Savannah Lee

Warning: I will be discussing a deeply subversive image of suicide. If you have sensitivities around this issue, you might want to skip it.

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I don't know how I lived nearly forty years on earth without ever running across this astonishing 1947 image of a woman who leaped off the Empire State Building and crushed a limousine into her final bed.

(It was made of steel. Do all the dead have beds of steel? She made hers fit her like a glove.)

The reason I posted a warning about it is because of one central, terrifying fact. For all the smashed steel, for all the half-torn-off stockings, for all the shattered glass, for all that the victim's (properly-gloved) hands are clenched, she looks like a sleeping angel.

If you follow the link, you'll see quotes about that mix of pain and peace. Life Magazine refers to "death's violence and its composure." Blogger Leo Kottke writes of "the serenity...amidst the crumpled wreckage." Yes, the angle that the photographer chose in order to bring out this effect is one which validates every I'll-be-beautiful-and-at-peace suicide fantasy ever fantasized. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this one only needs three: "Oh, how lovely."

Of course, not all beauty is beautiful, and this particular beauty is one of that sinister tribe. If you keep looking, you can see that the peace of the image is corrupt. The totaled limo...think about what would have happened if anyone had been inside. And the stunned freedom on the woman's face, for all its odd ecstasy, is a sad Janis Joplin sort of freedom: "Just another word for nothin' left to lose."

But the story of the twentieth century was the story of how to take nothing and turn it into something. Regimentation into a new kind of poetry. Madness into manifestos. Smokestacks into clouds of glory. Barrenness into modernism. Death into epiphany.

This woman's tragedy, and the man who documented it, tell that story.

I'm in a hurry, so bear with me; I don't have time to look up the History Channel website and figure out exactly what show it was that my daughter and I stumbled on yesterday. I don't know the title, but I do know it was about ancient Egyptian architecture.

I loved ancient Egypt when I was little, but back then, duh, I had no context for what I was seeing. I just accepted it. Pyramids. Okay.

But yesterday, I truly saw and felt in my bones how odd the pyramids were. The show emphasized the smooth outer layer of polished stone that was put on them. "Like glass," said the experts. For the first time, I saw the coldness of the pyramids as they once were, how pristine they were, how inhuman. Glassy and hard-edged and perfect.

The rest of our surviving architecture from the ancient world, as far as I know (and I'm not an expert), is not like that. Not Greece or Rome, not Mohenjo-Daro or Macchu Picchu. Grandiose, yeah, massive, yeah, but not so...not so...

"Mommy," said my daughter, observing a computer regeneration of the ancient site at Tell El-Amarna. "It looks really modern."

Modern.

Yes, in the technical, art-historical sense of the term. I was looking at modernism. A form of it anyhow. Modernism through an impossible, alien prism. Modernism born out of different and unfathomable reasons. For different purposes. To different ends. But modernism just the same. Angles. Surfaces. Reflection. Hardness. Linearity. Smoothness.

Modern.

Future.

How strange and wonderful.

Okay, it's the Wall Street Journal on a cultural issue, so, in my opinion, you really need to take it with a pound or two of salt.

However, this review of "Praising It New," a book about the New Criticism, is largely right when it says we took a serious wrong turn in literary criticism when we jettisoned formalism ("textual intensity") in favor of postmodernism.

But I think we took that wrong turn for some good reasons.

I would say that the reviewer (James Seaton) does not. I only read the review one time, but I didn't notice even a polite, let alone positive, word about the "death of the author" crowd. Instead, Seaton admiringly quotes Cleanth Brooks as saying that literature should be "not statements about what ought to be, but renditions of what is." This stands for the kind of commonsensical, emotionally-engaged literary criticism that we've lost in the past few decades.

And I agree with it! Brooks is right!

But here's the thing. At a certain point, you do need to ask, "But what does it MEAN to 'render what is?'" Yeah, yeah, we all know what it means, but...do we? It's worth asking the question. And while we're at it, what IS 'what is?' That's worth asking too.

The problem is that those questions were SO worth asking that they were too strong for us. They blew our tiny little minds into an illion billion pieces and we started taking people like Barthes and Derrida way too seriously and--as the WSJ review correctly charges--discussing the discussion instead of the work.

I say this because I love theory; in grad school, I spectacularly failed to endear myself to my professors by insisting on approaching art theoretically instead of historically. I know, or used to know, theory about as well as someone who can still make themselves understood when trying to order coffee CAN know theory.

(A true postmodernist would be there for half an hour: "The construct of 'self' which I perceive as coexistent with the singularity of what is commonly agreed upon as my physical presence at these particular coordinates of the invisible graph imposed upon us by our patriarchally-encoded perception is 'interested' in your 'pot' which 'contains' 'hot' 'liquid' 'flavored' by 'beans'...")

So I know its defects, and they are steep. But I also know that...Well, you parents out there. Your kids ever gone through a phase? I bet they have. And what are phases? Phases might as well be defined as "developmental manifestations which annoy parents to no end, but we have to suck it up, because they have a purpose."

Literary criticism's awkward swan dive into copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy land ("...could maybe transfer the liquid currently oppressively restricted by the confines of your patriarchally-defined vessel across a gap in both 'space' and the perception of space into the empty, smaller vessel that I am currently holding--not that you should read anything symbolic into my possession of such a vessel even though I'm physically configured in a way that has been defined as 'biologically female'...") is a PHASE.

We will get through it, and over it, and hopefully, we will be better for it.

Because the truth is..."what is 'what is'" is a serious question. And even if it pulls you off course for four decades and makes you churn out hundreds of thousands of pages of unprintable crap, alienate everyone, and possibly even have difficulty ordering coffee...

...it's worth asking.

As I've said, this blog is pretty much brain-to-screen. I generally don't blog ahead (which I consider a dire personal failing). I get up in the morning, I write something and I post it.

