Here is a picture . . .

. . . of a lady who looks very pretty:


Here is an article about a list she published in a book that will scare you shitless.

In case anyone is . . .

. . . still arguing the opposite, let me put in my two cents: The terrorists are cowards.

Deutsch fürs Gespräch

There are only eight hours of daylight in Berlin this time of year. The sun sets at about 4:15 and it is as dark as midnight by about 4:30. I got out to Charlottenburg relatively early this morning, not to do anything touristy, but to check out a couple of book stores. I came up from the Earnst-Reuter-Platz U-Bahn station and headed for Knesebeckstraße--and it was then that I learned that the stores opened at 10 a.m., not 9.

Not a problem. I bought postcards and headed for the post office, which was not only open but rather busy. Post offices in Germany are more civilized than their U.S. counterparts. German post offices also function as banks for a lot of people. Anyway, I sat down at a desk and wrote my postcards. (U.S. post offices don't have chairs.) By the time I handed my postcards to the lady it was nearly 10. I didn't see a place to get a snack in the area; so, I went straight to the bookstores.

One of the things I like to do when I travel in non-English-speaking countries is buy their books on learning English. I use them in reverse, and I happened to find three good ones this morning. The resources for Germans learning English are far greater than our resources for learning German. (And the French have greater resources for learning English than we have for learning French.) So, once you have a foundation in grammar and vocabulary, if you want to learn German, get those books that Germans use.

At Knesebeck Elf I bought Englisch ganz leicht. Wortschatz, which was only €5, and Große Lerngrammatik, Englisch, by the same publisher. My favorite, though, is Englisch fürs Gespräch, which is not only a wealth of things we say all the time in English, it is also a convenient pocket size. When I go on to Amzon.de, I see these books' siblings, which I did not see in the stores I went to. I suppose I'll buy them online at some point. I did not buy any audio books today. At Marga Schoeller I bought a few other books, German translations of books I know in English (which means I can use the English version as a crutch as I try to improve my reading). I was surprised that I did not see any of the dual-language books published by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. I have bought several of those on eBay, and I suppose that's where I will continue to find them. If you want to learn to read German, buy these books (and other dual-language books by other German publishers). To repeat: The German resources totally blow away our resources.

I dropped my sack of books off at my hotel and headed out to another neighborhood to check out its used bookstores. I changed trains at Alexanderplatz. Since you asked, the answer to your question is yes, you can buy a copy of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz in the bookstore in the Alexanderplatz station--however, that is a very long book that is waaaay over my head. Instead, I bought a Leberkäse im Brötchen.

Leberkäse is pink meat that is the approximate size and shape of loaves of bread and it sits under the glass in hot steel pans waiting to get sliced up and served between two halves of a roll. The man at the Leberkäse stand in the big train station, in his tattoos and leather, with a lean, hard face, looked like he would rather beat me up than sell me a sandwich. But when I asked him (in German), he was very polite. He took out a big knife and sliced a slab of meat for me. When I didn't understand his question about the mustard, he switched to English--my semi-useless American phrasebook had not prepared me to be asked whether I want sweet or hot mustard. I also ordered a Heineken. A Leberkäse im Brötchen is about the size of a hamburger.

The meal was delicious! Leberkäse is similar to what we think of as hot dog meat, although it is lighter and less salty than a hot dog, and it has a mild taste that I enjoyed. By the way, you can buy beer in Berlin the way we can buy, say, Coca-Cola, and you're allowed to drink it in the street without that beloved American charade of hiding it in a small brown paper bag. When I finished off my brunch, I handed the empty Heineken bottle back to the leader of the pack behind the counter, and he politely thanked me. With a light lunchtime beer buzz I headed through the tunnels of Alexanderplatz to find the U-Bahn that would take me to a neighborhood that had a used-book store.

ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ

I first heard about Père Lachaise years ago, in college, while reading an article in Rolling Stone that mentioned that Jim Morrison is buried there. I was curious about this vast necropolis, but I never got to visit it until the spring of this year. I was there again today. I did not visit Marcel Proust again this time.

We got to the gate before 9 a.m. The light was beautiful and almost no one was there except a few workmen tending graves and a couple of guys who wandered in the same direction as us to see you know who, which is where we went to first--my friend wanted to see this famous tomb and we had a plane to catch.

I first visited Paris when I was 12, and after college I went four or five more times, but it was only this year that I traveled with people whose idea of Paris was similar to mine and who were inclined to explore it accordingly.

I have spent so many years not traveling that I devoted too much of 2007 to making up for lost time this year. I went to Europe three times, including Paris twice this year. It's a bit disorienting to hear about Père Lachaise and then not have a chance to visit it for a quarter of a century and then this is a year in which I visited Jim Morrison’s grave twice. By the way, I have never bought a Doors album. It's strange that considering all the famous people who are interred there it is Jim Morrison who seems to have put the place on the map. (Georges Bizet, Maria Callas (sort of), and Frédéric Chopin are buried there, along with a lot of other notable musicians.)

There are two people that I know of who I saw in life who are now interred in Père Lachaise. I saw Stéphane Grappelli perform three times. His ashes now rest in the Père Lachaise's columbarium. I never saw Michel Petrucciani perform, but I once saw him being pushed in a wheelchair on the Upper West Side. There are maybe others, but I haven't thoroughly combed the list of Père Lachaise's residents.

I got to visit the grave of a childhood hero of mine, Jean-François Champollion--who lies in an easily found area where paths converge on a circle (one of which leads toward Jim Morrison). And, after threading our way up through quite a hillside of graves with only a so-so map to guide us, I found Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), a painter who I learned about and admired in high school (although I had seen his paintings when I was a child but didn't remember his name). I was stuck by the contrasts that time wreaks. Chopin’s music sounds alive now (but, of course, music is an art that is experienced in living time, although I guess all art requires the devotion of some amount of time on the part of the experiencer). Stepping into the little walled garden of Corot's grave I thought of the vividness and beauty of his paintings. But Corot's grave is overgrown with weeds and the stones have shifted and his bronze bust is patinaed bordering on rust. There are thousands of graves here that are not standing up well to the onslaught of time. Ars longa, as they say. I have two translations of À la recherche du temps perdu: I can look at any page at random and even in translation the writing is beautiful and the tone and ideas are not musty or undergoing the kind of degradation that crushes stones. Then again, the forces that have been shifting the masonry of Corot's grave since 1875 might not amount to a millimeter a year of pushing.

When we came out the corner door, the one near the Père Lachaise Mètro stop, the crèpe store was opening up. I had a Nutella and coconut crèpe and an amazingly great café crème. There are many things to appreciate in life.

With my phrasebook in hand I asked the man behind the counter where a post office was--and I understood him! There was one nearby. I stopped at an ATM to get some more euros and asked the lady at the post office for the stamps I needed to send my postcards. This very useful question was not in my semi-useful phrasebook. However, my butchered French was sufficiently understandable and I got what I assume are the necessary stamps.

We then had to catch our ride to the airport to fly to Berlin, a city I have never been to.

[Postscript: "Κατά τον δαίμονα εαυτού" is apparently loosely translated as "True to his own spirit"; like you, I have no idea where this phrase came from and am curious about its source. By the way, the phrase is apparently in Ancient Greek, not Modern Greek.]

