Finally, reading Dune (in the summer)

I can’t seem to stop buying books. This week alone I bought more than seven books. My loot from today:

Lately, I’ve been reading too many books that come wrapped with that somber, meditative sheen. (See the offending line-up below.) I am drawn to such books, and I read them flagrantly for pleasure, for introspection, for research, what have you. But today, the heat broke me. (Yes, I’m in Texas, so it’s only going to get worse, but the first wave is always the hardest?) The unexpected heat wave felt so oppressive that it made me, well, question reality. It also made me want to burrow my head into a hole in the ground. I couldn’t sit still, and spent much of the day pacing the house with my panting dog as if waiting for some impending doom.

At my exasperated breaking point, I was writhing around in my hot house, unable to get relief despite having thrown all the windows open, blasted all the ceiling fans at maximum speed, and sucked down an ample supply of frozen coconut popsicle stick. That’s it, I thought, and decided to take it out on my reading list with the decree: no more introspective brain stuff to further melt away my existence. So I drove to the bookstore and picked out some sci-fi. It seemed like the right thing to do, and by the time I got home, the sun had set, and the cool night breeze marched through the windows like a nod of approval at my decision. (Okay, maybe this whole affair doesn’t even make much sense, but I’m already 100 pages into Dune and I’m all jittery with the feeling like, this is gonna be a goood one!)

PS – These are all darn good reads, by the way.

Autoportrait

Reading Edouard Leve’s Autoportrait made me wish there was a search function for printed books. The book is essentially made up of fragments (not even long enough to be called “vignettes,” since each scene ends precisely with the sentence). Which leaves you with random memories of moments, unable to remember where something occurred in the book. The middle could be the beginning, the beginning could be the end. And for days after, a random sentence/scene would materialize in my brain, and I’d have no way of knowing where to even start looking for that sentence.

(Will have to re-read it with a highlighter in hand.)

The book has no apparent narrative direction, and is purportedly 100% factual, yet it hooks in the way fiction does—evocative language, vivid scenes, heavy emotions (although some of those emotions are heavy in their dullness/mutedness/mundaneness), and clever associations. It’s massive on juxtaposition and parallelism. In short, easy to read but hard to achieve.  The creeping sense of something wasting away, life, time, or talent, or happiness even, is overwhelming. At the end of the book, I didn’t get the sense that I knew Edouard Leve any more than I did before, but I did get the sense that he was somehow a more intimate presence in my life than before.

Autoportrait
by Edouard Levé
Translated by Lorin Stein

Dalkey Archive Press, 2012
120 pages / $10.36

Buy directly from Dalkey

Snippets:

“I wish there were regions where every day was the same day of the week, I could decide to go spend five Mondays in one city and eight Saturdays in another.”

“On trips I surprise myself, for example I decide at a moment I did not expect that the trip is over.”

“I’m surprised there is no word for a mistaken sense of deja vu.”

“I have sometimes asked the same question of someone several times, if the answer didn’t interest me enough to remember it, it’s only at the moment of hearing the answer that I remember having already asked.”

“Borrowing is an ordeal.”

“I would like to accept the idea of love without passion.”

“I have never regretted traveling by myself, but I have sometimes regretted traveling with someone else.”

“At the beach I start out bored, then I get used to it, then I hate to leave.”

“I have a fantasy involving female art students.”

“Love does not distinguish me.”

Post-Floyd

February is a good month to pick up on this blog again.

The days are getting shorts-and-flip-flops warmer, the residual-end-of-year lethargy of 2012 has largely worn off, and…I have a new dog.

Floyd (or Floydy, or Floydy Baloney) was abandoned at a shelter 2 hours away from us, where he stayed for a few months. At some point, a volunteer put a blurry photo of him online. I saw him, wanted him, and we drove out to get him. The rest of the stuff knocked us off our feet with the ferocity of a dog-scented tornado.

He had come with quite a few bad habits (food/resource aggression, under-socialized, aversion to body handling, anxious/unrestful, bitey, other coping behaviors that shelter dogs inevitably form), and had a few thorns he could sheath, but his underlying nature (like all dogs’) is inherently caring, eager to please, and attentive. And now, almost a month into his adoption, lots of clicker training later—that good-natured side is fast trumping that angry side.

Life is now retroactively divided as: pre-Floyd, and post-Floyd.

