Moving, Motion, Mobility

So, I've decided to haul my little self-indulgence over to Wordpress and from here forward, you can find me at http://arbitraryvanity.wordpress.com or http://arbitraryvanity.com. And maybe because I find Wordpress to be a slightly friendlier format, I'll do some things with some semblance of regularity. Not that once every two months isn't a regulated schedule, but nonetheless.

I've Been Thinking About Arson A Lot Lately

Fire is on my mind. It's not supplanting love letters and pretty things and the new episode of The Office or any of the other things I find myself thinking about often, but arson is there. Crammed in with all that other stuff.

If the short list in the previous paragraph hasn't gotten me off the FBI watch list the title of this post pegs me for, let me clarify that I'm researching cases of arson. Not figuring out to do with my afternoon or anything.

A recent series of articles on wildfires on Miller-McCune.com discusses the phenomenon of firefighters who commit arson and I haven't been able to get it out of my head all week. Apparently it's a pretty substantial, albeit under-reported problem. According to the piece:

When the SCFC and the FBI created profiles of firefighter arsonists in the mid-1990s, the FBI concluded that their No. 1 motivator was a craving for excitement. Some firefighter arsonists are would-be heroes, starting fires so they can rush in and save the day. But often they’re simply bored thrill-seekers who, particularly in rural areas, are frustrated because there aren’t more fires to fight. Such arsonists are drawn to the work not by a desire to perform a public service but by the anticipation of excitement. So, when there’s not enough action, they don’t like it.

This strangely echoes of that mid-century mentality that lingers in some communities (Berkeley?) about Western doctors secretly conspiring to keep Americans sick so as to boost private practice incomes. But this is true!

Might I suggest that there's a lesson herein as to why so many aspiring writers agree to teach adjunct comp courses for $1500 per semester? Think about it. Think.

To read the full article, go here. You should.

Things I care about recently and right this second also

<--- Pastry humor. Dig it.

In an attempt to start writing again with some sort of routine (or at least semi-regularity), I'm spending the day in front of my laptop. This, of course, is not unusual, but what is rare is that I will decidedly not be refreshing the bookface and Etsy with alternating clicks in four-second intervals.

Instead, I'm blogging nonsense.

I've been out of touch for oh-so long, and I have all of these opinions, you see. I just opine all the live-long day. And they're piling up around here. The opinions. Here goes [a whole lotta] nothing.

STUFF I LIKE A LOT LATELY:

The Bay Bridge.
I've been in love with this beastly bastard for years now, but I find that it's even better when I'm not using it. And now no one it using it. It's just sitting there, just this big useless thing. We live right at the base of it and it's hard to explain the oddness of not hearing traffic at all ever. It's like growing up in rural Iowa--when's the last time you fell asleep and could hear the sound of cars if you tried to hear them, if you considered how long it's been since you started ignoring the sound of traffic?

You just sit there and look pretty. The stupid, lazy bridge as seen from the roof.
Still, Bay Bridge, I prefer you to the Golden Gate any day. Most. Overrated. Bridge. Ever.

Movies About Sewing And Other Stuff.
Two excellent excellent films everyone in the world has to see right god damned now.

Bright Star is a movie about sewing that takes place in 1818 [sic]. The movie is also about a hipster poet named John Keats who was basically like the Dan Brown of the 1820s, except that unlike Dan Brown, Keats died before seeing any of his work adapted for the screen. Ok, but really: a lovely little romantic, Romantic biopic. With poetry. And long, slow sewing scenes. Because I'm a geek, I've been obsessively reading up on this romance and a lot of the film's dialogue is taken from the letters Keats wrote to Fanny (though tragically, all of the letters from Fanny to Keats were destroyed after his death, as per his request).

Oh, by the way, things the movie messed up: the word Dandy didn't exist in 1818, am I correct? And the film fails to mention that PERCY 'd-bag' SHELLEY was the one who invited Keats to Italy (where he [spoiler?] died, thanks Percy). I'm so tired of pro-Percy propaganda films, but this one apologizes with pretty dresses and lovely poetry.

Coco Before Chanel is about two of my most favorite pastimes in the world: sewing stuff and smoking cigarettes. I'm not going to go into detail here about all of the political untidiness the filmmakers get out of dealing with by making a film about Coco's early life, but suffice it to say that this film is gorgeous, sultry, meticulous, and agonizing. The heroine's relationships with clothing made me fall in love alongside her and her relationships with men made me want to pluck her from dark bedrooms and bad decisions. And the lines, oh, the perfectly stitched hems and pleats and collars.

