UFO Sightings

Betsy often laughs at me. Most notably, she laughed at me as I limped in late to our Dante lecture, bleeding heavily from my knee, hands, and foot after a mysterious shift in the balance of the universe caused me to fall up some stairs on my way to class.

More benignly and less friendship-threatening-ly, she finds hilarious my passing interest in conspiracy theories, cryptozoology, and ufo-ology. Incidentally, I did not make up inter-demensional string beings. Also, if you are a kindred spirit, you can sign a petition to various and sundry governments to protect Sasquatch.  Protect our wildlife. 

I'll admit it, I don't actually believe in bigfoot or aliens, but I wish I did. I am cursed with non-belief. Lo, I have been a reluctant skeptic from my mother's womb and a doubter of mystery. Sometimes I psych myself out a little bit just so I can imagine what it would be like to actually be a kook who hunts Sasquatch. Sometimes when I walk out in the woods, I try to imagine that behind every odd crack and crunch crouches an undiscovered 200lb primate. Sometimes I've amused myself with bogies of at least six impossible beasties before breakfast. This is easy when you actually live in a cabin like I do. (Last night I woke up at 4am with what sounded like an explosion of all my pots and pans in the kitchen. A raccoon? Impossible. The Flatwoods monster has probably moved East.)

Some nights, however, I don't have to make things up. 

My third night on the farm, the crescendo of what sounded like a John-Cage-orchestrated rip in the Earth's atmosphere took several years off my life. Now, I wander around in the misty woods when I pop awake in the early morning before dawn without a thought. When I first got here, I confess that I huddled on my narrow cot as a terrifying plague of June bugs pinged against my window screens in a hellish rain, little limbs outstretched like angels of death. I tried to take my mind of the rustle of moth wings against the glass by madly flipping pages of Maximus the Confessor (note to past self: Eastern theology does not make good escapist literature). Things would walk past my cabin, sniffing, and my heart would go into heart-attack-inducing palpitations. 

That third night, however, I heard something different, like the wind rending and screaming overhead, and so shrill I could feel it rip through me as well. 

I was pretty damn sure I was going to be abducted by aliens and some confused state trooper with a heavy Appalachian accent would find me wandering along the high way fifty miles from Floyd in a week, a wreck of a woman with mad wide eyes and several organs missing. Hollywood would make a movie about it.

Turns out that it is a government conspiracy--a conspiracy to prevent the residents of Floyd County from sleeping. The Air Force sends trainees right over our heads at all hours of the day and night. Well, they're not supposed to fly after dark, but they fly so low at 11am sometimes that you'd swear you lived in a war zone. 

I'll admit I love watching them fly in the daytime: they move so impossibly fast. Just think, when you get in your car and zip down the highway to the grocery store, you're going faster than anyone had ever gone before (unless perhaps they fell off a cliff), say, 70 years ago. Ever. Now watch the jet go overhead and let your jaw drop a little. I once watched a video taken from the cockpit of the first man to break the speed of sound. He died. The memory of that spinning camera and the silence of the cockpit I still find chilling. Just the other week one of those Air Force planes went down in fire a few miles from here. 

Whenever their scream startles me at night now I like to distract myself from my irrational sweaty-palmed fear with the thought that they're shepherding an alien ambassador to the secret interplanetary embassy here in southwestern, VA. It's almost as good as being abducted myself--except without the movie story rights.

(Also literally seconds ago I heard a very loud and mysterious explosion. This happens about once every two weeks. Explanations?)

Fast Facts About New York (Pt. 1 of a series)

You will never kill all the mice in your house. You will try everything, everything will work, and they still will never all be dead. Unless you don't have any in the first place, in which case, find some wood and go knock on it real fast. Or just sit tight, because they're coming, especially if you live in Harlem, where everyone is out of mouse traps (this is not a joke; this is a fact).

You know how Feivel never dies? Real mice don't ever die either. They just come back as other mice. 

My Life in Books Right Now

Oh hey, this is the part of the blog where I list the books I'm reading and try to tread the fine line between pretentiousness and asininery (and hey, sometimes you fail in the first sentence -- lawl, as the kids say these days) without boring both of you to death. Let's see how it goes, shall we?

Anyways. Books. Here's what I'm reading:

-The Seven Storey Mountain -- I'm supposed to be reading this with friends from school and I so totally am, but I don't know where my copy is right this second, so that's all I have to say about that.