The problem is that there are days...oh yes, there are days...when I just can't.

Sometimes I go to Bloggy Headspace only to find tumbleweeds rolling through and a tin can rattling in the wind.

Sometimes, I don't want to go to Bloggy Headspace at all because if I'm in Bloggy Headspace, I'm not in Writing Other Stuff Headspace, which is a problem when I'm backed up on Writing Other Stuff. I lose time, not only to blogging, but to recovering afterwards. It takes so long to transition out of Bloggy Headspace. I need to decompress. I need to read bleak articles about the fate of American democracy.

A college admissions interviewer once peered at me and inquired, "Do you ever do anything for fun?"

I never did answer her.

...were staring at me again in the shower today, their heads twisted well past "yoga" and heading towards "YA TV horror movie."

They had their final bathtime playdate with my daughter some time ago. She stuck them up here on the rail for their hair to drip dry, then never came back for them.

Every day they watch me, their unblinking eyes empty of judgment or approval. They keep me company in the one place where I am supposed to be most alone.

Do they remember being queens and river-jumpers and butterflies? Champion swimmers, unicorn runners, ballerinas, the souls of nighttime stars, and--most exotic and wondrous of all--high school students?

Once they were dreams.

Now they're reminders of dreams.

For me too.

Hmmm...have I just written a defense of the Barbie doll?

If I have, then good.

So okay, that Turin-and-Sanchez-approved 5-star perfume that I was lucky enough to get my hands on.

At the time I got it, I was basically trusting Turin and Sanchez's word that this really was a great perfume. I liked it (once I got it home, that is; the store tester was actually kind of awful), but I couldn't tell you if or how it was better than anything else.

The other day, my daughter came across one of those magazine perfume strips and opened it up. "Ooh, Mommy! Come smell! Isn't that pretty?"

No, dear, it's not. It's an imitation of pretty created by aliens even more aesthetically impaired than the Vogon. (Though less malicious.)

...Whoah! How did I know that?

Well, a little over a month of inhaling Dune (the Dior perfume, not the book) every day has obviously reoriented my nose.

I still cannot explain why Dune is exponentially better than that poor pretender in the magazine strip. But I know that it is. It has an honesty, for lack of a better word, a clarity, a truth, that the other one does not.

I look forward to learning more.

Between a hurt shoulder, some sudden cross-town errands, an appointment, and more errands, I have been completely overtaken by events today.

My apologies.

I've watched the proliferation of the "how to dress" industry for a while now. All those TV shows where they take somebody who allegedly can't dress and overhaul them.

On the one hand, there really is such a thing as bad taste. But you know? I've never seen someone with bad taste on one of those shows. I've never seen them take a 57-year-old woman empty of hopes and dreams who wears ruffled shirts with elastic-waistband royal blue polyester pants. No. In general, they do not do this. In general, they take offbeat people whose priorities (and they do have them) are elsewhere. You know--people who would make better television.

And in my opinion, quite frankly, they mess those people up.

First of all, there is more than one way to dress a body. The rules universally applied by these shows do work, but they are not the only rules.

Furthermore, following them leads to predictability in choices. Ooh, look, they're recommending jackets again! And on the grounds that jackets 'pull everything together,' too. Haven't heard that one before! (I hereby challenge all designers everywhere to do a ready-to-wear mass-market jacket that tears everything apart. Your country needs you. Get moving.) Ooh, look, they're giving strategies for creating a waist and minimizing a stomach again! Ooh, look, they're recommending A-line skirts and dresses again! Ooh, look, they're recommending layering again! Shocker there.

Finally, and most crucially, there's a loss of individuality in the object (remember him/her?) of all these ministrations. They take someone who's spent a lifetime living from the inside out, and turn them around, convincing them to look outside-in.

I mourn that. Anybody can dress for their shape. It takes a real individual to dress for their soul. So what if it doesn't "look right?" Who said? It may not look "right," but it looks like that person.

Which brings me to....the people who recommend their friends and loved ones for these shows.

First of all, I hope that's not actually how the shows work. I hope people do not actually literally send in videos of their friends. I hope the friends recommend themselves, and then everyone goes back and makes it look like their mother or their husband or their BFF from kindergarten did it.

But taking appearance for truth (as Mother Television teacheth us to do)...

All you people who, literally or only in your own imagination, cheerily put forth your loved one for self-improvement? All in the name of helping him/her raise her game, get ahead in life, get all the wonderful things s/he deserves, and, of course, bring out how beautiful s/he really is?

Stop and think.

What if somebody had gotten to Prince in 1979 and convinced him to dress right?

What if somebody had gotten to Boy George in 1981 and convinced him to dress right?

What if somebody had gotten to Madonna in 1983 and convinced her to dress right?

Ditto Cyndi Lauper?

What if somebody had gotten to Marge Simpson's animators and convinced them to dress her right (and do something with her hair)?

Yeah, those people are all either art or artists (or both)...but in each and every one of their cases, they are first and foremost individuals.

If you've got someone in your life who holds her favorite pair of jeans together with paper clips, or buys lobster-print Bermuda shorts, or has an aversion to sleeves, or wraps herself in dark layers like a secular nun (and these are actual examples that have stuck with me over the years), you have an INDIVIDUAL in your life. Cherish them. And I mean as they are. It takes real ingenuity to be different in this day and age. If it bothers you, maybe that's a symbol of something else about them and their relationship that's not working for you. Okay? Please. Think about it.

Because you know what the real secret is?

It's not what you wear. It's really not. I have just been looking at a ton of pictures taken at a recent party I went to, and most people there didn't dress 'right,' but they dressed who. They dressed exactly who they were...and they were beautiful.

It's not what you wear.

It's why and how you wear it.

It's inside...out.

