearl Harbor, maybe the assassination of President Kennedy -- and 9/11, its impact on the American people was such that this was really a response from America to demonstrate the solidarity and cohesiveness of the American people towards these victims. That‘s the only way to explain this program I think convincingly.

the solidarity and cohesiveness of the american people does not, apparently, extend to the financial managers of the small business relief funds, who would ho out their own mothers for six chocolate munchkins.

are we all such old dogs?

my grandfather was
wounded in japan. he bears
the folks no ill will.


yesterday stephen walker, author of shockwave: countdown to hiroshima, was on book-tv discussing his work, and he said some things i have problems accepting but no trouble believing. apparently the united states developed the atomic bomb as a precaution against germany developing a weapon of the same caliber. fair enough. but even after it was indisputable that germany was making no attempt to do so (thanks in no small part to hitler's dislike of "jewish physics"), the u.s. decided they still had to drop it somewhere; the president wasn't about to face the american people with the fact that he'd spent millions of taxpayers' dollars on a weapon that was just going to sit around in a storage facility. so the folks in charge selected japan, even though they had no comparable weapons to speak of, either. there was a fledgling atomic program in japan, but nothing had come of it by that time. someone, at this point, will always attempt to argue that it doesn't make any sense to wait around until something does come of it, and i'd concede to that argument, especially when talking about an enemy who had already attacked us once, if we had dropped the atomic bomb on a target where known atomic research or weapons development was taking place. but that isn't what happened.

the united states selected a target that had been more or less untouched by previous bombings, so the population wouldn't be too emotionally dulled. hiroshima was bordered on three sides by mountains that would significantly magnify the bomb's impact. they studied one hundred and fifty years' worth of weather patterns in the region so they could attack at a time of year when conditions would be conducive to a maximum of destruction. it was known that the bomb let off an incredibly bright flash at the moment of detonation, visible for a radius of between fifty and a hundred miles; a memo was circulated suggesting that loud sirens be released alongside the bomb so people on the ground would look up, and anyone who wasn't killed by the blast would at least be permanently blinded.

there was no military base in hiroshima. there may have been a few hundred military personnel among the tens of thousands of civilians in the city. there was a munitions factory, and some of the torpedoes fired by japan in the attack on pearl harbor may have been built there.

the scientists who had designed the weapon petitioned, pleaded, with the coordinators of the manhattan project to halt its production. they maintained that there was no longer any call for it, and they couldn't see any good coming of the existence of a thing so terrible. robert oppenheimer, the head of the project, intercepted the petitions on their way to president roosevelt and stuck them in a drawer.

this was not a preemptive mission, and it was not the only way to end the war. it was vengeance. it was us showing them.

remind you of anything?

people will always see things the way they want to see them, i guess. i think blind patriotism is an affliction, but other people can't seem to get past the good old days of manifest destiny. from an associated press article published this morning:

A group of veterans offered a...message across the park from the more than 500 activists [in favor of nuclear disarmament]. One sign read: "If there hadn't been a Pearl Harbor, there wouldn't have been a Hiroshima."

In Washington, G.R. Quinn, 54, of Bethesda, Md., held a sign across from the White House reading: "God Bless the Enola Gay," referring to the B-29 that dropped the first bomb.

i am not a fan of philip short.

no, actually, "crimes
against humanity" should
not be sufficient.





in a post-lecture discussion of his recently published biography of pol pot, short said he refuses to use the word "genocide" in reference to the 1.7 million people in cambodia who died at the hands of the khmer rouge because it is too strong. genocide, he explained, is the extermination of people of a particular race or ethnicity for the sole reason of them being of that race or ethnicity, and such an act is carried out at a higher level of evil than are murders committed for other reasons, even murder on such a numbingly large scale. the khmer rouge didn't target any specific group, they killed anyone and everyone who didn't live up to their ideal of a true cambodian. he was eager to point out, also, that most of those 1.7 million were not killed outright by pol pot's followers; the majority of them died passively of things like malnutrition and starvation, and the actual number of people who were physically, brutally killed is really only in the low hundreds of thousands. only. well, in that case...

gen•o•cide (n) the deliberate extermination of a race of people, such as the Nazis attempted against the Jews [fr. Gk genos, race, + L. caedere, to kill]
-the new lexicon webster's encyclopedic dictionary of the english language, 1993 edition

now, in my opinion, killing a chinese man because he is not cambodian is not so very different from killing a chinese man because he is chinese. it's true that no specific race was targeted by the regime, but that's because they were all targeted. and they weren't only killing people who weren't cambodian, they were killing other cambodians for not being cambodian enough. the killings were motivated exclusively by racism, and that racism was extreme, irrational and all-encompassing. their ultimate desire was to ensure that, within the country's borders, the blood of every member of the population was one hundred percent pure. if you were deemed unworthy of the title of "cambodian," your new race designation was "Other," and you were to be exterminated. it differs from a nazi aryan mindset only in that the khmer rouge was not interested in carrying these exterminations out world-wide. if genocide is the strongest available term, the one most appropriate for describing the gravest of crimes against humanity, then it is definitely the one that must be used here.

although he denied it more than once, it sounded to me then, as it does now, that short was attempting to defend pol pot, or at least his mission and philosophy. the sensation i experienced in the face of such an attitude is one that my personal lexicon lacks suitable language for.

SONS OF BITCHES!!!!! BUMPESES!!!!!!

pigfucker bastard
soul-selling douchebag cuntface
bitch-ass whore! die! DIE!!!



YOU, jonathan safran foer! i am yelling at YOU! how could you do it? how could you take something like everything is illuminated and option it to liev schrieber so he could cast FUCKING ELIJAH WOOD?!?!?!?!?!?!?

whatever, you're a filthy, unscrupulous, money-grubbing slut and you probably deserve to be synonymous with a glassy-eyed hack, but your novel deserves much better. MUCH better.

oh, man. i am so pissed i can't even talk about it. you've let us down, foer. you really have. damn.