My New Japanese Boyfriend

It is amazing the things you discover when you read books.

I always shudder a little bit when people proudly announce "I don't read." Not out of snobbery. I don't really care what you read, it needn't be all high brow and incomprehensible. But reading is just one of those fundamental elements of life. Through reading we learn facts, we see those facts disputed, we learn stories, perspectives. We have windows into lives we would otherwise never witness. Reading develops the part of our brains that ingests and analyzes information. We learn the nutritional information on the backs of cereal boxes, we discover what's on sale at the grocery store, what albums are due for release this month, and what somebody's cute baby said today. We are enveloped in wild romances, other planets, other times, other places. We also find our long lost 13th century Japanese soul mates.

It goes a little something like this: A few weeks ago, we were at some friends' house for lunch. No wait. Back up. Last November, some friends of ours came over to our house. The library copy of Oblivion with which I was in a steel caged grudge match was lying on the end table in our living room. (By end table, I mean steamer trunk, but let's not discuss my decorating tastes here.) Our friend completely surprised the pants off me (not literally. What kind of people do you think we are?!) by picking up the book and saying simply "Consider the lobster." This friend of ours is a very straightforward kind of fellow. An engineer, a little bit shy, logical and straight laced. I didn't doubt that he read books, I just was surprised that his choices would be similar to mine. So we commenced commiserating about David Foster Wallace and then we went out to dinner (wherein my darling jBird announced my various gastric distresses to the table and pretty much all else was forgotten.) We all ended the day seeing each other in a little bit different light. I had this other piece of to the puzzle of my quiet friend, an area of commonality, something new we could talk about when conversation got awkward. And he... well, I don't know what he came away with. Probably some excessively disturbing mental images.

So, a few weeks back, we were at this friend's house and I was pawing through his bookshelf because that is my version of peeking in someone's medicine cabinet. You find out interesting things about your hosts, and generally the things you find out have nothing to do with frightening rashes. After a few minutes of pawing, I had to borrow a sheet of the Hooligan's coloring book and a crayon to scribble down some titles. Don't you just love friends like that? One of the titles I scribbled down was The Art of the Personal Essay and immediately went home and reserved it at the library (along with Eminem's latest album, but I digress.)

To my delight, this weighty tome has come available for me to peruse and probably not finish and then have to consider buying for a reference book because it is so awesome and then copying huge parts of it down in case I can't find it at the used book store and wishing I could highlight a library book and then wondering what good that would do me since I have to return it and then wondering if I should just commit the cardinal library sin and keep it and how bad would it be to have to move to a new city?

In a very heavy paper nutshell, this book is a collection of personal essays from since the beginning of time. It is my own personal version of Disneyland. It is also my Graceland and my Great Smoky Mountains and my Niagara Falls. Last night after the monkeys were in bed and the fire was lit, the Chief Lou and I sat down to read and listen to music and occasionally chat. [This is a large and important aside: When I was 18, a friend of mine was trying to convince me to date him and possibly marry him. I explained that while I loved him dearly, I didn't think we had enough of the right things in common for us to really be compatible. "Like what?" he asked me. "Well, like I like to read and you don't. I like to write poetry and you mock it. Like I don't like professional sports or Republicans." (or something like that.)  He was dismissive of this and said "What is more important to you? That you be with someone who make enough money to support you (my other option at the time was a penniless college student) or that you be with someone who will sit by the fire and read with you and talk about fancy things?" When I chose the latter, he was incredulous and assured me that would never happen and I was being hopelessly romantic. Much to my delight, he was wrong. No hard feelings, though. We remain friends to this day.]

What was I talking about? Oh yes. I was reading with my love when I found my long lost Japanese boyfriend. Kenko lived in thirteenth century Japan. Little is known about him except that he was someone or other in the Imperial court and that he was a bit of a poet. Then he became a Buddhist monk. The best details of his life are learned from his writing, however. He wrote in the style called zuihitzu - which directly translated means "follow the brush". Donald Keene, the translator of Kenko's work, notes:

"This form - or lack of form - was most congenial to Japanese writers, who turned to it perhaps because it was less 'dishonest' than creating fiction. The formlessness ... did not impede enjoyment by readers; indeed, they took pleasure not only moving from one to another of the great variety of subjects but in tracing subtle links joining the successive episodes."