Perfume.
I'm not going to attempt to write about perfume because I don't know how and the other member of this household does it much better than I ever could. I did just want to mention, for all the bibliophile geeks I love, that CB I Hate Perfume's In The Library is an extraordinary little thing for your nose's brain to love. Let me clarify: this is the scent of bibliotopia. This perfume captures the scent you imagine old stacks to emanate. "You" here implying anyone who has ever paid thousands of dollars to sit in classrooms and talk about Jane Austen with other like-minded, aspirational youths of all ages. No real library smells charmingly and romantically like aging leather and dusty pages. This smells like you'd imagine an archival basement to smell as you ran a fingertip over a gilded title of a first-edition book that you love. Libraries don't smell like that. In fact, here is a short description of the scents of the three libraries in which I've spent embarrassingly too much time:

The University of Iowa: Twizzlers, Red Bull, last night's Long Island iced teas transfused in the sweat of 19-year olds (tmi?), the sort of sexual energy that gets frat houses kicked off campus, florally supermarket shampoo

St. Mary's College of California: Rockstar Energy drink, shitty coffee, sunscreen, that sort of chemically smell that rises from non-shag carpet in direct sunlight (sort of like artificial static electricity)

The University of Chicago: when's the last time you showered?, Indian food, benzoyl peroxide, burning dust on hot-to-the-touch radiators, dry erase markers, evaporating stipends

Anyhow, buy In The Library if you love books or want to love books or want them to love you or want to be loved by or be lovers with lovers of beloved books. This is not a guarantee, but seriously. Make your library a better-smelling place.

Television's Reminders That You Could Be Failing More Severely But Aren't.
Oh my god, if you haven't watched all of the (available online!) episodes of A&E's reality show Hoarders, go right now and watch the shit out of it! And then come back and read the rest of my blog!

Have you heard the joke about the seven-year-old dyslexic hoarder with attention deficit hyperactive disorder? That's because it's not a joke. It's episode number five!

I'm also way too into watching people fail on Project Runway and Top Chef but who cares. There's a tv show about people who keep way too much useless shit for way too long! Oh my god, it's incredible!

Have we had enough for now? I think we have.

Chicago, early notes revisited

In the spring of 2007, I spent a weekend in Chicago deciding if I could live in the city for a year or more. It just so happened that during that weekend, I was able to catch the Vollard exhibition at the Art Institute. I typically hate Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (I'm a Classical girl, you know, and a bit of a Romantic) but I developed an odd fascination with Cézanne's "View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph" and wrote an essay about (or sort of rather on, at, around, etc.) the painting later that spring.

I won't bore you with all of this, but having lived in San Francisco again for a month and a half, this early description of Chicago seems mildly-to-moderately pertinent. Or maybe not.
(from On Context: Cézanne's 'View of Domaine Saint-Joseph')

It’s so good and so terrible to attack a blank canvas.

- Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)

I must tell you about this painting.

You must know first that sometimes in Chicago in April, it is still very cold. Cold is subjective, but sometimes wind can be described as nothing less than cold. Later this day, the sun will come out, and it will rain.

Impressionist painting is very sentimental, don’t you think? With those blotchy brush dabs and imprecise-seeming strokes and no definitive edges on anything? Monet is maudlin, even when his canvas is dark, even when the light shown down on it is subtle but ample, highlighting the blurred starlight, lowlighting the reflections on water. Even when the pair of strangers in front of me is quiet, short, and therefore unobtrusive.

Yes, Impressionism is maudlin, and I dare say a little gaudy, though maybe I’m thinking too much of the mass-produced, blotchy, pastel prints that hung over made-to-match duvets in economy hotel rooms in the 1990s. The beds were too hard, the comforters scratchy like fiberglass insulation, the prints amateur and base. Or maybe I’m thinking simply of reproductions—take, for example, the water lilies, and how they were stuck with Sticky Tak to one wall in the dorm room of almost every girl in college who kept and would eventually marry her boyfriend from high school. Just beneath in the white margin, in a flippant font, the title scrawled for those who didn’t know, though by sophomore year, when the posters moved to apartments, we all knew.

