Ryan Sloan

The Plagiarists - a wordmap

2011-10-09T12:53:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Wordle.net for the tool, and to Emily St. John Mandel for the idea.

Published Work: Stories, Essays & Interviews

2011-03-16T12:58:00.001-07:00

"The Opposite of Animal" reprinted in Nerve's Smut Vol 2, available in paperback at bookstores.

"The Bitches of Banner Elk" in Mr. Beller's Neighborhood

"Floating Zoe Rosen" in The Rambler

"March Madness: Pleasures of the Crowd" in The Modern Spectator

"On Speed Dating and the Supersecret Spy" in Opium Magazine
"Things To Do When Your Best-Selling Non-Fiction Account of Addiction and Redemption is Revealed to Be an Embellished, Garden-Variety Crack and Whiskey Habit" in Opium Magazine

"Full Fathom" in Locus Novus

"Demonstrating His Love, Oz Battles the Infants" in Poor Mojo's Almanack

"M and the Artful Lie" in Painted Bride Quarterly, Issue 71 / Print Annual 2

"Loyalty: The Guest Driver" in LA Weekly's 'A Considerable Town' series (scroll down to the third piece)

Things to do when your bestselling nonfiction account of addiction, violence and redemption is revealed to be an embellished, garden-variety crack and whisky habit

2011-03-16T12:54:00.000-07:00

[originally published at Opium Magazine, in the wake of the James Frey Oprah Incident, Pre-Reconciliation]

- Hire a merciless attorney.
- Duck attorney’s phone calls. He bums you out.
- Wonder whether memoir can ever be truly factual, especially memoirs of a hazy life of substance abuse and violent behavior, since felt truths are still truths and journalists who say they’re reporting only facts are big fucking liars.
- Wonder whether you really did go to jail / run over a cop / have a hole in your cheek.
- Eat Utz potato chips.
- Wonder whether the ladies from the talk show still cry heartily when they think about your life story.
- Prowl search engines for your recent photos, decide you looked puffy at last week’s Bloodrayne premiere.
- Consider becoming celebrity sponsor of Utz potato chips. Great name; crunchy too.
- Talk to reporters against attorney’s advice, but only for two minute interviews from your new apartment. Get pissed off and catch yourself saying things like, “Can memoir ever truly be factual?” And “Felt truths are still truths.” And “Journalists who say they’re reporting only facts are liars.”
- Wonder what the big fucking deal is.
- Have new Berber carpet installed in the penthouse, since your wife’s been nagging you. Discover carpeting nine rooms is boring, go for walk.
- Wear baseball cap and sunglasses. As an inside joke for fans, also wear a Harpo Marx wig. The fans love that shit.
- Attorney leaves another message on cell. Then another. Throw phone away, walk to phone store to buy new one.
- Find self lounging near the equestrian police in Central Park. Socking a horse in the jaw, then running over the cop with the horse – now that’s tough. Get close to horse, but it’s big and brown and looks wily.
- Note it’s almost lunchtime and no one’s spotted you yet. People give you a lot of space, and it’s hard to say whether it’s the wig/cap combo, or that they have spotted you and hate you now.
- The hot cashier at Barnes & Noble compliments you on your purchase of your memoir.
- Jog home slowly.
- Check email. Producer writes that controversy’s good for the film, total greenlight, smart move. Wife writes that she and the kid read the article today, are weeping collectively. Fan blog writes that it’s an outrageous smear campaign. Publisher writes that another print run for the paperback is imminent. Mother writes that she’s relieved it wasn’t all true. Attorney writes that talk show host wants to meet with you. You think they all should have known better. Open a new bag of Utz. Repeat.

Things for an editor to do after he’s exposed a bestselling nonfiction account of addiction, violence and redemption as an embellished, garden-variety crack and whisky habit.

- Continue to point out to girlfriend that bestselling memoirists are privileged, hyperbolic pussies.
- Lay burning coals in office kitchen.
- Challenge bestselling memoirist to his choice of:
o A) cockfight
o B) kickboxing match
o C) fact-checking decathalon
- Publicize the exposing article on talkshows, preferably ones that embarrass you with your mother in the audience.
- Insist that the public needs more celebrity mug shots & reports of lady teachers digging their students & revelations that writers lie.
- Ingest low doses of toad poison via morning coffee.

Published Work and Readings

2009-05-19T16:51:00.001-07:00

Published Work: Stories, Essays & Interviews

"The Bitches of Banner Elk" in Mr. Beller's Neighborhood

"Floating Zoe Rosen" in The Rambler

"The Opposite of Animal" in Nerve Magazine

"March Madness: Pleasures of the Crowd" in The Modern Spectator

"Full Fathom" in Locus Novus

"Demonstrating His Love, Oz Battles the Infants" in Poor Mojo's Almanack

"M and the Artful Lie" in Painted Bride Quarterly, Issue 71 / Print Annual 2

"Loyalty: The Guest Driver" in LA Weekly's 'A Considerable Town' series (scroll down to the third piece)

Readings: Past & Present

Flashers - Sudden Fiction Exposed @ KGB Bar, 5.06.06

Opium Magazine @ Happy Ending, 2.26.06

MFA Graduate Student Reading @ Fales Library, 4.28.05

NYU MFA @ Bowery Poetry Club, 10.11.04

NYU Emerging Writers Reading Series @ Bowery Poetry Club, 2.1.04

The Bitches of Banner Elk

2009-01-06T14:50:00.001-08:00

Published today on Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is my short nonfiction piece called "The Bitches of Banner Elk." It takes place in Greensboro, NC, in the air and on the tarmac at JFK.

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is fun; you can search in different NYC neighborhoods for stories, via Google Maps, or simply read in chronological order. Thomas Beller has been running the project for years. When I did an Opium reading with him a couple of years ago I was already a big fan, but was too shy to say so.

Lots of interesting writers and their city-stories on the site:
- Jeanette Winterson
- Philip Lopate
- Daniel Nester
- Luc Sante
- Jonathan Ames
- Maud Newton
- Sam Lipsyte

Anyway, hope you get a chuckle. No doubt the sisters are tearing it up in Manhattan right this very instant.

Bravery In Small Steps

2008-12-31T16:33:00.000-08:00

I don't believe in New Year's resolutions. I think we tend to set ourselves up for failure with a dozen impossible goals that represent who we'd like to become.

It's a bit like the Netflix queue theory of people: what you have at the bottom of your list is who you'd like to be (a viewer of edgy, independent films) versus what you have arriving next is a closer reflection of who you are (heartwarming, sentimental television you watched in the early 90s, a la Northern Exposure. Which is, in fact, just as wonderful as you remember). We like to keep a running tally of dramatic improvements... but how often are they things within our control?

So I have a few goals, borne of the turbulence of the past few months, that are really just for me. They're incremental, pragmatic, and I want them to outlast January. In no particular order:

- I will try to be productive, slowly. Self-worth does not, in fact, reside solely in a book contract.

- I will try to be wary of my stubbornness and self-righteousness. It's what I tell my students, after all: Watch out for the "always" and the "never". We make one choice, then another, and after awhile our habits feel like values, justified because it's the way things have always been.

- I will try to recognize that the successes of my friends have no inverse bearing on me. In fact, success for those you care about is pretty remarkable, full stop.

- I will try to be far less concerned with the impossible task of pleasing others beyond a reasonable measure. You give an inch and someone takes three because you've both agreed it's the right way to do things. And no one's any happier.

- I will try to be comfortable in my own skin. When in doubt, remember those few people who who rarely need assurances, who are rarely offended or snubbed. [I'm thinking of the Peterson family, and Drew Spraggs, and my brother Andy, for instance.] They're blissfully unselfconscious, and the rest of us immediately feel at ease.

- I will try to write, especially in my fiction, about what makes me uncomfortable. I'll create from a place of humility -- starting with a question begets more questions, which is hard but necessary. And I'll write with a little more bravery.

- I will try to simply enjoy the moment I'm in more often, and not plan for what the next moment ought to look like. This is all we've got. While my wife is in China next year doing her fieldwork, I'll be alone quite a lot. My instinct is to plan trips or find some way to set up my own adventure or to look for a new teaching opportunity. When in fact the opportunity is here, in the small steps I am taking on my own path, with my book, my community, my students and colleagues.

And you? Silent visitors, what will you try to do? Anything but weight loss, I beg ya.

The Sloan/MacPhail Wedding: Photos!

2008-12-10T15:00:00.000-08:00

There's a lot to say about my wedding, and it shall be written after I teach my final class of 2008 this afternoon.

