Taxes

This is something of a follow-up to the previous post about Sarah Palin. This is what I mean when I say it pisses me off that Republicans play the populist card. Sarah Palin says in her speech that Obama wants to raise taxes--your taxes, which presumably means the taxes of the average American. McCain made a similar claim during the Saddleback meeting, in the same answer that included his famous "I dunno. Five million dollars?" quip. Obama wants to raise taxes, the Republicans want to lower them.

Now read this comparison of each of their tax plans from the Washington Post. As far as I can see, the only taxes Obama is raising is for the upper 1.1% income bracket. The rest of us actually get a tax break. For the bottom sixty percent, where I fall and so does practically every person I've ever known, it averages out to about a 3.8% decrease. Now, McCain is lowering taxes for everybody--that's true--but the upper 1.1% gets an average 3.9% decrease, while the lower sixty will enjoy less than half a percent decrease in our taxes.

To me, this is a no-brainer. I've said this before. You tax the rich more heavily than the poor because they have more to give. When you're doling out tax breaks, you give it to people who are struggling before you give it to people have more than they need. You help people who can't get their kids through college before you help people who have enough money to send their kids to private preschools.

PS

I just read my friend Bonnie's blog, and I think she's pretty spot-on about who Sarah Palin reminds me of:











Yep. Spot on. Beyond just the looks, the comparison's are pretty impressive. I mean, except for the tax plans.

RNC

A friend of mine in the program had mentioned he thought Sarah Palin's speech was excellent, so I thought I'd give it a listen. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, partially because she stays away from the really crazy shit she believes in (like teaching creationism in schools) or her hypocritical stance on abortion (she says her daughter's pregnancy was a personal choice within her family, so why shouldn't other families get that same choice?) or her disturbingly unempathetic stance on gay marriage (she's against it, surprise surprise, but claims she has gay friends; so, I guess that's just a big fuck you to them, huh?), but it still nauseates me every time candidates get up and play their "Aw shucks, I guess I'm just a small-town girl/boy with nothing on my mind but your best interests...that's why I want to drill for oil." Yeah. Never mind that Palin has ties to oil companies and, like Papa Cheney before her, has only to gain financially from drilling. She's only thinking of your happiness, completely unbiased.

Beyond that, the overall tone of her quips against Obama were just more of the same snide, mean-spirited jabs that the Republicans have fallen back on for the last eight years. It's the same sort of shit that people who like Anne Coulter (ugh...sorry...that phrase just made me throw up in my mouth a little) consider a witty barb. But it isn't wit. It's snide. It's condescending, both to her opponent and her audience. It plays on the worst, most petty tendencies in the American people. In short, it tells me Sarah Palin is the same kind of cynical, self-serving politician I've seen sitting in office for the last eight years.

It's time we were done with that. It's time we replaced these bastards with people who see governing our country as something really serious, people who respect government and, more importantly, who respect us enough to say "You are bigger than this." I want someone in my government who will call on us to be more than petty and self-serving, who believes we are big enough to come together as a society. That, make no mistake, isn't McCain. It isn't Palin.

Anyway, here's the speech, both text and video. Enjoy.

Well, this is Just Unacceptable

I realize this blog has been silent for a long while, and it'll probably go back to being that way soon. Sorry for the tease. Suffice to say, I'm busy.

What's rousted me out of silence is the news that, three journalists for Democracy Now! were among the protesters arrested on the first day of the RNC. The show's producers, Nicole Salazar and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, were arrested during a protest while trying to leave the area after police told them to do so (read this transcript of the event and watch the video; she clearly identifies herself as press). The show's host, Amy Goodman, was arrested shortly after while trying to find out from police the status of her two coleagues. Or to put it more simply, the three were arrested while trying to gather news. Seriously. Watch the videos and tell me if there's anything on them that seems arrestable or worthy of charging with felony riot charges (which is what her producers were charged with...for running backward...while crying out, "Press! Press!").

What gets me is not just the arrest itself, which, after the last eight years actually doesn't surprise me (and how sad is that?). What gets me is the police chief's response to the reasons why the incident happened:

The chief said that he'd yet to review the specifics of Monday's incident. But he said that police seek to give ample warning before breaking up what they deem as unlawful assembly, and that if journalists don't clear the scene, he added, it is difficult for officers to look at protesters and reporters and "to make those kinds of fine distinctions."

