Frantik Girl
Saturday, June 28, 2003
The Sunny Day Blues
These endless, perfect, beautiful, flawless, warm invigorating days are making me tired. Anyone will tell you that the reason Seattleites put up with rain for nine months out of the year is because of the sheer joy of the Emerald City in Summer, full and lush, gleaming beneath the sunlight, light breeze washing over the Sound bringing salt air and a cooling touch to the concrete maze. I agree, I walk out into a day like today and my heart fills with joy, I take the air into my lungs with the same gusto as a stoner with his lips around a bong. The beauty overwhelms and humbles me and I am the groveling suplicant, swooning at the feet of this glamourous metropolitan mistress.
But enough is enough. It's been over a week, and I feel overwhelmed and exhausted. Worse, on days like today how can I justify staying inside when such transcendence awaits just beyond my window? I feel guilty for not wanting to be in the sun, I feel like I'm wasting my life if I choose to be inside (writing a blog entry, for instance). I went canoeing yesterday, I swear to god I did... these are the heady summer days of my youth, I will not waste them... I promise, please don't smite me.
Yesterday, on said canoe, I used SPF 50 sunscreen and wore my floopy hat, and I still got a sunburn in those hard to reach places. Yet skin health is not a valid reason to miss a day like today... not when there's a Gay Festival Thingy on Capitol Hill.
I walked to the water the day before. The water was grand and I could see Mt. Ranier in the distance. I got a blister on my little toe. Yet this is not a valid excuse to stay inside... not when a day like today only comes once every five years.
Then there's the guitar strummin', beer smellin', up north White Girl blues reasons that I don't want to go out:
I got no girl. Lately I've been singing Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" to myself as I walk the shady glens of Seattle's parks. "It's such a perfect day... I'm glad I spent it with you... Ohhhhhhh, such a perfect day, you just keep me hangin' on..." My god I feel pathetic.
I got no money. Cities, for good or ill, are built around commerce; and while the parks are lovely and free, I enjoy walking the streets almost as much. But what destinations are there other than stores, or malls, or the Pike Place Market where I can pick up some fruit at a little family fruit stand, just Like Vito Corleone in the Godfather? Without money, the city is filled with mocking jesters waving temptations in your face and pelting you with free mustard packets when you cannot afford to buy their shiny wares.
I got no job. Obviously this relates to 'got no money' above; but on a more fundamental level, being unemployed during the week, when there is not a cloud in the sky and the air is fresh, makes me feel like a total flake, living off of the state while people working in McDonalds breathe in hot grease fumes and curse the tantilizing sun outside the drive thru window.
In the literary sense, my mood is at odds with the setting, which is why my shady apartment seems like the safer, and more honest place to exist right now. Happy people belong in the sun. I sing the blues, tend to my sunburn, and watch the blue sky from my window.
Friday, June 27, 2003
Gay is the New Black
No more anti-gay sex laws, gay marriage in Canada, actual sun on Pride Weekend… it seems that the gods are smiling down on my queer brethren. The gods themselves were mostly queer of course, Apollo was a gym bunny chicken-hawk, Zeus leaned toward bestiality, the Furies were the first angry lesbian folk trio… and then old man Yahweh moved into the neighborhood with his German Shepards and started waving his cane around yelling, “Get your sodomy off my lawn!” So fell Greece, and the rest of the Western world with it.
As part of my continuing rant about the end of modern culture as we know it, I’d like to point out that the legal acceptance of gay people is yet another sign of the fall. I place no value judgment on the fact… the instance of legal equality of queers definitely rates a ‘good’ stamp from my Moral Relativism meter… however, I’d like to point out that the demonization of sodomy is a staple of our society, deeply rooted in literature, politics and the Catholic Church. After the legal barriers fall, which they are doing with eye popping swiftness, the moral objections will also crumble within a generation. There will always be fringe groups who fight it, but just like birth control and miscegenation, it will become terribly gauche to speak out publicly against gay rights.
Headline from the future: “Cyber-Senatrix Trent Lott III Resigns After Expressing Nostalgia for ‘Good Old Gay Bashing Days.’”