Until then: enjoy the insightful, chaotic, joyful photography of my good friend M Ryan Purdy. You'll get the gist of what went down.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mryanwashere/sets/72157610936748006/show/

Hendrik Hertzberg, Blogging on "Clinton People" in the Obama Circle

2008-11-30T15:16:00.000-08:00

[I'm getting married in a week! More on that soon.]

People Who Need People

No question about it: asking Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State is a bold and brave move on the part of President-elect Obama. A risky move, too—but if it weren’t risky it wouldn’t be bold and brave, now, would it?

But that doesn’t change the fact that the current fad for stories (and/or lamentations) to the effect that “Obama is surrounding himself with Clinton people” (with the implication that “this isn’t the change we voted for”) constitutes an unusually bogus “narrative.”

What is a “Clinton person”? Apparently, it’s any Democrat under about fifty or fifty-five years of age who has had work experience in the executive branch of the federal government.

The theory seems to be that a “Clinton person” would be inclined, at best, to reproduce the policies and actions of the Clinton Administration, including the accompanying mistakes, or, at worst, to serve the interests of “the Clintons” should they prove divergent from those of the Obama Administration and the nation.

This is the sort of reasoning that led to needless unhappiness the last two times Democrats were in power. Jimmy Carter’s circle regarded Johnson, who mired the nation in Vietnam and then handed the White House to Nixon, as a failure. They weren’t about to have any “Johnson people” in their White House. Clinton’s circle regarded Carter, who allowed himself to be paralyzed by a few hundred Iranian “students” and then handed the White House to Reagan, as a failure. They weren’t about to have any “Carter people” in their White House.

It didn’t seem to occur to either crowd, Carter’s or Clinton’s, that old hands, far from being eager to repeat the errors of the Administrations of which they had been a part, would be especially keen to avoid them. Also, they would know in detail what those errors were.

The Carter people made several stupid mistakes right at the beginning of their tenure. One was to cut the White House staff by one-third. This resulted in a couple of days of fairly good press. A fresh breeze was blowing, Nixon’s imperial presidency was being cut down to size, “cabinet government” would restore the rightful order of things—that sort of thing. Another mistake, related to the first, was to cut the White House budget for “frills” such as newspaper subscriptions and television sets. A third mistake was to sell off the Sequoia, the Presidential yacht—another gesture of populist humility, yielding in another day or two of positive press.

If Carter had put a “Johnson person” in a top White House job—if, for example, Joseph Califano had been named White House Chief of Staff instead of Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare—then that person would have been able to tell the newbies (a) that you need a big White House staff to have any hope of controlling the departments and agencies, (b) that getting rid of newspapers and TV sets is like wearing earplugs and dark glasses to work, and (c) that a Presidential yacht is one of the most cost-effective items in the federal budget, because it can be used to flatter and persuade impressionable, luxury-loving, bourbon-drinking Congressmen to give their support to worthy measures, support that might otherwise have to be purchased with bridges to nowhere and the like.

A yacht is a lot harder, politically, to acquire than to dispose of, even (or especially) if you’re a Republican, so when Clinton came to town he didn’t have the option of getting rid of one. However, not having any “Carter people” around to warn him off, he repeated Carter’s mistake of splashily cutting the White House staff, this time by one quarter. Naturally, the positions eliminated were not those of big shots—special assistants to the President and whatnot—but of grunt workers. Mid-level big shots ended up doing their own Xeroxing, typing, filing, and so on. Results: unreturned phone calls, exhaustion, impaired judgment. Eventually, interns were recruited to take over these clerical tasks. We all know how well that turned out.

The Clinton Administration was not an obvious failure; on the contrary, it was rather successful, overall. Nevertheless, it had its problems, and Senator Obama ran against its first couple. So President-elect Obama deserves credit for choosing Rahm Emanuel—who not only served in the White House under Clinton but was a senior staffer whose West Wing office was a ten-second walk from the Oval—to be his White House chief of staff.
Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg

Jon Meacham on the Age of Obama

2008-11-07T19:07:00.000-08:00

Obama has more in common with Reagan than appearances might suggest. Reagan's loyalists believed in his issues, or at least one of his issues, and they believed in him. They were anxious for a change from the incumbent administration at a time of shattered confidence and economic turmoil. The comparison is revealing, for it may foreshadow the nature of the next four or eight years. Like Reagan, Obama is an astute performer, a maker of myths and a teller of stories. Like Reagan, he is popularly seen, by friend and foe alike, as an ideological purist—but has demonstrated a tendency toward the pragmatic. Like Reagan, he is the leader of a core of believers so convinced he is on their side that they are likely to forgive him his compromises.

Obama gets the Gipper. "Reagan spoke to America's longing for order," he has written, "our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism and faith."

A man with a vivid literary and historical imagination, Obama is something of a dreamer, if a down-to-earth one. As a senator, he saw things that are not there, but once were. "Sometimes, standing there in the chamber, I can imagine Paul Douglas or Hubert Humphrey at one of these desks, urging yet again the adoption of civil-rights legislation; or Joe McCarthy, a few desks over, thumbing through lists, preparing to name names; or LBJ prowling the aisles, grabbing lapels and gathering votes. Sometimes I will wander over to the desk where Daniel Webster once sat and imagine him rising before the packed gallery and his colleagues, his eyes blazing as he thunderously defends the Union against the forces of secession."

Visiting the White House when he arrived in Washington as a senator, Obama mused: "The inside of the White House doesn't have the luminous quality that you might expect from TV or film; it seems well kept but worn, a big old house that one imagines might be a bit drafty on cold winter nights. Still, as I stood in the foyer and let my eyes wander down the corridors, it was impossible to forget the history that had been made there—John and Bobby Kennedy huddling over the Cuban missile crisis; FDR making last-minute changes to a radio address; Lincoln alone, pacing the halls and shouldering the weight of a nation."

It is telling that his visions ended before the middle of the 1960s, a decade that has disproportionately shaped subsequent decades. Obama's campaign was about moving beyond the wars of the baby-boom generation. In this he is a contradictory figure. Pressing a centrist message in the presidential campaign, he had a reliably liberal and not terribly interesting voting record in the Senate. Which Obama will show up for work in the White House? The New New Democrat, or the safely liberal former community organizer from Chicago? It seems safe to say that he would not have won as he did if he had appeared to be an eloquent Walter Mondale, or a tactically brilliant Michael Dukakis. He ran as a more practical kind of center-left politician—not a Great Society liberal, but one who, in the tradition of Bill Clinton, believes in pursuing progressive goals through centrist means and with an occasionally conservative cultural message. The "socialist" attacks of the McCain-Palin ticket failed in part because they stretched credulity.

Liberals who have thrilled to Obama could grow disenchanted with him if he fails to deliver a progressive Valhalla by, say, Valentine's Day. But the Reagan example offers a different—and more likely—possibility. Given Obama's popularity with his base, he may be that rare politician who can get away with making a deal without being seen as selling out. Reagan raised taxes and nobody held it against him, or even noticed all that much. Obama could be a Teflon man for the new century.

One thing is certain: Obama knows the Washington game he disdains, and he knows it well. He confounded virtually every prognostication in the campaign, and he knows politics, psychology and history. He understands that patience is a rare American virtue, and that it is easy to lose one's perspective. "When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest that we all take a deep breath," he wrote.

There will not be much time for deep breathing between now and January. Before the crowd in Grant Park, Obama acknowledged the difficulties: "two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century." In characteristically serious tones, he downplayed expectations, trying an all-too-novel approach in American politics: he was (basically) honest about what awaits us. "The road ahead will be long," he said. "Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there." But he quickly came back to earth. "There will be setbacks and false starts," he said, promising that "I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face."

To govern well, Obama will need all those spirits he once evoked—FDR, Kennedy, Lincoln—and he will need an understanding public. Two years ago, on the eve of his campaign for president, Obama said this about the American people: "I imagine they are waiting for a politics with the maturity to balance idealism and realism, to distinguish between what can and cannot be compromised, to admit the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point."

Bachelor Parties in the East Village

2008-10-29T21:20:00.001-07:00

IMG_2557.JPG
Originally uploaded by mryanwashere

They're the way forward, Don Draper-style.

Now That's a Well-Structured Argument

2008-10-19T10:22:00.000-07:00

Duran Duran of Alderaan

2008-09-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

My fiancee was a Duran Duran fan growing up. She owns the Milton Bradley board game still.

I was a Star Wars fan growing up. I have the Millenium Falcon in my parents' garage still.

Recently, Lucasfilm released a poster of the venerable Princess Leia of Alderaan... in the style of the New Wave, early-80's Rio album cover.

Sometimes, even our childhood obsessions intermingle and all we can do is marvel at the beauty of it all.