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I sincerely apologize for the homiletic nature of today's post and fully blame it on my sore shoulder, which has made me exceedingly cranky. Thank you. Namaste.

I started trying to wake up at five. After all, the birds were chattering outside. It was midday to them. And I had so much to do. Laundry...I tried, I really tried to establish a laundry day, but it fell apart almost as fast as it gelled. We're back to doing laundry whenever we run out of socks. But that's okay! Because I took an online test, and, you see, I have the wrong conative style for housekeeping. The test results even said so. "Orderliness," they told me, "is a low priority for you." I nearly fell to the floor. "Thank God! There's an explanation! I make sense!" I mean, I always knew that orderliness was a low priority for me. How could I not? But now I know why. It's not a choice, it's a preexisting condition! It's not a bug, it's a feature! It may be a weakness, but it's tied to my strengths.

Okay so anyhow. We were, in fact, out of socks (and towels, and shirts), meaning that, according to my conative style, it was laundry day. So there was that. Then there was blogging, then there was a freelance article, then there's the three stories I'm inching forward on (sometimes the waters thunder like the ocean, sometimes they trickle like tears). Plus we only had two eggs left in the house. Yep, it would really be a good idea to get up and get going.

But my eyelids wouldn't open.

Plus, I noticed myself thinking about all this in rather odd ways. Instead of thinking "And then I have to blog," I would think "Mountain squid desktop."

"Okay, those words don't actually mean 'I have to blog.' Aw, hell, am I asleep? Dammit. Well, I can fix that if I just open my eyes. If I can just...open..."

Nope. Not this trip.

So I didn't get up until eight, too late to buy eggs for a hungry family, so we went out to breakfast, but then something was wrong in the restaurant kitchen, so we were there for over an hour (sitting near an utterly patient and happy baby who was clearly a Buddhist monk in a former life). Then my husband the efficiency expert refused to drop me off at home until we'd been to the post office, because home was not on the way. Not that this was a problem. I provided very important assistance at the post office, like digging a pen out of my purse and then holding the packages while everyone else wrote labels.

We saw a guy in a Dalek T-shirt. "EXTERMINATE!" it said.

An unusual name on a nametag. A story behind the eyes.

My daughter thought my knuckles looked dry.

There was an SUV with a small sharklike fishing boat hooked up to it.

Lights flashing on and off around us, and we moved or stopped depending on the colors that we saw.

These things are as strange as dreams, if we would only see.

Johann Hari mystifies me with one of his answers to the Total Politics questionnaire.

Asked which six people he would invite to a fantasy dinner party, living or dead, he replies:

"Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Paine, Andrea Dworkin, Clive James and my grandmother."

Okay, Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche? And Andrea Dworkin? See, to me, that goes beyond "an interesting combination" and well into "every man for himself." I think it would take Wilde about three seconds to start throwing elegant verbal darts at old Freddy, who I can't imagine taking it well. Nor do I think Mr. "Ubermensch" would cope particularly effectively with Ms. The Patriarchy Is Even Worse Than You Think And I Have The Vaginal Scars To Prove It. And vice versa. Not that she'd get much help from Wilde, whose idea of how to handle being violently oppressed was quite different from, one might even say opposed to, hers.

I salute Mr. Hari for his bravery in wanting to oversee such a crew, and his optimism in apparently believing that light could be wrung from their heat--and that it wouldn't totally overshadow his other three guests, the great rationalist, the great critic, and the great private citizen of whom Hari has written before, the widowed grandmother who struggled to raise her children.

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What's really interesting, though, is the question of what they would eat at this party. When asked "What's your favourite dish?" a few lines down, Hari replies, "Big Mac and fries."

I hope that's what he'd serve. I'd love to see what Wilde and Nietzsche would make of it.

Yesterday I blogged about Johann Hari's fascinating fantasy dinner party list.

It got me thinking who I would invite to a fantasy dinner party of my own.

First of all, I'm hoping I have a fantasy location to host this fantasy dinner party, because our house is not actually big enough. Our table only seats four, and in a very cramped alcove off our kitchen. Hosting six guests would leave people sitting on our couch and loveseat in the living room, kicking old newspapers out of the way and holding their plates on their laps.

Well, I guess I'll just have to invite a bunch of people who would not be bothered by total chaos.

Samuel Johnson! Boswell tells us your house was pretty much a pit as well. Come on down!

And okay, I'm gonna use my powers for good, here, and bring together two people who never got to meet in life: Alexander the Great, and the chronicler he always longed for but never lived to see, his devoted biographer and prose-poet Mary Renault. They can go sit at the kitchen table by themselves.

That leaves three. Hmmm. I pick Madeleine L'Engle, who might well be bothered by my house, but who would forgive me. I know she would.

And...Sojourner Truth. Well, for her I'd clean the place up.

And...Gertrude Stein. Yes, definitely Gertrude Stein.

Hm. Interesting. With the (really only partial) exception of Alexander, everyone's either a writer or a speaker.

Good lord, I wonder what we'd all eat. Would I have to cook? Help. Hari's beloved Big Macs are lookin' better and better.

No, I think, presuming I still had access all areas, I would simply have to bow down and kiss Anthony Bourdain's feet and beg him to come make us some bad-ass boeuf bourguignon.

I wonder who my husband would pick. I'm going to guess, and see what he says.

Let's see.

Linus Torvalds.

Geddy Lee.

Queen Lili'uokalani.

Robert Heinlein.

Leonard Bernstein.

Eric Dolphy.

That would be an interesting night...

In this essay for Salon, Jennifer Sey, a former elite gymnast, admits that she hates talking sports with non-athletes. Specifically, she hates talking sports with non-athletes who used to play a sport.

"One co-worker approached me in the cafeteria...Having read my book, she squealed, 'I was a gymnast too!'