Oh my, the civil rights struggle is not over by any means, but I can see the eventual surrender of the right on this issue. Once the Atom Bomb of gay marriage is dropped on Washington, they’ll sign the armistice and the overt war will be over. A covert war will begin, but barring a new fascist state, they’ll only earn themselves ‘you know you’re a redneck if…’ type caricatures for their wacky bigotry. Because the sad fact is that the public face of The Queer is depressingly middle class, unrepentantly white, male, fiscally responsible, powerfully sexual and virile. Even the queenliest queen gets tons of sex, and even Rick Santorum secretly envies him. Once homosexuals go mainstream, the country will blink its eyes and wonder what the hell the big deal was in the first place… ‘they’re just like us… they like to shop at Bed, Bath and Beyond too! They drive SUVs and raise spoiled screaming brats… and my husband and I buttfuck all the time… it’s fun!’
Which brings me to my real point. The civil rights struggle is not over by any means. Earlier this week, the Supremes also handed down a split decision about affirmative action. It got press at the time, but has since dwindled into the background… I suspect because it didn’t contain the words: sodomy or sex. Essentially the ruling stated that race can be used as a factor in college admission, but it cannot be the deciding factor. As the University of Washington can tell you, affirmative action is still a necessary tool to assure that campuses aren’t solely white and Asian; since Washington State repealed affirmative action, black enrollment has plummeted in state schools.
The covert war against blacks in the United States is winning, and here’s why: because African Americans refuse to be assimilated into the larger white culture, and as a result, market forces have sharply defined and promoted a separate black culture which is distinct, frightening and alien to the white middle class. Powerful black leaders on the left, are extremists or have been politically crippled (Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson respectively) and black leaders on the right are non-entities, tokens who have no real power or voice (Clarence Thomas is a ventriloquist dummy with Scalia’s hand up his ass). Colin Powell is a tragic figure. There were times that I saw genuine pain on his face, and sadness in his eyes when he was sent to the UN to tell lies and bully for the Bush Administration… someone’s gonna find him hanging from a ceiling fan in an anonymous hotel room one of these days.
So while gay activists bask in this new time of hard won freedom… a freedom won in the courts and not at the lunch counters… there are darker days ahead for those with darker skin and who choose to live outside of drive thru culture (Arabs… I’m looking at you). Assimilation is power.
Thursday, June 26, 2003
Sweet Water
Most people I know filter their water. I filter my water… I use a Brita filter… it’s pronounced with the short ‘i’ sound, like the ‘i’ in Brit Pop… when it should be pronounced with a long ‘i’… like the ‘i’ in bright. But if I were to pronounce it correctly… “Do you carry any Bright-a filters?” People would look at me funny and not know what I was talking about… I would be the crazy one. So I follow the crowd and call it Britta in public and in private, to my cats, I call it Brighta.
But in this modern day, why do I need a Brighta filter at all? Our water is disgustingly clean… clean enough to drink certainly. During the American Civil War, the Confederates ran a prison camp for Yankee POWs. As the general condition of the Confederacy declined, the already appalling conditions at Andersonville became akin to the worst concentration camp. Prisoners were housed in a large open area where the only source of water was a stream that ran through the center of the prison. Needless to say there was also a dearth of toilet facilities, so that most of the human waste ended up in the stream. Men had to drink from this fetid water, or die of thirst. Many died of dysentery and cholera… diseases who’s worst feature is the creation of more foul human waste that the disease uses as a vector for new infection. While I doubt that a Brit-ta filter would have made a dent in that water, those men would have been grateful for any improvement. These men would have religiously changed the filter every six months just like the instructions say.
I am very bad about changing the filter on my Brite-a. I let them go for years, until they hold more mold and algae then they supposedly clean out of the city water. It’s like seasoning… the water doesn’t taste right until it has that green flavor.
Straight out of the tap, Seattle water is the best water I have ever tasted. When I first moved here eight years ago, I dreaded that first drink, knowing that with any long distance displacement, the water always tastes strange for a few weeks. The water in LA for instance is foul. If you hold a glass beneath your nose for three minutes, your eyes will tear up and turn red, irritated by the chlorine fumes. That first taste of Seattle water, however, was brilliant. Advertising slogans whipped through my head, filled with words like ‘sparkling fresh,’ ‘mountain spring,’ and ‘clearly refreshing;’ and they were distributing this shit for free, through the pipes straight to my tap.