Cost of the Bailout (in Perspective)

2008-09-23T12:45:00.000-07:00

I love msnbc's "First Read" column for many reasons. But here, in passing, we finally have some perspective:

From NBC's Domenico Montanaro
Just how big is the proposed Wall Street bailout? Let's look at how it compares to some other numbers...

-- $700 billion: proposed Wall St. bailout
-- $695.4 billion: GDP of Taiwan. If the bailout were a country it would be the 21st largest GDP, larger than most nations.
-- $580 billion: cost of Iraq war (so far)
-- $515.4 billion: proposed 2009 Pentagon budget
-- $315 billion: McCain's nuclear energy plan
-- $295 billion: amount Pentagon overspent original budgets by.
-- $150 billion: Obama's energy plan
-- $50-$65 billion: Obama's health care plan, per year
-- $59.2 billion: proposed 2009 U.S. education budget
-- $10 billion: McCain health care proposals, per year
-- $38 million: Hank Paulson's post-2004 salary as Chairman, CEO of Goldman Sachs
-- 16.1 million: number of median Ohio household incomes ($43,371 as of 2004) that would add up to the bailout -- or about THREE Ohios.

Steven Pearlstein on our Category 4 Financial Crisis

2008-09-17T23:01:00.000-07:00

We've been talking about developments in the market a lot in my business communication classes this year. What does it mean -- especially from the perspective of a young business student with no assumptions of how the market is supposed to work -- when literally all of the major, blue-chip financial institutions fall apart?

Steven Pearlstein writes convincingly in the Washington Post today that it looks like a hurricane (predictable, but apt, metaphor) -- but more importantly: how do we clean up? From privatizing the benefits to socializing the risks, we've had a bipartisan hunger for deregulated short-sightedness.

But for my students, all of 20 years old: they are about to become stakeholders in a very different system.

This is what a Category 4 financial crisis looks like. Giant blue-chip financial institutions swept away in a matter of days. Banks refusing to lend to other banks. Russia closing its stock market to stop the panicked selling. Gold soaring $70 in a single trading session. Developing countries' currencies in a free fall. Money-market funds warning they might not be able to return every dollar invested. Daily swings of three, four, five hundred points in the Dow Jones industrial average.

What we are witnessing may be the greatest destruction of financial wealth that the world has ever seen -- paper losses measured in the trillions of dollars. Corporate wealth. Oil wealth. Real estate wealth. Bank wealth. Private-equity wealth. Hedge fund wealth. Pension wealth. It's a painful reminder that, when you strip away all the complexity and trappings from the magnificent new global infrastructure, finance is still a confidence game -- and once the confidence goes, there's no telling when the selling will stop.

But more than psychology is involved here. What is really going on, at the most fundamental level, is that the United States is in the process of being forced by its foreign creditors to begin living within its means.

Read on here at the Washington Post...

Endgame for Dumpster Muffin

2008-09-09T18:56:00.000-07:00

This morning, walking up the hill to my 9am class at Berkeley, four helicopters whirred in place. I knew what the news and police were covering: after two years, the Memorial Oak Grove was finally cut down and the final tree-sitters would have to descend.

I like a good kerfuffle, especially in public. My friends and readers know this to be true, whether it's a Final Four flash mob or a Code Pink moms-of-marines protest or the May Day scuffle my dad wandered into in London between cops and mohawked marijuana advocates. It's not that I think protest in large numbers does what people hope/fear it does. It's that the crowd always ends up in these fascinating, oddly composed tableaus.

If you've followed the treesitter conflict in Berkeley at all, you know the following:

- BUILD IT...: There's a grove of oaks and a few redwoods by Berkeley's football stadium. The school is building an athletic facility. The development was tied up in the courts until last week.

- ...AND THEY WILL COME: Several people, none of them Berkeley students, built nests up in the redwoods to protest the cutting. Signs were posted that this was an Indian burial ground (not true) and that the oaks were ancient (also untrue: they were planted in the 1930s as decoration).

- SHIT HITS THE FAN: Fences went up to cut off food to the treesitters and round-the-clock security was put in place. Which led to fascinating things. Like permanent camping in the median. Scraggly info booths with eco-friendly dirty limericks. Indian incense and a man named Running Wolf who is running for mayor; he likes to scrawl platitudes about white racism in chalk on the sidewalk every afternoon. A young woman named Dumpster Muffin, photographed for shaking her booty in the redwood crow's nest and shouting at construction crews. Several thin, earnest men who grilled vegetables and thanked the equally earnest older women who came by to feed them on the weekends. And the man with the haggard dog who slept alone, and once when I walked by threw a bottle at Dumpster Muffin when she suggested he wasn't giving the dog enough water.

Cut to today.

At 1, I walked over to find a crowd of hundreds on Piedmont. At the Haas Business School, I greeted a student of mine from the summer, and kids in button-down shirts cheered as a man in a hardhat tied up a temporary banner advertising the construction service that had built a clever set of risers around the sole remaining redwood.

Then I moved past the tv crews and swaying, aging hippies, beyond the spontaneous bongo-and-xylophone action that was straight from Return of the Jedi (original version, stormtrooper helmet-style).

Up on the roof of the Anthropology Annex, Kevin Karpiak showed me the view from his office. I arrived just in time to watch the very last tree-sitter descend in handcuffs to cheers, shouts, clapping, student derision. Kevin had his students conduct an ethnography of the protesters this summer; apparently, reports came back that they were really tried of Cliff Bars. And their helium balloons with nuts sometimes made it up to the tree-sitters. And they were proud of the crossbow they'd used to shoot a pulley line from one redwood outside the fence to another inside. Pulley line = food and water. And beating the fuzz. Also, did you realize people know how to use crossbows with any accuracy?

Speaking of the po-lice, I watched them gather together after the last tree-sitter was safely thrown to the ground for a group photo. Summer of '08, yo. The truth is, they were models of restraint by any reasonable measure. Cops were on duty every day I walked by the fences (though at night it was manned by yellow-jacketed rental security). Kevin said he watched a massive black cop get heckled by one tree-sitter who was foiled in the attempt to get food across the fence. For every racial epithet and basketball allusion, though, another quasi-hippie was talking him down: "Hey man, racism's just not cool."

And there we have the issue, love it or leave it, with the tree-sitter saga: mixed messages.

What was all this about? Trees? Burial grounds? Getting back to nature? Tossing bottles of urine at cops? Getting Running Wolf up off the sidewalks of the East Bay? Or best yet, was it a catch-all condemnation of whatever issue you care about?

At one point last year, tree-sitters in headscarves held a tree hostage on campus. What was it for, people asked. 'Tree genocide!" shouted a man in the bough.

On the news tonight (and believe me, I've seen news crews up there a dozen times -- they're part of the muddled message) the host asked a reporter: what now? Well, there's a decommissioned nuclear reactor in Livermore, the reporter said with an only-in-Berkeley smirk.

In other words, whatever protest meant to boomers in the 60s, today to most of us, aggressive activism means precisely this most of the time: sound and fury, signifying too many things -- none of them particularly bright.

Mad Men: In the Kitchen Where You Are Loved, However Imperfectly

2008-08-25T14:36:00.000-07:00

It's a curious thing, being a fan of Mad Men. The episodes are often subtle, clever, visually striking. And so, when you watch an episode designed to set up later ones -- where primarily backstory and conversations happen but no true plot points emerge -- you think, is that all?

In short, you get spoiled.

Last night, as Don Draper (the master of self-invention) is rescued from an embarrassing, boozy mistress by Peggy (who plays Robin in this duo of denial) and then returns home to discover that he is loved by his family, I just keep wondering: really?

The same revelation?

Every three episodes?

(And we had to see Peggy in a bad fatsuit. Again.)

430 New Demographics That Will Decide Election

2008-08-19T20:27:00.000-07:00

Latest Poll Reveals 430 New Demographics That Will Decide Election

Redefining What "Is" Is

2008-08-06T16:30:00.000-07:00

No doubt Jon Stewart will take over the On Language section of the New York Times Magazine when Safire finally kicks it. Who needs to talk about the etymology of "artful" or the vertical pronoun when you've got this slightly more relevant analysis:

What Do You Yell If China Wins the Most Medals?

2008-07-31T00:54:00.000-07:00

In every class that I've taught over the fast five years, I'm going to say a third have been Asian-American or born in an Asian country and raised in the US.

Most frequently, these students come from China -- and given the opportunity, they write about China. Its business practices, its hidden dynamics, its prejudices and customs and controversies. It leads to some great self-reflexive discussions.

After class recently, one student asked me, "What's the deal with the US and the Olympics?" Suddenly everywhere he turns he sees troubling nationalism: in ads, on tv, in the US' fierce exaltation after demolishing Team Canada in a pre-Olympic warmup. "They've always got to win and be aggressive about it. Doesn't it creep you out when everyone yells 'USA! USA! USA!' and beats their chests?"

