Going North

Hey, look it's Niagara Falls! Ha ha ha...no really. I just drove for ten hours to look at a great heaving caldera of fog.

Here are some tourists, staring at the fog:


There is something very entertaining about seeing a great many people gathered together to stare at...a bowl of mist.

I don't think I could see much more than 1/3 of the falls, but (all joking aside) what there was to see was quite beautiful.


I don't often do look-but-don't-touch nature excursions, and it's strange to be so close yet so far away from the object of your attention. Waterfalls are funny because there's generally at least one avenue of approach where the waterfall springs at you out of nowhere. If you walk up to Niagara from behind, all you see is, water, hotels, walkway...woah! Sudden elevation drop and gorge extending for...as far as you can see into the mist. Even on the approach facing the waterfall, it's tucked into the gorge - submerged and out of the way until you get close.

That's what happened to me when I saw the Cascades d'Ouzoud for the first time - another memorable occasion when I drove for ten hours in order to see a waterfall. We finally arrived and kept asking everyone we passed, "Where is the waterfall?" and people kept pointing into a very ordinary looking olive grove and I was starting to think that there wasn't a waterfall at all...and then I was right on top of it. I kept thinking of the Cascades d'Ouzoud at Niagara because at the Cascades, you crawl (practically on hands and knees sometimes) down this trail to get from the top of the waterfall to the bottom, afraid of making a wrong step and toppling head over heels into the falls. And the times I've been there, there were always people swimming in the pools at the bottom, and clambering up the rocky cliffs to dive. Basically, the polar opposite of standing on a walkway, leaning over a guard rail, and observing.

I don't know that one experience is better or worse than the other; maybe just that the walk takes longer to do. I walked up and down the promenade a bit today, and I'll do more tomorrow, just to take in the lay of the land. It was icy and forbidding, and the water just looked dangerous - dangerous when it was dark and churning, dangerous when it was white and frothy, dangerously cold where it was a pale, clear, arctic green.

The town is more or less a typical tourist town, with a dash of Vegas thrown in just in case wax museums and motels weren't tasteless enough on their own. But that's kind of fascinating too.

Book Lists

Melinda just directed me to this site, which has a long list of interesting lists to write about books. I like this idea, and since this blog has been about books so much anyhow, thought it would be fun to incorporate every so often.

I'm going to start out with...

Books That Make Me Highlight Again

I have a kind of interesting personal history with book highlighting. For many years I was obsessively protective of my books - I read them opened very narrowly so that I wouldn't crack the spine, I was at pains to avoid food and water stains, and I never wrote in them.

I had a change of heart around the time I finished reading Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. This is my favorite book of all time, as I'm eager to explain to anyone who will listen, and I started reading it over the summer in Australia between my freshman and sophomore years of college. At the time, my habit was to use a blank piece of paper as a bookmark and whenever I came across a line or paragraph I wanted to remember, I would copy it onto the bookmark. Proust is rarely succinct, so I filled up pages and pages with tiny little writing of magnificent, life-changing quotations...all of which I lost somewhere in the move back to the States, either California or New York, I don't know. So I have no record of the particular phrases that I loved most in my favorite book, and Remembrance of Things Past is not a book that you decide to re-read lightly.

That was about when I decided that it was okay to write in books.

And then there's the Moby Dick debacle. This is a fun story, actually. I read Moby Dick while I was doing an intensive summer language program in Fez, Morocco, just before I started at Harvard. When I'm reading a book I try to carry it with me everywhere I go - you never know when you will end up having to wait around for something, or have a spare minute to read. I had traveled with a few other students to Chefchaouen, a city tucked into the Rif mountains in the north of Morocco. Tourists like to visit because the weather is temperate, and all the houses in the old city are painted an icy blue, which can be very charming and surreal.

I went with Ryan - a good friend I met at the language school, who recently moved to New York to start law school - on a hike up to the top of whatever the nearest mountain was. We had a guide, we had water, we had snacks, we had time - we were all set for a great hike. On the way up, Ryan said that he would hold my bag if he could put his own things in it; he did this a lot, since girls tend to carry bags and he had too many hiking supplies to fit into his pockets. So I handed the bag over and we climbed to the top of the mountain and it was lovely and we had a fantastic view and I like hiking, so that was wonderful.

On the way back down, when we were getting to the edge of the wilderness and nearing the old city again, Ryan admitted that when he'd taken my bag to put his things inside, he'd noticed that I was carrying Moby Dick and he thought it was kind of ridiculous to carry a gigantic book on a hike up a mountain, so he'd hidden it under a rock and planned to pick it up on the way back down. I knew what was going to happen the second he said this, and I felt sick to my stomach, but I held my tongue until we got back to the section of the trail where he'd stashed my book and he looked around, searched under every rock even remotely resembling the one he'd covered my book with, and discovered that it was gone.