No, you weren't."

Sey goes on to talk about practicing 40 hours a week with abusive coaches while attending high school. "I did [real] gymnastics," she throws down, then cowers in shame: "See what I mean about this woman inside being horrifically ugly?"

I would argue, no, it's not the woman inside who's ugly. It's the system that produced her.

And the American system isn't even the worst one. I'm sure there are Romanian women who would march up to Jennifer Sey and seethe, "No, I did gymnastics, beeyotch! You moved away from home at fourteen? Fuck you! I moved away from home at FOUR!" (Actually I don't know the exact age at which Romanian gymnasts traditionally go away, but I do know it's young.)

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Sey writes, "I'm not convinced that [outsiders]...really understand" what Olympic athletes go through.

To which I can only say: don't people look at their faces?

Try it sometime. Look at the faces of, say, those Chinese synchronized divers from last night. I did, every time. Those were two of the most woeful faces I have ever seen. No, I don't know what they've gone through. But I can see what it's done to them. I can see that I would never want to be in their Speedos.

And it's not that I don't understand dedication or passion. The number of hours I've spent writing stuff just to write stuff would stun you. At college, when other people were talking in the halls or out at the bar or whatever, I was in my room with my archaic typewriter. I know about giving up big chunks of a "normal life" because there's something you like better, and "if it gets me nowhere, I'll go there proud," as the song ("I Got a Name") says.

No...it's because I do understand dedication and passion that I would never want to be either of those divers. I know what dedication and passion look like. They don't look like those faces.

That is what outsiders don't understand.

One time, someone told me, face glowing, "I did four or five hours of yoga a day for twenty years. And I'm so glad I did. Passion is a wonderful thing."

That is what people think is the story of those Olympic athletes.

But as Jennifer Sey's essay reveals, it's not.

My friend's yoga practice was his own. He did it for his own reasons. No one else was invested in the outcome. No one else had any stake in it. No one else needed to control it. It was just him and the mat.

(It was just me and the keyboard.)

That is exactly the opposite of elite sports. Once you step on that track, your practice doesn't belong to you anymore. It's not for your benefit anymore, or about your love or passion or joy. It's not even, I would argue, about the sport itself. It's about results. The toll of this is very evident in Jennifer Sey's description of her years as an elite gymnast--her voice flattens and takes on the hollow ring of despair. She sounds like a prisoner.

The beast, in my opinion, is not her anger at people who think they went through anything like what she did. I think the beast, if there is one, would be whatever drove her to do it.

Okay, I had a post all ready to go about a very deep (and somewhat disturbing) discussion I had the other night about depression. But my husband didn't like it. Which was depressing.

And now I have to make lunch for the kid, so there is only one thing left to say:

David Tennant was only number seven in the TV Guide poll of "Sexiest Sci-Fi Stars"!?!!!

What is WRONG with everybody!?!!!

For indeed, like Nigel Tufnel's immortal amp...this one goes to eleven, folks. This one goes to eleven.

The huz (h/t Tenaya Darlington for that exponential improvement on the unbearable "hubby") and I were discussing our favorite TV shows.

"Keeping Up Appearances," he said.

"The Thin Blue Line," I said. "'I blame those terrible refrigerator magnets!'"

"Are You Being Served?," he reminded me.

"Blackadder," I said.

"That goes without saying," he chided, then continued, "As Time Goes By."

"Red Dwarf," I said. "Let's watch Back to Reality right now."

"You know what would make 'Back to Reality' even better?" he said.

I said, "A crossover with..."

"DOCTOR WHO!!" we both yelled.

Isn't that frightening?

But it's okay, because the huz grew up in Hawaii, so his total all-time favorite show is Shadow Warriors, the Japanese ninja drama from the early 1980s. You think the Doctor and Rose is a tragic love story? Oh, my friend. Try Hattori Hanzo and the doomed Okou.

"Thank you, Hanzo, for drinking with me tonight. And tomorrow...I will kill you."

They don't make 'em like that anymore.

Or so I have been informed by my dreams.

It certainly was a pretty one--dark blue, with outrageous raves of tiny flowers going on all over it. Yes, in my dream, I decided it would be the perfect thing to wear.

You know The Royal Shakespeare Company? That company in Britain which (shocker) does Shakespeare?

We need one of those. A New York theater dedicated to a single iconic playwright.

Only it can't be Shakespeare.

I was talking to my dad yesterday evening and he read an article where someone insisted that we need a permanent, dedicated Shakespeare company in New York. I totally agree that we need a permanent, dedicated company in New York--but I disagree that it should be dedicated to Shakespeare. It has to be a company dedicated to a great American dramatist.

Why? Because that's the only way we'll ever get good enough to deserve to set up a national Shakespeare company of our own.

Americans, imho, generally stink up the joint in Shakespeare. That's because, also imho, we don't know WHY we're doing it. We just do it because it's Shakespeare. That's not good enough. What do we have to bring to it that's unique and meaningful and different from what a British or Australian or German theater company would bring to it? I don't think we can answer that.

And I think the reason why we can't is because we don't understand our own national drama. We have no compass. We have no north star. We have no baseline. We have no default setting.

The only way we can approach Shakespeare, or Richard Greenberg for that matter, in a meaningful way, is to get one.

The only way we can do that is to (a) pick a great American dramatist--Arthur Miller, (argh) Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Paul Simon--and (b) build a highpowered professional New York theater company around his work.

Year after year, this company will cycle through the artist's works. When they get to the end, they start over.

What will this do?

It will orient the theater world. There will be a needle pointing north--something to head towards, away from, to the left of, to the right of, underneath, above, around, whatever. Something to ignore! But something. And something American, for better and for worse. It will teach us what we are as American actors, playwrights, and directors. It will be a mirror.