Wearing the cone of shame after his neuter surgery

The new self-appointed Window Sentry

Hipster Floyd squeezed under a chair

Big Bend National Park

Letting two months lapse since my last post is bad form; but I’ve been busy. Mostly travelling, trying to get my road fix in before resuming work.

—-

Labor day weekend was also our anniversary weekend, so Kris and I took to the road and drove to Big Bend. The original destination was Grand Canyon, but that was too far (though I would later have the chance to see it anyway, on another roadtrip of my own). Big Bend was doable in just under a day’s drive.

Southern geography & history still stumps me, and to add to the swarming confusion (Cormac McCarthy being the only reference point), Kris loves piling it on with ridiculous exaggerations of stories of the “Wild West,” “The Frontier,” cowboys and gun gangs and whatnot. If it were anything like Blood Meridian, I’d have been well thrilled.

But Big Bend National Park is, well, a National Park. Well-marked trails and well-behaved law & order enforcers and pretty lush amenities all around. The Rio Grande is the long snaking river that marks the Mexican-US borders, and at our visit it was pattering along at a pitiful waist-level (high drought season), which made it easy for us to wade right across and touch Mexican soil.

Sunset at the window trail at Chisos Mountain Lodge

Kris peering at the sun

Was hoping to spot one of those

We spent a night at the Chisos Mountain Lodge, a lodge nested in a basin nestled between the canyons, which made for beautiful views.

Mexico behind me at the Hot Springs. The spring was scalding hot, so we went into the river instead

Rio Grande’s riverbank cracking from drought

Along the riverbank we found small displays of crafts for sale. Apparently Mexican children from the other side of the waters would wade over and set up small shop, with signs displaying the prices and little containers for payment. They’ve got a pretty decent honor system going on, I’d say.

Little knick knacks for sale

more crafts for sale when we got up to a higher mountain lookout

Handicrafts for sale, Rio Grande in the background

snug birdnests

The next day we made our way out of the National Park and into Terlingua, a charming little town that, unlike Big Bend, fit right in with what I’d expected “The West” to be like. Sparse brush vegetation and an ever-burning sun (the kind of heat that brings on delirium), dilapidated ruins, western-inspired shopfronts, and just an ever-permeating feeling of coming from nowhere, going nowhere.

With the right amount of inebriation, you (lucky you) might even feel some semblance of an old-world romance lingering in the air like static electricity.

Townspeople are friendly, the locals co-mingling with the tourists with a sense of camaraderie, the sense that well-if-you-made-it-this-far-out-the-fuck-middle-of-nowhere-then-you-might-well-be-one-of-us.

Later, our canoe trip guide would make misogyny-tinged jokes about the women in town (“most don’t shave and are like men”), lamenting their scarcity, bidding us to invite our female friends to move to Terlingua, and finally saying about the local womensfolk: “The odds are good but the goods are odd.” His manner was easy, the jibes coming out with an old familiarity, causing some of us to laugh (I hope) a pained laugh—but nay, in a small desert town like that, how else would you bid your time if not cracking loaded jokes, some of which are bound to seep out of your local circle and into the ears of tourists from the yonders?

The town’s bar, restaurant, mini theater

A stretched porch area where locals & tourists alike gather at all times of the day, drink in hand, no doubt exchanging delicious gossips

“You too Wayne”

A trailer in the sunset at Terlingua

At Terlingua we rode horses, trotting up and down never-before-chartered-territories (well, kinda):

horsebacksploration

ridin’ like a pioneer

Farmer’s hat coming in handy: Back at the Rio Grande, in between the Santa Elena canyons, for a canoe trip

The canoe trip we did the next day was awesome! It was a full day affair, with plenty of upstream rowing and cave-exploring—At midday we parked our canoes and waded into Mexico to climb around their caves and little nooks & crannies of secret watering hole, which was probably the funnest thing I did on the trip. Nothing beats climbing stuff and ducking in and out of bat caves.

Wedged between the Santa Elena canyons

squeezing through a narrow cave-hole

Giant & imp

Never mind the sore necks that lasted for a week, everything was a dern good time! Pretty much it folks!

New and old: The way books smell

Books bottled up into smells. This one here promises “a warm blend of English Novel, Russian & Moroccan Leather Bindings, Worn Cloth and a hint of Wood Polish,” a musty library book smell that you can sidle your nose up to (minus the sneezing from the dust), while this one here promises the smell of a freshly printed book, whose “idea is that is should relax you, like when you read a book, to a level of meditation and concentration.”