Reasons to be cheerful

Even if you don't own stocks directly, you may have been watching your 401(k) go haywire since approximately February. If you financed your home with a "liar loan" that has reset lately, you might not have been cheery--this whole mortgage meltdown/turmoil in real estate thing. But today I read the following encouraging comment:

Phil Dow, director of equity strategy with RBC Dain Rauscher, also thinks that the economy is in reasonably decent shape.

"There is a disconnect. The economic reality isn't as bad as some are indicating," Dow said. A mentor of mine told me that real risk is at its highest when perceived risk is low. But right now, people are afraid of their own shadow."

(God it must be annoying to work on Wall St. and have "Dow" as a surname, although I guess having a last name such as "Standard" or "Poor" wouldn't be any walk in the park either.)

Anyway, there you have it, a pre-Thanksgiving contraindicator. If more Americans had been scared shitless when they took out all those ARM loans for homes they couldn't afford, we might not have got into this mess in the first place.

For more information about mentors, click here. For additional reasons to be cheerful, here is the full list.

I'm only sleeping

A rare instance in which my cat is awake and I am not.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Pygmalion

I thoroughly enjoyed Shaw's Pygmalion today. I must say that I had my doubts after a couple of Gawkers trashed it. I thought they were criticizing Claire Danes's acting ability. But having now seen the Roundabout Theater Company's production I realize that they simply don't know much about Edwardian London, England's class system, and the vast disparity between the rich and the poor at the time. Danes did a fine job, and the interplay between her and Jefferson Mays was superb. (If I may trash the Gawkers for a moment, I don't think they can get over the star of "My So-Called Life" doing a fine job in a great role in one of the twenteith century's great plays.)

I read the play so long ago (college) that I wanted to reread it--also I had never seen it before. But I ended up being too busy cramming for my German exam (I'm flying to Europe on Thursday, and I am going to Germany for the first time).

What struck me about Pygmalion today was, first, that Prof. Higgins has Asperger's syndrome. Hans Asperger described the syndrome in 1944, but Shaw put it up on stage 30 years earlier. Just skimming through the Wikipedia entry on AS one finds phrases such as "characterized by difficulties in social interaction," "Abnormalities include verbosity; abrupt transitions; literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance," "show a theoretical understanding of other people’s emotions; however, they typically have difficulty acting on this knowledge in fluid real-life situations," "Individuals with AS may collect volumes of detailed information on a relatively narrow topic," and so on.

I had always thought of this as Liza Doolittle's play, but I don't now. I see Henry Higgins in his parallel Asperger universe--he holds his own, but he does so in his world. At the end of the play he is convinced that it would be a great idea if Liza Doolittle joined him and Colonel Pickering and they lived as three bachelors. If only Liza has Asperger's as well, she probably would have agreed--but then the play would have lost a major dimension of its conflict. I'm not saying it's a story of a man with Asperger's; I'm saying the conflict arises from two universes that cannot intersect--and disparate universes that can (I'm thinking of the themes of wealth and class, which Shaw disaggregates). Shaw apparently wrote an essay explaining why Liza does not marry Prof. Higgins; however, I have not read it. By the way, the funny scenes in this play are really funny.

The second thing I noticed is how Existential this play is--chiefly at the instigation of Prof. Higgins, who is surrounded by non-Existentialists. I have read more Sartre, Camus, and Beckett since I graduated from college--and if I hadn't, I don't know that I would have recognized this strain in the play, including how it informs the social commentary that runs through the work, which on the surface is quite slapstick and layers below pertains to the core of what it means to be a human being. Shaw has become a much better playwright since I first read him in college.

Generous Idealist

"Composition with Red, Yellow Blue and Black," by Piet Mondrian, 1923



"Red and White," by Josef Albers, 1963

"Generous Idealist," by Tony Powell (with a little help from http://personaldna.com/), 2007

I hope . . .

. . . Lakshmi Tatma pulls through her operation today and goes on to have a great life--but what were the chances of her being born in India?

Who needs American Idol . . .

. . . when there's YouTube. This is talent:



I admit it, I'm a YouTube addict.

Secretly . . .

. . . creepy
For when words don’t even begin. secretly creepy

What Tony is reading

I have finally finished Emma, which I thoroughly enjoyed--and I am glad there are more Jane Austen books I haven't read yet.

One of the things about travel is stumbling about things that even with a good deal of Internet trolling you might not have ever stumbled upon. This happened to me a couple of times in London earlier this month--and I include serendipities pertaining to things that I know about and yet wouldn't think to seek out.

When I was growing up in London, I was aware of Billy Bunter even though he was before my time. I think the weekly in which stories about him and his friends appeared had ceased publication before I was born--but perhaps not too long before I was born. I was reminded of Bunter & Co. just before my London trip, when I reread some essays by George Orwell, including one he published in 1940 called "Boys' Weeklies," which he describes as "vilely printed twopenny papers, most of them with lurid cover-illustrations."


However, Orwell approved of the Magnet, the weekly that devoted 20,000 words or so--in each issue--to the adventures of Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry Wharton, Johnny Bull, Billy Bunter, and the rest of them at a boarding school called Greyfriars (which is a lot like Hogwarts Academy, by the way). These stories had been appearing in the Magnet since about 1908--they had already been around a long time when Orwell wrote his essay (let me repeat: 20,000 words a week).

Orwell describes an English surreality: These boys live in a kind of permanent 1910--before The Great War. The slang they use was probably obsolete by 1908, when their adventures started (if it was ever real slang--they speak words that make perfect sense but were probably never a part of the real language of men, saying "dash" instead of "damn," for example). There is a sameness of style that leads Orwell to conclude that the stories had been written--and were still being written--by a succession of writers over the years who were required to stick with the official voice that these tales were told in. (Five years later Orwell found out that the stories were all written by one man: Charles Hamilton, who used the pen name "Frank Richards" and was simultaneously writing other stories under other pen names. Egads!)

As I strolled through a bookstore on King's Road (what books would they have that we don't have in New York anyway?) I came across Billy Bunter's Postal Order. Who knew such a thing existed? Well, now both you and I do. It's an audio book, three disks. And I'm glad I bought it and listened to it. Apparently CSA Word produces several of these episodes from the Magnet.

Orwell points out that the stories are what we would tend to think of as wordy, and he quotes one as follows:

'Shutup, Bunter!'

Groan!

Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter's line. He seldom shut up, though often requested to do so. On the present awful occasion the fat Owl of Greyfriars was less inclined than ever to shut up. And he did not shut up! He groaned, and groaned, and went on groaning.

Even groaning did not fully express Bunter's feelings. His feelings, in fact, were inexpressible.

There were six of them in the soup! Only one of the six uttered sounds of woe and lamentation. But that one, William George Bunter, uttered enough for the whole party and a little over.

But you know what: It works. Although an editor today (O.K., me) would be greatly tempted to condense a passage such as the foregoing, when I listened to the audio book this writer's voice had a hypnotic quality that I found drew me deeper and deeper into the ridiculous world of Billy Bunter and Greyfriars, a world that is probably more English than the English themselves have ever lived in.


Now, if I may climb from the ridiculous back up to the sublime, I am now reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, by Zora Neale Hurston, a writer who is not much remembered these days. I have only got through the first 30 pages or so, but I am completely captivated by her magical phrases--I was not overly surprised to learn that she produced a literary magazine with Langston Hughes at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.