I didn’t keep my boyfriend from high school, but from those years I kept my favorite poem:

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

-From Lisel Mueller’s “Monet Refuses the Operation” (1-11)

Despite my distaste for Monet and his weepy, wet landscapes, I like that Mueller is able to write a logic to him, a system of reasoning. Ah…gas lamps—as angels. There’s a value to the rereading of poetry that is absent in the experience of reproduced art. When I read this poem, at fifteen, I underlined the word aberration, wrote deviation from truth in the white space beside it.

It was sentimentality that drew me to the poem, but it is the articulation of the logic behind indefinite shapes that kept me its reader for all of these years. Paul Cézanne is a Post-Impressionist; he picked up where Monet left off, though in fact, Monet outlived Cézanne by two decades. It might be said that Cézanne was more anxious than sentimental. Most of his work happened at the tail end of the Impressionist era, after 1880, and his most youthful and enlivened painting was done at the tail end of his half-century-spanning career. Here, however, I’m already getting ahead of myself.

---

For the decorative painter whose main object is the organization of his design upon the surface, this is no difficulty, rather an advantage. But for painters to whom the plastic construction is all-important it becomes serious. For them, the contour becomes at once a fascination and a dread. - Roger Fry, From Cézanne: A Study of His Development

In 1871, for just less than three days, the city of Chicago burned. Four square miles were razed to ash, give or take a few buildings—a pair of churches and a couple of lucky houses—left standing in the sooty mire, with resignation and burdened stoicism.

Chicago was resurrected swiftly and with perfect geometry—with the exception of a fistful of curves to accommodate the river, the city’s streets are straighter than any average Midwest horizon, each intersection a quartet of immaculate right angles. This makes it easy to find your way around, though don’t hesitate to ask directions—the people generally don’t mind.

Downtown the gray-bricks and weary columns resonate with a solemnity I want to call American Gothic because it reminds me simultaneously of Poe’s solitary ravens and The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark, but Chicago School architecture is informed by both the classicists and the modernists. I have to look up to see the whole of the skyline, and remind myself there are no earthquakes here to shake those giants. The order and the precision and calculation and height of it all might lend the city a sort of arrogance—this bravado of pre-apocalyptic perfection, a brick and concrete masterpiece that would look lovely in ruins—but remember this: Chicago has already once been demolished by fire.

happen in passing

On New Year's Eve day, I flew back to Chicago. I got off the plane and onto the Blue Line and off at the Addison stop, from which I walked to Target, hauling my overweight suitcase behind me. I heaved the bag into the cart and plucked thigh-high gray knit stockings, nail polish, and other things I knew I needed off the shelves and dropped them into the child's seat. I cabbed home, dyed my hair black, put on the olive green embroidered silk dress I'd recently purchased at a vintage shop in the Mission, and went to an ultra-trendy gallery warehouse sort of party, the kind you never know if you'll enjoy or not until you get there, but the kind you know well in advance you'll enjoy reporting to others of having attended.

At 3 a.m., we were walking up Ashland Avenue, waiting, hoping, calling for cabs. There's never a shortage of cabs in this city except half the time you want one. Instead we found a 24-hour Dunkin Donuts and, because it was late and cold and we were drunk and needed no other reason, we went in, flirted with a few cops, and left with hot chocolate (because it was freezing, just bitterly cold) which I promptly spilled all over my new old dress, slipping in chunky heels on invisible ice while stepping into an about-time-finally cab. I should've known it would be a bad year for writing, but I was all sorts of forward-looking and if you're the sort of person who makes resolutions on every night but New Years Eve, then it's easy to believe that on any unparticular day, things are going to be different, completely and noticeably.

It's hard to write outside of cliches when the day-to-day is so explicitly laden, like spilled hot cocoa at 3 a.m. on a now-tragic favorite dress. I used to write a lot in and about cliches. I used them like metaphors, though I never referred to them as such, all those bridges, windows, letters, and earthquakes I was genuinely enamored with. When I stopped writing in and about them, I started theorizing at them. Mediation, I'd say over drinks sometimes, mediated and mediating. There's something in the instability, in the dependency, and it reads like biography if you're inclined to overly close reading. Perhaps that something in the mediation metaphors is why I can never remember the term for what they do to bridges to prevent them from collapsing or the word for the kind of solid ground that's safest for building near fault lines.

I've been reading quite a bit of poetry lately, at least a lot for me. I'm inclined to think it's because I'm too lazy, too busy, too distracted--like I was when I was 14 and had just started to learn to love to read most things. Poems came first because they seemed flexible. A spacious and forgiving poem fascinates me as much as contemporary architecture in California--six-story water tanks and the obscene symmetry of any thing such that if the world decides to shake it, it can still be a thing. Then short stories, then essays, and finally, maybe sometime in college, I started loving novels, and not for the plots, like I did when I was in junior high.

