Notes on New York City V

In the museum, people move with false reverence. What we're affected by is not so much the painting, the sculpture, the historical or the avant-garde--it's the way we're all here together, but all separated by experience.

In front of my favourite Monet (and why should this be my favourite, this image of a cathedral I have never seen, cast in a light I have never experienced?), two women with their studying faces on. One (short dark hair, glasses, very still), hands crossed at chest; the other (longer dark hair, full of nervous energy), hands placed at the small of her back, bag worn across her chest and in front, as if she's afraid of something, wants to hold her possesions close. They seem to be looking for something in the painting, something, perhaps, in the cathedral itself. Sharing (or trying to recall) a memory that neither of them actually owns. I want to sit in front of the painting, as I do every time I am here (there is a bench placed before it as if just for me) but they distort my view, they may as well have stepped into the image itself, and I'm too fascinated by watching them watch it to pay any real attention to Rouen Cathedral.

Walker Evans' collection of postcards. Americana distilled. The streets were wider then; no, that's not right, they were only emptier. People against a patchwork backdrop: LA, Nashville, church spires, telephone wires. Shiny black automobiles, from the days when they could still be called "automobiles," still had some dignity.

Gauguin's Tahiti is enough to make anyone crave a warmer place. I photograph it in black and white to see what, when the image is bled of colour, is left. Still something, I'll tell you that much.

Irrisistible for the artist to make a sketch. One girl, on the floor, cross-legged, pony-tailed, makes a sketch of a lumpy, pasty female nude. Her breasts uneven (the nude, not the girl). A man, in flat cap and scarf, has brought his own folding chair, sits before a scultpure, balances his pad on his knees. People peer over his shoulder; the rendition is good, exact.

Back on the street, the Upper East Side, the sunlight is almost too much after the shadowed light, the light made for looking at things. We squint our way down Park Avenue. There's nothing to eat in the Upper East. What, I say, do rich people not need to eat? Do they, I ask, as we pass Gucci, Prada, Christian Dior, get their sustenence from expensive shoes and ugly handbags? Do they get off on knowing that we will find their wide-avenued world unpenetrable?

Probably, the Man says, to shut me up. I'm hungry, therefore irrational.

Notes on New York City IV

Nothing here is as it seems. The museum in black and white; it's not the paintings we care about, really, it's the people looking at them, isn't it? Karl Rove in Federal Hall, touring the Lincoln exhibit. (He has a crushing laugh, loud and ugly). The shop that proclaims to be "your 24 hour pot dealer" is really only an emporium for vases decorated with nipples. A barbershop proudly displays posters of boys wearing perfect bowl-cuts, men in mullets. Another features images of men in tight boxer shorts, dancing with their hair straighteners. Am I in a Dr. Seuss book? (Oh, the places--) Unnecessary quotation marks everywhere. How about this one: "free soup" with any sandwich! A plaque tells of a place called The Highway Leading to the Fortification Called Oyster Pasty. A friend takes us up the steps of a church; look closer, he says, so we lean towards the cathedral pillars and see a baby's head emerging from a vaginal cornstalk.

All the absurdities. A sign that tells us both to cross the street and not to cross the street at the same time; even the signals have become confused, here. The windows of Bergdorf Goodman's look as rich as any painting in the Met. I find a place outside Trinity Church where the Queen stood in the 1970s; Prince Philip, reads the inscription in the tile, stood nearby. Oh, no photographs, not here, says the woman selling posters at the flea market, and I retreat from her snarls and stumble into a rack of fur coats, brown and white, urban bears. On Madison Avenue, our first night in the city, cold and hungry, we look across the broad street (broad as an ocean) and see the Oxford Café. Seen from a certain angle, the statue of first world war soldiers on the eastern edge of Central Park becomes real; shadowy men pierce a wintry tree with freshly sharpened bayonets (do bayonets need to be sharpened?).

And I have a photograph to prove every single one of these things; but as one placard in the museum points out: "a photograph of an angel is either a miracle or a hoax." (Even the photograph in this post is merely a reflection).

Notes on New York City III

On the subway, rumbling under the map of Manhattan, somewhere or other beneath the dots, the lines and grids, the green space of parks, the skyscraper dreamscape, I read this:

"Cities are full of situations, sexually cunning people."