Inevitably, local news programs lead off their Fear at 10 broadcasts with leaders like: “What’s in your tap water? The answer might shock you!” And they will list: lead, mercury, human feces, scary sounding bacteria and parasites. Sure these things are a hundred times below the national standards, and sure they are in such small quantities that they can not hurt you… but you should buy a Britttta Brand Water Pitcher ™ anyway, so that your apple cheeked baby child won’t drink human feces. Never mind that just yesterday, the apple cheeked baby child was spreading his own human feces all over your white couch, or the fact that he was digging through the catbox and tasting the contents… we must protect our children from bacteria.
The human immune system is a funny thing. It gains immunity to disease through exposure. That’s how vaccines work, by shooting us full of almost dead viruses so that our dumb little T-cells can taste the disease, play with it for a while like a stoner kicking around a hackey sack, then flush it, bored to tears by this silly little bug. As infants, we receive some immunity instruction through the antibodies contained in mother’s milk. So what do we have today: infants who are not breast fed, who’s first immunosuppressive reactions are induced by vaccination, covering only a narrow set of dangerous childhood diseases, and then raised in homes that are cleaned with Clorox ™ wipes, anti-bacterial soaps, detergents, one-use anti-bacterial cutting boards, sterilized cutlery, anti-bacterial toilet paper, bed sheets, processed irradiated foods and… Britta water.
Are children really getting more allergies today than in previous generations? Or are their immune systems just bored and looking for some way to pass the time? “Oh look… cat dander!”
I will continue to use my Brighta pitcher… and when my sink is too full of dirty dishes to refill it, I’ll drink from the tap without a second thought. The Bright-a water is cold, and on a sunny day, that’s the real value.
Note:
Power naps are far less effective if you sit up every few minutes and yell "POWERNAP!" at the top of your lungs.
Friday, June 20, 2003
The End of Humanity... Again...
Just read this article about the possible pitfalls of human genetic engineering (See: Oriononline.org). It would be easy to dismiss the article by calling it Ludditism, or sci-fi paranoia. Indeed, many of the points Bill Mckibben makes are overstated, and come straight from the movie Gattica. However, it's a good read, and it raises genuine questions about the consequences of creating modified children. What I admire, is that his arguments are not moral in nature, but practical... the one which I found both amusing and horrifying is the idea that children will become outdated, like old copies of Windows, when more advanced children are produced later.
I seem to find these end of the world articles. I seek them out, scratch my head and bemoan our fate. Back in high school I used to feel like I should have been born a hundred years earlier (or twenty years earlier when I was listening to Bob Dylan or The Beatles); but now I feel like this turn of the century is the last of the old world. Children will ask me what the old world was like, and depending on the configuration of the new, I will be either bitter or nostaligic... perhaps both. The system could crash, the USA could devolve into a fascist state, we could blunder our way into a Brave New World of isolation and primary colored furniture, we could enter into a third world war and live with the consequences of a limited nuclear exchange on health and the environment, the ice caps could melt, the rich could retreat into bubble domes where they genetically enhance thier children... any or all these things could happen. All I know is that the world of twenty years from now will seem as alien as our world would have to the Victorians.
Moral Relativism Meter:
Genetic enhancement of embryos = bad
Bionic enhancement of me = good
Gay Marriage = good = Canada
Sex outside of marriage = good
The fact that I am not getting sex = bad
Thursday, June 19, 2003
When I Think About You I Google Myself...
So just on a whim (I love that word... whim... sounds like a sweet faery sigh) I decided to Google myself. This is internet intellectual masturbation at its finest, grasping for the brass ring of celebrity with desperate, shaking claws. This here blog Googled up at number 2 (!), right after this entry:
"Katherine Turner
Lecturer in English at Trinity College, Oxford.
Has published on eighteenth century poetry, travelogues, and women's writing, and her most recent publication is British Travel Writers in Europe 1750-1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (2001)."