After about twenty years of that...we will start to DESTROY in Shakespeare. Not to mention, I bet we'll have a lot more new theater of power and consequence. And new directors of originality and confidence.

And actors who can do something other than look blank (blankly anguished, blankly scared, blankly crazy, blankly blank) and yell a lot when they go on "Law and Order."

(Okay, that's not fair. The actress who played the con artist that took over her sister's identity was pretty nuanced and surprising. Other than that, however...)

But anyhow. We need a national theatre, in New York, dedicated to a great American dramatist. And we need it yesterday.

Maybe this is because I come from a family of teachers, so my perspective is skewed. But can somebody explain why we judge Olympic gymnasts the way we do?

I just watched NBC's coverage of the individual medal round in women's gymnastics for the vault. The event included Alicia Sacramone, the American gymnast who had such a difficult meet during the team competition.

All eyes were on Sacramone as she battled...okay, sorry, I did know the name of the Chinese gymnast, but The Kid just came wandering in and started talking to me. Cheng Fei? I think so. (Yeah, I could google it. But I'm not gonna.)

So: Alicia Sacramone and Cheng Fei.

Sacramone did a solid but not perfect job on her two vaults.

Cheng Fei nailed her first one beyond all nailing, sending the commentators into raptures. I am pretty sure one of them said, "It feels like destiny here!"

Then she completely blew the second one. She didn't even land--the floor rudely cut her off while she was still struggling to get out of her mid-air gyrations. She found herself on her knees before the world.

There was embarrassed silence from the commentators who, barely a minute earlier, had been using the word "destiny."

I will say that, as Cheng Fei (holding back tears with an iron will) went by, Sacramone met her eyes and gave her a look of such profound understanding, a look which spoke so many volumes of empathy and hard experience, that my heart tore in two. (As a writer you just want to swallow pills, because there will never be words to say what were in those eyes. It's something anyone can see but nobody can say. There will just never be words. If I were an actor I'd be going for the razor too, for much the same reason--"I will never be able to express that.")

And now for my bitch.

Can't everybody see how stupid these competitions are?

I mean...those two vaults, the nailed one and the blown one, the triumph and the disaster, each from THE SAME GIRL AND WITHIN TWO MINUTES OF EACH OTHER...don't they show how stupid the whole concept of these competitions are? How arbitrary they are?

I am sorry...you CAN. NOT. JUDGE. a gymnast...or a pole vaulter...or a swimmer...one moment at a time like that. Okay? You can't. It is nonsensical.

Sacramone herself, after she fell off the balance beam in a random wobble, went on to nail the rest of her routine. Doesn't that say anything? Doesn't that begin to suggest that, in judged sports, we penalize mistakes the wrong way? It leads to craziness.

The winners are not the good ones--not at that level. At that level, everybody's good. (The tenths-of-a-point differences in their scores...that's a whole separate joke. Don't get me started.) So no, the winners at this level and in these circumstances are not the good ones. The winners are the lucky ones. No, don't talk to me about nerves or courage or heart or standing up to the pressure. The winners are the lucky ones. That's all. They have to know that. I'm sure the other athletes know it. It's only seemingly the entire rest of the world that's too stupid to see what a rigmarole it all is.

Again--I think I see things this way because I come from a family of teachers, whose goal is to assess people overall rather than in a series of snapshots. Those situations are almost completely ruled by chance. Assessing people by such thin slices under those circumstances is just...I mean, it's stupid. It's stupid. It's so stupid that it may even, god help us, be stupider than show business.

There has to be a better way. There just has to.

...and can we please go do the shopping now.

Yes, the hell of school shopping is upon me.

Sigh...

(Sorry to be so late today.)

Person of my acquaintance: "They say exercise can't cure depression."

Me: "That's a Duh Heard Round The World."

Person: "But it does elevate mood."

Me: "And? So what?"

Person: "Hey, that's something! It gives them [depressed people] a baseline to work towards."

Me: "No it doesn't. Feeling better for an hour and a half isn't going to get a chronically depressed person thinking differently about their life. Feeling better for two weeks isn't going to do that. Feeling better for three months isn't even going to do that. In my opinion, you have to get a chronically depressed person feeling better for seven or eight months before they're really going to start thinking differently about life. Anything less, and they'll still be waiting for the rain to come back."

Person (thinking this over): "Let's say I could take a bunch of depressed people and have them as lab animals."

Me: "Hmmmm."

Person: "My goal would be to see if they had any survival instinct at all."

Me: "What!? Listen. Depressed people are nothing but survival instincts. Their survival instincts are running flat-out all the time. That's why their quality of life is so awe-inspiringly shitty, because they're in a permanent state of invisible emergency. It takes everything they've got just to get through the day. The goal in treating depression is not to wake up the survival instinct. The goal in treating depression is to fix it so that the survival instinct can stand down."

Or at least that is my opinion.

Me, con't: "Only when they don't have to battle the buzz in their head, the miasma, the rumination, the grayness, the fog, the millions of things they've called it, can they start figuring out what it means to inhabit their own lives."

Person: "So if I had a bunch of depressed people as lab animals..."

Me: "Where do I start?"

Person: "My goal would be to take them to a place where thinking isn't possible. Like...I could throw them into icewater. Then they wouldn't think, and would be free from the weight in their minds."

Me: "Yeah...for as long as it took them to climb out of the water. You can disrupt the buzz or the rumination, but then it comes back. See?"

Person (gasps): "I've just described a serial killer."

#

At the time, I thought that remark showed a terrifying flash of self-insight. I thought Person had realized that it was...how shall I put this...not necessary to go to the trouble of imagining a whole herd of human "lab animals" in order to theorize how depression might function or be cured.

And that it was even less necessary to imagine plunging them into icewater--a tellingly punitive way of "disrupting" their suffering. (Replace it with a painful, immediate threat to survival. And one which will ruin their clothes in the bargain. Great!)