It is Don Delilo, White Noise. Five years ago or so, I tried to read White Noise. It was an assignment and I rallied against it with all my will; I threw my late-teenage energy, such as it was, into hating the novel, into finding it blasé, so over, so dated, so not something I could relate to. Now I read it in between subway stops. 81st street and 42nd street are the bookends for one chapter; 14th and 72nd frame another. I find myself transfixed. Why is this, my dad wants to know, why the change of heart? I say maybe it's because I failed to see the humour in it the first time around. I say maybe it's because I was too afraid to recognize certain anxieties as being mine, too; that maybe it's because, now that I openly own these anxieties, I can allow myself to enjoy the language.

Here's a situation. Bryant Park. It's fashion week but the only people outside the white tents are the nobodies, the people who work for the people who work for the people who do something related to fashion, and they're badly dressed, they look cold, so we skirt the park. On the library side we try to identify the buildings around us. Lit up; dizzying. A man in a baseball cap comes close, asking for spare change. My reaction is always to turn the other way. I become absorbed in a bench. Is it some sort of denial, or is it just smart? I can hear him talking to the Man, and the Man's two brothers, twins, nine years his junior.

"You take care of your sons," the beggar tells the Man. I don't know where this places me. And the funniest thing of all of course is that he does take care of them, as if they were his sons; and when he drops them off at the airport, leaves them there, he frets for their safety, their peace of mind.

***

"It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city," Delilo writes. "All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography."

I always liked the subway. I like it more now, and I have Delilo's staccato words in my head whenever I mount the steps. I have no way of knowing whether the sentences that start to form when the cold sunlight hits my face are mine or his; but they end up being mine, twisted into something that only I could say. That's all ownership is--and anyway, nobody owns anything here.

Notes on New York City II

The thing about jet lag is this: it doesn't just mess with your sense of time, it messes with your sense of place. This is a far more serious offense. Time is nebulous enough on its own that when, for a few days, we've totally lost track of it, when we're hours ahead of or behind ourselves, we feel that maybe it is, this secret force we live by, just asserting itself for awhile.

Place is different. There's nothing so off-putting as falling asleep in the late afternoon, knowing you're in Oxford, and waking up convinced you're in New York, and being therefore in a New York state of mind, and realizing only by the voices outside, crawling their way home after an evening at the pub, only by the smell of your house (a nice smell, a specific smell), that your body is still where you left it hours earlier to sleep.

I don't know how to count the hours, speaking of them. And I never know how to describe the time before a transatlantic flight: is it yesterday that we left, really, truly? I can hardly convince myself that this can be so--that yesterday, whatever that means, we woke up late, we had lattes and bagels, we took the subway to midtown, and then again back uptown, we ate a Korean lunch across the street from Columbia. And I ask this, not to be pedantic or navel-gazing, particularly, but because I genuinely do not know how to answer it: was it yesterday or today or some time in-between that we sat eating croissants at an altitude so high it is usually reserved for our hopes and dreams alone, that I wondered, because my mind had gone numb in the hours of no movement while we sped over an ocean, if the correct way to spell student was s-t-u-d-e-n-t or s-t-u-d-a-n-t? My copy of White Noise now bears proof of this struggle, but I don't know exactly when the struggle occured. Student. Studant. Student. If I spell it wrong, will they let me back into the country? (In the end, I spelled it right).

***

Photography is banned at the Institute of Contemporary Photography. Never mind irony, or paradox, or, indeed, copyright: there was a large part of me that wanted to turn round upon seeing this sign, back into the night wind, that wanted to say, even though admission was free, this isn't worth it. Because I've started to become convinced that the value of a gallery or a museum or an exhibition space has almost nothing to do with the art being viewed. It's about the art being created, the human traffic, the art that could potentially be created as a result. If I keep following this train of thought I realize of course that this is impossible, that only in a futile world could things be so: surely a passive audience is necessary, if for nothing but to stroke an artist's fragile ego, reassure him that his work has some value, at least in terms of time.

But time. One time, we took the metro, from the village to the upper west side. As we were underground, staring at our own feet, moving fast through a rare darkness, things happened outside. Rain fell. Night fell. Things we couldn't know until we re-emerged. Before we alighted at our station I looked at the bookmark in my novel, a thank-you note from a friend. Our Oxford address on it. I liked the way the address looked, the way the country (England) was not specified, the way our last names (Ward, Cansell, things that identify us in ways we can not change) were not specified. It seemed friendly, familiar, small in a city where nothing and everything is small.