Fine distinctions? The press are easily identifiable because they wear press passes, which are big dangly name tags with the word "press" written out in big block letters for all to see. Often, they're brightly colored. Not exactly what I'd call a fine distinction to make. And if that wasn't enough, the producer kept announcing that she's press, both during the arrest and after, while she was sitting and awaiting a medic. So, no. That's not an acceptable reason for nabbing someone and throwing them in jail and charging them with felony riot charges. Not at all.

The Swelter

A couple of days ago, I was down the shore visiting my father. We had this lovely weather for three days. Seventy degrees, a nice ocean breeze blowing inland. It was so beautiful that I took a bike ride to celebrate. A nice long one. Ten miles or so. Late Saturday night, the swelter blew in. I woke up in the middle of the night sticking to my sheets. The air had gone still and the ceiling fan wasn't doing a thing to stir it up. I spent the rest of the night rolling over and over, looking for the comfortable sleeping position. Around eight, I finally gave up on sleep.

Summer is officially here. Not in an astrological sense, of course--solstice is still a couple of weeks off--but damn the stars, the sweltering heat outside confirms it. My insomnia confirms it. With it, all of my productivity has completely evaporated. Hell, I'm easily distracted in the best of weather. In heat like this, I can barely put together two coherent sentences without staring off into the distance and wondering how on earth I'm going to get out of here. Seriously, it's taking multiple cups of coffee, a mind-focusing playlist, and 1000 BTUs of air conditioning just to finish this paragraph.

Still, I've been keeping busy. As the semester came to an end, I slowly started gathering all of the books I wanted to read last year, but couldn't, since I was reading other books for classes. Over the course of a couple of months, what started as one or two books I wanted to read has grown to a stack of books up to my hips, which I can't possibly hope to finish before the year's out, let alone the summer (one of my students this semester told me he reads a book a day during the summer...I'm lucky if I can finish one in a week). I'm whittling my way through it, hoping I'll manage to make at least a dent before I have to start teaching in August. I just finished reading The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, an excellent and eclectic collection edited by my chair, Ben Marcus. Though not everything in it is really my cup of tea, there was not a single story that didn't grab me and keep my attention all the way through. Currently I'm reading Paul LaFarge's Haussmann, which is a fun read and full of all sorts of nerdy references about Paris.

In addition, I took a position as one of the reading staff for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, which is Columbia's journal of literature. And art. I've basically been reading slush, which is the unsolicited manuscripts the journal receives from various aspiring writers. People like me, essentially, who aren't well-known enough that magazines ask for their work. Some of the stories are really excellent, but for the most part the stuff we read is really awful. Actually, awful isn't the word. Boring is the word. Earlie this year, Stephen King published an essay titled "What Ails the Short Story," which basically sums up my feelings while I read slush. The whole article is here, but the part that I'm thinking of goes like this:

Last year, I read scores of stories that felt ... not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers.

It's the last one that keeps getting me. I think ninety percent of the stories I've rejected, it was because they felt like the author was playing it too safe. They're not bad stories, exactly--in fact, some have been absolutely functional pieces--but they don't do anything to define their own space in the literary canon. Either the author's voice is too weak to drown out the rest of the world and induce (as Ben Marcus would have it) the literary hallucination that makes us feel really immersed in a good story, or the subject is too uninteresting to keep me enthralled, but the end result is the same. A story that's easy to put down and forget about. The problems these stories have are, I should say, problems I see in my own work. Timidness. Over-explanation. An overly soft touch. It comes from wanting to be liked. To seem nice. Pleasant.

More and more as I read, both in my every day reading and my slush reading, I find myself looking for stories that are just slightly flawed. Not so badly that they can't keep it together, but just enough that what I'm looking at doesn't feel too constructed by human hands. I look for the glorious messes, the stories where I can see that the author isn't entirely in control but is reaching a little outside of their own grasp. These are the stories that grab my attention and keep it. The ones I want to publish right away before anyone else gets the privilege.

And that's about it for now. I'm planning to spend the summer writing, and hopefully you'll see this blog updated more regularly. I'm a little sad I missed out on the primary season, but really, did the country need another uninformed political blogger? I didn't think so, either. All the same, go Obama, and that's the last I'll say on the subject.

I Turned 3O and All I Blogged Was this Lousy Cartoon

Well, at least I'm not this far gone.

(Yeah, I know, this is a lame post, but I'm busy. Much to blog about later.)