How sweet is that?! I have, at long last, found a name for the kind of writing I do. It's in an anthology. It's medieval. It's valid. So, if I should happen to blurt out to my real estate agent that I write and she should happen to look surprised and ask me what, exactly, do I write, I could happen to respond: zuihitzu. It is a much less ridiculous response than: I don't know. Stuff?


The icing on my merry little Japanese cake of discovery -  the wasabi on my peas, the ikura on my sushi - is this opening written by Kenko himself, to his Essays in Idleness:

What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.

One of my favorite quotes from the movie Shadowlands is when C.S. Lewis's recalcitrant student tells Lewis: "I read to know I am not alone." Of all the wonderful things we learn from reading, finding that you are not alone is among the most valuable.

To your inkstones, friends!

Under Pressure

Thanks to the Hooligan, I listened to Under Pressure about thirty-six times in a row yesterday. Like all good hooligans, he is a huge fan of Queen. When we have to be in the car for a long time, he plays deejay for us. Well, actually it's more like he plays the repeat caller on an all-request radio show and I play deejay. We sing along and we dance at red lights and we repeat the same songs over and over because he likes to know when to snap in the right parts or to get all the lyrics down so that he can sing them at preschool or at church and astound people with both his singing ability and my lax parenting.

[Small digression: A while back, both of my monkeys memorized this version of Welcome To The Jungle and sang it whenever possible. The first time the Chief Lou heard their rendition, he almost went off the road from laughing so hard. It would seem, though, that some people do not find that as amusing as we do. In my defense, they have also memorized a great many hymns and sing those, too. That's a transcendent experience in and of itself - my little monkey angel choir of two - but it's not nearly as funny.]

Has there ever been a more sublime, fantastic, glitter-encrusted musical pairing than Freddy Mercury and David Bowie? I think not.  It's so sublime, in fact, that even Vanilla Ice couldn't ruin their song by co-opting its magnificent opening riff for his Ice Ice Baby.

[Another small digression: If you are one of the Ford Escort people, you cannot sit there with a straight face and tell me that there was not at least one summer that you loved that song.]

Regardless of how you feel about the music of either Freddy Mercury or David Bowie - not everyone can be a Hooligan -  you have to admit to a certain genius in both of their work. Perhaps more than the music itself, it is the genius that attracts me. Even if you don't like what you're hearing, from a creative perspective, you can sit back and think: Wow. Where did that come from? How did they think to create that? As these things happen when you are driving with a small Hooligan in a pouring rain, listening to Queen and contemplating creative genius, thoughts drift toward David Foster Wallace.

[tiny digression: you knew I was going there, didn't you?]

In his commencement address to Kenyon College's class of 2005, three years before he died, Wallace said this:

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things...[T]here are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I was reminded of this particular speech while Freddy Mercury and David Bowie sang this to me at least thirty-six times:

 'Cause love's such an old fashioned word. And love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night. And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves.This is our last dance. This is our last chance. This is ourselves, under pressure.

These words, written by complicated men who lived complicated lives and died complicated deaths (except David Bowie who seems to have the same cosmic connections as Keith Richards) resonate. These were men of particular genius. Men who burned brightly and vividly and tapped into the deepest of the collective unconscious. They were men who were able to take that wild madness that inhabits us all and give it voice - through literature, through performance, through music, through words. It's a voice that frightens at times, confounds and disgusts, but also uplifts and understands. Ultimately, the life that they seemed to grasp in such elemental terms, got the better of them. But it would seem that at some point, they understood what lay at the bottom of it - that "same force that lit the stars", that "old fashioned word" - love. 


It is the currency of our time to be Under Pressure. Invisible forces from both without and within bear down on us from every direction. Whether it is controllable, or self-imposed, or situational, we all feel it. Sometimes the tendency is to lie down and allow ourselves to get smooshed, to give in to the irritability, the exhaustion, the "constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing". But "this is our last dance." The beauty of our existence is the ability to choose, to take those dares that love offers, to accept that "real freedom" of remaining connected. To love. To love in whatever ways are present for us. To see our connection to the whole of humanity and realize our burdens, our pressures, are not ours alone. These two men, creative geniuses that they were, realized this - turned it into art, even - but ultimately failed to live it. Do we want to fall prey to the same fate? This is ourselves. Under pressure. What will we do with it?


The Hooligan mostly just likes a steady beat he can dance to, but maybe he was onto something when he made me listen to Under Pressure thrity-six times.