I looked at him. "What do you yell if China wins the most medals, then?"

He grinned innocently. "What do you mean if we win the most?"

The Beijing Olympics: Are They A Trap?

Nancy's my favorite by far:

"Oh, they're gonna wait until it gets dark. And then they're gonna bring out their dragons."

Courage Comes With Practice

2008-07-28T15:55:00.000-07:00

I just want to strongly encourage you to listen to the second half of NPR's All Things Considered this afternoon.

The personal essay of my soon-to-be-wife is up, and I couldn't be prouder. Theresa's essay is called "Courage Comes with Practice," part of Jay Ellison's ongoing project This I Believe.

“The more often I do things that scare me or that make me uncomfortable, the more I realize that I can do a lot more than I originally thought I could do.”

Wherefore, Deutschland?

2008-07-23T15:48:00.000-07:00

So if you've turned on the tv this week, you know Barack Obama is traveling. To Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Israel. These are all regions that (one has to agree a little with McCain) it is essential that any US President (cough Bush) should understand from the local perspective, however briefly.

The pomp and drama have been heightened, of course, by the press scrum. One hears often how high the stakes are in case Obama fumbles... but once the Iraqi Prime Minister agreed that a timetable for troop exit was a good thing, what verbal misstep will even be heard?

Jon Stewart has a great graphic for the week -- ObamaQuest -- in which we realize the Illinois senator starred in Jason and the Argonauts. In it, we see that Obama will indeed be battling mythical creatures: the hydra of Israeli public suspicion, the cyclops of Iranian appeasement. All while wearing a leather tunic (rawk).

I'm just not clear why such a fuss is being made over the German part of Obama's week-long, trans-continental whirlwind.

There was some anxiety about whether Merkel would let Obama speak in front of Brandenburg Gate, where Reagan called for the wall to come down...

(and where the World Cup had an awesome interactive exhibit inside an enormous football. Just saying).

But now that they've got a less sexy location, there's a concern that Obama will pack a stadium filled with adoring Euros and he'll seem somehow... alien as an American liked by the world. I can see how this would be a change of pace, but isn't that kind of what we talk about when we talk about leadership? Not creepy Bushian backrubs and McCain one-liners, and indeed not simply golden-boy posturing by Obama.

But actually telling our strategic partners in the global community that we do not act in a vacuum. Acknowledging that we are open to dialogue and diplomacy. Recognizing that solitude and protectionism (issues that Obama, it's true, is often on the wrong side of economically) only leave us with fewer options as a country -- and fewer answers as interlinked global markets strain.

Postcards are being passed out in Berlin today to advertise for the event.

Meanwhile, McCain's campaign passed these faux-French luggage tags to the press corps who had to stay in the US this week.

Europe, as in the days of old, seems somehow to represent that fancy great-aunt who lives in the big city: you want her approval, but if she likes your brother better, it's important to tell everyone how out of touch she really is.

Europe's grown increasingly conservative in the last eight years, all across the board. They don't want Obama because they think he's easy. They want him because they think he's rational, flexible, smart.

And you know. He likes those leather tunics.

--

p.s. You really need to watch the Floridian old-timer debate on race and Judaism: Baruch Obama.

Jib-Jabbery: Campaigning

2008-07-16T14:47:00.000-07:00

I love the Jib-Jab. Here's their newest, in time (barely!) for the 2008 election.

You will, of course, remember them from four years ago: Bush v Kerry, This Land is Our Land.

Marvel at the production values, sing along, insert your own face as the citizen getting a proctology exam by Uncle Sam.

Ah, political irreverence. Gimme.

Send a JibJab Sendables® eCard Today!

Seriously: with the New Yorker cover flap, and Maureen Dowd saying it's sad we can't make fun of Obama, a little disneyfied (jib)jab gets a laugh.

But best of all, the jihad. That's one beautiful jihad.

And now I dare you to put your face in there. I've got to go write a chapter or plan a class or something. Or read more politics.

Slow News Movement

2008-07-04T19:18:00.000-07:00

You know what's great about a slow news day in America? (If you don't count the good riddance farewell to Jesse Helms.)

The 12th European Balloon Festival got underway near Barcelona, Spain.

Participants took aim in an organized water fight in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Chinese tourists in the desert close to Dunhuang, in northeastern China. The Olympic Torch will pass through Dunhuang, which is located near the historic junction of the northern and southern Silk Roads.

A volunteer contributed to the massive effort to clean algae from the coastline of Qingdao, China. A recent algal bloom has encroached on areas which are to be used for Olympic sailing events.

Iraqis enjoyed an amusement park ride at Al Zawra Park in Baghdad.

- NY Times Pictures of the Day, 7/4/08

Floating Zoe Rosen - New Story Published

2008-07-02T15:30:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

Rush out to your newsstands, your Barnes & Nobles, your independent book shops!

For lo, my story "Floating Zoe Rosen" comes out today in the July / August issue of The Rambler.

The magazine (as an incentive to buy a copy), doesn't provide a online version... but go on. Pick one up. It's a good story, I think. My friend Andrea Luttrell, who was in the class where it was written, has very kindly vouched for the title on her blog.

Here's a excerpt below.

--

Floating Zoe Rosen
- by Ryan Sloan
The Rambler Magazine, July / Aug 2008

It starts like this: a kitchen full of people leaping and shimmying and almost-grinding to the music. Next thing I know the guy to my right takes off his shoes. And the hairy girl slips out of her skirt. Everyone’s taking off all their clothes, as though some declaration of nudity occurred when I wasn’t listening. They grin and head out the kitchen door, barefoot in the snow. Zoe goes up in the air into someone’s arms and suddenly I’m the last one left. Just me and the music and some jeans on the kitchen floor. Zoe’s leg brace is sprawled in the sink. I try not to panic. I think, hey. I’m a modern girl. My breath rolls against the window. Through my own fog, I can see the six of them out there in the hot tub. Someone’s laugh leaps up, a hoot that ricochets against my fingers splayed up on the glass. Slowly, slowly, my shirt comes off, and also the jeans, and the jokey physics underwear with blue equations and the sturdy off-white bra. Somehow it’s the loss of my socks that signals my nakedness but they go too, all in a pile that’s meant to look accidental.

When I open the door, the night air reaches and spoons me out of the house. It’s this vast field of pearl-gray in front of me, dipping off in every direction with fir trees in the distance so green they’re almost black. I can hear the trees pop occasionally far off. Each step I take is deliberate – the snow crunches up between my toes and numbs my heels, so I try to use the footprints left by the others. Naturally I’ve picked a boy’s trail, these huge lopes that require me to jump from stone to stone. Picking my way over to the group, I feel like some giraffe relocated to the arctic but as my mother never fails to point out, there are a few advantages to having long limbs. The moon is just a thin curve but it’s enough light to see the trellis, the octagon of the hot tub, dark forms and the bobbing orange tip of a joint. Enough light that they must be able to see me hopping toward them. My arms are covered in pinpricks, my nipples sting under the shield of my arm, and for about the sixtieth time this week I wish I hadn’t let Zoe hack off my hair. It’s short as a boy’s now, and – two hops away – there’s nothing left to hide behind as a few of them turn and shout a welcome.

She’s not watching me. Zoe grins wolfishly at one of the twins, explaining the difference between wild turkeys and peacocks. She leans against the tub’s edge, arms out. Her small, pale breasts rise just above the water’s surface. As I climb up Zoe slips suddenly beneath the water and reemerges, slick as seals, to grab me by the ankle.

“Down with Dru, our last kid in the bucket!” Zoe’s voice is all delight, and as hands grab my waist, my shoulders, my calves, my hips and I am raised into the air like a sacrifice I look up at the sky and laugh in spite of myself, because the stars are so bright they’re forming and reforming in constellations of their choosing, a dipping cup yes but also a girl and a bear and soon theorems, it’s numbers and vectors up there as the shout goes up and I go down below the water among a tangle of limbs.

This must be how it starts.

Read on in The Rambler...

Baron Davis Makes Me Feel Slightly Less Foolish for Being a Clippers Fan

2008-07-01T20:03:00.000-07:00

There are times when, if you're a real fan, you relish admitting you love your team. Even if that team is ridiculously bad, wracked by constant injury, mired in ineptitude. Even when other people widen their eyes in disbelief, and then those eyes go vacant because the pity they feel for you is what one normally reserves for the retarded.

I, my friends, am a Clipper fan, and have been for many, many years.

My team comes up in every top-ten-worst-franchises list online. All of them. At ESPN, we're ranked #3, beaten out only by the Cubs and the freaking Bengals.