. . . I used to go to bed early

I have heard it said that Proust's use of French is very beautiful. I consider it unfortunate that even if I immersed myself in French for the rest of my life, I still would not know for sure, for myself, whether that is true. But if I wanted to get immersed in French for a long time, I suppose I could buy this:

Yes, the whole A la recherche du temps perdu as an audio book, complete, on 111 CDs (139 hours). Normally it's 360.00 €, but this weekend only it's on sale for 299.90 €--while supplies last. I don’t know French well enough to jump at that kind of bargain. In the meantime I will continue to regret that there is no English-language complete audio book of In Search of Lost Time.

The G-word

Turkey has recalled its ambassador to the U.S. "for consultations." Whatever. Hey, Nabi Sensoy, if you move fast enough, the door won’t hit your ass on the way out. I am not sorry that the truth could prove to be "very injurious . . . to the psyche of the Turkish people."

You can tell I will never be a diplomat.

And nor will Egemen Bagis, a foreign policy adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said in Washington, "Yesterday some in Congress wanted to play hardball. . . . I can assure you Turkey knows how to play hardball." Bagis went on to warn that if the full House passes its nonbinding resolution (declaring the Armenian genocide genocide), "We will do something and I can promise you it won't be pleasant." Oh, come on, Egemen, holocaust denial is soooo 20th century. And you really are protesting too much.

A man on the street, apparently of Turkish origin, told a radio reporter that politicians should stay out of the genocide question and leave it up to historians. Oh, really? Thank you for that insight, Man On The Street. You mean historians in Turkey? A country that convicts citizens of Turkey who write about the topic in a way their government does not agree with?

Our president isn’t much better than that Man On The Street. In his comments yesterday, President Bush was able to describe "the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915" as "historic mass killings." Hmmm, if only there was a convenient one-word term for historic mass killings of members of a specific population. Oh, well. If politicians can't come up with a word, I'm sure some writer or historian will.

In your dreams

I snoozed after my clock radio went off this morning, and I could swear the man was announcing that Helen Mirren had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. "That's out of left field," I thought. He went onto explain that her key work was The Golden Notebook. "He's way off," I thought. I looked over at my clock: 5:33. I was awake now. I have no idea whether the guy really said Helen Mirren was the winner or my sleep just jumbled up what he did say. Anyway, I would definitly cast Helen Mirren if they make a biopic of Doris Lessing.

Rhinovirus

I just got back from London last night and I am fighting off a cold. I catch colds when two conditions are present: (1) exposure to the virus and (2) stress.

One thing in London that was not stress is the new production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros that has opened at the Royal Court Theatre, in Sloane Square. This is the theatre where the first English-language production opened in 1960, with Sir Lawrence Olivier (who was thought of as slumming at the time but was reinventing himself and revivifying the Royal Court Theatre) and directed by Orson Welles.

It turns out that Monday night is the cheap night at the Royal Court (£10 all seats), which happened to be a perfect night for me and my parents to go. The costumes are of the era (i.e. 1950s France). The new translation is strong, using a present-day flavor of English without violating the 1950s look of the characters and set. One of the funniest lines is a throwaway (as is so often the case in theatre). The characters are working in a first-floor office and a rhinoceros charges into the ground floor, destroying everything, including the stairs up to the first floor. The characters look over the railing into the destruction below:

To which one of them remarks "This was bound to happen eventually."

!

Maybe you had to be there--and I hope you get to be.

The cold I have now I caught from my father. The stress came from staying up late and waking up early. (My parents don’t stress me anymore--but I can’t explain all that in one blog post.) The next day we went to Kew Gardens. In the cab my father let four HUGE sneezes or, as the Wikipedia calls it, "aerosols of respiratory droplets." There in the sealed London cab careening through those twisted curvy streets I knew it was all over. The next night we saw the Woman in Black and the next day I came back to New York. American Airlines had put me on a later flight, and I felt the cold get me for sure over the Atlantic. The air on the plane was too dry and with screaming babies and people talking, I couldn’t sleep. I looked at my watch: People chattering away at 4:15 a.m. London time. Because of all the security at Heathrow, I’d had to check my bag, meaning it took 40 minutes to reclaim it at JFK. I took the train back to The Bronx, but by then nighttime construction was in full swing and it took 3 hours to get home (instead of the 1 hour it had taken me to get to airport the week before).

I got to bed by 3 a.m. and got up early to fetch Jenny from boarding before I went to work. I dragged into work a bit late and my sinuses majorly stuffed.

YouTube doesn't have a clip of Rhinoceros on YouTube, but it does have a clip of one of the costumes:



(This is what rhinoceroses looked like in France in the 1950s.)

Only as good as your word

My friend Susan Shapiro's new book, Only as Good as Your Word, is out now. Sue traces the effect mentors had on her life, from when she was a misfit high-school student to her arrival in New York as an aspiring poet to the present day--in which she finds she has become a mentor.

Although Sue’s career has been as a writer and teacher, the stories of her relationships with mentors are instructive for anyone in any industry who has thought to seek out the wisdom of a mentor to guide his or her career. I wish this book existed when I came to New York as a young, starving, unemployed writer. ("[Shapiro] doles out invaluable advice for aspiring scribes. Pulling back the curtain to reveal what it takes to earn a living with words, she emphasizes the usefulness of exploiting one's obsessions, writing about people you love and realizing that a page a day is a book a year. Shapiro's engaging stories about her career trajectory are replete with missteps. She provides guidance on transforming private humiliations into hilarity for the public forum and asserts that when it comes to getting published, 'no' never actually means 'no.' . . . The book's final chapters, which explain how to find a great mentor and be a good protégé, should be required reading for all would-be writers"--Kirkus Reviews.)

I just hope . . .

. . . that the end of the world has not descended upon us like the first five minutes of a cheaply made science fiction movie. But if it has, I also hope there are two teenagers somewhere--misfits, let’s say, or a nerdy guy and the cheerleader who would never give him the time of day--who will spring into action and save us.

What Tony is reading

I enjoyed Great Expectations, and I am now reading Jane Austen’s Emma. This is my home reading. On the train into work I am still brushing up my German. Actually, “brushing up” suggests that I have retained some level of German and just need to remind myself. I’m afraid my situation is more desperate than that: I’m just trying to cram as much German as I can prior to my trip in the fall--which might get pushed back to winter.

To that end, I am reading Ranier Maria Rilka’s Letters to a Young Poet. I found a decent translation on the Web and what seems to be a reliable copy in German. I copied these both onto a Word document so that I have English on the left and German on the right. (O.K., I barely know German at all. I just hope that when they find me I can get out the words “Essen, bitte!” before losing consciousness.) Anyway, on the subway I am both reading this marvelous insight on writing and art and studying German. Here is a little of what I read this morning:

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

Mit nichts kann man ein Kunst-Werk so wenig berühren als mit kritischen Worten: es kommt dabei immer auf mehr oder minder glückliche Mißverständnisse heraus. Die Dinge sind alle nicht so faßbar und sagbar, als man uns meistens glauben machen möchte; die meisten Ereignisse sind unsagbar, vollziehen sich in einem Raume, den nie ein Wort betreten hat, und unsagbarer als alle sind die Kunst-Werke, geheimnisvolle Existenzen, deren Leben neben dem unseren, das vergeht, dauert.

Little Pinky visits Golden Gate Park

There must have been 30 types of grass for sale at the garden shop my friends took me to near Golden Gate Park today. (Yesterday was my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary, and we celebrated it in San Francisco.) We bought Little Pinky in a pint-sized container. Here is a picture of Little Pinky (Pennisetum macroctacium):

Then we had dinner at the Beach Chalet as the sun set and parasailers swooped over the water. After dinner, as the sun was still declining, we went out on the sand. The wind was blowing in strongly from the Pacific Ocean, but the water was calm and the waves were very tame. I dipped my toe in the water. I think it has been ten years since I dipped my toe in the Pacific, although I have been to the West Coast quite a few times--it seemed a shame to come thousands of miles again and not actually touch that ocean.