Notes on New York City I

The last time I was here: two years ago, almost to the day.  A good friend and I meet for a drink this time, late in the evening, at the bar of the same hotel we stayed in then.  I am, as always, delighted by the circular.  Still there seems suddenly to be a strange disconnect between my life in Oxford and my being here.  I feel in-between.  This is not a place I've ever called home (Boston or California, say), but not a place completely new to me, either.  I am in my own country, but things that used to seem prosaic now delight me (lemon flavored iced tea, Smartfood, Banana Republic).  

We go to Times Square to feel small, at the mercy of flashing lights and a crowd with no beginning and no end, no direction, no understanding of time or place.  The wide boulevards of the Upper West Side seem like temporary home.  We all go to the Met, we all enter the same museum, but when we leave it's like we went to six different places and talk past each other.  My Met was in black and white, all modern, all about the people, not the art.  The Man's, I think, was Renaissance and photography.  Maybe this is a metaphor for the city, but I don't know yet.

In the hotel room which is hot and small and comfortable I am typing on a computer that is not mine thinking that sleep is what I crave, because by the rhythms of my body clock it is darkest morning.  I sleep well here, and heavy.  My dreams are infused by the sense of this city and the memory of other places.  Sometimes I think that my dreams, and not my thoughts, are the perfect manifestation of a home-like feeling, but when I wake up I can never recapture it in any terms but the most abstract.  

How to Pack for a Midwinter Vacation

1. Make sure ahead of time that your day is as full as possible (I'm talking 7 hours of class full)
2. Sleep in
3. Skip lunch; do a load of laundry instead so that all your clothes will still be wet by evening
4. Leave the house
5. 8 hours later, have two pints of Addlestone's on a semi-empty stomach
6. Head home and toss some stuff in a bag

Oddly enough, this may have turned out to be one of the smoothest packing jobs in my personal history. No wardrobe crises, no major omissions (like, oh shit, I forgot SHOES), no sitting on the suitcase to make it shut. Go us.

In other, more exciting news, the Man and I are headed to New York City for the week. If you live there, have lived there, are visiting, have visited--let me know. I want suggestions for groovy off-the-beaten-path things to do. We have wifi at our hotel so I'll blog as often as possible...

House of Words

I'm on a bit of a design kick these days. Last week the Man and I went for a lovely dinner with some friends, and then spent the entire ten minute walk home discussing how we would re-do their kitchen if it was ours. We didn't even get to the rest of the house.

I have also developed a--let's call it a "healthy interest"--in bookshelves. Anyone who's been to our house knows that the Man and I don't seem to believe in any form of decorating except to pile the books a little higher. But if we were a little wealthier, we could have some seriously cool bookshelves, as the following photos illustrate. Who needs art when you have these?

Having said that, the Man and I are cultivating a fondness for big, bold prints like these ones, discovered courtesy of this blog:
The more I think about it, we seem to be literally building a house of words (here I am, a writer, and here he is, a researcher). I think the visual manifestation of this started with this print, which the Man picked up from work (on the other side, it's actually a promo poster for Penguin):Our most recent acquisition is a fabulous little print from the lovely Badaude, who offered a wonderful books-for-artwork exchange last month. Since we are already the proud owners of the print she was offering, and since we are neighbors, we popped over one chilly evening for a glass of wine and a perusal through some really rather stunning stuff. I'm such a fan of this sort of old-fashioned bartering system, and, as the Man pointed out, there's something weighty about owning a piece of art that you have a personal tie to. (When he said this I suddenly remembered going to Santa Barbara with my parents as a child, to this artist's studio, and how my favorite paintings growing up were always the two we'd chosen on that day.)

It was a tough choice, but here's what we've ended up with from Badaude (the photo doesn't do the incredible green real justice). It's called "wake-up call" and the man in the middle is, the artist told us, actually Edgar Allen Poe, though she hadn't realized it at first. How apropriate:

Lost in Translation?

So today, my results for the first term of my masters came out. As a certifiably competitive-geeky-academic-type (I don't necessarily want to be like this, and I know it's silly, but I always, always want the A), this meant lots of excitement and anticipation for me this morning. The first thing I did when I got to work was log in to check my marks, and sure enough, there they were...

It was only then that I realized I have absolutely no concept of the UK grading system. The numbers were meaningless. What a cruel irony for poor little me. An online search fixed the problem, but it also reaffirmed something that I have a tendency to forget these days: I'm not in Kansas (or, rather, California) anymore.