And that the whole premise showed a lack of understanding of depression that was so extreme it would be funny...if it wasn't so serious. Person thought they were thinking about depression, but they weren't. Person was just playing peek-a-boo with the outer veils of sadism.

I thought Person had grasped this, and leaped for an extreme and crazy metaphor, overdoing this as Person had overdone everything else tonight.

But no! Actually, Person was still projecting onto that hypothetical huddled mass of depressed "lab animals." Since it was apparently news to Person that people with depression tend to feel a weight or buzz or cloud or obsessive ruminating impulse in their heads, Person was now imagining that the strain of this must turn them into killers.

(No, but being pitched into icewater over and over again...)

"No," I clarified, "that's what sociopaths and psychopaths do. They're different."

"Oh."

So Person must have said "*You've* described a serial killer." And I misunderstood.

It was a night for that.

Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, anti-war and pro-electoral justice...rest in peace.

There's been some comments about the role of exercise in (hopefully) elevating mood in depressed people, and how much of a role that can play in recovery. It made me think more about exercise--motion--in general.

I've always seen myself as someone who has spent my entire life trying to avoid moving my body, punctuated by bizarre aberrational periods in which I puritanically attempted to get in shape.

Just the other day, one of those sudden thunderbolts struck me:

Actually, it's the reverse.

I have spent my entire life trying desperately to find a way to express myself through movement (which I had no other way to conceptualize except as "getting in shape"), punctuated by VERY long periods of despair at my total failure.

But the truth is--I've never stopped searching.

I will admit I've had some one-night stands. I tried body rolling. Pilates. I joined a gym, then another one. And yes, I once bought a balance ball. Hey, I'm human here.

But we'll just focus on my longer-term relationships.

In college it was swimming, which was wonderful and felt fantastic and which would have to come in second overall in terms of joy. But the hassle around swimming sank me (oh ha ha ha) in the long run. In other words: I loved swimming, but not enough to overcome the barriers to staying with it. Or as a young George Michael put it in "Heartbeat," "I was happy with the kisses she gave me/It's just that happy was all she made me."

Then, oh, let's see. For a couple of years I walked a lot because I hated taking the city bus. That worked quite well, but as soon as the circumstances around it vanished, the walking vanished too. Another relationship which was not nearly as deep as it seemed.

Somewhere in there, I went the typical western calisthenic route. Bought 5-pound handheld weights and a stationary bike, subscribed to Shape Magazine, and dutifully performed the routines in their layouts. That period was a very difficult, fragile one for me. I worked out to kill time, because even the relatively small amounts of it that my limited stamina afforded me for workouts felt like eternity inside my head. My body got no joy from what I did, and I wasn't all that in touch with it. In fact, that was how I got through my workouts! I never could have sat on that damn bike for thirty minutes day after day, back hunched, shoulders tighter than a fundamentalist and screaming at me like a baby on an airplane, any other way. One time, I managed to overdo some lunges on a truly epic scale. For an entire week my thigh muscles felt like clumps of dry spaghetti being broken in half whenever I moved.

Well, that period of relative activity fell away like "an overcoat of clay" (Emily Dickinson can have my firstborn if she wants). Then, speaking of firstborns, I had a baby. I spent a couple of years carrying her around and pushing her in a stroller, none of which I even saw as "exercise." I'd have to say that this was probably the most detached I'd ever been from my own body since I was a teenager, which was really bad. In my teens I walked like an old lady from the 1870s. Constrained and circumscribed and bound. The body's metaphors are so touchingly literal.

Then what. Then I tried Nia, which--for me at least--worked incredibly fast. My (relative) aerobic capacity skyrocketed. I was infatuated with Nia and thought it was love. I worked hard at the relationship. When going to classes became too much of a hassle, I got a DVD. I could only get through the first thirty minutes, but I worked those thirty minutes on an almost-daily basis for at least a couple of months.

But I still had the "headspace" problem. Always before, to "work out," I not only had to change my condition to varying degrees (my clothes, my location), I had to change my headspace. I had to go from one mental room to another. This was a huge burden to me.

Which, though I didn't know it, meant precisely one thing: nope. This ain't you either.

#

There's an orthodoxy in our culture that we're supposed to be "in shape." I hate that. I really do. No we're not. We're supposed to have joy in our bodies.

People approach "exercise" as something you do for "health." It's a duty, a process, which leads to a result (denser muscles, elevated mood, lower blood pressure). It's a means to an end. People are told to "find something that works for you," which is dry, dead language that will never lead anyone to water. We're told to "fit it into our lives," as if it was a puzzle piece. Or an appendage. No wonder no one can "find" the "time."

Very often, the experts are no help. By definition, they're not going to have any idea why sedentary people lie outside their systems. If somebody feels they need to write, for example, but can't motivate themselves, how the hell am I supposed to help them? I can't stop myself from writing. I would have absolutely no idea how to teach someone to start. I would probably end up saying really stupid stuff like, oh, say, "Find the kind of writing that works for you! Find time to fit it into your life! Get a writing buddy so the two of you will motivate each other!" Dear lord, I might even tell them to 'just do it.'

You'd have to look very hard--and know what you were after--to find the key to those platitudes.

Here it is: We're supposed to have integrated lives, lives that flow outward from a steady central star. Not a Frankenstein's monster built from the outside inward with the found objects of conformity and guilt.

What you do, with the possible exception of the dishes (and really not even then), should never be a means to an end. It should be a Ding an sich, a "thing in itself."

That's what "just do it" points to, or ought to point to--not will, but instinct. Flow.

Exercise must die and be replaced by poetry.

For various reasons of karmic spillover which we don't need to get into (i.e. I've been the instrument of someone else's irony karma), I haven't had much luck with teachers in life. I haven't met very many who were real teachers, the change-your-life sort.