The sun set beyond the water. There wasn’t a green flash--I think maybe because there was too much fog. Then we drove by the de Young Museum. I had the little pot of Little Pinky in my lap. In front the de Young it’s a loading and unloading area only, and they are very strict about enforcing their rules. To avoid getting ticketed for merely stopping, I got out of the car. I showed the museum’s façade to Little Pinky: “Look, Little Pinky, it’s a beautiful new museum. And look at all the grass they have!” The kids in the backseat got a kick out of that. Then I got back in the car and we were on our way.

Here is the regular Pinky:

. . . although she is at the Huntington, not the de Young.

Hey, Hotshot!

My friend Beth Herzhaft is a Hey Hot Shot winner this summer, and her work is being shown at the Jen Bekman Gallery (6 Spring St., at Bowery). The opening is September 12--this Wednesday. (Beth, you are always a hotshot winner to me, this summer and every other season.)

St. Agnes's farewell book sale

The used-book sale this weekend at the St. Agnes Branch (Amsterdam Avenue & W. 81st St.) of the New York Public Library is not only the last before they close for renovatons, it is apparently the last ever (after a 25-year run). I will definitely be there:

September 7, 8, and 9, 2007
Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Sunday, noon - 5 p.m.

The books are plentiful and cheap. And good: Some smart people live on the Upper West Side and when they’re done with their books, they donate them to the library to be sold. I don't know what they're going to do with their old books now. I will certainly miss their sales twice a year.

The job

If you leave out the left-handed virtuosic rock blues guitar playing, adoring fans, tours, recording sessions, millions of dollars, setting guitars on fire, flashy clothes, and drugs, there is very little difference between what I do for a living and what Jimi Hendrix did--oh, and I guess you need to add accounting book editing.

Here is a case in point: Today I found the following in one of my author’s manuscripts:

However, that raises an obvious question: Wouldn’t a FIN 48 determination that a tax position is not more-likely-than-not sustainable upon examination be inconsistent with a taxpayer’s assertion for tax purposes that the position is based on a reasonable belief that the position is more-likely-than-not proper?

In my world, not only is that an obvious question, our book answers it. My author is grammatically correct, although we are disparaging contractions in this particular publication. That isn’t the toughest sentence I have ever seen, although it is the toughest one I’ve seen today. I need to eliminate the contraction and make the material more readily accessible to our readers. Every editor in the world would propose a different solution. Anyway, I will confer with my author about my suggested fix, and we will mutually find a way to alleviate my concerns.

Now, ignore all that: If you want to see the kind of awesome post that make me question why I even bother blogging, there’s this.

Rebelión en la granja

I have read so many things since I last posted What Tony is reading that I won’t list them. Life goes on. At home, where I actually concentrate, I am still reading Great Expectations. I had never read Dickens before, and I heard that this was his most complex novel. In the morning on the subway I am brushing up my German for a trip I expect to take this fall. On the way home I am dividing my time between reading things my friends wrote and some essays by George Orwell.

The other night I was reading Orwell's essay “The Prevention of Literature,” which he published in January of 1946. Orwell always has sentences that stand out: “There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature” and “To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox”--and if you don’t agree with such statements, they appear in a persuasive essay that you have the right to read. As so much of Orwell does--or, for that matter, good essay writing--the theme took me on a few unexpected turns, such as how liberals end up advancing totalitarianism. At over 60 years old, some of the paragraphs apply, intact, to civil liberties questions we face today in the ever-widening war on terror.

And then I heard the news about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s latest constitutional reforms, I could only think of Orwell’s Animal Farm, which besides being a political fable is also a brilliant illustration of how one--a nation, let’s say--can find oneself at the bottom of a slippery slope with no idea how one got there. It is simply a matter of time before the Venezuelan people look in the window of the farmhouse and see that the pigs are living exactly as Mr. Jones did.

I'm still here

I hate that I haven't posted for so long; here is a roundup: On Big Wednesday (August 8th, when we had all the rain), it took me 4 hours to get to work. When I phoned my boss at 10 a.m. to say that I had only made it to 145th St. and was walking through Harlem toward a bus stop, she said "Why don't you have breakfast, and if the trains still aren't moving downtown, go home?" Answer: I don't know how to be me. The bus was amazingly slow because all of Manhattan was a traffic jam. I was tempted to write about that, but remember, Homer only wrote the Odyssey, he didn't have to actually do it.

On Friday I woke up with a cold that was so bad I actually called in sick, something I hardly ever do. I stayed in bed most of the day setting a world record for a sinus headache. I was so incapacitated that when I was listening to a talk show on public radio that I hated, I just lay there and listened to it because the thought of crossing the room and turning the damn thing off barely seemed possible. At that point I wondered whether in fact I had contracted the flu, possibly from all the people I was cooped up with on that bus for three hours on Wednesday.

I got out on Saturday, bought some groceries, ran some errands, back to bed--I never set foot out of my apartment again till Monday morning, when I went to work. I got a little writing done on Saturday. I did a lot of sleeping. Normally I think of sleeping as unproductive, an overly Protestant notion that I am still recovering from. My new ethos is: More sleep = more dreams.

I spent Sunday in my pajamas and worked on my memoir. It's coming along well. I seem to just about have the voice down, which means capturing the perspective of me at age 12. Now that the novel is effectively out of my way and I am devoting myself to this project fully, things are coming back to me: things people said, people's last names, food I ate, magazines I looked at. On Sunday night I had an extremely vivid dream of being in my grandfather’s study, which is the room I lived in for six months on an aluminum cot while my family was in transition. I think what struck me most about the dream was that it proved for me that the details are still there in my memory. The other thing that struck me was my total immersion in this project, which is a major reason why I haven't blogged for three weeks.

On Monday, I sooo wanted to see the Penny show at the UCB Theatre, but I was totally run down by the time I finished work. I went home, had a bowl of soup, and crawled into bed at 9 to read Great Expectations for awhile. At 9:30 I turned out my light and was thinking about now the show would be starting any minute. I fell into a dense sleep and when I woke up and saw that it was 3 a.m. I was also in the afterglow of a dream in which I had just seen Penny's performance. The dream wasn't as vivid as being in my grandfather's study and looking at his books--and it couldn't have been as funny as the real Penny show--but I was glad that in some surreal way I had not *wholly* missed the Penny show.

Tonight is Tuesday. We had a boring meeting that lasted two hours late this afternoon. Since I was there to listen, I shut my eyes--which allows me to concentrate more. My boss told me to at least look awake. So, I spent the next two hours staring at the shiny top of the wooden table while four people blathered about problems that will probably be fixed before they have any effect on me. My soul might have drained out of me during those two hours, but I at least I looked awake. Other people in attendance didn't have anything to contribute either--and they probably looked more awake than me. I wish I could go to Harold Night tonight. I can't; I am too tired, although I am not coughing like I was on the weekend. I need to buy groceries on my way home, which might be a challenge. It's 5:45 here at my desk and I just wish I was reading in bed now as my soul wakes up on the floor of a conference room and wanders back to the Bronx to find me. I can't believe I felt so awful about not posting since July 24 that I'm still here.