I was 20 pages from being done with Moby Dick. 20 pages, and I had lovingly, carefully highlighted and commented all the way through. And I love Moby Dick - it's another one of my favorite books ever. And then, boom, all of that gone. That's my saddest highlighting story. I bought another copy when I got back to the states, but I'd lost my momentum (I finished it immediately, but the end of a long book can be so satisfying, and that was pretty much gone).

That's my saddest highlighting story.

Mostly, I highlight in books that I love, because I want to be able to go back and remember exactly what content in the book made an impression on me, and because I want to have a record of how I was reacting to the book as I read in a specific moment in time.

Then there are books where I highlighted a lot, but didn't really like the book. Djuna Barnes' Nightwood is a good example. How can you resist quotations like

She has the strength of an incomplete accident - one is always waiting for the rest of it, for the last impurity that will make the whole

or

God, children know something they can't tell: they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

In some ways, quotations like this are the reason why I didn't like the book. It is packed with savage, clever, beautiful phrases - but the unremitting intensity, the brilliance of individual words, overshadowed the work as a whole for me. By the end I was exhausted, a little sickened, and my emotional engagement with the book had played out a while before.

The funnest category of highlighting is hate-highlighting. In Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, right next to the phrase

"Sometime around four o'clock that morning, for example, half-disentangled from the tulle of a dream..."

I scrawled,

"oh, please, YAWN."

A few pages later, in the same book, underneath

"He has thick, shining hair, glossy as a squirt of black paint,"

I wrote,

"chomp chomp."

On page 242 of Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy by Rudiger Safranski, next to this awful poem of Schopenhauer's (translated from the German so it might read better in the original, but in English it sounds as though it were written by a bitter, much-maligned seventeen year old):

From long-harboured deep-felt pain
It rose up out of my innermost heart.
To hold to it I struggled a long time:
But now I know I have succeeded.
Act now whatever way you please:
You cannot threaten my life's work.
You may delay it but cannot destroy it:
Posterity will raise a monument to me


I drew a picture of a donkey, with a little speech bubble reading "HEE HAW."

I should say that not all of my hate marginalia is silly or, you know, insulting in an unhelpful way.

Of course, there's also workhorse highlighting - highlighting for research, highlighting for exams, highlighting facts you will need to draw on later. I have no interesting stories about this kind of highlighting.

Notice

Halfway through Ulysses.

New York Navel Gazing

Last weekend I also made a trip to the Queens Museum of Art. I'd never been before (most likely because it is, as one might imagine, in Queens) to see a pretty interesting exhibit about Robert Moses curated by my once-upon-a-time undergrad thesis advisor, and the scale model of New York City pictured below. Since then, I keep telling everyone I know to go to the Queens Museum of Art to see the model...especially anyone who's only been in the city a few years, because the model can help you see the forest instead of the trees...it can give you a sense of the size of the different boroughs, where they are located, where population is concentrated. The model shows all five boroughs, at a scale of one inch to one hundred feet, and walking around I could find individual buildings at Columbia, and the street where I live now.


Looking from the Upper West Side of Manhattan south and east.


Looking from eastern Brooklyn to the west - Manhattan in the distance.


Looking from Queens south - with an excellent view of La Guardia airport.

Trivia: the General Assembly first met in the room that currently houses the scale model of NYC.

Second piece of trivia: Did you know that the Statue of Liberty faces Brooklyn? Or that this is because it looks in the direction of the Battle of Brooklyn, the first major battle of the Revolutionary War?

Ralph Nader

I did a Ralph Nader double-whammy a couple of weeks ago. I was listening to an interview with Nader on NPR, and it mentioned at the end that he's touring to promote his new book, The Seventeen Traditions, and would be speaking at the Union Square Barnes & Noble that evening. I didn't have anything in particular scheduled, so I decided to go.

Nader is a pretty fascinating speaker, because he's both incredibly eloquent and touchingly awkward. His words are very well-chosen, very apt, and he speaks thoughtfully and with deliberation. But he's not very good at transitioning from subject to subject, so his talk was very choppy (I noticed this at Barnes & Noble where I hadn't on the radio when an interviewer talked him through everything) and he doesn't have the kind of slick polish I associate with an orator.

What impressed me most about his talk was the way he dealt with the heckler in the audience. Events like this naturally attract the extremes - supporters and opponents. This heckler kept shouting out things like, "If you were so selfless, you wouldn't have cost Gore the White House," and other similarly angry comments about the 2000 election. I know Nader has a lot of experience with this sort of thing, but I admired his response. He didn't get angry, he didn't snap, nor did he ignore the heckler. Instead, he treated all of his loud-mouthed blabber with respect, and responded to all of his allegations calmly and rationally.