*Update 12/2: in a brilliant twist of irony, I managed to spell a number of words incorrectly in this post. Luckily I am not being graded on my spelling, but still, I am dutifully blushing...

On Beer and Human Company: How the Rusty Bicycle is Becoming a Part of the Neighborhood

So, finally, here it is, a proper post on the Rusty Bicycle! The landlords were kind enough to have a chat with me this afternoon, so I got to find out more about what's going on, and as far as I can tell, it's good things. See below...in the meantime, I think I'm off for a quick pint down the road, and I suggest you do similar...


On the corner of Hurst Street and Magdalen Road, deep in the heart of East Oxford and nestled between the Cowley and Iffley roads, used to live the pub where cheer and warmth went to die: the Eagle Tavern. Now it’s the home of the Rusty Bicycle, a wood-floored gem run by a pair of young, friendly landlords. My interest in the pub is partly selfish (it’s a matter of yards from my own house), but mostly, if I’m honest, cultural.

Hilaire Belloc, a transplanted Frenchman with an appreciation for all things English, wrote this in 1948: “Change your hearts or you will lose your inns, and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.”

Perhaps it takes a foreigner to see the truest importance of pubs; and if that’s the case, I’m certainly qualified. In my California youth, the pub was the pinnacle of exoticism, required a stretch of the imagination just to envisage. It’s one of England’s most famous institutions, built on simple foundations (beer, human company) that have outlasted every recent age, outlived every war and every movement for centuries. And today it runs the risk of becoming sterile. I am not an expert on pubs, but even I can tell that there’s a sadness in the hollow bellies of mass-marketed establishments like O’Neill’s, Wetherspoons, The Slug and Lettuce, places so often replicated, and in so many different locales, that they have ceased to be anything but a holding pen for the tipsy and the more-than-tipsy. The contrast to the Rusty Bicycle, which is still only in its infancy but, as far as I can tell, in good hands, is striking.

Alex Arkell and Chris Manners are fresh out of university. They talked about running their own pub idly, but had other plans until a passing comment from Arkell’s father, the chairman of Swindon-based Arkell’s Brewery, set them on a short path that ended at the Rusty Bicycle.

The turnaround was almost shockingly quick—they’re still breathless talking about it. Manners was heading to Berlin, he says, his travel companion had already bought a ticket, and then, suddenly, he was a pub landlord. The Eagle, true to its reputation, wasn’t in good shape when he and Arkell arrived, but four skips and a lorry full of rubbish later, they had purged the building of mold, carpet, rotting meat, and a weary atmosphere.

The renovation, funded by Arkell’s, resulted in a complete transformation of the pub, which now features warm wood floors, a fireplace, bold wallpaper, and an assortment of furniture handpicked by the young landlords. The result is a pub with personality, enhanced by the photographs and drawings, all done by friends of the landlords.

Still, say Arkell and Manners, the Rusty Bicycle is a work in progress. When I meet with them on a chilly Tuesday afternoon, they are busy hanging a dartboard. They are also looking further ahead, awaiting installation of the internet so that they can offer customers free wifi, as well as a phone line so that they can accept cards (they currently have a cash-only policy). They look forward to opening during the daytime and being able to serve food, as well, and hope to eventually feature live music, open mic evenings, poetry, and quiz nights. They’re still finishing things off, they say, and don’t want to rush anything, but, as Manners points out, “it’s all about not getting stale.”

And so far success, it seems, is on their side: they have sold more alcohol in two weeks of business than the Eagle sold in an entire year. But it’s when they start talking about their clientele, however, that Arkell and Manners begin to reveal what makes them so different—and so refreshing—in a city, a nation, of pubs.

“We don’t want to alienate the local people,” says Manners, and in East Oxford, this can mean catering to a hugely diverse range of people, from students to young couples to established locals who have lived here for years. The landlords say their main goal is to make everyone feel welcome, and that they especially want to draw in people who are looking for a nice pub to settle into for the evening. This, I think, surely this is the point of the pub? And am thrilled to hear them affirm it.

Publicity for the Rusty Bicycle has been almost exclusively word-of-mouth—which in itself has tied the pub even more tightly to the community, who have, upon recommending it, at least some small sense of ownership of it.