Scary thought for the day

CNN.com has posted the following map showing where Americans have gotten obese since 1985:

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/fit.nation/obesity.map/

New York, I am very disappointed in you: You are about to become a red state. Try to do better. As for 1985, keep up the good work.

She doesn’t even know what spoon is . . .

. . . although she has seen me use them to transfer her food from its can to her dish--which is an obtuse way of ambling toward my point, namely that last night I was finally back in my apartment in The Bronx, and so was Jenny, my cat. My weekend was exhausting, beginning on Friday after work, when I carried a couple of sacks of books back up to The Bronx, and continued with ten more trips on Saturday and Sunday. (Strategy: Take items such as chairs and bookshelves on the subway very early in the morning.)

On Sunday afternoon I fetched Jenny from my generous friend and took her home--and I still had a few more trips to make. By 1 a.m. I crawled, muscles aching, into bed, losing consciousness almost before my head hit my pillow. When I happened to wake up in the dark sometime later, Jenny was fast asleep against my leg. She woke up and nuzzled her face against my shoulder, saying “massage my neck” and “I’m glad to see you” and “scratch under my chin.” She reclined near me, and as I fell asleep she tapped me on my cheek, saying “pet me more.” So I did. And when dawn woke me up, Jenny was sleeping nestled against my arm. Two months was a long time for us to be apart, with only a few moments in my hectic stupid schedule when I could visit her.

On!

My apartment renovation is done and I will soon be leaving my sublet in the Greenwood section of Brooklyn, or, as I like to call it on days like this, the Standing Water section of Brooklyn. The rain was falling so hard as I walked to work getting soaked from the thighs down to my socks that my downsloping street was nothing more than a fast-running creek.

This half-Hispanic, half-Polish neighborhood lies on the western edge of the Greenwood cemetery, which means we have a lot more funeral homes, florist shops, and memorial stores than most neighborhoods. I have taken the M train on purpose: Even now when it trundles into my station it surprises me that it still exists in the way that it’s surprising when one finds a shop that still blocks men’s hats or sells moustache wax.

Certain memories of this neighborhood will stay with me: As I walked along 7th Avenue on a sunny day a couple of weeks ago, where it runs along the edge of the cemetery, I wondered about the graves on the grassy hillside--there are geotechnical considerations. And soon I saw and answer: There was a group of four graves with their headstones leaning in different precarious directions and the casket-sized rectangles of grass before them swooped into the slope. They may have stood that way for years or looked like they were. Most likely they are slowly moving--even as you read this. The coffins below gave way and the earth above sagged into the empty space, the grass growing in the sun not at all disturbed.

Another memory: As I was walking by the Jurek Park Slope Funeral Home, on 4th Avenue, on a pleasant summer evening I could not take my eyes off a silver-and-black Cadillac hearse. It wasn’t of a style I recognized, but I guessed it was from the 1970s. My attention was riveted to the back window and its lace curtains, whose edges ludicrously and elegantly came together to leave a post-card-sized opening for anyone who would care to look through the glass. It was then that an attractive blonde woman wearing a short black skirt and black high heels and a rather stylish jacket came out of the funeral home, got into the hearse, and drove away. Life imitates cable television.

The Guerros Taqueria seems to have gone out of business, and I will miss them. Their tacos were delicious and they had about twelve kinds, ranging from al pastor to oreja.

I will not miss the mosquitoes. Probably one of the reasons why sublet was so cheap is that it does not have niceties such as screened windows. So, I have been spraying my entire body with Off! each night before I go to sleep. And for a couple of weeks the itching of fresh mosquito bites would wake me up at 4 a.m.--like clockwork. I finally read the Proustian paragraph in 3 point type on the back of the Off! bottle, with its explanations of how to apply the stuff to children, how to keep chiggers out of the cuffs of your pants, and other information I can’t use, and then I saw it: Off! only lasts for 2 hours. That’s probably on a hiker, for a sleeper in the Standing Water section of Brooklyn, it lasts till 4 a.m.--and man are those lady mosquitoes hungry by then. I am probably now nourishing the grandchildren of the long-dead mosquitoes who were eating me alive when I moved in.

Six or seven years ago, when West Nile virus was a new concern, trucks with nozzles emitting a fine mist of insecticide rolled through the streets of New York. Now there is nothing to be done--or is there? I would just like to add that I am very pro bat and pro dragon fly. Spraying a whole city with poison never held much appeal for me. I wish there was some way to release New York-native species of dragonflies instead. Or erect bat houses.

Brooklyn stigmata

Here's something I've never done before: I got a mosquito bite in the center of the sole of each of my feet. At first, because they itched, I thought it might be athlete's foot--which I had never had before. But, no, they were mosquito bites. And I can't believe those were easy places to pierce and suck blood from. I know there are easier places because plenty of other mosquitoes found them. I looked like a teenager in the morning--I mean the pimples, not the perpetually haggard look I have developed over the years. Oh, I suppose I should mention that my cheap Brooklyn sublet does not have screens on the windows and it has been really hot lately.

Do what I do

O.K., I haven't blogged for a while; however, in my defense I'd like to say that this is due to a complete lack of trying. Here is today's installment of what I have come to call Do what I do. (But don't follow my example about not blogging--if you have a blog, you should post stuff.)

An editor I know whose surname begins with the letter S once gave me a piece of advice that I have found to be both simple and brilliant, and that is this: When confronted with a long alphabetized list that you might have to search through all of--but might stop searching through at any point if you find what you're looking for--don't start at the letter A. Start with whatever letter your surname starts with.* For example, I start my searches at the letter P.

I was reminded of this today when I began to comb through a list of 77 potential technical reviewers for two books I have just finished editing. One book is about generally accepted accounting principles for governmental accounting and the other analyzes the standards for generally accepted auditing principals.**

*People whose surnames start with A can ignore this rule--it really only applies to the rest of us.***
**I realize this information simply horrid--although it happens to be perfectly true. And for both of those characteristics I apologize.
***Surely, however, we can all enjoy the kitten scene pictured above, which I found on a blog that is put together by bloggers more prolific than me.

Brother’s Keeper Dept.

This has not been a good month for depending on the kindness of strangers:

Police: Diabetic Man Missing After Being Kicked Off Train

Group says U.S. citizen wrongly deported to Mexico

Tape: 911 operators did little to help dying woman in ER

As you probably know . . .

. . . there aren’t enough assholes in the world, at least not in Washington, D.C., or, rather, at least not among lawyers in Washington, D.C. Fortunately, Roy Pearson, Esq., is doing his best to rectify that state of affairs:

Judge aims to have pants suit ironed out next week

A mammal that can live to be 200

I really can't add to this AP story except (1) I didn't know this about whales and (2) Herman Melville was still alive in 1890 (although by then he was perhaps best known as a retired customs inspector, who had worked at the customs house on Gansevoort St.).

What Tony is reading

After a craving to read British novels of the first half of the 19th century (which is why I read Frankenstein in February), I got sidetracked. After Frankenstein I read The Namesake because I wanted to know the book before I saw the movie. However, I ended up being too busy to see the movie, which in the meantime has closed. (Good planning, Tony! Well, I was busy with things like visiting Paris and moving to Brooklyn.)