Oxford Katherine Turner (OKT) is deeply cute. Oxford didn't provide a very good picture of Dr. Turner, she's squinting against the sunlight and her hair is tied back in a bland ponytail; but even this non-glamour shot shows her winning dimples and full, strong nose. She looks like she's in her thirties, the kind of Oxford professor who speaks with a crisp, upper middle class London accent, writes yawn-inducing academic prose and is secretly a tiger in bed. She has a boyfriend (let's call him Jared), and they've been living together for three or four years. Jared's struggled to get the funding for his Machu Picchu expedition and promises that they'll marry once he finishes his dissertation on early Peruvian dietary taboos. But as time wears on, OKT begins to realize that Jared, although sweet and loving, will never fullfill her childhood longing for a virile, prince charming type.
I would love to meet Oxford Katherine Turner and discuss Victorian literature and gender.
Another Job at an End
So they're ending my current temp job a few weeks early. That's OK with me. I can sleep in past 8 and hug my cats without having to worry about cat hair on black pants. The job was pretty damn good though. Sure I was working for the pinky finger of a massive, Bush-licking oil mulitnational... I sent next day letters to Hong Kong and South Korea for god's sake. But I was making $12 an hour to warm the receptionist chair and answer the phone once or twice while I write my novel and play solitare. Hey, that's the beauty of trickle down economics.
I'll tell you what bothers me about this early dismissal. I think they've ended my assignment just so they don't have to invite me to the company picnic.
I know... I'm horrified too. This picnic is to be held in two weeks to celebrate the company's move to Everett (why would anyone celebrate moving to Everett... must be an oil company thing) and it sounds like volleyball, possibly softball will be involved. As usual for affluent Seattle companies, it will be held at Golden Gardens. In the spirit of sour grapes, I hope the weather spites them and gives them golden showers.
Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
In literature, there are showmen (show-women) who have built careers on one great, knock-em dead performance and then, like David Copperfield (the magician, not the Dickens character) disappear in a puff of smoke, leaving the audience clamoring for more. Would J D Salinger have been as successful as a cultural icon if he had written one groundbreaking book and then spent the next fifty years turning out sequels, a la John Updike? Not to demean Updike, but lets face it, he has nowhere near the street cred as Salinger, who's reclusive life piques the reader's imagination more than any fiction. Then take Harper Lee. After To Kill a Mockingbird, she never wrote another novel, and her subsequent literary output was limited to a few McCalls articles. In a recent class discussion, I witnessed copious confusion about her one hit wonder status: some people thought that she had died shortly after publishing Mockingbird (she is, in fact, still alive... I wonder if she attended Gregory Peck's funeral, or at least sent a wreath), others offered the theory that Truman Capote was the real author (he must have been shy). The idea that she only had one story to tell, and that story JUST HAPPENED to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, simply does not satisfy.
In the first few sentences, reviewers of Donna Tartt's second novel The Little Friend point out two things: that it was eagerly anticipated and that it took her ten years to write. Ten years is a long time to wait for a second novel, especially when the author was so highly praised for her first. Clearly the literary establishment was standing by with the laurels, waiting for Tartt's next amazing project to declare her Intellectualism's Stephen King. But they waited ten years, and eventually people got bored of waiting and re-read The Secret History instead and found that it really wasn't as good as they had remembered.
Donna Tartt is in an awkward position now. If she had only published Secret History, she might have cultivated a mystery. People would have wondered, "Whatever happened to that highly intelligent and promising new author who wrote about elitism, murder and debauchery?" Bacchic cults would have arisen in the Northeast, recreating the rites alluded to in the book, speaking greek and having sex with thier twin sisters. The Secret History could have become a niche classic, not because it was particularly well written (it's not... many hundreds of pages of plodding narrative do not make for a compelling page turner) and not because it's very original (the characters play with the idea of breaking out of thier snotty-rich-kids mold, but fail to develop any depth before circumstances rip them to shreds); but because it speaks to a specific subset of the intelligencia who publicly decry elitism and yet long for it in thier very bones. Above all, Tartt's characters are seductive, thier lives even more so. The murders that drive the plot are merely a Maguffin, the stick that nudges the characters into the full blown insanity to which thier copious neurosis make them prone to: that is the heart of the Poe-like justice that punishes the spoiled brats; but at the same time, the narrator, Richard, by stepping into the world of riches and self indulgence, comes out the other side reeking of the benefits: good taste, refinement, career and an extraordinary college experience to share at dinner parties. So the reader gets the satisfaction of seeing the evil rich get thier cummupance, while getting a taste of fine wine and cigars served on the backs of the poor.