This sense of interactivity is crucial, and Arkell and Manners are making the best of it. They tell me that just the other day, they had a customer come in with a photograph of a rusty bicycle, and that they’re going to frame it and put it up; another customer, they say, wants to partner with them to sell his sculptures, made of old bike parts. They may be young, and lacking in traditional experience, but if they do want to be not just a pub but a local pub, they are doing all the right things.

“A good local pub,” writes Paul Kingsnorth in his book Real England: The Battle Against the Bland, “serving good local beer, is the ultimate antidote to placeless globalisation. At its best, it can be the perfect representation of a rooted, human scale institution serving good-quality local produce, which results in good-quality local enjoyment.” The world is huge and times, they tell us, are dark; things that are good, and human-scaled, may be just about all we can take these days. And, anyway, as Kingsnorth writes, “It’s hard to know what more to ask for.”

The Rusty Bicycle 28 Magdalen Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX4 1RB
Opening Hours are Monday-Thursday 6 pm-11 pm, Friday and Saturday 6 pm-1 am, Sunday 6 pm-10:30 pm, but check back shortly as the pub plans on opening during the daytime soon!

And Some More Rusty Bicycle:

Where it is...
An article in the Oxford Mail
Arkell's

Another Late Night London Sky

Does it always rain in London? Probably not. But there's that cold, seeping into your bones, under the wool of your coat, settling beneath your skin. We stand on the corner under a droopy umbrella, wondering what the point of a droopy umbrella is. Later we sit in the heat of a friend's restaurant, listening to the table beside us. They say things like, I can tell a good wine just by smelling it, and, In Canada we just drink beer, and, But you know what, whenm you go back, you'll be all cultured. They are City people with a capital C, just slightly out of their depth, aiming just slightly too high, so enamored of their own image of themselves that they forget who they are, where they are, why they are.

Time passes more quickly in London than anywhere else I know. First it is just gone nine, and suddenly it is midnight, and then one. We splash down the street with our friend, who we haven't seen for too long (but none of us has the energy to say this), we wait at a bus stop, we go separate ways. Gliding down Oxford Street it occurs to me that there is nothing sadder, nothing that makes me feel smaller and more powerless against the force of the Big City, than glitzy shops all closed up for the night. A kind of desparation creeps into view; the Big City isn't so different after all, is it, I think; it's just as sleepy and just as shut as anywhere else in this in-betweeen hour.

But earlier, on the tube, leaning nonchalantly against the plastic in the car with my headphones and my heavy coat, going to meet The Man, I had remembered how well I like the city-feeling, the knowing feeling; I had felt again the happy chills as I skipped down the escalator and waited for a train, for there is nowhere in the world but a big city that you can feel so a part of the world, such an insider, whilst being above it, too, outside of it.

We wait for the bus home. Now the cold has entered our socks and shoes, our very beings; we huddle close together. For the first time in I don't know how long, we are not unhappy under this late night London sky, just cold, just waiting, just wanting, because it is late, to get back to the warmth of our house.

Er, it's Sunday, and...We're a Little Weird

So, it's Sunday, and it's snowing outside again, so this is what we're doing: sitting in the lounge sipping mulled wine, with a fire going, and Christmas songs playing in the background. No, we are not two months behind the rest of the world; just quirky. Here's proof, in conversation-form:

"Like Good King Wenceslas...he went down..."
"He didn't go down..."
"He did, he went down. On Stephen. And gave him a good feast."

Also, the response that George gives his significant other when she murmurs from the couch, "I'm tired": "I know, but this is, this is rock n' roll, this is the chance you take, going out with a rustic poet like me."

Remember: quirky.

Lessons from a Friday Night at Tesco

1. If you absolutely must wear leather-look leggings (and I don't condone this at all, but some of you out there seem to find them irrisistable), for the love of God, wear a thong. Or, since you're pretty much baring it all anyway, don't wear underpants at all. But what you mustn't, mustn't do, is wear panties that dig into the blubber on your bum, because everyone else can see it.
   
2. It's unfortunate, but painting your lips a paler colour than the rest of your face doesn't look pretty, or even edgy and cool; it just makes you look like a corpse.
3. There's only one sort of man who will wear a canary-yellow jumper over a collared shirt (with baggy cords, no less, and patent-leather shoes): the man who wants to be seen as more successful than he actually is. The canary colour is his way of being weekend-y and "playful"--his concession to fun whilst still trying to prove that he's too good at his job to ever really go off-duty. He's probably going to play golf tomorrow. In the same jumper. Avoid him.
4. If you're the manager of the store, don't hold an impromptu gathering of staff in front of the doors while students are queueing all the way to the back of the store trying to buy as much Jacob's Creek as they can before closing time. It makes it hard to leave. Or enter. And it kind of makes it look like you don't really care about your customers. Just saying.
   