I wouldn't place Vanilla Ice in the pantheon of creative genius, but perhaps he was onto something when he told us over the top of Freddy and David's riff: "Stop. Collaborate. And listen."

The Davids Are In Collusion Against Me

I have been singing this Bruce McCulloch song in my head for the past couple of days to keep myself from curling into the fetal position and sucking my thumb. I'm not a superstitious person. I'm not even sure what all of the superstitions are. Knocking wood, hat on the bed, salt over the shoulder, something to do with ladders and cats and stuff. I didn't realize this past Friday was the 13th until I sat down and did the painstaking calendar math involved in counting the number of days it has been since the Chief Lou's birthday, trying to figure out what day that was and then trying to figure out what the current day is. I'm chronologically challenged that way. So, on Friday the 13th, the Chief Lou and I sat down to movie night and a cozy fire and I really haven't been the same since. Not being superstitious, I refuse to believe the date on the calendar has much to do with it, but I'll let you be the judge.

The Blue Velvet Chronicles:

Sometime in 1991 - My friend (who was so not my boyfriend, why would you even say that?!) and I went to our friend Mandy's house to watch a movie with her and her boyfriend, Dave. My friend (who was positively not my boyfriend and whose middle name is David) was way into Twin Peaks, so he thought it would be wise do delve deeper into David Lynch's work and brought over Blue Velvet for our viewing pleasure. While being as jaded and worldly-wise as all 16-year-old girls are, I was actually pretty sheltered and naive. For years I remembered very little about the movie except a pervasive, shuddering ick.

June, 1992 - Senior prom. My friend (still not my boyfriend, folks!) and best girlfriend from high school (whose dad's name is David) share the first slow dance of the evening. Friend-not-boyfriend thought it would be really funny to request Blue Velvet for the first slow dance. I remember very little about the experience except feeling like it was, perhaps, icky and being impatient for Tainted Love to come on.

January, 1998 - I take an abnormal psychology class with a man (named David) who would become my favorite professor. In the first few days of the class, the professor discusses his early experiences with Freudian psychoanalysis. Apparently his analyst was a bit on the strange side and his entire office - walls, proverbial couch, everything - is covered in blue velvet. The professor says this with a tangible shiver and easily segues into David Lynch cinematography as an aside.

July, 1998 - My wedding day. My "something blue" is a pair of blue velvet underwear. My maid of honor (sister) tells my matron of honor (best girlfriend from high school) who tells her husband who casually mentions it in nervous conversation with my future sister-in-law's boyfriend, who immediately tells my future sister-in-law, who tells... well, really, everyone (she's a one-woman broadcasting network, that one) including our extremely strange and high violinist who agrees with Chief Lou's aunt that it would be an absolute gas to play a rendition of Blue Velvet on the violin and harp as our first dance at the reception. (Sound impossible? I have it on video somewhere.)

Sometime in 1999 - We finally decide on curtains for our bedroom and purchase them on sale at TJMaxx. They are a gorgeous navy blue velvet. This coincides with my taking another class from Favorite Professor David and a repetition of creepy blue velvet analysis couch story. F.P. David finds it curious and entertaining that our new drapes are made of the portent-laden fabric.

July 3, 1999 - The Chief Lou sends me a dozen long-stemmed roses at work in honor of our first anniversary. He phoned in the order to the florist who was obviously not paying very close attention. The card reads: "Thank you for the best year of my life so far. Happy Anniversary! Love, David". My husband's name is not David.

Fast forward to this past summer, 2011 - I check out David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again from the library. I barely make it past the essay about tennis and math when the Chief Lou commandeers it and reads the whole thing, excerpting the highlights for me. An especially salient essay for him is David F.W.'s take on David Lynch's Blue Velvet. The Chief Lou casually comments on it and says he's never seen the movie, have I? I tell him I have, but that I barely remember it. Seems like it was pretty strange and maybe I was too young to have understood it fully when I watched it but that any mention of the words blue and velvet together gives me a bit of a chill, but I can't remember why.

Friday, January 13th, 2012 - Snuggled down with the Chief Lou on the couch and he produces his movie selection for the evening: Blue Velvet. Have you seen this movie?! Did it creep you out as much as it did me?! Why is Isabella Rossellini's wig exactly the same as her hair?! What is the thing on the couch in the background at the Quantum Leap dude's apartment? Why is the dude from Quantum Leap even in this movie? What kind of acting mojo enables Dennis Hopper to make an oxygen tank scary?! Why the long face, Laura Dern? And why does anyone listen to a word that Kyle MacLachlan says when he's got his shirt buttoned all the way to the top, which is clearly the universal cinematic symbol for "crazy train"?! And why is the happy-feel-good ending the absolute creepiest part of the whole movie?