I currently wear Kenzo’s Indian Holi (the musky, spring cherry blossom-y, vanilla-ry, nag champa-y incense hint), and I’ve never been a fragrance hoarder, faithful usually to one bottle until it runs out—but I’m highly intrigued. How do you distill all the smells, memories, history, associations of The Printed Book into a bottle? Just a case of clever copywriting?

In any case, I’d love to find out. The fragrant notes aside, I think what I’d be looking for would be associations – old libraries/book stores always trigger this sense of vastness in me, as if everything I’ve ever known is simultaneously pulling away, zooming out, and out, until there is just this multitude of history & information, and I’m standing smack in the middle of it all, a small speck wading through all that has come before me. Y’know, that gasp and momentary tight chest. The smell of a new book, on the other hand, is the smell of possibility and anticipation, the stage before that foreignness of something new gets assimilated and become part of my bookshelf/part of me.

Now try and do ALL THAT, smell-makers!

Passing through New Orleans

Tennessee Williams’ New Orleans is a lazy, dreamy one. He wrote of the big easy,

Don’t you just love those long rainy afternoons, when an hour isn’t just an hour—but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands, and who knows what to do with it?

And yes indeed. The short time I spent in New Orleans was not short on choppy rain, languid strolls, and endless alleyways through buildings and monuments straight out of time. But there was no shortage of things to do: The open container laws (nothing says “island life” like strolling with a drink in hand) itself get you busy enough, and there seemed to be something to feast your eyes on every two steps you take.

Art for sale on sidewalk at Jackson Square

New Orleans was one of the high points on the post-grad roadtrip (from New York to Texas) I took last month. It’s a no-brainer—I love spicy food, alcohol, and live music—and voila, all were present on our first day in New Orleans: Cajun rabbit jambalaya, Sazerac (whiskey & bitters), and blues, blues, blues.

More Jackson Square: Saturated with psychic palm readers

So it goes with all things commonly loved, New Orleans comes with a list of cliches everyone is warned to be wary of—don’t linger too long on Bourbon Street, go further away from the waterfront, don’t loosen your purse strings too easily for overpriced “voodoo” trinkets, find true Po-Boys instead of what “tourists” eat, don’t eat a hot dog (said to be nasty-tasting), don’t stray on dark streets at night, and so on.

Last but not least: don’t be lazy and settle for tourist-infested cesspits – go out and find the “real” New Orleans.

Marching band sighting

I’d be the first to say that the what-to-avoid list is a valid one—but if you followed it to a T you might be missing the forest for the trees. Bourbon Street was indeed bustling with drunk tourists who were making good on the three-for-one drink deals, peddled with loud signboards and shouts. Neon Mardi Gras signs and cheesy T-shirt shops were lined up next to expensive bars and strip clubs. Litter and (the occasional) vomit completed the picture of a college campus on a Saturday night.

It wasn’t my scene—so we floated through the spectacle and went off and away—but those folks were having a damn good time, marching band and all. And I have to say: that shit was infectious. It was a strange kind of feeling—a disdain for such boisterousness, yet super psyched by the crowd’s energy. On top of it, if you do get drawn into conversation with any of the drunk/drugged passersby, much hilarity will come out of it. (As well as knowledge on devil worshipping and conjectures on night clubs in the sewers.)

Glorious

Oh, I almost forgot this. Before we started the evening we’d stopped by a little hole in the wall—only to find ourselves in a book-infested haven. The place was amazing. It’s a one-man operation with an impressive inventory of books, precariously stacked from floor to almost ceiling. I was so taken I might have even asked him (I think his name is Steve) for a job, though he said he’d tried many times to have employees but failed, because at the end of the day he was the only one who knew where anything was. Steve himself had owned the store for a couple decades. Tons of Beat stuff, decent Philosophy section, contemporary fiction, and a load of Southern books as well as a neat shelf of first editions.

After spending way too much time dusting off the stacks (and me coming away with 6 books), we had to detour to the hotel to park the books.

Dauphine Street Bookshop

Before we walked out of his shop, Steve gave us a mini hand drawn map of the French Quarters (and adjacent streets), bearing the locations of other used book stores in the area. And there were many! I could, ever more so, easily live in this town.

Another charming bookstore-front – but it wasn’t open for the day

We did eventually leave the Bourbon Street/ French Quarter area, go to some cute market (along the waterfront), wander into voodoo sex shops and peeked through display glasses of psychic fortune tellers, before spending the rest of our night around the Frenchmen Street area. It’s slightly west of the French Quarters, and seemed to have Bourbon Street’s fun minus the raucousness. Some have even said this was how Bourbon Street “used to be like.”