My biggest quibble with The Secret History is the narrator, Richard. He should have been erased from the novel entirely. He served no purpose in the plot as he was a tangential figure at best, he does not effect any change in the other characters, nor does he change, beyond a heafty burden of guilt. His narration goes on for pages and pages, telling us about events and never showing them unfold... much of the novel reads like a lengthy police statement; and the worst sin of all, the narration omited key clues, and then introduced them later in exposition, when Richard 'remembered' the incidents ipso facto. No, no, no! Bad author... no biscuit for you!
A successful rewrite of the novel would have removed Richard and then told the story from multiple points of view, staying within the core group of students: Charles, Camilla, Henry, etc. The scene where Bunny is murdered at the ravine would have been particularly powerful if told from Bunny's POV (ending just before he landed at the bottom of course). Seeing five characters descend into madness, each in thier own unique ways would have been priceless.
So Donna Tartt wrote a strong first novel with some problems. She then took ten years to write a second in which time expectations rose to impossible heights. Had she never published a second novel, expectations would have plateaued and been replaced by mystique. Instead, she has released a second book which most reviewers agree, is sub par. Now Donna Tartt has two options if she wishes to maintain her lustre: either become more prolific and bury the disappointing sophmore work beneath new material, or take 20 years to write the next one, and let it be a true masterpiece (here's a hint... hire a content editor). I can't say which she'll do or which one will be more difficult. I know which one I'd like to see her accomplish.
Thursday, June 12, 2003
Reverence
I sometimes forget that I'm a legally ordained minister of the Universal Life Church (Date of Ordination March 13, 2000). In the e-mail they sent me to confirm my ordination they call me Rev. Katherine Anne Turner. And lest some of you think I am joking (surely she is joking, you say) I have performed exactly one wedding... and they're still married.
I want to start signing my name with the 'Rev.' in front.
Thus begins my descent from quirkiness to genuine madness. Whoopee!
Regarding Plagues, Vampires and Novelas
Lets start with a quick review of the novel I am Legend by Richard Matheson. First of all, 170 pages and two inch margins with thirteen point font, do not a novel make; I am Legend is squarely located in the literary banana republic that is the NOVELA (I'll always love Elaine for giving me that analogy). Novelas are fine, the word itself when written out looks like a classy Spanish noun describing female genitals... "I love to touch my novelas when no one is watching..." (Don't forget to pronounce the "v" as "w"); however, Matheson's opus is billed as a full length novel, and then stealthily packaged with eight short stories to pad the thickness. Once I got past this bitter dissapointment, I enjoyed the tale of the last human on Earth as he battled an entire world overrun by vampires. Matheson's main character was deeply flawed, yet sympathetic and there were no shortage of cinematic moments which I hope they recreated for Charlton Heston in "The Omega Man." How they got the title "Omega Man" from I am Legend, I cannot fathom, for while there's a rather lame attempt at a pseudo-scientific cause of vampirism in the book, it's far removed from actual sci-fi; more of a post-apocalyptic-gothic-horror-Swiss Family Robinson.
I am Legend, with a revision or two, could have been a full length novel; but I felt impatience on Matheson's part. He spends the entire novela in Robert Neville's head, and poor old Robert spends most of the novella alone and slowly going insane. As a reader I would have liked to see more about the dissolution of society under the massive vampire plague, or the society the rises up out of the new vampiric population. I was confused by the pseudo-science, and never understood the difference between the 'living' vampires and the 'dead' ones... a distinction that is vitally important to the end of the book and which, as it is explained, brings the logic behind 90 percent of the story into question.