You know it's bad when your team is a punchline in perhaps the worst film of all time: Juwanna Mann.

So when Baron Davis, who I watched at UCLA on a regular basis, jumped ship today to come to a team that needs leadership and passion and... well, a reason to not be laughed at quite as frequently... I was thrilled. Thrilled. As if I'm actually playing with the guy, that kind of thrilled.

In short, I felt like Michael Whang, who wrote this song in the 12 hours between hearing we had a chance at the guy and when we signed him.

Dude. I feel the sincerity when he hits the Los Angeles bit. So nice to maybe, maybe have a strong team to watch.

And when I tell people I'm a Clips fan, and the eyes go vacant, the awkward smiles will be because I'm embarrassing, not my team.

I can't freaking wait.

--

p.s. Michael's lyrics are below.

Baron, It's Time To Come Home
Michael Whang (2008)

mr baron davis i dont know if you could hear me
but im just a humble clipper fan
it's a crazy summer right now
and we're so afraid of losing elton brand
but if you come around,
everything will turn around, yes sir i believe
tim thomas will find his jump shot for you
and you'll heal chris of his ADD

and i heard they're finishing up
a new clippers workout facility
on behalf los angeles and the clipper nation
we gon' make you a king
you gon' have mr ralph lawler screaming bingo
and we gon' go buck wild when you
don the red and blue and dunk on adrei kirilinko

Baron Davis droppin dimes to Chris Kaman
2009 at Staples Center is going to be so amazing
You've done your time at the bay,
now pick up your the phone
Talk to Elgin, cuz Baron, it's time to come home

you gotta be the swagger removes
the clips of all that 4th quarter fear
if you come i promise i'll do my best
to grow a baron davis beard
and i saw that documentary on reebok.com
with you on your roller skates
if you come to los angeles,
i'll pretend i never saw anything that day

no but seriously, you and elton brand could be
the one two punch nobody else wants to see
and just imagine with chris kaman on the other post
mobley pullin up for three, with eric takin notes

Los Angeles,
There's No Place Like Home

Hong Kong in the Summer

2008-06-13T13:54:00.001-07:00

Junk and Central
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

After three weeks in New York and Hong Kong, I'm exhausted and pretty happy.

The One-Room MFA

2008-05-10T14:44:00.000-07:00

My friend Tom Hopkins routinely sets the bar for troubling, hilarious storytelling, so this most recent story in Yankee Pot Roast (The One-Room MFA) should come as no surprise.

An excerpt:

Lord, how I miss my old one-room writin program! How partial I was to the place! No heat in the winter, no indoor plumbin, no polite and supportive encouragement. And none a these waterin holes, these bars and clubs and whatnot where y’all retreat after you’ve finished with all that critiquin y’all do neither. Not that we all would’ve called any a that business “critiquin,” son. My old professor, he right would a called it “chokin the heifer.” Y’all pat each other on the back—like shuckin a bull up his James Dickey till he shoots a hot load, that’s right—and then y’all swap grand dreams over mug after mug a cheap soda and steep spirit, with some pickled fruit and a baby umbrella thrown in besides!

“Did you hear that no-good so-and-so got himself an agent,” you complain.

“He got a pile a loot withal,” you reply, “and some sweet foreign markets at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the bargain for his no-good such-and-such roman à clef.”

“Sure as Carson McCullers loved junk but not a soul know it, this writin life is a hard one,” you bitch some more.

Ankle-biters, crankin each other by the pike in a circle like that, y’all got it easy! In that one-room em-eff-ay, who knew from agents and advances and Frankfurt? Who read the lunch-rag gossip and who knew the hot deals? In my one-room graduate schoolhouse, all we had, all we knew, all we ever wanted, was the writin, nothin but the writin. Yes sir! And how to tear it all to bits like a heartless and three-headed hyena!

The Handicapped Can Harass You Too

2008-05-09T17:19:00.000-07:00

I was sexually harassed by a man in a wheelchair an hour ago. Then, I was expected to feel apologetic. Here's how it broke down.

It's the end of the week at Berkeley. I wait at Shattuck and Center for the 4.30 bus. A man in a motorized wheelchair wheels up next to me. He shifts position once, twice, three times so that it's remarkably like someone pacing. The bus is definitely running late.

Finally he's parked directly behind me. I hear his voice, soft and friendly, but the words are too quiet. I turn and notice he's looking up at me, smiling. He's in his-mid forties, black, with a gentle face. "Rub it," he says.

I have clearly misheard him. I lean in a little. "I'm sorry?"

"It's a song. How are you?" he asks.

"Pretty good, thanks." I look for the bus, which is nowhere in sight. "How are you?"

"I'm good." He smiles again. "You should rub me."

"Wow," I say. "I'm... That's really uncomfortable." And I walk to the other side of the large ad enclosure.

I feel like laughing at the absurdity of it. He is completely calm and lucid in a town that is filled with people who are often off their meds. One woman mutters and swears regularly at this bus stop, calling anyone who won't give her a dollar a fucking bitch. Another woman, younger than me, interrogates passengers in the mornings once they're on the bus; she likes to ask them where they're going and why.

This is different. He is cruising me in his red, motorized wheelchair at a bus stop in front of the role-playing game shop. But asking me to rub it? Rub what? Leaving political correctness aside, what do you rub for a disabled man? And it's a song? Huh.

In the time it takes me to think this, I hear a motorized whirr. He wears a wounded look and says softly, "I meant my back. That's what I meant."

It's clearly time to walk home.

Women go through this all the time. I almost never do, and so now, walking, I go through the following stages:

- I feel gross.
- I just insulted a man who cannot use his legs. Nice one.
- Did I give off some kind of signal? Or was he baiting me, deliberately trying to make me uncomfortable?
- Why did I speak to him in the first place? Big mistake.
- And yet, surely you can be humane in Berkeley, CA. Surely when a stranger engages you in conversation, the polite thing to do is respond. And if they claim it's a misunderstanding, surely this too must be true. Right?
- There's no way I misunderstood that moment.

It reminds me of something I was told years ago by someone with a disabled parent. Sometimes, she would complain, when you're disabled you feel like you can say whatever you want. Anything at all. There are no consequences worse than what you already experience.

When the bus finally caught up with me I was halfway home. The man in the red wheelchair was not on board.

Iron Mania

2008-05-05T13:16:00.000-07:00

Slate has two great items up that poke fun at / raise some eyebrows about Iron Man.

The first, an article by Grady Hendrix (Why Iron Man is like Steve Jobs), examines the contextual and racial tone-deafness that Marvel has employed over the years with Tony Stark.

Even now, Iron Man represents Stan Lee's adolescent dog-eat-dog version of capitalism, the version that appeals to our "might makes right" monkey brains: Innovation is good; monopolies rock when we run them, suck when we don't; big corporations need CEOs rich enough to own space jets; and regulations should be a result of the CEOs' benevolence and wisdom, not imposed by outsiders. Tony Stark is a self-made man who believes that we can build ourselves out of trouble. He's one of America's romanticized lone inventors who, like Steve Jobs, solve problems by locking themselves away in secret workshops to emerge later with their paradigm-shifting inventions.

The other isn't so much an article as just a funny YouTube parody.

Photobooth

2008-04-28T20:48:00.001-07:00

Ryan Sloan, April 08
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

Berkeley, April 2008.

Portrait taken by Christopher Irion for Berkeley's PhotoBooth Project.

Check out the wide range of faces taken on that day. They're really pretty wonderful.

Stanley Fish - Much Ado

2008-04-28T16:39:00.000-07:00

So it's crunch time at both colleges, and I'm trying to write my book and grade papers and steer students in the final, galvanizing effort. I'm also, with increasing dismay, observing the often-absurd media coverage of the often-craven attacks of all three political candidates this season.

Imagine my surprise, then, that I would welcome the commentary of Stanley Fish, opining in the New York Times. Oh, he says many a wise thing from time to time, but on the whole I argue with his analysis as often as I agree.

Still: a nuanced and reasonable repudiation of the Ayers smear against Obama from someone not in Obama's camp comes, I think, at exactly the right time. I hope more people step forward, and step away from the superficial FlagPinning of American political debate.

--

Much Ado
by Stanley Fish
New York Times, April 27, 2008

In 1952, when McCarthyism was at its height, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas labeled the investigative techniques of the junior senator from Wisconsin “guilt by association” (Adler v. Board of Education). Douglas added that McCarthyite tactics were “repugnant to our society” because, despite the absence of any overt wrongdoing, the pasts of those attacked were “combed for signs of disloyalty” and for utterances that might be read as “clues to dangerous thoughts.”