Reading poems now feels like packing the essentials a month before a move. I'm the sort of person who boxes up the flatware and the silverware first, has to dig through her luggage for her toothbrush several hours before heading to the airport. Lines like "i like my body when it's with your / body. It is so quite a new thing. Muscles better and nerves more." and "I literally don't know your middle name. does that / matter? what systems we arrange for intimacy, small / disclosures like miniature bridges, your mouth." and "You are not beautiful, exactly. / You are beautiful, inexactly." aren't staying put away, will be out on the table again long before I finish the Russian novels, which I'll do this time around, with the patience to keep track of all of the names, I promise.

And some thoughts thought lately in words used such as I could never hope to be able

(why I leave this one) Untitled

That lake is not
an ocean. Even still

May happens even in Chicago.
Even in April

(it’s not) my pacific
seasons will and do (you still?)

happen in passing. Last June
almost at least (that’s what you said) once
a week

the sky at two a m
brilliant. Don’t talk at me
weather.

This lake is not. Trust
in time love is

not
an ocean.

I leave I’ll leave out
this time. Send my things and don’t
look back.

I want to tell you this
lack this miss this gone
is real.

Somehow is not
pacific. Enough.

- Kristin Lueke

Basically Just Exactly

Chicago, you're no good for me. We both know. Here and there for a moment, it becomes clear to me that you love this, this thing you do. You can't not, I suppose, and then I love that you love it, and we laugh about it, and I love you again. I smile and offer directions to tourists and don't lie to them like I'm tempted to when they're toting Cheesecake Factory to-go bags and looking for the American Girl Store. When the older women on my street pass by with their tiny dogs and throw tiny looks at some tiny half-pajama outfit, I smile and say hello and good morning and what is his/her name? I wear sunglasses and walk south for coffee, dodging stray sprays from the sprinklers in the patches of grass between the sidewalk and curb, tiny fenced-in, manicured plots still wet from yesterday's rain. It's hot and sunny this morning, will rain hard later, and I've just made outdoor plans for this evening.

We're together, then not, but I fall for you again and again, each time I'm on a train that's not too bad and the light's just right. Budweiser, Beatles, whatever; it's gorgeous and I love it because it works and makes me happy in spite of all else. And this video does too.

Do what you want, you always do, but I suggest watching this a few times; Chicago, palimpsestic.

Let's (just) be friends

I am averse to profundity. It is not a thing that is on the internet.

Profundity does not reside in a blog you read, nor in one I write. Let's just be clear about this one thing. I think profundity is on Kindle but I don't really know. I don't have a Kindle.

I respect you too much to make promises now about what you might expect here. I'm a person on the internet who is a person in the world. There's a venn diagram somewhere that could illustrate these persons to you, perhaps, but I'm bad with circles and numbers, so I'll spare you.

Let me tell you a few little things:

- This is a profundity-free zone. And by "zone" I hope you understand that the internet is not a place. As the old idiom goes, a cupcake is a cupcake is a muffin.

- I used to roundaboutly write about sandwiches and other things. There will be sandwiches. Oh, there will be. Unless things go horribly awry. But to answer in the negative (as one is wont to do), you won't exclusively find sandwiches here.

- And by sandwiches, I mean discussions of sandwiches. Kristin and I are still working to develop ways to blog food to one another. So far, I've lost 45 minutes and half a fudgesicle on this endeavor. We'll keep you posted on our progress. That was a blog joke.

- I promise you up to 340% more fake statistical evidence than any other blog on the interweb, guaranteed.

- I will forget most made promises almost immediately after having typed them.

- Any apologies herein are disingenuous and exaggerated for dramatic effect.

- I sincerely apologize in advance if anyone is offended by anything at anytime, ever.

- I like shiny things, pretty things, letters, style, and sarcasm. On these issues, I will not disappoint. That is not a promise.

Our internet personalities are but shades of our non-virtual selves. I'm not trying to be profound here--I don't mean shades as in Shades of the Dead in the Odyssey. Then again, maybe sort of like them, in that on the internet, as in hell, tales are told, histories are elaborated, and epics are enhanced, but the Shades are left for eternity and the guy the reader cares about goes back home and slaughters all the guys who've been eating all of his food and trying to hook up with his wife.