I actually really liked what he said - something like, "Well, and if I agreed with you then what, we accept that there will never be a third party?" Personally, I think it would make more sense to focus on reforming the electoral college and instituting instant runoff elections on a state by state basis, but the principle of the thing is right.

Later that week, I sat down to watch An Unreasonable Man with Melinda. It's playing at the IFC here in the city, but now all the independent movies that come out at the IFC are simultaneously available on On Demand, so anybody who has full cable can sit down and watch it anytime they want at home.

And I really recommend this documentary highly - first of all, because it's a good documentary. The filmmakers definitely have a point of view, and it's not hidden, but they do a good job of showing all sides of the story. In particular, they spend a lot of time interviewing apostates - people who were once active Nader supporters, but who have since either cooled towards him or turned against him.

But also because the documentary charts the whole history of Nader's career, and most people my age won't really know a lot about his accomplishments in the sixties and seventies, or have a solid sense of how he became who he is today. I certainly didn't, and I have to say I respect him a lot more know that I do. It also delves into all the controversy surrounding the 2000 election.

The title, and the full quotation that appears at the beginning of the film, gives away the documentarian's opinion on the man:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw

And I leave you with a photo of Nader back in 1966, when he was young and looked like a more attractive version of Eric Bana:

Upright Citizens Brigade

OK, stay tuned for further posts but this one is fresh in my mind, so it goes first. Last night I went to see the Upright Citizens Brigade.






I had no idea what this was, so I was really pleasantly surprised. It's an improv comedy institution...at the beginning of the show, somebody from the audience calls out a word and then one of the improvers delivers a monologue based off of the word. Then, after that's over, the other improvers make up skits based off of the monologue. The monologuer did two monologues for each word, and they ran through the cycle four times.

I have been to bad improv before, and I have been to ok, that was fairly funny improv before, but I have not been to awesome improv before and all I can say is - if you want to see awesome improv, go to the Upright Citizens brigade. The comedians there last night were...

Amy Poehler (Saturday Night Live)
Seth Meyers (Saturday Night Live head writer)
Jack McBrayer (30 Rock)
Scott Adsit (30 Rock)

And a couple of other really funny people whose names I don't know off the top of my head and can't look up on an NBC website.

I don't know if you have ever tried to get tickets to Saturday Night Live, but I have looked into it and you have to send in a postcard in August (only August!) listing three dates you'd like to attend during the upcoming year, and then you are put into a lottery and maybe you will get seats sometime during the next year, hopefully on one of the dates you specified. Or you can show up at the studios really really early in the morning on a Saturday and stand in line and maybe get any tickets that have cropped up from cancellations or whatnot, if they are available and you are not too far back in the line. And then be ready to stay up late because Saturday Night Live is, I believe, actually live.

This show was free (free!), although you can also reserve in advance and pay like $8. It doesn't take a year's advance planning or trudging through the snow in the wee hours of your precious weekend, hoping against all hope that you're the only person insane enough to do it. On top of which, the theater is teensy tiny and it's really fun to see a lot of incredibly talented comedians improvise. Plus, everybody was free to be as foul-mouthed or inappropriate as they liked, which was also pretty fun.

I'd try to sum up some of the skits but I imagine they're only funny when a funny person tells the story/does the act. Humor is mysterious that way.

The Elementary Particles

I'm on a roll here - my last post was about a play centered around a male prostitute, and now I've just finished a piece of filthy literature by Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles. Houellebecq is Big News in France - their current shining literary star and a subject of constant controversy. I'd wondered about reading him for a while, but so many people gave me dubious looks and said, "You know, Erin, he's great but I think you might hate his books," that I didn't pick one up...until recently, when Ariana assured me that he's a genius and Not To Be Missed.

Now, allow me to say the same to you, gentle reader: The Elementary Particles is great, but there's a good chance you will hate it. My one sentence review would be: Something along the lines of Borat, if you added more sex, a compelling voice, and lots of science. This is kind of inapt, but if you've seen Borat you probably remember thinking something along the lines of, "No matter how offensive this is, or how horrified I am, there's something true here..." That's the connection.

Here's an excerpt; not the most offensive, but not the least either:

For many women, adolescence is exciting - they're really interested in boys and sex. But gradually they lose interest; they're not so keen to open their legs or get on their knees and wiggle their ass. They're looking for a tender relationship they never will find, for a passion they're no longer capable of feeling. Thus they begin the difficult years. (193, Vintage edition, trans Frank Wynne)

I could go on and on about this book (it deserves discussion) but I'll finish off with two quick thoughts.

(1) More than with any other novel I've read recently, I found myself wondering what Michel Houellebecq himself is like and, in particular, what's wrong with him. Something is definitely wrong with him. Even if he is a genius.

(2) I now understand the reactions I got from Houellebecq readers. I appear to be doing a really bad job of recommending it myself - even though, in fact, I recommend it highly and hope somebody who reads this review will read the book, and talk about it with me.