More than a half century later, “McCarthyism” was joined in the lexicon by “Swiftboating,” the art of the smear campaign mounted with the intention not of documenting a wrong, but of covering the victim with slime enough to cast doubt on his or her integrity. Now, in 2008, after a primary season increasingly marked by dirty pool and low blows, “McCarthyism” and “Swiftboating” have come together in a particularly lethal and despicable form. I refer to the startling revelation — proclaimed from the housetops by both the Clinton and McCain campaigns — that Barack Obama ate dinner at William Ayers’s house, served with him on a board and was the honored guest at a reception he organized.

Confession time. I too have eaten dinner at Bill Ayers’s house (more than once), and have served with him on a committee, and he was one of those who recruited my wife and me at a reception when we were considering positions at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Moreover, I have had Bill and his wife Bernardine Dohrn to my apartment, was a guest lecturer in a course he taught and joined in a (successful) effort to persuade him to stay at UIC and say no to an offer from Harvard. Of course, I’m not running for anything, but I do write for The New York Times and, who knows, this association with former fugitive members of the Weathermen might be enough in the eyes of some to get me canned.

Did I conspire with Bill Ayers? Did I help him build bombs? Did I aid and abet his evasion (for a time) of justice? Not likely, given that at the time of the events that brought Ayers and Dohrn to public attention, I was a supporter of the Vietnam War. I haven’t asked him to absolve me of that sin (of which I have since repented), and he hasn’t asked me to forgive him for his (if he has any).

Indeed in all the time I spent with Ayers and Dohrn, politics — present or past — never came up.

What did come up? To answer that question I have to introduce a word and concept that is somewhat out of fashion: the salon. A salon is a gathering in a private home where men and women from various walks of life engage in conversation about any number of things, including literature, business, fashion, films, education and philosophy. Ayers and Dohrn did not call their gatherings salons, but that’s what they were; large dinner parties (maybe 12-15), with guests coming and going, one conversation leading to another, no rules or obligations, except the obligation to be interesting and interested. The only thing I don’t remember was ideology, although since this was all going on in Hyde Park, there was the general and diffused ideology, vaguely liberal, that usually hangs over a university town.

Many of those attending these occasions no doubt knew something about their hosts’ past, but the matter was never discussed and why should it have been? We were there not because of what Ayers and Dohrn had done 40 years ago, but because of what they were doing at the moment.

Ayers is a longtime professor of education at UIC, nationally known for his prominence in the “small school” movement. Dohrn teaches at Northwestern Law School, where she directs a center for child and family justice. Both lend their skills and energies to community causes; both advise various agencies; together they have raised exemplary children and they have been devoted caretakers to aged parents. “Respectable” is too mild a word to describe the couple; rock-solid establishment would be more like it. There was and is absolutely no reason for anyone who knows them to plead the fifth or declare, “I am not now nor have I ever been a friend of Bill’s and Bernardine’s.”

Least of all Barack Obama, who by his own account didn’t know them that well and is now being taken to task for having known them at all. Of course it would have required preternatural caution to avoid associating with anyone whose past deeds might prove embarrassing on the chance you decided to run for president someday. In an earlier column, I spoke of the illogic of holding a candidate accountable for things said or done by a supporter or an acquaintance. Now a candidate is being held accountable for things said and done four decades ago by people who happen to live in his upper middle class neighborhood.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain should know better. In fact, they do know better. To date, Clinton has played hardball, but hasn’t really fouled. I never saw anything wrong or inaccurate about her saying that Martin Luther King’s vision required a president’s action before it could be implemented, or Bill Clinton’s saying that Jesse Jackson won the South Carolina primary twice. He did, and if the implication was that Obama’s base constituency is African-American, that too was accurate and continues to be so.

As for her saying that all Obama had ever done was give a speech, she was being generous: he gave that speech against invading Iraq at a small event featuring other speakers (including Jackson); the local press coverage did not even mention him; and if this was, as his campaign claims, an act of courage, it was a singularly private one, maybe even a fairy tale. Clinton’s exaggerating the danger of her visit to Bosnia (most likely unintentional because, as she said, “I’m not dumb”) came a little closer to crossing a line, but didn’t. Re-telling a story (about a hospital’s refusal to treat an uninsured patient) that turned out not to be true was evidence of faulty campaign organization, not of deliberate duplicity.

But the literature the Clinton campaign is passing around about Obama and Ayers cannot be explained away or rationalized. It features bold heads proclaiming that Ayers doesn’t regret his Weathermen activities (what does that have to do with Obama? Are we required to repudiate things acquaintances of our have not said?), that Ayers contributed $200 to Obama’s senatorial campaign (do you take money only from people of whose every action you approve?), that Obama admired Ayers’s 1997 book on the juvenile justice system, that Ayers and Obama participated on a panel examining the role of intellectuals in public life. That subversive event was sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals, an organization that also sponsored an evening conversation (moderated by me) between those notorious radicals Richard Rorty and Judge Richard Posner (also a neighbor of Ayers’s; maybe the Federalist Society should expel him).

I don’t see any crimes or even misdemeanors in any of this. I do see civic activism and a concern for the welfare of children. The suggestion that something sinister was transpiring on those occasions is backed up by nothing except the four-alarm-bell typography that accompanies this list of entirely innocent, and even praiseworthy, actions.

As for Senator McCain, in 2004 he repudiated the Swiftboat attacks against fellow veteran John Kerry, but this time around he’s joining in, and if Obama gets the nomination, it seems that the Arizona senator will be playing the Ayers card. Of course, McCain knows a little about baseless accusations and innuendos, given his experience in South Carolina in 2000. And in case he has forgotten what it feels like, he may soon be reminded; for there’s a story abroad on the Internet that says that rather than being a heroic, tortured prisoner of war, McCain was a collaborator who traded information for a comfortable apartment serviced by maids who were really prostitutes. I don’t believe it for a second, just as I am sure that Senators McCain and Clinton don’t really believe that Obama condones setting bombs or supports a radical agenda that was pursued (as he has said) when he was eight years old.

The difference is that I feel a little dirty just for having repeated a scurrilous rumor even as I rejected it. Apparently Obama’s two opponents have no such qualms and are happily retailing, and wallowing in, the dirt.

Sloan Birthday 08 - Albany Bowl

2008-04-20T14:34:00.001-07:00

Sloan Birthday 08 - Albany Bowl
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

What's not to love here? The night before my birthday, we gathered up at Albany Bowl: so low-rent, so perfect.

- Two rounds of surprisingly great bowling from future academics untrained in the art of the bowl

- Orange and yellow clown shoes

- Extraordinary, homemade chocolate cupcakes, courtesy of Eric and Anne

- Troubling, animated interstitials on the screen when you get a spare, usually involving bowling pin characters crashing biplanes or cynically unraveling Egyptian mummies

- Vending machines with Doritos and bowling socks

- A diner offering milkshakes and eggrolls, served by a shy Vietnamese woman

- The Dance Dance 2 video game showdown between Mac & Anne, evenly matched to the end

- Eric and I playing the Aliens arcade shoot-em-up with great focus and gravity. Saving humanity should be serious, don't you think?

- The hostess who came around with our pitchers and was delighted with my 4/20 birthday. You know, she said. 420. Right? You know?

Tonight, for the birthday proper, Mac and I are going into the city for a great meal and a stroll.

Birthdays rock.

Small Victories

2008-04-05T14:50:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. It's been ages since I wrote here.

The semester's turned into a beater car that dies on a hill. For the past month I've been pushing while holding onto the wheel with one hand, and we've almost crested the top so I can hop in and accelerate downhill and pop the clutch and roll in style.

I miss The Wire. I wanted to say, semi-ironically, that that's how we do.

Good news: I got a story published in The Rambler Magazine. No word yet on which issue, but it's coming. For those of you who go back awhile, the story is "Floating Zoe Rosen," which has been revised and reworked relentlessly over the years. I just always felt she needed a home. Glad it all worked out.

Also, I've joined two local writing groups. The book proceeds apace, with good critics and friendly voices. Turns out, and I'm not sure if you knew this, but the Bay Area has a few writers too.

I got into the Kenyon Review summer writers' residency, only to realize that there's no way I can afford it this year. Taxes, while essential for the governance and repair of our great nation, have bent me over the prison sink this year.

That said, for the first time in my life I went to a tax attorney, Matt Whatley, in San Francisco this week. I heartily recommend him. After all, his business is called Tax Ninja. Just serious-ish enough for my tastes.

Some friends from back east and down south are visiting in the next coupla months, which is excellent.

And finally: UCLA is in the Final Four, beginning... well, now actually. Unlike previous years, when I dragged all my friends to Professor Thom's in the East Village and bought lots of beer and watched us lose to Florida TWO YEARS IN A ROW, I've decided it'll just be me. At home. With a bag of tortilla chips, some salsa, and reverential silence. I shall not tempt the gods to be displeased with my rampant, partisan enthusiasm.