So while I am Legend was a genre buster for its time, the plot holes and surface treatment make it less than satisfying.
But it did spark my imagination and get me thinking about one of my favorite topics: the end of the world as we know it (and I feel REM is overrated). In the interests of full disclosure I will tell you that I am an evil, misanthropic, hypocritical, media addled, apathetic, part-time depressive; so take my death wish for humanity with a grain of salt. The advent of SARS gave me a tickle, thinking that this could be the super disease that government scientists underestimated and by the time they realized thier mistake it was too late. Only they didn't underestimate it, they overestimated it, and the casualties are limited to a few thousand people in China and the Toronto tourism industry. According to NPR, consumtion (read: TB)... that old standby, still kills more people in China than SARS. SO much for modern super diseases. West Nile doesn't spread person to person, and isn't terribly fatal, and the new, exciting monkey pox is far too silly to wipe out 99.9% of the world's population (The world will never be laid low by pet prairie dogs).
This is the part where I qualify my genocidal ranting with a mix of personal ethics and moral relativism (see Moral Relativism: May 10, 2003). Everybody dies. I will someday die, and this weblog may be the only evidence of my existance on this planet. But in the wider view, all life on Earth will someday stop, so that even if I publish a novel that becomes a cult classic and is read for millenia (like the Oddessy or Harry Potter) all the cultural achievements of all cultures will cease to exist. Therefore, all human achievement is ultimately futile.
Does that make me a nihilist?
Not at all. I'm a happy cheery person... look at my dimples! I think that the end of civilization would be cool: a chance to make up your own rules, build the only library left in the world and fill it with nothing but your own teenage angst poetry, no more clocks, all the time in the world to read (stock up on multiple pairs of reading glasses). If you're the last man in the world, women no longer have excuses not to sleep with you, if you're the last woman, you are by default, the new standard of beauty. There would be peace in the middle east (or if not, we wouldn't hear about it), everyone would have guns but there'd be no more NRA. You could start a new religion and appoint yourself god, tell your decendants to save your DNA and clone you once the world leaves the new dark ages and looks like Star Trek. You could start a crazy society where cannibalism is OK, but flossing is heresy (eww... put myself off lunch with that one).
In short, where others see the end of Mall culture, television, and the fiat system of exchange as the end of the world; I see a new world of brilliant possibilities. All it will take is a bug... if the bug turned people into vampires, that just makes things more exciting.
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
These are the words that I love today:
Ovipositor... It's a part of our world, and yet so alien. It's long and sticky, it shoots out goo and yet is entirely female.
Cadaver... The flat 'a' sound gives this word the same detached feeling as wax. It's meat, but it's not meant for eating. A cadaver used to be filled with person-ness, but is now something to be studied and dissected. This word is perfect for removing the mystery from death... you're dead, here's your cadaver, get used to it.
Retrofit... I love the way the word sounds, like someone having a tantrum because clogs are back in style. I unfortunately couldn't find a proper dictionary definition for retrofit, because something about this word always confused me. Its common meaning is to take an old piece of technology and add newer technology to bring that old mechanism up to modern standards. BUT... Retro: backwards, fit: to equip. So actually the word should mean: to add backwards technology to something new... like putting an 8-track player on the International Spacestation.
So now I'd like to use all three words in a sentence.
'The cadaver's retrofitted ovipositors were deteriorating.'
Monday, June 09, 2003
Collaborative Fiction
So today Elaine, Joe and I decided to begin a new collaborative fiction project. I've started with a page titled Book. There's a link to it just to the right... assuming I didn't entirely fuck up the HTML. Stay tuned for links to the other two stories. It should be alot of fun and hopefully we'll get some truly fucked up and wacky material out of it.
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
Characterization
What is particularly disturbing is when I write a character who's emotional life is based largely on my own and then to have some person, perhaps a member of a critique group, tell me just how lonely and desperate my chartacter is, and how my character would do anything just to know that someone wanted her, if only for a quickie in a grimy alley outside some gay dance club. I was happy, because it helped me clarify my character's motivation and gave her depth... at the same time I realized that maybe my plan of finding a girlfriend by becoming a famous writer isn't going to work out like I had hoped.