-The Power and the Glory -- I can't even explain how good this book is. I don't want to write about it because I'm worried I'll jinx it, but it's too good not to talk about. I read it as a senior in high school and was absolutely stunned, and I'm happy (but not surprised) to say it stands up to re-reading (unlike some other books I read in high school.) Greene writes beautiful sentences, his story gets under your skin, his characters -- from the half-caste to the pious woman in the prison to the atheist 13-year-old to the whisky priest himself -- throb right off the page, and he's heavy-handed enough that you can't escape what he's saying (like that hate is a failure of imagination, or that tiny sins can be deadlier than huge ones, or that you can't outrun the devastating speed of the mercy of God) but so artful you can't get it out of your head.

-1Q84 -- I'm kind of on the fence about this one, but I can't stop reading it because it's insanely immersive; I can't remember the last time I got this wrapped up in a story, so Murakami must be doing something right. It's in translation, so some of the sentences are kind of clunky (I might start a feature called Ugly Sentences in Murakami, time will tell), but I've almost missed my stop on the subway multiple times because I've been so lost in it. Reading it is, honestly, therapeutic -- it makes me completely forget I'm in New York, which is impressive. And it's probably even worth the shoulder problems I'm getting from carrying it everywhere.

-The Sportswriter -- I started reading this because I left 1Q84 at the office over the weekend and needed something to read and couldn't find Power and the Glory. I'd almost forgotten how good Richard Ford is, which is a scary thought. He takes the boring life of a middle-aged divorcee living in a made-up town in New Jersey and makes it the most absorbing thing you can think of. He's crazy. Plus anyone with a head as big as his has to pump out good stuff.

And I'm always kind of perusing St. Bernard of Clairveaux's sermons on the Song of Songs because they are beautiful and I love them.

You know, this is kind of frustrating. I feel like I'm great at explaining why I hate books, but as soon as I find one I like, I turn into some sort of cotton-mouthed fangirl. Whatever, make of it what you will. I'll be reading Greene until I die, and you should too.

It's...Musical Friday!

Pardon the lack of alliteration. I would've waited until Monday, but I hate waiting. So "Musical Friday" it is. 

As a follow-up to my last post about jazz, I'd like to post a song I frequently forget about and then remember that I love it and loop it until everyone else is sick of it: Blossom Dearie's version of "Someone to Watch Over Me." 

Blossom Dearie is awesome. First of all, it's the name. How do you get a name like that?? (If you find out it's just a stage name, please don't tell me. I've been avoiding knowing anything at all about her for about 8 years now so I can live in this delusional world where parents actually name their future-famous children "Blossom Dearie").

Second of all, it's her voice--which is weird. Very lispy and obnoxious. Actually I hated her for about a year, but she kept appearing on my jazz Pandora station in high school and I developed this bizarre love/hate relationship with her. I finally surrendered: Her diction is perfect; her interpretations are stunningly crisp and spot on with this fantastic seductive innocence she cultivates. "Someone to Watch Over Me" is one of her best songs, in my opinion. While I was in NYC with the girls, I heard a few other covers, among them Amy Winehouse's--and I just didn't buy them. I mean, you just don't believe that Amy Winehouse wants to be watched over (pardon me for speaking ill of the dead). She's too brassy, too brash. You just don't don't buy her schtick there, you know?

So this weekend, tun on some Blossom Dearie, imagine you're in some metropolitan, posh flat drinking a dry white wine--or possibly a great champagne, because you're extravagant--all by yourself while a summer wind blows in the window and curls around your cheek, promising cooler weather.

As for me, I'm off to pick blueberries. Cheers.

Jazz

When I was sixteen, my father gave me a ripped copy of Getz/Gilberto and I fell in love.  This week "The Girl from Ipanema" is turning 50, NPR informs me as stomp up to my little kitchen and punch on my Sony boombox. I have to adjust the antenna because some irresponsible past apprentice broke off the end, and the silly contraption likes to gargle and waver as I walk to and fro making dinner. I'm flattered that it sounds clearest when I'm standing near. Yes, I'm so starved for attention, living by myself on the fringe of the pinewoods, that I anthropomorphize an archaic hunk of electrical wiring and plastic. I call him Phil. We have a great time.

But I digress.

My father, as I said, gave me a copy of the CD, title scrawled in Sharpie when I was sixteen and even though I know it's one of the best selling jazz albums ever and you're a total philistine if you don't know "Girl from Ipanema," I still feel like it's my little secret when I slip it into the stereo and pad around kitchen like I did when I was sixteen and enamored with Chinese cuisine and jazz. In an alternate universe, I would either be a theoretical physicist of a jazz singer. In this universe, an unfortunate lack of mathematic or vocal talent has limited me to the world of the written word. At sixteen, I fell in love with jazz for its paradoxical boldness and interiority, its smallness, its nuance, its texture, its brassy and seductive keen. It's my personal soundtrack to solitude. "The Girl from Ipanema" by Getz and Gilberto does all of that with a flair which may be matched but certainly not surpassed, and as I listen to it crackle through my radio tonight, it still holds me.