(go bruins!)

p.s. An amendment, post-game. Why did I have to go to the school that only celebrates championships? Final Four three years in a row is extraordinary. But I'm bummed we lost anyway. Will Love and Collison and Westbrook go to the pros now? Man...

I'll be honest, if any year was ours it was going to be this one. See you this time next year.

Young 'Bama

2008-03-13T21:03:00.000-07:00

Come on. Who wouldn't elect this kid?

Read the NY Times article out today: A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path

Spitzer and The Wire

2008-03-10T17:33:00.001-07:00

Briefly: what a moron, our brave fighter of corruption, our Attorney General-turned-New York State Governor has turned out to be.

I remember how several lecturers from the business community, visiting the undergrads at NYU's Stern School, commented darkly about Spitzer's regulatory zeal. He'd move from one industry to the next, exposing corruption and double-dealing -- not so much by taking companies to trial but by bullying them backstage with the imminent shame of public exposure. Now he is irreparably exposed.

Personally, I admire reform. But piety and ambition are dangerous admixtures, and the moment he became governor the place has been a mess. Spitzer built up a long list of enemies, and so it was natural to assume he'd eventually get tangled in some ethical gray area. One of his aides is already under scrutiny for alleged character assassination of a Republican opponent.

Hasn't the former Attorney General ever watched The Wire? Any kid on the corner knows you don't use your cell phone to procure something illegal. You certainly don't text verifiable information. And you definitely, definitely don't transport a high-class prostitute across state lines -- thus enabling the free-spending feds a chance to nail your ass to the wall.

As a former buster of elaborate prostitution rings, he certainly knew the rules. And felt he was above them.

I believe we call this hypocrisy. And poetic justice.

And... scene.

The Back-Alley or the Big Ticket

2008-03-08T21:35:00.000-08:00

Bob Herbert's got a new opinion piece in the Times, which trumps the more cutting (but essentially similar) argument of David Brooks in yesterday's edition.

In short: getting in the mud doesn't win Obama any blue-collar Pennsylvania voters. I'm inclined to agree, to a point.

David Axelrod, Obama's communications guru, has suggested that a larger offensive is underway to put Hillary back on her heels. One that suggests she's a habitual hider of secrets. Dare I say it, that she has monsters in her closet.

As one might ask the New York Times about Vicky Iseman, have you got some smoking guns to properly equip that boogeyman?

Or are we headed into a nice long news cycle of real estate innuendo: Rezko vs Whitewater, winner take nothing?

Tell the jobless what you're gonna do, Barack, and say it concretely. If you don't have a clear vision, now's a great time to see it. Hillary's folks want a nice back-alley fight. It's important now, more than ever, to see the wisdom of the larger battle looming ahead.

--

This is an odd switch of metaphor, but bear with me. In professional basketball, you have deliberate half-court teams that play defense, execute pass-and-screen offensive sets and walk the ball up the court. The San Antonio Spurs -- your 2007 NBA Champs -- are a textbook half-court team.

There are a few teams that have tried to buck that trend lately, and they've struggled to reach the final rung: the Golden State Warriors, but most famously the Phoenix Suns. They play low-defense, shoot quickly, high-scoring games that are true team efforts, because all five starters (and a few others) have to be talented passers and scorers. These speedy, high-octane teams have drawn record crowds, advanced far in the playoffs -- and frustrated conventional teams because the slow guys try to run and gun at the fast pace. Quite often, slower teams lose.

But the Suns recently caved. Desperate for an NBA Championship, they decided to pretend they were the Spurs. They ditched Shawn Marion, their jack-of-all-trades, for the aging, charismatic bully in the paint, Shaquille O'Neal. Once atop the division, they've plummeted, losing five of the eight games Shaq has plodded through.

It's crucial to adapt, folks. I know this. But to alter your ethos, when it so strongly defines you (and your opponents when they fight you), invites disaster. And it certainly doesn't win you championships of any stripe.

--

Here's the Herbert article, in its entirety:

Confronting the Kitchen Sink
By BOB HERBERT

The high anxiety in the Obama circles has thrown the campaign off its game.

Samantha Power, one of Senator Barack Obama’s senior foreign policy advisers, had to quit Friday after she lost her cool in an interview with a Scottish newspaper and called Senator Hillary Clinton a “monster.”

The campaign apologized for the flap. But Mr. Obama himself seems unsure of how to respond to the trash-and-thrash tactics that helped Senator Clinton defeat him in Ohio and Texas this week.

The anger that caused Ms. Power to blurt out the monster comment is widespread inside the Obama camp. But Senator Obama, for a variety of reasons — some of them self-imposed — is sharply constrained in the way that he can respond to provocations.

And if there is one thing the Clinton crowd knows how to do, it’s provoke.

On Thursday, Senator Clinton’s spokesman, Howard Wolfson, likened Senator Obama to Ken Starr, the independent prosecutor who hounded the Clintons in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Why the Clinton forces would want to inject that poisonous bit of business into the campaign is a mystery.

But there was Mr. Wolfson on Thursday, in response to a call from the Obama campaign for Mrs. Clinton to release her tax returns, asserting: “I, for one, do not believe that imitating Ken Starr is the way to win a Democratic primary election for president.”

More serious was Senator Clinton’s assertion that she was qualified to be commander in chief, and that John McCain had also “certainly” crossed that “threshold,” but that the jury was still out on Mr. Obama.

In other words, if a choice on national security had to be made today between Senators Obama and McCain, voters — according to Mrs. Clinton’s logic — should choose Senator McCain.

That is a low thing for a Democratic presidential candidate to do to a rival in a party primary. Can you imagine John McCain saying that Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney or even the guitar-strumming Mike Huckabee might be less qualified than Hillary Clinton to be commander in chief? It couldn’t happen.

But Senator Clinton never gave a second thought to opening the trap door beneath her fellow Democrat.

And then there was Mrs. Clinton on “60 Minutes,” being interviewed by Steve Kroft. He had shown a clip on the program of a voter in Ohio who said that he’d heard that Senator Obama didn’t know the national anthem, “wouldn’t use the Holy Bible,” and was a Muslim.

Mr. Kroft asked Senator Clinton if she believed that Senator Obama is a Muslim. In one of the sleaziest moments of the campaign to date, Senator Clinton replied: “No. No. Why would I? No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know.”

As far as I know.

If she had been asked if she thought President Bush was a Muslim, would her response have included the caveat “as far as I know”? What about Senator McCain? Why, then, with Senator Obama?

In the run-up to the crucial Texas and Ohio primaries, the plan in the Clinton camp, as The Times reported, was to unleash as many lines of attack as possible — a “kitchen sink” fusillade — in the hope that something would work. Senator Obama is still trying to figure out how to respond.

Whatever anger and frustration he may be feeling, he should stick to the high road. He can’t win wrestling in the mud with Hillary Clinton. That will not put Barack Obama in the White House.

Mr. Obama’s strength was his message of hope and healing, the idea that he could bring disparate groups together to work on the nation’s toughest problems. That has gotten him this far, which is much further than almost anyone expected.

He now needs an added dimension. He needs to articulate a vision. He needs to spell out to voters where he wants to take this country over the next few years, how he will alleviate the suffering of millions trapped in vicious economic circumstances and what he will do to restore the honor and prestige of the U.S. around the world.

Political campaigns are not about fairness, but they can often be about vision. Voters want more from Senator Obama.

He may not be able to close the deal with, say, working-class whites, but he more than anyone else has the eloquence to try and make a compelling case. He should go for it.

We have seen election after election in which candidates have won by fanning the anxieties of voters. Elect me, or something terrible will happen to you!

That is now the Clinton mantra, which is a measure of how grim our politics have become.

An Obama-Clinton Ticket: the Bugs-and-Daffy Show

2008-03-05T12:43:00.000-08:00

Never underestimate the wisdom of the voting public, Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested on Monday. Last night, she was rewarded by victories large and small over Obama in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island.

Not that she's gained in the delegate count, because of course she's still 100 down. We have on the prez-speculation calendar now a few smaller states and the prospect of increasingly nasty fighting until the Pennsylvania primary in late April.

And now this, widely reported when we all woke up this morning: a softball tossed by a CBS host about a possible joint presidential ticket, to which HRC suggested... sure, we'll spoon. But I'm the big spoon. [Insert your own top/bottom, admiral/captain, dom/sub phrasing at will].