New Stories

I've put up a couple of new stories on the Stories I Tell blog. This semester, I'm taking two seminars that are fairly heavy on writing, one with David Plante and the other with Kelly Link. The Plante seminar is focusing heavily on a structuralist view of writing, the idea of which is that you can analyze writing from a less organic place by examining the simple facts of the events in a story. Which sounds really dull when I write it out, but is actually a wonderful and freeing way of approaching a piece. Last week, we created fabulas--time index grids outlining the basic facts of a piece--and then traded the fabulas with other people to see what would come of it when they fleshed it out. The first story, "Birds and Water," is the result of my fleshing out. I should give credit to Ramon Isao, who wrote the initial fabula this story is based on; he really did the heavy lifting with this piece. All the other stuff is just me having fun.

The second piece, "Cyril Shot: Private Eyes" is for my Kelly Link seminar, which is focusing on genre fiction pieces, specifically about transformation. Earlier in the semester, we read an essay by Samuel Delaney that talks about the various signifiers readers pick up when they read a piece of fiction, and the way that genre affects our interpretation of various sentences. He uses the example that the sentences, "Her world exploded," and, "He turned on his left side," take on entirely different meanings for a reader of science fiction than they do for someone reading more mimetic fiction. In response to these ideas, I decided to create a piece around the idea of eyes and seeing. Hence, Cyril Shot. It's much more genre than I normally work in, but I like it, and it's not bad for a day's work.

Enjoy.

Also, as an aside, my long-time friend, Miranda has put up a blog. Check it out.

Experimental Skillet

One of my more interesting classes this semester is a course in experimental writing with David Plante. The original title for the class was "The Short Story," but basically every class David Plante teaches that isn't workshop becomes experimental writing. Which is lovely, actually, since it's had me writing a great deal without worrying too much about what I'm saying.

Anyway, one of the major experiments we're working on this semester is trying to find a way to use the computer to expand our writing. We're trying to see what the computer does that can't be done on a typewriter. I decided at an early point in the semester to play with using the computer to create an interactive environment, something that is more three dimensional than what you experience on the page alone. So, I expanded my skillet story and came up with this:

Every night, as was his custom, my father would come to the kitchen before my mother made dinner, pull a copper skillet out from behind all of the other pans and wave it over the other kitchenware in an act of ritual blessing. The food processor, the stick blender, the metal and rubber spatulas, the Japanese knives that promised to julienne a tin can should we ever choose to include one in a salad, and so forth. Every cooking implement we had, dad would wave the skillet back and forth above them, his lips moving in slow, silent prayer. He was not religious in any other way, my father. He was, in fact, an atheist, and he would happily expound to anyone who would listen on the ills of needless ritual. This skillet, however, he held up as a sacred object, and by the sheer act of waving it over the other cooking tools, he believed that the other tools in the kitchen would be inspired to the greatness this skillet knew.

Enjoy. If I pulled it off, you should have felt, while you read it, as if you were walking down a hallway, opening doors and peering in as you went.

And Here We Go Again

The semester officially started this week, and it looks like I'm going to have a good one this time around. Workshop, especially, looks like it's going to be good. Before we got started on the semester, the teacher, Jaime Manrique, had us all submit a few pages of work to each other, just to break the ice. The stories people submitted were wonderful. Engaging and passionate. Excellent work. It's nice to look forward to reading what people turn in. Jaime, himself, has a reputation for being a tough critic, but he's fair and very supportive.

I'm also taking Yiddish this semester, which I almost dropped after the first class. I took it, thinking that since it was similar to German, I might have a good chance at picking it up quickly. Which is true on the speaking end of things. Unfortunately, on the writing end, Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet, something I did not know when I signed up for the class. Being the big Goy that I am, I've never read Hebrew, except when it's transliterated. I decided to stick through it, though. I'm not sure I'll ever get the hang of the alphabet, but that's fine. I'm not looking to write for the Forward, just to be able to order at a deli. So I should be OK. Also a friend of mine in the program is taking a bilingually taught Yiddish literature class, so she and I have agreed to start meeting to help each other. I'll help her with the Yiddish lit, and she'll help me reinforce what I learn.

For those of you wishing to pick up a bit of Yiddish on your own, may I recommend starting with the Bulbes song. Mmmmm...bulbes an Zuntik!

Communist Sympathizing Little Punks

My eyes are still pink. At night, I can hear them muttering their Marxist propaganda to my ears and my nose and my lips, trying to subvert the rest of my face to their insidious empire's cause. I've been inside for three days in an attempt to contain the situation, lest a plague of antibourgeois body parts rise through the city. Can't have that. It starts with the eyes. Always the eyes.