That may be changing in some interesting ways these days. But in the past, it's been true. The angels in my life, and they are beautiful, have generally not been placed in that spot.

Despite that, there have been a few hand-out-grades-at-the-end-of-the-semester people to whom I can only bow.

One of them, at ninety-two, left us Thursday morning.

So, rusty as I may be after all these years, I'd like to say goodbye in the language she taught me.

Doctrix, semper tibi gratias ago agamque.

Yep, it's August.

Oddly cool, actually; we've got a pleasant breeze where the crushing brick-like heat should be. I'm certainly not complaining.

There is an absolutely ginormous spiderweb outside my window. Mr. or Mrs. Spider scored a major real-estate coup there. He or she has been able to construct a perfect circle of a web, a dream web, an arachnid mansion. I am sure this web has been featured on the cover of Web Beautiful accompanied by a 6000-word article. "The filigrees, so seemingly delicate, reveal their power in a breeze, testament to the magic of proper alignment."

Mr. or Mrs. Spider is hanging out in the center right now, no doubt enjoying the view.

I wonder if spiders can hear the cicadas. I wonder what it means to them if they do.

(Sorry to be so late today.)

It was a terrible day yesterday. I got nothing done. So I hit Blogthings pretty hard.

First I found out What My Bed Says About Me (and, by extension, my husband):

What Your Bed Says About You

Outward appearances aren't important to you at all. You think that the over emphasis on looks to be shallow. Your life tends to be completely chaotic. You aren't a very organized person, and you tend to be slow in cleaning up messes. You are not very high maintenance in general, but you are high maintenance about a few things. In relationships, you tend to kick back and let the other person be in charge. You tend to be a dreamy, head in the clouds type of person. You think in terms of possibilities. You are a traveler. You are comfortable anywhere, and you rarely feel homesick.

Then I found out what kind of tea I am:

You Are White Tea

You are quite delicate and very sensitive. You are easily overwhelmed. Peace and serenity are important to you. You shy away from intensity of any sort. You appreciate a simple quiet moment. You can relax easily without feeling bored. You take the time to enjoy life. Even when things are busy, you make the time.

Finally, I learned what my ideal wedding dress (of the choices given) says about me:

What Your Ideal Wedding Dress Says About You

Your Personal Style: Modern and simple. You like clothes to accentuate who you are, not overwhelm you. Your Ideal Wedding: A small ceremony at an old church with a beautiful flower garden Your Philosophy on Marriage: You can have a deep commitment without marriage. It's only a piece of paper. Your Perfect Marriage: Simply loving each other a little more every day

#

The scary thing is, I agree with most of the quiz results...but there has to be an asterisk next to "avoids intensity" on the Tea Quiz. I love intensity in stories. Ever since I blew my brains out on Madeleine L'Engle's "A Swiftly Tilting Planet" in elementary school (my parents had to take it away from me), I have loved stories that howl like iron wolves.

This does not mean that I like thrillers, btw. In fact I often read things that are very quiet--on the surface.

Sometimes the screaming's in the skin.

I've been reading "The Lady of the Lake," and it's the oddest thing; I can understand every single word in it, but it isn't English.

I recognize this language--

"Her kindness and her worth to spy/You need but gaze on Ellen's eye/Not [the lake], in her mirror blue/Gives back the shaggy banks more true"

--but I cannot use this language myself. English, nearly two hundred years on, doesn't function like that anymore.

"On his bold visage middle age/Had slightly press'd its signet sage/Yet had not quench'd the open truth/And fiery vehemence of youth/Forward and frolic glee was there/The will to do, the soul to dare/The sparkling glance, soon blown to fire/Of hasty love, or headlong ire."

I wonder if it was so impressive in its time. Well, it was a big success--but that doesn't necessarily mean its readers heard it the way we would hear it, like honey from the mouth of heaven.

I have the same question about Shakespeare--in that more poetic age, did his poetry ring as true as it does to us? Remember, the cult of Shakespeare as we know it today is a fairly recent phenomenon. Only when the immense, powerful traditional substructure of our thought and language, ponderous but necessary to uphold the flights of a Scott or Shakespeare, fell away, did the Bard go from being well-regarded to being Teh Biggest Genius Anywhere OMG. In other words, only when our language no longer allowed us to come up with our own lines about flights of angels singing all sweet princes to their rest, did we start fawning so heavily over those that had come before. There's an exoticization at work here.

And not that we can't speak lyric in our own ways. We can and we do. But THIS kind of thing, this "So forth the startled swan would wing/So turn to prune his ruffled wing" (Scott) stuff, that door is closed.

So it's a different language really. One we can see but not touch. An odd feeling.

Or so it seemed to me this morning. Who knows. Maybe it was just a spell.

Some days, the freelancing just comes at you fast and furious. People turn out to be ready to talk Right Now, so you do! And what started out to be a day of setting up interviews becomes a day of doing them. It's great fun.

I will be late or never with the blogging today.

Ever since I got it for a birthday present one lucky year, I have been metaphorically clutching The Dictionary of Imaginary Places to my heart.

The Dictionary is a marvelous compendium of fictional places on earth.

These places need to be at least somewhat fantastical--no obvious stand-ins for real places. And they need to already 'exist'--no future locations.

Once past those hurdles, though, you're free to explore a gratuitously vast and diverse menagerie of wonders like the Sea of Frozen Words, the City of Dreadful Night, the Other End of Nowhere, Quarll's Island, Pa-Anch, the City of the Blind, Pyrandria, or the aforementioned ambivalent utopia of Satrapia--all entries in the Dictionary.

But my favorite place to visit in this book is actually the second-to-last paragraph of the Author's Note to the revised edition, a tiny kingdom of poetry bounded by and consisting of the following words:

"The imaginary world keeps growing, and countless continents of the mind are born between book covers every year."