Rusty Bicycle Update II

Another visit to the Rusty Bicycle tonight--a quick stop after a lovely evening. I keep promising to write more on this place and I will, but for now, a summary:

• We like. Very much. Warm, cosy, and exactly the pub you want on the end of your street.
• Some very trendy people; apparently some sort of message went out to the big-glasses American-apparel wearing Cowley road crowd.
• Therefore: good people-watching.
• But not sure how we feel about the cowboy-boot-wearing, Guiness-drinking Tibetan with no sense of social convention. I'm not usually very supportive of stifling and oft-arbitrary customs, but there are some that you just need, and this dude, he broke all the rules.
• The bike rack out front is getting lots of use. How very cool.

Turquoise

I'm wrapped up under the duvet, listening to Chopin. He wants to know if I'm okay.

Me: I'm fine, I'm just feeling...well, not blue, exactly, but...

Him: Turquoise.

Me: Yes.

(He gets me. He really does!)

Anxiety Eats You

A while ago, in the throes of some anxious moment or other, I told the Man that I wanted to stop taking my (low-grade) anti-anxiety medication, because (arbitrarily) I'd decided I'd been on it too long. And he asked me something that I had never, not once, asked myself, not in three years. That's great, he said. What have you done to actually reduce the anxiety?

So I pretended to be all offended for a little bit, and then admitted, with some chagrin, that I hadn't done anything. I'd started taking the medicine. It had worked. That was it.

"But I'm happier now than I was then," I said.
"That's not the point," he said.

So today, as I was walking home from work, I tried to pinpoint precisely what anxiety feels like, to me. I had to get beyond the physical manifestations. I think I wanted a metaphor. I figured if I could understand something greater than the fact that worrying over something made me dizzy, my heart race, I could also understand something greater than the relationship between medicine and symptoms.

What I came up with is this: it feels like something is eating you. That is, it's a bit like being in the belly of a beast, your thoughts held captive so that it's the beast's voice, not yours, in your head. That tingling in your toes is the nibbling of the great monster; the dizziness is the Alice-esque fall down the monster's throat and the disorientation after, the doubt, that's the dark cavern of a cruel belly.

Quite what this says about anything, I don't know, except that maybe I shouldn't try to overthink things, but there we are anyway.

Love is a Poor Man's Food*

The Man's been telling me about these guys for absolutely ages, but in classic fashion, I've ignored him up until now. I'm sure many of you will recognize this little dance: he finds something absolutely riveting online, and insists that I listen Right This Second while he reads whatever it is aloud, and I go on doing whatever it is I'm doing (trying to decide if my eyebrows are too thick or not, shopping for shoes online, etc). I say, "mm, uh-huh" and offer a few short, diplomatic spurts of laughter where possibly appropriate and then mumble variations on, "hah, wow, that's so cool, who knew?" and he knows full well that I'm not paying attention because I do the same thing to him, and he continues merrily doing whatever the male equivalent of shopping for shoes online is.

But recently, he implored me with more than the usual enthusiasm to sit down and look through these two blogs, and I acquiesced, because I could hear something really, deeply genuine in his voice, and boy am I glad I did. Here's why:

They're really cool! He's English and she's American. They met and fell in love in space of days. Shortly thereafter, he moved to New York, where they now live. Yes, I like their story for its parallels to our own, and I like the feeling I got when the Man said to me that it's nice to read about these people with a really amazing history and I got to say back, well, hey, we're not doing so badly either, are we?

But also, maybe more importantly, I like reading the words of two people who are unashamedly in love with each other. It's nice. It makes me feel all hopeful and warm inside. It's like the blogospheric (can I say that?) equivalent of playing with a very small, fluffy puppy, which maybe makes it sound more trite than it is. It's just somewhere between a favorite old book and a small animal, perhaps.

Part of me wants to say to myself: whoa, now, hang on. This is really, super creepy. You're basically peering across an entire ocean into the lives of two complete strangers, watching their every (virtual) move, and making judgments about them, projecting your own hopes and fears onto them. Stop being a stalker and GET A LIFE.

The other part of me says: oh, shut up already. Scruples suck, and bloggers don't write about their lives in the hopes that no one will ever read their words or identify with them as human beings (and if they do, wow did I get this whole blogging thing wrong).