Tomorrow I break quarantine. I'm done. I've been inside for three days straight watching movies and playing interactive fiction on my computer. I don't think I can do it anymore. I need fresh air and fresh food and fresh vantage points. Literal fresh vantage points. I've been staring at the same four white walls so long I'm starting to think I live in an asylum.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Catherine Lacey...

A little earlier this week, I received a comment from my friend Lacey that she has a blog and has linked mine to hers, and I kind of thought, "I'll give her a little while to get the thing off its feet before I put it up." That was four days ago, and her blog has not only gotten off its feet, but has somehow learned to run before it learned to walk. That's not including the two other blogs she has up. Wow.

Anyway, she's a good writer and a lovely person (and apparently quite the cook/arts-and-crafts maker), so check out her blog. Lord knows it's more active than this one.

Oh, and she's funny, too. Did I mention she's funny?

Pink

When I woke up this morning, I was somewhat alarmed to find I couldn't open my left eye along with my right. As I suspect is true with most of you, it is my normal routine to open both at once, but today, my right eye opened, while my left remained shut, cemented in place by unpleasant goop that had solidified to my eyelashes in the night. Unpleasant goop is, luckily, water soluble, so I was able to steam my eye open in the shower, a little like prying a stamp off of a letter. When I looked at the eye underneath it, I found it was pink, which, it turns out, is the first sign of pink eye. Yep. I'm a walking conjunctivitis bomb just waiting to induce plague.

In the meantime, I've been working on a couple of short stories for a friendly bet I have going with a friend from the program. Since neither of us had been writing over the break, we agreed on New Year's Eve to write a story in a week and then hand it to the other. Didn't have to be a good story or a long story or anything. It just had to be a story. So I wrote a story about a skillet. Here it is.

Skillet

Every night before my mother made dinner, my father would pull a copper skillet out from behind all of the other pans and wave it over the other kitchenware in an act of ritual blessing. The food processor, the stick blender, the metal and rubber spatulas, the Japanese knives that promised to julienne a tin can should we ever choose to include one in a salad, and so forth. Every cooking implement we had, dad would wave the skillet back and forth above them, his lips moving in slow, silent prayer. My father wasn’t religious in any other way. He loathed church and aspired to atheism (though I think a smidgeon of belief still lingered from his Catholic upbringing), but this one thing he would do with ritual exactness at the same time and in the same way every night.

The skillet was an ancient thing, thin looking and dented all over from years of use. If you glanced at it in a junk shop, this skillet, you’d take it for junk destined for the melting pits. But its weight in your hands had presence, the way a stone left by a glacier has presence on a landscape. The skillet was handed down from man to man on my father’s side for ten generations, and possibly more. It had been hammered out of a single chunk of copper that one of our relatives had dug from the ground and purified in his own smelting pot. The date hammered onto the underside of the pot read 12 February, 1706, and next to it, faded almost to the point of illegibility was his name, Lazar. You could just make it out by tracing your finger along the bottom. Since then, the skillet had passed from hand to hand in our family.

There were a thousand stories surrounding this skillet. The family favorite—not mine, but the family’s—was that the skillet had cooked Marie Antoinette’s last meal, a plate of savory crepes, when she was held away from the mob at the Tuileries. I always thought that story smacked of a tall tale. How would this skillet have escaped the mob in Lazar’s possession or his son’s or grandson’s after the revolution? And anyway, who the hell was Marie Antoinette that she should eat crepes while the people around her made due off root vegetables? The best story about the skillet was its inclusion in the accidental death of my great-grandfather’s cousin Albert. One October evening, while pregnant with their third son, his wife Alana woke in the middle of the night in need of something to get her back to sleep. She was bringing a pot of milk and sherry to a slow boil in the skillet when someone grabbed her from behind. She wheeled around, grabbing as she did so the only thing she could think to defend herself with, that being the skillet, and smacked the person behind her in the skull with it. Cousin Albert died of a concussion in St. Anne’s hospital later that evening. The impression of his head is still visible along the bottom edge of the skillet to this day.

Since that night, it was considered taboo in my family to use the skillet as a cooking implement. My great-grandfather refused to use it out of deference to his cousin (it was all he could do, in fact, to convince Alana not to sell the skillet for the scrap money), and the tradition continued after that. Stripped of common use, the skillet took on a kind of religious power. When family would come to visit, they would ask to see Lazar’s skillet and they would hold it up in the light and run their fingers along the name on the bottom and the dent and the spot of oxidation that people in my family insist is remnants of the sauce from the Widow Capet’s last meal.