I then read Old Yeller, by Fred Gipson--my craving had shifted to catching up on other things I hadn't read. When all the other boys read Old Yeller, in the Scholastic edition, I read the How and Why Wonder Book of the Human Body. And I didn't see the movie of Old Yeller--although not because I was going to Paris; it was probably because I wanted to see The Ghost and Mr. Chicken instead. I can't help thinking that my life might have gone in a different direction if I had read Old Yeller in second or third grade, when other boys were reading this incipient-testosterone coming-of-age story. Then again, for that to happen I would have had to have been a different person anyway.

In May I read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass--they're late 19th century, but oh, so British. They are also totally crazy books. I hadn't read them since I was 12 and I had forgotten how off-the-wall they were. This is the culture that brought you Monty Python and "I Am The Walrus," which didn't suddenly spring out of nowhere in the 1960s. By the way, here's a trippy fact I gleaned from the Wikipedia: When Alice Liddell was hard up for money, she auctioned off the handwritten manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground that Lewis Carroll had given her. In 1932 she visited America when the manuscript was displayed at Columbia University for the 100th anniversary of Lewis Carroll's birth, and it was on that trip (when she was 80 years old) that she met Peter Llewelyn-Davies, one of the brothers who were the inspiration for J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. So, there you have it: Alice in Wonderland met Peter Pan, and I’m sure if you had enough patience you could eventually connect them to Kevin Bacon.

I also read Growing Up, by Russell Baker. On Monday I finished Wuthering Heights. And I am now reading a P.D. James for the first time, A Certain Justice--which is British but certainly not from the first half of the 19th century, which I still want to get back to.

In the new

This phenomenon of doing new things--or at least recognizing them, whether they be trivial or grand--is contagious. Last night I did something new: I spent the night in Brooklyn. I know that doesn't sound impressive, but I have lived in New York for over half my life, and I have spent the night in Queens, Manhattan, and The Bronx--because I have lived in all those boroughs. But never Brooklyn.

My Bronx apartment is being renovated, and I found a good sublet deal on craigslist. By Saturday night I was all set up; so there I fell asleep in the back room on the top floor of a three-story brick walkup to the sounds of people in the yard below chatting and drinking beer. The apartment doesn't have air-conditioning; so, keeping the window open for cross-ventilation in this weather is essential. Jenny is staying with a friend, also in Brooklyn--her first night ever in Brooklyn was Friday.

I have been in Brooklyn late at night before. One of my first jobs in New York was monitoring fire and police radios and dispatching a freelance TV crew. As I went off shift at 2 a.m. one winter night, the crew was in our Times Square office dubbing tapes to deliver to TV stations when the radios came alive with dispatchers sending fire engines to a two-alarm blaze in Brooklyn. "Ever seen a fire, Tony?" one of the guys said. I hadn't, and so I went with them. We sped through empty New York, running red lights, and when we got to the fire, which was on Avenue U or something, I carried a spare battery belt for the crew. Nobody got hurt in the fire, and a cat that had been overcome by smoke inhalation was revived on the hood of the fire marshal's car. That was the clip that ended up on the local news later that morning.

A house fire has an awful mixture of smells: The pleasant smell of burning pine, which you might experience in your fireplace when you're glad to be home on a dark winter evening. But it's mixed with the dust and dirt of dry old timbers and the buttery smell of burning paint, which might contain lead. And the burning tar of the roof. And the house's vinyl siding. This smell sticks in your hair and coats the inside of your nose for days. You smell like fire till you get your clothes off and take a shower and then you still smell like a fire.

Last night was a lot more restful than that. And I'm going to do it again tonight.

Food for the soul

The reading tonight that will include Ian Frazier, Susan Shapiro, and Holy Apostles Church soup kitchen writers workshop participants reading their latest stories and poems will be a lot of fun--and good for your soul!

Wednesday, May 30
7:00 p.m.
Holy Apostles Church
W. 28th St. & 9th Ave.

It's free and open to the public, although most people will make a donation at the door.

What Tony is Dreaming: No Problem

Three weeks ago today I was in Paris having an extremely French day: Used book shops on the left bank, bouquinistes, café crème at a sidewalk café with my friend, contemporary theatre, and a dinner whose first course was a thick warm blood pudding on toast with a layer of caramelized peaches on top, presented in a perfect, hockey-puck-shaped and sized disk.

Last night I dreamed I was suddenly back in Paris. It was a rush trip. In fact, I had come with only my wallet, as if while at lunch I went to Paris instead of back to work. In the dream, R.G. Sand and I are on a houseboat in Paris--not having planned far enough in advance to make hotel reservations.

"You wanted to be back in Paris, and here you are," R.G. Sand says.

I go through my pockets and find my ATM card.

"We can get euros," I say. "I can't believe I left my map at home. Now I'll have to buy another. And I need a pen." I open a drawer in a desk on the houseboat. It is filled with pencils, compasses, fountain pen nibs, erasers . . . "I still need to buy a pen," I say. "And paper."

The interior of the cabin is roomy. It's wooden and cozy. The capacious room is lighted by sconces and the many windows are hung with translucent white organdy. We go out on the deck. The houseboat is floating on the Canal Saint Martin.

"I know where we are," I say. "Les Abîmés has closed, but I can show you where the Théâtre du Marais is without a map. It's on the other side of the Place de la République." We debark and head toward Rue de Malte. (At the beginning of this month the Place de la République was the hub of my universe for a whole week.) "We can get some money and I can show you where that restaurant is. Maybe the theatre has another play." I'm sure that's the first thing you would do when you get to Paris: Find the theatre.

"We should get an umbrella," says R.G. Sand. "Look."

I can't say it was frightening, but a huge cloud, like thick black wool was drifting toward us--actually all of Paris.

"It's Sarkozy!" shouts R.G. Sand. "And it's coming right toward us!" Now it is frightening, and we run.

The cloud is so huge and so close and so thick I can reach up and almost touch it

"It probably isn't that bad even if it is Sarkozy," I say as we get back to the houseboat and go inside. (Sometimes I am overly rational in my dreams.) The rain starts. "See? It's just rain." I resume searching through my pockets. "I forgot to bring my passport," I say. And as the black wool Sarkozy rain turns the view out the houseboat windows to a complete blur I contemplate that without my passport I will not be able to leave Paris. No problem.

Letting the serendipities happen

I have a bad habit of trying to make things happen when--and I know better--if I didn't, they would happen anyway if they were meant to, or not happen if they were not meant to, or something better would happen. This is not to say that my philosophy of life is that things go best when I float along passively letting things happen. Rather it is the recognition of my uncanny ability to wreck what I'm trying to do. Or if I actually brought about what I thought I wanted, I would be precluding something better--and unanticipated--from happening. It's like when I was six years old and the Zimmer kids said there was a robin's nest in their attic. We all took turns trying to lift out the beautiful blue eggs--which broke the moment we even touched them. "Here, let me try," I said when I watched Danny Zimmer cloddishly destroy one of the eggs between his thumb and forefinger. The one I tried to lift broke too--their shells were as thin as tissue paper. If we had done nothing, there would have been baby birds.

That's way too much preamble to get to here: namely that I knew Marcel Proust lived at 102 Boulevard Haussmann and that the room where he wrote most of Remembrance of Things Past is now an office of a bank. However, Boulevard Haussmann is quite long, and I didn't know the cross street--so, I had no intention of looking for it. For what? To take a picture of me in front of the building? To bother the bank people?