And most importantly, why have all of these Davids colluded against me all these years? I'm beginning to get a little nervous. What did I ever do to the Davids?!

Steel Cage Grudge Match, Revisited

Oh, David Foster Wallace, how you remind me of college.
Not because of your high-blown prose and dense, deeply meaningful meanderings.
Not because sometimes you literally make me sweat while I read.

But because you are that boyfriend I can't let go. You are bad for me. You warp me. I hang in there with you through your every breath and then realize it was going nowhere; that you didn't love me after all and that you are just going to leave me hanging.

I leave you for a while, swearing that I've had enough. I walk away, in search of healing. I promise myself I will only put that much effort into someone who loves me back, who is kind to me and appreciates my loyalty.

I reluctantly trudge away and I leave you there with your Hideous Men. Then one day, out of nowhere, just when I think I've gotten over you, I Consider the Lobster and my heart melts and I'm overcome with fond nostalgia. The sweating nights gripping you tightly while you ramble in a fevered daze, trying not to throw you across the room in heartbreak and rage - all forgotten. And I tell myself I've grown. I tell myself I'm more self-assured now. I tell myself I'll just check in and see... I can always walk away if it gets too heavy.

You haunt me even when you're not around. Your wit, your way with words, your darkness. Oh, the darkness. My heart teeters on the precipice of your darkness. It's magnetic to me and treacherous. I want to save you over and over and revel in your sadness and cynicism all at once. Even when I turn my back, whispers of you are everywhere. My friends like you, casually mention you in conversation. Your quotes turn up like snapshots - unexpected. They pierce me and I hide my pain behind a laugh that is a little too loud and a dismissive wave. But you're always there somewhere, lurking around the edges of my consciousness.

Our last tryst was short. Two solid weeks in the beginning of Oblivion. You spoke to me directly. We had that connection. It can't have been mere coincidence that I should have just taken part in a focus group only days before running into you and your Mr. Squishy again. I thought we had an understanding. I thought it would be different. I suffered with you to the end only to be burned again. To be unceremoniously left with no explanation, no closure, not so much as a backward glance or even any resolution of why on earth that man was climbing up the building!?!? I swore it was the last time. My heart can't take this abuse anymore.

And then...

As casually as you please, my husband - my husband who knows my every weakness, of all people! - asked me to pick up his holds while I was at the library. And there you were, heavy and looming like Everest. My resolve is weak. Just a few pages while I wait for the monkeys to finish up, that's all. And just like that, I'm head over heels falling, doomed, into a long-term relationship with you.
Aptly:  Infinite Jest. 

Listing

List: /list/ verb "Lean to one side; typically because of a leak or unbalanced cargo."

Things of which I was initially skeptical but are now permanent fixtures in my life:
- my iPod
- blogging
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- my son
- mystery shopping

Things without which I thought I would die but now hold little or no use for me:
- Wonderbras
- Mascara
- That kid in my 8th grade class whose name I can't remember
- Leather pants
- Baby monitors

Things with which I am currently in a steel cage grudge match but I will win:
- The first story in David Foster Wallace's Oblivion
- My cell phone battery
- This mascara I put on for family picture day
- A particular chocolate chip bread recipe for the bread machine
- NaBloPoMo

Things of which I am still quite skeptical:
- "smart" phones
- Twilight
- foundational garments
- Kombucha
- skinny jeans

Exploding Unmentionables: An Intensely Personal Book Review (Sort of)

 If you've ever given birth, you'll understand what they mean when they say "the urge to push". Urge is putting it mildly. There is no wondering whether, perhaps, you may or may not be ready to push. There is no weighing the consequences. There is no sense in telling you not to push. There is no worrying about what people will think of your pushing. There is nothing in the world to do except push.

David Foster Wallace's description of a work in progress: “a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (dragging itself across the floors of restaurants where the writer’s trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebro-spinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.”

There's no way to know what truckload of mental suitcases the reader brings to any bit of writing at any given time. As a compulsive writer and an avid reader, the most gratifying experience for me is when I read something that collides with me and has me screeching on the brakes and sending that mental baggage flying: exploding unmentionables in a colorful, embarrassing mess all over the place.