It's the latter part that wins. You know what? It's nice reading something that makes me smile, and makes me feel normal(er), and also reaffirms my belief that human beings are actually really groovy sometimes.

****

It's also made me think, maybe I haven't explained enough about the Man and me. It's always just been that he's a presence in my life (a big one) and, you know, he's English so sometimes we have some really funny interactions. But the thing is that I wake up every morning, and then spend quite a lot of time throughout the day, thinking how lucky I am and how extraordinary it is that I literally found this man that I love at a pub, in Oxford, in a sea of people. I mean, what if it had been a Thursday night instead of a Wednesday night, and he'd been at football instead of the Turf Tavern? I like to think that we'd have met anyway, but life's funny like that--you never know.

It amazes me every day, every moment that I think about it. I don't think about it enough, these days. I used to think about it all the time because it came up all the time, when he was introducing me to his friends or I was telling mine about him. "How did you meet?" they'd want to know, and he used to say, "fortune of chance," and I settled for saying, "at a pub," with the wryest smile you've ever seen. It just seemed too implausible. And implausible, I suppose, it was. I mean (avert your eyes, Mom!), I've kissed other men I've met at bars, too (not a lot, but still), and I didn't fall in love with them.

But I did fall in love with him, and he, extraordinarily enough, fell in love with me. I've forgotten of late not how much we love each other--there's no ignoring that--but about how incredible the circumstances of our loving each other are. We love each other across cultural boundaries and in spite of the distances between our birthplaces. A year ago I wasn't sure how the hell I was going to make a move to England work but now here I am with a boring office job thinking how dull making photocopies is, as if this huge, huge thing hadn't happened in my life to allow me to even have the job in the first place.

It's not that I take things for granted; it's that, in the words of Pico Iyer, who I've been reading a lot of lately, I'm "beginning to domesticate the dream, to know my way around the marvel." Iyer was talking about a place, and I could just as easily say that it's how I feel about Oxford, too, but I think it's just as apt about love. I don't forget that I'm lucky, or that my situation is beautiful; I forget that my coming here to this place (this city, this state of in-love) was so full of chance and happenstance. It just seems so natural. And hearing Ray LaMontagne sing that "love is a poor man's food," when all the newspapers predict a decade of austerity and financial ruin, when my paychecks barely cover the bills and we can't imagine ever having the funds to do something drastic like, hey, buy our own house, only reaffirms how important this is.

*Ray LaMontagne, "Hold You in My Arms"

Notes on My Literary Love Affair with Alain de Botton

Here is how I first came to read Alain de Botton:

We were babysitting for some friends who have a small (or not-so-small) library in literally every room of their house, including the bathroom (reason one thousand-and-one why we love them). So there I was looking at the shelf when what should I see but Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel. I had never heard of it, but the title appealed to me. I picked it up and started reading (which, if you didn't know, and I didn't for quite some time, is a very dangerous exercise in a house with three small boys who are liable to burst into the room at any time while you've got your trousers around your feet and are deeply engrossed in some work of literature or another). Half an hour later I came downstairs and said to The Man, why have I never read this before, it's amazing? Who only said, I don't know.

I find him fascinating, and inspiring, on a number of levels. He published his first book when he was 23--proof, perhaps, that you can become a serious member of the literary community whilst still in your youth (and even whilst still chronicling it). The Art of Travel, moreover, represents what I consider to be one of the most perfect genres of writing: both artistic and practical, thought-provoking and real, full of precise sentences and invitations to the reader to interact with the words themselves.

And, a few weeks ago, I came across this. It's an interview with de Botton from 2002, just after The Art of Travel was published, and the author's answers to some of the questions filled me with so much excitement that I realized I'd developed a virtual crush on the man, whose work has been described, rather brilliantly, as "essayistic" (I'm starting to use this term to describe my own work, in the hopes that it catches on). The interviewer, Robert Birnbaum, says to de Botton: "I read Kiss & Tell. That was essayistic?" and de Botton responds:

"Well, yes...Really, it was a reflection on different ideas. The point was not the plot so much as the ideas in it...it wasn't totally straight fiction and I suppose I was just trying to move closer to what I felt was where my real interests lay. Which is in a non-fiction structure but which can allow for a certain amount of personal digressions and descriptions and some of the things that tend to belong in a novel."