At its best, jazz a celebration of the mundane and in a world of high def, I still think its heard best of the cantankerous crackle of a jacked-up radio, the way I'd listen to it during late-night car trips home, dizzy with sleep and the heavy stutter of the radio host--That was...um...*shuffle shuffle*...Astrud Gilberto on vocals. That voice crooned my eyes shut at six, and then sixteen, and now again at twenty because even though I have the CDs (yes, I know: I'm a technological cavewoman) and I can have whatever music I want instantly, I still love the radio best.

Here on the farm, I wake up to the news, I eat lunch to "Afternoon Classics," and I make dinner to the tune of "Evening Edition" and the growl of Terry Gross. Some days I can count the number of words I speak on my fingers (maybe throw in a couple of toes), but my Sony boombox is a faithful and chatty companion. Sometimes I get annoyed with it because I flip it on halfway through my favorite show and my little PowerBook G4 won't play podcasts so I know I'll never hear the beginning of that fascinating interview with some film director. But I like to think that you can have a conversation with a radio precisely because you can't control it. It plays what it plays, and you can switch stations but the archipelago of clarity between the static waves is limited. Limitation is the space where love happens.

What I'm Reading: Jhumpa Lahiri

I was hot, but not in a sexy way. I was tired, and also grumpy. I wanted a milkshake. Instead of luxuriating in the burger joint across the way, however, I found myself stomping up and down the aisle ways of The Strand. Poor mortal, I am, alas, but human, and in the great battle between appetite and intellect too often the gut wins.

The Strand: that great New York monument to cheap books, a reader's paradise, the book glutton's delight. And all I wanted was a chocolate milkshake.

Instead, I discovered Jhumpa Lahiri.

I had first heard of her while interning at Mars Hill Audio three summers ago, but her name languished in a dark file titled "Books to Read" which I never open on principle; the sheer number of titles and authors is more depressing than impressive and I'm afraid of being too intimidated to ever flip open a title page again.

But as I looked over copies of Aristotle's Ethics, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (more on Marquez some other night), and dozens of other cheery covers stacked in intelligent little piles on the browsing tables, this book caught my eye:

In a fit of impulsiveness, I tossed it in my $1 red Strand totebag and marched up to the counter. 

I started reading it last night and I finished it today. Perhaps the highest praise I can give Lahiri's enchanting collection of stories is that it's the first book I've read in two sittings in a long time. 

Published in 1999, Interpreter of Maladies was Jhumpa Lahiri's first book and won her a Pulitzer. The back cover tells me that Lahiri "was born in 1967 in London, England and raised in Rhode Island." Most of her stories unravel the mundane and colorful difficulties of life as an Indian ex-pat, usually from a domestic point of view. While her prose style isn't exactly the brightest I've stumbled across, her characters and their little dilemmas are engrossing. It's a quick book; the plots are sparse and snappy, sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, but always thought-provoking. 

I give Interpreter of Maladies 4 stars out of 5 as a great summer read. If you're looking for something to read on the subway or beach this July, check out Jhumpa Lahiri and tell me what you think. 

We're back

Sorry for the silence. For the last week, we, the Writinators, have been too busy enjoying each other's company in person to bother with the interwebs. For me, it was a great hiatus from farm life--though around 5am every morning, the suffocating heat of Harlem blowing into Betsy's unairconditioned apartment made me remember fondly my little cabin on the hill and the cool night breeze which never fails to tickle down from the high country of Floyd County.

But the heat aside, my first trip to New York was fantastic. Some highlights in no particular order:

• Camping out like a hobo behind an elementary school hiding from the sun and waiting for the megabus
• The Hungarian Bakery two blocks from Betsy's apartment at which I almost made myself sick on baklava and rum balls. #noregrets
• Late-night walks down to Fancy Fare or Fine Fare or whatever the corner grocery was called, watching Harlemites livin' up their 4th of July holidays with sidewalk fireworks and carrying on life as usual over the pound of the boombox plugged into a street lamp.
• Spending our 4th at the Apollo Theater Amateur Night in Harlem where the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Michael Jackson were discovered. 
• We also saw some fantastic urban art:

Spending time together was the best part, of course.