We found it anyway. I might as well say Proust's apartment building found me. Here is a picture of me looking rumpled and touristy (don't worry, I told everyone I was from Texas) doing what hundreds of people do all day long--getting their picture taken in front of the building where the greatest novel of the twentieth century was written:

Here I am eating a hotdog (or, as the French say, "un hot dog") in the gardens surrounding Notre Dame with someone who is more glamorous than I will ever be:

Thank you for taking those pictures, Marty!

To Proustify

Marcel Proust spoke in long sentences early in life. By the time he was in junior high or high school his friends made up a word for it that translates into English as "to Proustify." In Search of Lost Time is a very long book--which doesn't mean you will drop dead upon finishing it. However, there are people who claim that it is the best novel written in the 20th century. If they are right, all those other novels you read in the rest of your life just won't as good as they might have been if you'd saved Proust till last.

I bought a full paperback set of what I call "the Kilmartin edition" for just $47.25, which is cheaper than used copies on eBay. This edition is the C.K. Scott-Moncrieff translation that Terence Kilmartin revised based on a better edition of Proust in French being made available. Kilmartin's revision also eliminates Scott-Moncrieff's excesses. I have only read the first part: Swann's Way (656 pages).

I have so far managed to assemble three of the volumes of the six-volume edition that editor Christopher Prendergast oversaw, published by Viking in 2003. This got my attention when I saw the smashing review Lydia Davis received for her translation of the first part: Swann's Way (468 pages). Apparently Viking had a big print run for the first volume but printed fewer copies of some of the others. It doesn't seem to be sold as a set; so, you have to track down its parts. I have never seen all six volumes together in a bookstore. In her introduction, Davis says that Proust is not wordy. In fact, she says, he is concise, but it takes him as many words as it does to articulate the fineness of nuance that he achieves.

I'm reading other stuff right now, but I do occasionally dip into the 2003 Penguin edition. In The Guermantes Way, translated into English by Mark Treharne, I found the following:

Ever since I had ceased to see actors solely as the depositories, in their diction and acting ability, of an artistic truth, the had begun to interest me in their own right; with the feeling that I was watching the characters from some old comic novel, I was amused to see the naïve heroine of a play, he attention drawn to the new face of some young duke who has just taken his seat in the theater, listen abstractedly to the declaration of love the juvenile lead was addressing to her, while he, through the rolling passion of this declaration, was in turn directing an enamored eye at an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his interest; and in this way, largely owing to what Saint-Loup had told me about the private lives of actors, I saw another drama, silent but telling, being played out beneath the words of the play that was being performed, yet the play itself, however uninspired, was still something that interested me, too; for within it I could feel germinating and blossoming for an hour in the glare of the footlights--created out of the agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of greasepaint and pasteboard, and on his individual soul the words of a part--the ephemeral and spirited personalities, captivating, too, who form the cast of a play, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to met again after the play is over, but who by that time have already disintegrated into the actors, who are no longer what they were in their roles. into a script that no longer shows the actors' faces, into a colored powder that can be wiped off by a handkerchief, who have reverted, in a word, to elements that contain nothing of them, because their dissolution is complete as soon as the play has ended, and this, like the dissolution of a loved one, causes one to doubt the reality of the self and to meditate on the mystery of death.

That paragraph is one sentence long. That isn't the longest sentence in In Search of Lost Time, and Proust did not always write in long sentences. But it is a tribute to Proust as an author and Treharne as a translator that it is a beautiful sentence--the kind of thing that Proust produces, sentence after sentence, for thousands of pages. And although it is a translation, few native-English-speaking writers today can ever hope to write a sentence as good.

I don't really know French, but, for the curious, here is the foregoing translated passage in Proust's own words:

Depuis que les acteurs n'étaient plus exclusivement, pour moi, les dépositaires, en leur diction et leur jeu, d'une vérité artistique, ils m'intéressaient en eux-mêmes; je m'amusais, croyant contempler les personnages d'un vieux roman comique, de voir du visage nouveau d'un jeune seigneur qui venait d'entrer dans la salle, l'ingénue écouter distraitement la déclaration que lui faisait le jeune premier dans la pièce, tandis que celui-ci, dans le feu roulant de sa tirade amoureuse, n'en dirigeait pas moins une oeillade enflammée vers une vieille dame assise dans une loge voisine, et dont les magnifiques perles l'avaient frappé; et ainsi, surtout grâce aux renseignements que Saint-Loup me donnait sur la vie privée des artistes, je voyais une autre pièce, muette et expressive se jouer sous la pièce parlée, laquelle d'ailleurs, quoique médiocre, m'intéressait; car j'y sentais germer et s'épanouir pour une heure, à la lumière de la rampe, faites de l'agglutinement sur le visage d'un acteur d'un autre visage de fard et de carton, sur son âme personnelle des paroles d'un rôle, ces individualités éphémères et vivaces que sont les personnages d'une pièce, séduisantes aussi, qu'on aime, qu'on admire, qu'on plaint, qu'on voudrait retrouver encore, une fois qu'on a quitté le théâtre, mais qui déjà se sont désagrégées en un comédien qui n'a plus la condition qu'il avait dans la pièce, en un texte qui ne montre plus le visage du comédien, en une poudre colorée qu'efface le mouchoir, qui sont retournées en un mot à des éléments qui n'ont plus rien d'elles, à cause de leur dissolution, consommée sitôt après la fin du spectacle, et qui fait, comme celle d'un être aimé, douter de la réalité du moi et méditer sur la mort.

Mr. Coughy

I have a long ride from my D stop in The Bronx to my job at W. 15th St. and 8th Ave., but at least I always get a seat. Today the guy sitting behind me coughed four or five times a minute all the way down to midtown Manhattan--about 45 minutes till he finally got off. I am mindful that the New York City Subway is mass transit for pathogens too. I can't say that I blame the guy: He should've stood in bed. But there were times when I had a deadline and went to work with a cold--and probably infected everybody. So, deadline met, and it's not as if there's an incentive to stay home sick.

When I got to work this morning, I Googled to find out whether there were any health benefits to catching cold (why not think positive!). I didn't find any benefits, but I did find this news item. Also, if that guy's condition deteriorates totally, there is at least this positive benefit. Presumably my fellow passenger from The Bronx is a Yankees fan.

Off Off Off Off Broadway: Les Abîmés

This was one of those long travel days that make a mockery of distance. I began this day with café crème and pain du chocolat with my friends at a little place on the corner of Rue des Archives and Rue de Bretagne. Paris was cool from the rain last night, and we were up early enough on a Saturday morning that the city had just a smattering of traffic and people walking their dogs as we waited for our van to the airport. Later today I found myself in my local supermarket in the Bronx picking up a few groceries till I figure out what to do tomorrow. So close and so far and seen through a sense of time distorted by jet lag.

Now that I’m not married I don’t have to spend obsessive amounts time shopping for accessories (shoes, handbags, watch bands). I wanted to see what was happening in the Paris equivalent of Off Off Broadway theatre. So, I did. This was a trip filled with serendipities, by the way; the best things I found seemed to be making a point of manifesting themselves without my looking for them. This was how I found the Théâtre du Marais, at 37 rue Volta, in the 3rd Arrondissement, not far from my hotel, off the Place de la République: On Thursday I had stopped off at an ATM to get more euros and the damned machine rejected my card (thank you, you damned beautiful blessed machine!). So I combed the streets looking for another ATM half wondering if the computers at Chase had cut off my card for suspicious activity (i.e. cash withdrawals in a foreign city). If they’ve cut off my card, I’ll let them have an earful, I’m thinking as I wander up and down alleys past cheap shoe stores looking for a main street with banks and ATMs. I turned a corner and there it was: Could I believe my eyes? It could be a storefront theatre in New York. Rue Volta, no need to write that down--I had an adviser in college named Volta. The play was Les Abîmés.