I centered on this because when I stumbled on the interview, I was in the midst of trying to categorize my own book. A non-fiction structure which allows for "personal digressions and descriptions and some of the things that tend to belong in a novel": it's more complicated than "travel" or "memoir", but it's just about a perfect description.

Then I read this, in response to a question about the book's title (emphasis mine):

"It wasn't that I set out with the idea that I'm going to cover the theme of travel. What I wanted to do was to cover certain feelings that we have in certain places, the psychology of places. That could be the subtitle. I was looking around for a form in which to gather together these thoughts and it seemed to me that travel is one of the times that we experience different feelings about different places. So that's really the unity. I would get annoyed—well not annoyed—I'd think that people would miss the point if they said, "But you haven't covered packing." I hadn't covered the impact of modern travel on the environment. I'm not trying to cover all aspects of travel. I'm really looking at particular aspects of it."

Always an elegant and apt wordsmith, de Botton has put his finger on exactly what I want to write about: the psychology of places (or, in the case of the book, of one place in particular). I was practically giggling to myself by now. And the interview goes on, with Birnbaum asking, "What do you think of the assertion that all writing is travel writing?"

"There is a weird way in which modern publishing has put the word travel writing on anything that isn't a story and is really about places," de Botton responds. "The description of place has gone into travel writing. But travel writing goes into so many different strands."

Then Birnbaum asks something which I find unecessary and inane: "I was amused when you related the tiff you and your traveling companion had over two portions of creme de caramel in Barbados," he says. "It seemed strange that two adults would have such a conflict and that you would report it."

And de Botton says back: "I think writing the book I felt an anxiety, "Maybe this is just too weird? Too trivial? Too something or other?...I think I lost confidence in my own experiences and descriptions. I think Jennifer Egan is right that what is wrong with the book is that there isn't enough of me."

And I think he's right--not in there being something wrong with the book but in realising that he, as a person and not an author, would not detract from it; and, indeed, does not detract from it.

Of course, the interview is not all so smooth, or so deliciously focused on the (often misunderstood) literary portrayl of place. There are a lot of digs at Americans that I'd almost forgotten were so fashionable for awhile, especially in the wake of President Bush's reaction to September 11th. You do still get it, of course, but I've lived abroad just long enough to forget this; and obviously we're in the midst of a few glory months for America, when people are blaming those earlier feelings on poor national leadership, and are willing to make Americans seem human again.

Interestingly, though, if you read the interview closely you'll see that a lot of it is the interviewer leading de Botton towards a question of American filthiness, as here, when Birnbaum asks if there are "national characteristics about how people see place and the way they travel from place to place?" which is, I think, an excellent question. De Botton responds:

"I'm sure there are. I think there are a lot of similarities in one what one could generally call the western attitude to places...I'm sure there are some differences. Americans get less time to travel. They travel a lot more in their own country—their country is much more diverse."

To which Birnbaum responds, incongruously, "Americans don't want to meet any foreigners."

But masterfully, de Botton manages to divert the conversation beautifully near the end to explain that place is not as fragile as those afraid of globalisation think it is.

"I think generally the world is too big a place to succumb to this fear of homogeneity," he says, to which Birnbaum asks, "Really?"

"I mean this idea that the whole world is going to become the same," de Botton says. "We have two fears. One fear is that everything is the same and the other is that everything is completely different. In other countries people fry their children and make terrorists all the time: the twin poles. I think neither is true, completely. What's interesting as a European is to discover the regional quality of the United States."

"So we shouldn't fear the advance of McDonald's into Paris and other places?" says (the apprently very wary) Birnbaum.

"No," says de Botton, "these are very, very superficial differences. To take a tragic example, there was a McDonald's in Bosnia, many branches of McDonalds. Everyone was eating hamburgers but then picked up guns and killed each other. It doesn't mean that everyone thinks the same thing."

"So these places are not American outposts. They become localized," says Birnbaum, still unwiling to relent.

"Exactly. When Indian singers do take-offs of Madonna suddenly Madonna songs become Indian songs, in a way. You get these wonderful transmutations. This has always happened through out history," says de Botton.

In terms far less eloquent (and far more outdated): word.

Something to Remember

Excerpted from Kate Saunders' review of How Not to Write a Novel by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark, The Observer, 1 February 2009:

"We will at this point remind you that the purpose of writing is communication...the reader should be able to discover what it is you are saying without having to call and ask you in person."

Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you thank you.

That is all.