Mrs. Hagstrand was my 6th grade teacher. She was so beautiful to me with her flowing skirts, nubbly sweaters and thick ankles. She was Jewish, and therefore exotic in our small Vermont town. She wore chunky, ethnic jewelry and a sleek bob. I wanted so much to be her. I tried to dress like her, write like her, talk like her. I wanted so much for her to see the potential "her-ness" in me. I wrote a book of poems for a creative writing project. I barely remember the poems - a vague recollection of one about a unicorn - but I remember working and reworking them to make them sound just right. Earlier that year I had won a state-wide creative writing contest and had my story displayed outside the governor's office. Full of 11-year-old anxious excitement, I awaited my turn for a private conference for the teacher; for the praise of my latest literary endeavor. Shattered and sick to my stomach, I listened to her explain meter, rhyme scheme, feet, stanzas, all a blur of her red pen and the tears I tried to swallow. "Well Suzanne, I've seen you do a lot of things well, but this isn't one of them."

At some point, the diary I have kept since I was 6 years old became less a record of events and more a blank space for experimentation. Fragments of thoughts, poems, I'm sure a lot of angsty feelings, ideas about things outside my small existence, quotes from songs, books, conversations, magazine articles that resonated with me. I wrote frequently and abundantly, a place I could not only be wholly myself, but also to try out who I might want to be, how I might want to think. When I was 14, my whole family moved to China. Rather than fly out of New York or Montreal, we drove from Vermont to Los Angeles, stopping all across the country to say goodbye to family and friends along the way. A month in the minivan with my parents and siblings, drifting farther and farther away from my childhood home toward what might as well have been another planet. I kept myself busy with Aerosmith and my journal. My older brother kept himself busy reading my journal while I was asleep and repeating parts of it back in conversation while I was awake with a gentle, mocking smile.

The year I dropped out of college, my roommate and I spent all of our time in a coffee house. Writing and letting each other read it. We met some other aspiring writers (who wasn't an aspiring writer? Perhaps the aspiring rock stars?) and spent many a caffeine fueled night - bleary eyed, half-starved, electric - talking, writing, creating with the pretension that only 21-year-olds or established writers can pull off. That roommate remains one of my closest friends. In a recent email, she told me "Your words have kept me afloat this year."

I have the skeletons of short stories littered throughout my journals. Ideas I wanted to explore tangled and left to die in the brambles of poorly developed fictional characters, stilted dialogue, and broken plot lines. I stopped writing much because I didn't like to write fiction. I had stories to tell, but I wasn't famous enough for an autobiography, "important" enough for a memoir, but I got bored with fictionalizing it all. I started this blog as an outlet for that pent up writing. Every time I go to press "publish", my inner censor says: "Why are you publishing that? So much navel-gazing twaddle. Who would want to read that?"

In a prose creative writing class in college, my professor told me I could write tone very well. He told me I could make the reader really feel something, but that my plots went nowhere. I said wasn't it enough to make the reader feel? "Well no!" [pregnant pause in which his ruddy, jowled face seemed to reconsider] "No. No it's not." [quietly, as if to convince himself].

A few months ago, I said "screw it" and started this blog.

I read Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields when it first came out. I had never heard of him before but I read a review by accident as I was stuffing the newspaper into the wood stove and I was intrigued. In part, the book explores how the literary vehicle of the novel somewhat outmoded and tedious. Our current culture craves reality because it seems to be in such short supply. The literature we crave is the real or seemingly real. He speaks of elevating non-fiction from mere memoir or scholarly pursuit to the lyrical essay, the literary collage. I read it all in one night and couldn't sleep for the fire it started. A writer, a good writer, a published writer had defied genre and the literary world with this manifesto, this justification for my journals. It was as if, like my brother, he'd read my journals while I was sleeping and was repeating my thoughts back to me. Except instead of mocking, he returned my thoughts to me in this amazing, eloquent, intelligent, resonant collage. Serendipitously, he sent me a signed copy of the book which is now dog-eared, annotated, underlined and full of coffee stains. "For Suzanne - Good luck with your own writing - Glad to hear this book pushed you in interesting directions."

I went to hear him speak the other night at the library. I shook his hand afterward and told him thank you.
"Your book has liberated my writing. Thank you."
"You're welcome. You're the person I wrote that book for."