I can’t remember the name of the handful of bars we went into, but I do remember the one we ended our night in. At a bartender’s suggestion we’d gone even further west, into a neighborhood area, and settled our saddles at Mimi’s. I remember feeling gladdened by the largely local crowd and understated live blues. The act of the night was a 30′s washboard blues band (no cover), and the place was the right blend of lighting, crowd, and grittiness. Clean enough, it seemed like the kind of place that would only age better—i.e., get more nicely scuffed up—with time.

(After the show, we even made friends with the guitarist, who turned out to be a Floyd fan and played a mean acoustic set of Dark Side of the Moon!)

Other things we did at New Orleans: See the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (which had some truly wonderful stuff), drink frozen daiquiries, eat gelato, chat with friendly boys.

Things we wanted to but did not do at New Orleans: Get a tattoo, eat a po-boy, witness a pagan ritual.

The Ogden museum

One of my favorites – Mark Messersmith’s feverish oils on canvas

Man busking with his violin and forlorn-looking dog

Po-boy shop on the western edge of town

Daiquiri store – where you can get ginormous “daiquiri” aka frozen alcoholic slushies from slushie machines for cheap

I fell quite in love with New Orleans within two short days. Left with a heavy heart. That bit of eternity Tennessee Williams was going on about? Definitely in the air, round the musty alleyways, behind beautiful French doors, floating on blues rhythms, inside everyone’s smiles—all New Orleans-smiles are the kind of smile that crinkles up your entire sun-beaten face—ahh.

It felt even more serendipitous when I befriended a guy who was in town to secure his lease, before he’d return next time with all his things from Virginia. I remember thinking, this was all it takes! You go, you find a spot, you move your things!

–

Also: Before rolling into New Orleans, we’d driven along the Natchez Trace Parkway, whose cypress swamps were one of the highlights:

Cypress swamp along the natchez trace parkway

Cypress in murky waters

Misunderstood: Who knew alligators aren’t actually human-hungry zombie predators? No wonder they get angsty anyway

mad cobwebs to trap the mad swamp mosquitos

And that is all, fine friends. I’ll have New Orleans bookmarked for now.

It’s RAMEN!! (The Higgs Boson, explained)

(Image from Boing Boing)

The world is abuzz! The Internet!

But—In the off chance that the Higgs Boson is found, and you want to find out what exactly this monster (that looks like a pile of flying spaghetti) is, Boing Boing has a nice round up of explanations.

In favor of time, here’s my version: the Higgs Boson, in colloquial talk, is essentially…nothing. (If only Nothing is what it seems, eh.) It’s the non-stuff that make up the spaces of nothingness, i.e., the “empty” space in between actual particles, since, according to physicist Brian Greene, atoms are mostly empty space: Particles (aka matter) float into this empty space, mate (aka bind) with one another, and form atoms. Stack these atoms together and you have actual things like…a Blade Runner DVD. Or a zombie costume. But since an atom is 99.99% empty space…that zombie suit is more space than matter. In Brian Greene’s own example, there’s so much empty space in between matter that, if all that space between the particles that make up the Empire State Building is removed, we’d have actual solid matter whose size is no more than a grain of rice (though probably a rice that is heavy as fuck). Trippy, eh?

The Higgs Boson, then, is said to reside in/constitute/be representative of all that empty space in between actual stuff. At best, en serio, though—it is a charged field where particles come to mate.

(And produce ramen!?)

Higgs Boson 101, explained.

[[[Postscript—A question one might ask, though, is this: Why the obsession with finding this Higgs Boson fella? The "God" Particle? (More like the "goddamn" particle, it being so "elusive" and all.) My guess is physics simply cannot fathom stopping at empty space—that 99.99% of "stuff" is actually empty space is more sci-fi than sci—Hence, slap a name onto this "space," call it a thing/field/charge, and then run one of the longest, costliest science experiment to date to try and "find" it...it's a win-win deal for physics. If nothing comes up, it's simply "not yet found"; if something comes up, as a result of running the particle accelerator "40 million times a second, all day, all year," generating 40 Terabytes of data each day to be analyzed, for a tiny, tiny statistical difference...hoorah "science," the Higgs Boson is found!? Via computerized oracles?]]]