My friends, Marty and Rebeca, were busy the next night with Marty’s relatives, which gave me a chance to go see the play. At 10 minutes to 7 I headed out of my hotel for the 7:30 show--or, as the French say, “19 h 30”--and could not find the theatre. I could not remember the name of the street. Now every street name looked familiar and I couldn’t remember the mnemonic about my college adviser’s name. I started looking for narrow streets with cheap shoe stores. I started looking for the ATM that had rejected my card except now I was coming across more ATMs than you ever thought Paris had. I tried to find the ATM that had accepted my card and work backwards from there. Then it started to rain. A walk down a long narrow street on a warm night with plenty of rain. I turned a corner--a different one from the night before--and there it was. They were just setting up to sell tickets.

I checked my phrasebook, looking up how to say “Is a seat available for tonight?” The man said yes and sold me a ticket (€15). He then asked me (in French) if I realized that the play was in French (wow, my accent must be really bad if I can use a grammatically correct and complete phrase out of my book and still sound like I have no idea what I’m talking about). I told him I understood.

Can I level with you? That wasn't exactly true. My French is not very good. My listening and reading comprehension are easily 10 times my ability to create my own sentences and say them and be understood. And when I say “listening comprehension,” it’s like a very static-y radio that lets you have wisps of phrases here and there supplemented by occasional disconnected words.

Someone in the doorway asked me--with a resonant voice that I envy--something in French. I thought he was asking me whether I was from New York. But I wasn’t sure; however, if he was, he was using real French rather than the schoolbook formal French that gets foisted off on students as if they would never be able to learn to read Flaubert if they learned colloquial French first (colloquial is harder to learn, by the way, not some lazy shortcut). Anyway, my mind went blank trying to think of the phrase to ask the guy to repeat his question. I gave up and told him that I didn’t speak French--which as soon as I said I regretted, because I wanted to say I didn’t speak French well (the phrase is only one word different in French as well as in English).

As the rain grew heavier and then lighter the rest of the audience milled with me outside the theatre. This audience looked more committed than audiences I have seen at Off Off Broadway shows in New York. For one thing it wasn’t demographically overweighted toward any particular group. There were trendy-looking young people, there were couples, there were people who came alone (I wasn't the only one), there were old people, I saw what I took to be a mother and her daughter, and so on. Yay culturally astute audiences who support the theatre and are rewarded with fine contemporary plays!

The house opened. The Théâtre du Marais is a small black-box theatre that seats about 45. There were 25 or 30 audience members--not a bad turnout on a rainy night for a contemporary play that costs €15.

Les Abîmés is about two couples, played by a marvelous cast in their early 20s to early 30s (Bénédicte Budan, Nicolas Martinez, Rébecca Azan, and Philippe Meimoun). I don’t know whether the play, written by Michaël Cohen, has been translated into English. The word “abîmé” means “hurt” or “damage” but it also has a meaning of--or at least a resonance with--“gulf” in the sense of a chasm. The couples are not complete emotional cripples, but they do have difficulty making contact across emotional chasms and this inability is played out in different ways. Bénédicte Budan is pretty and willowy and her scenes with Nicolas Martinez tend toward the tenuousness of human connection. Rébecca Azan makes her entrance marching onto the stage mid-tirade--and to her credit as an actress, the vulnerability of the character seeps through her tough façade. Her scenes with Philippe Meimoun and their tendency toward anger and high energy as a substitute for (and impediment to) intimacy illustrate a different way for a couple to not cross the emotional chasm.

A clip has been posted on YouTube:

Unfortunately that clip left out what I thought was most affecting action in the play, that of Bénédicte Budan placing Nicolas Martinez’s hand on her face to show him how to reach her.

Hurry if you want to see this play: It closes on May 13th.

Hot shows

Marx The Spot is going to be a great show. And I wouldn't mention it on my blog till after I reserved my ticket first:

Monday, April 23
8:00 p.m.
UCB Theatre
307 W. 26th St. (corner of 8th Ave. and W. 26th St.)

The cost is $5.

Meeting moment of the day

I work in a *very large* publishing company, with offices all over the U.S., as well as international offices. We are undergoing a companywide quality initiative.

Today was the *kickoff* of the initiative, and me and my department coworkers were among the 400 participants listening in via conference call to a meeting that was taking place in a Midwestern city that shall remain nameless. PowerPoints were provided to us via the Web to accompany the highly enthusiastic explanations of "six sigma," "change agents driving the culture," "working smarter, not harder," and so on.

Then a PowerPoint came up with a little animated graphic of a kicking karate guy, and we heard a woman on the conference call shrieking with laughter: "Look at that little karate guy! Ha! Ha! Ha! Jeeeezus! Ha! Ha! Ha! Holy shit!" and so on--we started laughing too.

"Could participants on the conference call please be sure their phones are on mute," the change agent a thousand miles away said, not acknowledging the utter ludicrousness of the tiny karate guy and his determined tiny kicks.

As I walk down the street . . .

. . . people point at me and say "There goes Crazy-Hair Tony!"

O.K., nobody does that. This is New York: I could walk for hours and not see anyone who has any idea who I am or who could possibly care about my hair. I had a slight trim 6 months ago, and things are very much untrimmed now. I wish my hair grew faster, because then I could have made up my mind faster about whether or not to cut it. A consensus is forming that I should.

So here's the question: Should I get my hair cut on Tuesday because I’m meeting an author and ought to make a better impression than I otherwise might (as opposed to, for example, giving the impression that I have not heard of this thing called a haircut and would not know where to get one) or should I get my hair cut in Paris--which will also make me look for a while like I got my hair cut in Paris?

I know most of the people who read this blog, and I invite you to leave a comment answering the foregoing question. If you don’t know me, you could always guess at an answer. Lord knows, I’ve taken surveys on other people’s blogs where I was just guessing.

À la recherche du pain perdu

I had dinner at the Mercer Kitchen with my two birthday friends last night. Somehow the people milling about the corner of Prince and Mercer and flowing in and out of the ground floor of the Mercer Hotel and down into the Mercer Kitchen all look like movie stars, record moguls, and models--yours truly excepted. And some of them probably actually are those things.

I started with the pea soup and for and entrée I had the barramundi--which I didn’t know was a fish until last night. I had only previously thought of it as a Lower East Side bar--whose name always struck me as implying a pun of something. The barramundi came with lentils. That was probably a healthy meal, in addition to being delicious.

The dessert menu listed “banana pain perdu.” Even with my limited French I can figure out that “banana pain” is “banana bread,” but perdu? Something idiomatic was going on (surely not “lost bread”). I turned to my friend R. G. Sand, who explained that “pain perdu” is what the French call French toast--yes, bread burning in hell.

So, R. G. Sand, the boulangeries of Paris await! (And, yes, kaseumin, I will be thinking of you.)

Strange . . .

. . . I just feel so happy today. No reason. I’m going to have carrot cake with my lunch--which is typical. I’m working like mad to get a week ahead at my job--because in 10 days I will be in Paris for a week. Tonight I’m having dinner with two friends to celebrate their birthdays (which are just a couple of days apart). And I feel great!

Where are they now: Brooks Brown

NPR, May 22, 1999

NPR, April 18, 2007