There was only one meal I ever saw cooked in the skillet. Beef liver, thinly sliced and sautéed rare with red kale and garlic—allegedly Cousin Albert’s favorite meal, which I always thought spoke poorly of Cousin Albert—followed by crepes suzette. Dad cooked this meal once a year, on Valentine’s Day, and in the event that there was a birth in the family. Afterward, he washed it and dried it and held it out to us to inspect before he set it back into the place where it lived year-round, at the back of the cabinet.

Arlington

I'm back in New York. Actually, I was back several days ago, but somewhere between here and there, I picked up one mother of a cold, which has had me waylaid for the better part of a week. Finally I'm feeling well enough to compose a thought or two.

The trip to Arlington was a good one. It's been a long time since my mother and I took a road trip--at least since college--and I'd forgotten what an enjoyable travel companion she is. We spent most of the ride just chatting away about everything. Haven't done that in a while, so it was good to catch up. Arlington, itself, is a strange place for me. Since I was twelve, I've been to the national cemetery for more funerals than any other; in fact, I'm pretty sure the first funeral I ever went to was there. I have three family members buried there. My grandfather and grandmother and my Aunt Marie, who died in the first Gulf War. As my mom and I drove through the town, I realized I could pick out landmarks from the various funerals, like the diner we ate in after my grandfather's funeral and the military housing we stayed in on Fort Meyer while we waited for my aunt's body to arrive.

It's strange to me to have a relationship with a cemetery, especially this one, but I suppose there was a time when all people had personal relationships with their cemeteries. When they dug their own graves and said their own last rites. I do like the funerals at Arlington. There's so much ceremony in them, so much respect for the dead. The other funerals I've been to were swift assembly-line affairs. A quick in and out. I don't care for those. I want a funeral with some thought to it.

After that, we went out for dinner with the family--many of whom I hadn't seen in years--and then drove home.


Und dann...

When I got home, I was happy to see one of the books I recently bought from Amazon has arrived. That would be Low Life, a portrait of 19th century New York desolates and delinquents. I'm looking forward to starting on it. I may have to vary between that and the other books I'm reading. One is Pandora's Hope, which is essays on the reality of science studies. I picked it up while looking for a book on neuroscience and wasn't able to put it down in the bookstore. The other is Transactions in a Foreign Currency, short stories by Deborah Eisenberg, which came on a recommendation from a friend and hasn't been great, but hasn't been bad, either.

Meanwhile, in the last day or two, I downloaded and played a short interactive fiction game that made me remember an earlier plan I'd had to write a choose-your-own adventure book. I thought of this years ago, while walking home. I would write a real book--a really in-depth and literary book--that would also include a path you could choose yourself. As with choose-your-owns, it would be in second person, but unlike them, there would be no way to simply die. If you made a misstep, or made a decision that led you to a dead-end, it would take you back to the beginning of the book and you could start over again, or just go back to the page you left off from. Alternatively, if I wanted to get really complicated, I could write it so there were no dead-ends, just alternate possible endings. Either way, the thought had me really excited.

And with that, it's a quarter after one and the day has finally caught up with me sufficiently that I'm a little sleepy. So I'm off to bed, in the hopes tonight won't be as crazy and full of fever dreams as last night was.

PS

I've edited my FAQ to fill out a couple of the questions at the end, which I think petered off a bit in the first version of it. Can't have petering around here...no sir. Peter-free, this place is.

New Year, Slightly Used

Happy New Year. There. I said it. I'm done.

The holidays really seemed to just zip by me this year. It's like they just sort of drove up next to me on the highway, asked for directions, and then left without saying goodbye or thanks or any of that. Christmas was like any other day with the family. New Years was like any other party where I didn't know anyone (which, these days, is most parties I go to). They've all been just days, like any other day. Which, I suspect, has always been what they are. But still.

In the meantime, I think I've figured out the source of my writing block. Essentially, I'm not writing because I keep thinking I ought to be writing. It's a little like lying in bed, trying to get to sleep when you're an insomniac. The more you lie there thinking, "I'm not sleeping," the less likely you are to sleep. So. I'm not writing. That's fine. I'm not the only one. Apparently, a lot of us haven't been so productive over break. And there's three weeks of break left in which to work.

And that's about it for today. I'm back in Pennsylvania getting ready to head off to Arlington to attend my grandmother's burial with my mother. After this trip, I swear I'm not leaving New York for another month, at least.