Countless continents of the mind.

And all we have to do is close our eyes.

WARNING: THE LINKED ARTICLE CONTAINS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF AN EXTREMELY DISTURBING PARASITIC DISEASE. If you're very sensitive and/or have been having a particularly bad week, you probably don't want to know.

And now:

Let's all ask ourselves...what has each of us done with our last twenty years? Because Jimmy Carter, besides working for peace in the Middle East and building houses with Habitat, has spent his last twenty years all but wiping the horrific guinea worm off the face of the earth.

As Johann Hari (one of my favorite journalists ever) puts it:

"When Jimmy Carter first encountered the disease, some 3.5 million people were riddled with guinea worm. Tens of millions of people had endured it, from Europe to Asia; it was regarded as an intractable, eternal problem. The idea of eradicating it was mocked as “utopian”. But today, the number has been slashed by more than 99 percent. Fewer than 10,000 people in a few remaining pockets of Ghana and Sudan still suffer – and soon, there will be none at all."

Yeah. Jimmy Carter made that happen.

And it's not even what he won his Nobel for.

Can you believe that??

SOMEBODY GIVE HIM ANOTHER ONE!! RIGHT NOW!! JESUS CHRIST!!

We need to invent a new category. The Nobel Prize for Ass-Kickingest Human. And he gets to win it every year.

#

If you're not at work, and are the kind of person who would appreciate the irony of a bunch of humor writers putting incredibly nasty words in the mouth of the (genuinely) saintly Carter, I invite you to check out this essay from the Onion, purportedly "by" Carter, which pretty much says it all:

"I Got What America Needs Right Here."

Yes he does.

(And see, they don't even know about the guinea worm thing! They don't mention it! Thus, unhappily, proving their own point--Jimmy Carter is possibly even awesomer than Batman, and nobody in America knows or cares--even further! Even his fans don't appreciate him enough!)

I fear that we do not deserve Jimmy Carter.

So I was reading this article a while back. The writer expressed horror at some cookbook or other that she'd found, which called for canned this, frozen that, prepared the-other. She seemed to feel this was a deep moral failing.

Similarly, I just got this otherwise wonderful casserole cookbook, "Bake Until Bubbly," out of the library. (Isn't that the best title?) But the book and I got off to a bad start when the author started dissing the traditional American casserole:

"The casserole made of leftover overcooked diced chicken breast with celery, water chestnuts, overcooked broccoli covered with canned cream of mushroom soup, and a quart of Velveeta topped with crushed Fritos has had its plug pulled and is banished forever to the dustbin of culinary history."

Okay, well, I hate water chestnuts, and overcooked broccoli is indeed depressing. But...dude. Do you not get it?

Canned, prepared, processed, and already-cooked food is safe.

It will not potentially sicken your two year old if she gets her hands in it while you're trying to cook.

It will not go bad after its fifth night in the refrigerator while you're having your latest crisis (late night at the office, crying kid, not feeling well, someone's dog died, it's Lizzy's gymnastics night, it's Kelly's swim meet, you have to get that old couch to the dump, you have to drive fifty miles through the snow to pick your second cousin's girlfriend up at the bus station because his car broke down....you know, life as we know it).

It's life-proof.

Yeah, yeah, health, taste, blah blah. I know. I know. But seriously. Today, you can get 99% fat-free canned cream soups to cook with, and frozen vegetables, and low-fat, low-sodium dressings and soy sauces. You do not have to use Velveeta. Or Fritos.

Meanwhile, the circumstances that gave rise to 20th century uber-convenient American home cooking have not gone away. People's schedules are more crowded and chaotic than ever, and, news flash, home cooks are not chefs.

The link is to Laura Shapiro's politely blistering review of Gordon Ramsay's "Fast Food." It says, "Gordon Ramsay says he can make you a more efficient cook. Don't believe him."

The idea behind the Ramsay cookbook is that, because chefs can turn out smokin'-fresh fare in less time than it takes most of us to find the can opener, YOU CAN TOO, if you just follow these tips.

Uh...no, says Shapiro. "Take note: Cookbook writers are different from you and me...They're professionals...The only really useful shortcut in the kitchen is knowing how to cook."

Meaning that the rest of us do not, in fact, have the years of training necessary to be able to turn an onion, five carrots, six garlic cloves, four potatoes, some flour, butter, cream, white wine, breast of chicken, prawns and cheese into a main-dish gratin in thirty minutes. 'Kay? It sounds easy, but guess what! It ain't!

I know that some people are exquisitely sensitive to how fresh their food is, so canned goods just won't work for them. For the rest of us, though...spurning even a low-fat canned cream soup because "it's not fresh" is self-defeating IMHO.

I guess...as with all things, it's important to ask WHY they are the way they are before you start pointing fingers. Especially with something like food.

My nine-year-old wanders in while I'm working.

"Oh hi, honey. Hey, I have such a headache. Go get me my ibuprofen."

There is a bewildered pause from my child.

"It's right there behind the water bottle," she says.

I start looking afield on my desk. The first three water bottles I see have absolutely no ibuprofen behind them.

My daughter reaches straight in front of me and turns up with the medicine.

Ah. So it seems she meant THAT water bottle. The one, you know, a foot and a half from my face.

"Well who would have ever thought to look so close by?" I protest.

This sterling example of my own personal logic ("I couldn't find it because it was too close to me"--right up there with "I couldn't find it because it was where it was supposed to be") does not impress her as much as I'd hoped.

Very well then. I shall blame it on my headache. "See what kind of shape I'm in?" I demand, naturally proceeding to spill the whole bottle like Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe on a girl's night out.

"Yeah, no offense, that is kinda sad."

From the small landslide of embarrassment, I take two.