It just seems like such a cynical move on HRC's part, sensing that the Democratic electorate is tired of this protracted, ugly nomination fight. They want answers and a teddy-bear narrative to cuddle before those massive turnout numbers start to stall. She gets to exploit the notion that even though she's still losing, if you vote for her in upcoming primaries you'll eventually get Obama too (as co-VP with Bill).

Marc Ambinder in the Atlantic Online notes:

Consider the unheralded virtues of an Obama-Clinton ticket. First, politics. Both durable, distinct factions of the Democratic party — united, and working at full throttle. McCain's national-security edge — blunted overnight. Obama's domestic-policy edge — sharpened instantly. Ohio, Michigan, Florida, New Mexico — suddenly, much less a worry for Democrats.

Now, governing. Obama, by the admissible evidence of his own career, is not an executive. A Vice President Clinton would be a prime minister, tending to Congress and health care reform and trade agreements while Obama travels and inspires and thinks. She would tarnish none of Obama's luster; the qualities he embodies — that make him so attractive to Democrats here and, well, in the rest of the world — would be undiminished by the brass-balls first minister he chooses to get things done.

And then there is the personal. Would Clinton survive the humiliation? Could Bill be contained? Is Obama humble enough? The reality is that Clinton has earned something. Her millions of votes, the states she has won, the demographics she commands — Obama can't dismiss these. At some point, he will make a gesture. Why not the ultimate gesture?

It's a well-reasoned consideration of the possibility (as opposed to a few other articles which simply slammed or embraced the joint-ticket dreamy-dream). I've got a few thoughts.

I love that Ambinder writes it as Obama-Clinton, as if this is the pecking order that HRC is suggesting.

It's possible to get past the strategy of this idea, the well-timed relevance that such a possibility lends Clinton, but what about reality? You don't get to be co-president, so who's going to say chicken first? It certainly won't happen for months.

Why does the media insist on writing off candidates before primaries? Ratings drama, sure, but also perhaps it is because they were the kid who finishes his test first, every time. Doesn't matter if he has the right answers. Just need to get that hand in the air. [Most egregious example: Slate descends into an extended analogy of Obama as eternal victor Bugs Bunny, Clinton as forever doomed Daffy Duck...] There were a dozen articles that I read over the past several days that literally dug a Clinton-shaped plot in the ground. Last night, there were two wordless pages up with images: one of the influential party leaders who might broken a Clinton retreat today, the other (completely foolish) the people HRC would actually listen to. This list included a photo of herself.

The conveyed sense of narrative drama is infuriating for me. Not that the voters of Ohio or Texas were reading voraciously and leaping to Clinton's defense -- she was always strong in these states -- but the only victors here are the talking heads and their endless cycles of speculation.

Finally, this: the press says it's a big mess, and we need to know now. But maybe they're wrong again. Maybe we can be patient. We'll know when everyone votes, from the superdelegates on up. When Florida and Michigan vote again. Perhaps it'll all come down to who has the most delegates when Puerto Rico votes in our last primary, which is really kind of fitting in tems of those with the least-heard voice speaking up. I'd rather have Democrats beating each other up about whose healthcare is more universal that Republicans having months to argue folks out of wanting insurance. I'd rather keep talking about the fine points of what two fine candidates want for us than an endless stretch of red/blue.

What do you think?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

2008-02-27T13:58:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty blissed out. It's not all puppies and gumdrops, but I feel very lucky on the whole. My love and I are doing just fine, enjoying the long, long engagement.

We have very serious conversations.

We have totally frivolous conversations.

We go for walks on afternoons like yesterday, when all the cherry blossoms have suddenly appeared, and we hold hands as we make fun of pious environmentalists and hypocrites and fashionistas and ourselves.

We buy a bottle of Italian wine and some great cheese and a fresh baguette and we stay in, watching vintage Cusack in 'Better Off Dead.'

Life's good. What gives?

--

In my Berkeley classes this semester, I decided we'd do a progression that makes them read oral histories, then interview a stranger, then write a profile. So much fun / insight / terror.

As an example, today I taught a class using a Susan Orlean profile from The New Yorker titled Show Dog. It begins thus:

If I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff Truesdale.

Biff is perfect. He's friendly, good-looking, rich, famous, and in excellent physical condition. He almost never drools.

He's not afraid of commitment. He wants children -- actually, he already has children but wants a lot more.

He words hard and is a consummate professional, but he also knows how to have fun.

What Biff likes most is food and sex. this makes him sound boorish, which he is not -- he's just elemental.

Brought the house down.

On Speed Dating and the Supersecret Spy

2008-02-24T12:42:00.000-08:00

* Originally published in Opium Magazine, and written by me as a performed piece for their Opium Reading Series.

The problem with being a spy for a supersecret agency is that people are boring. Just incredibly dull.

No, I’m not saying you’re boring, miss. No… No, I’ve never tried speed dating before. You seem very nice. There are a lot of desperate people here, but you seem nice. And you’re plain, I have a thing for plain women.

You see, I’m looking for love, and in my experience, love’s not the same as passion. Passion is coupling and uncoupling with a leggy killer as you hurtle at increasing velocities from an exploding aircraft toward the undulating wheatfields of the Ukraine, as she grabs at your safety harness and the wind ripples her face like pudding.

My interests? I like to build bombs using simple materials like twine, sugarcane and camel dung. Good spies can get a lot of mileage out of camel dung and other high-density fertilizers, did you know that? I put in a lot of time at work.

I really believe what my father told me when I was eight years old. He said, “Son, when you kick your boss in the testicles, you’ve got to run as fast as you can.” And I didn’t understand it at the time, because he disappeared the next day, but I think he was saying you’ve got to be daring and unconventional. And every day I spend as a spy at a supersecret agency is one more day that I kick the testicles of evil, really really hard. Is that something you’d like to watch? After this speed dating thing ends I’d like to take you in my fast, weapon-laden car and destroy some evil, what do you say about that?

Sometimes I get a few questions about my appearance. You know, “I thought secret agents were tall and handsome”. Do you think a square-jawed stud walks into Bahrain without people doing a double-take? I feel embarrassed for the Bahraini official whose intelligence is insulted by a gesture like that. I keep saying, the trick is to look really, really… normal. Really normal. Like me.

No, I still get ladies. I’m not so great at second dates, in my line of work, it’s love ‘em and leave ‘em, you know what I mean? When you’re undercover in a developing nation, women love it when you get violent, you know, nothing says Pussy Galore like brandishing your Golden Gun, it’s all high-speed action and treachery between the sheets, firing missiles as foreplay and destroying entire villages of evildoers, experience has taught me that women love the smell of screaming children with burning hair while being taken up against the command console and…

Wait, don’t get up. Did I say something wrong? I thought maybe you’d be into that. No, I don’t think that about women. No.

I don’t go on many dates. It’s been months, actually, since a woman said hi to me. I spend a lot of time listening to “terrorists” having phone conversations about Mohammed, who sounds like a really nice guy, actually. They put me up in old hotel rooms in upstate Jersey, or in one of those food service vans with a cot. My sweaters tend to smell like hoagies. They never actually send me to seduce anyone.

I work alone a lot.

Ah, the thing is, I’m coming out of a relationship with this one woman, she’s amazing. She has this really breathy voice. It’s like she knows her phone conversations are being recorded. Her name is Svetlana. She’s in this arranged marriage and she lives in a small apartment in Samarkand... That’s in Uzbekistan. She just wants a nice man to rescue her, and I listen to her speak to her sister every day and I think, you know, I should get up the nerve to introduce myself. I’m a nice guy.

I’m a nice guy who just got fired by my supersecret spy agency, fine, and maybe I’ve got commitment issues, and maybe I did fake my own death to join the Agency and now I have a fake identity and a fake history and a disguise kit with lots of moustaches instead of a pension plan. Maybe I never got to go to another country, never drove a fancy car with machine guns, never got tangled up with a leggy vixen as we wrestled for a pistol before making sweet, sweet love. It’s possible that Svetlana wouldn’t even give me a second glance. Maybe my father had it backward – when your boss kicks you in the testicles, there’s really nowhere to run. God I’m depressed.

No, I know our time’s up. So what do you say? I really, really want to go on a date with you. No, you’re not boring. What, who said that, I’ll kill him.

Can I at least get your number? Please don’t make me tap your phone.

Antagonism, Tracksuits, The Heft of Words, Modern Love

2008-02-16T14:17:00.000-08:00

I've been struggling out of a fever and a cold this week. On Valentine's Day, we had a date to honor: Pretty in Pink at the local cinema.

I took some asprin to knock back my fever of 101.7 and pulled my gray wool cap low over my ears. We met up with our good friend M amid the thicket of collegiate girls-without-dates milling about. Some were dressed in eighties ironic fashion, with scrunchies, leg-warmers and tracksuits.

Once the film began, this girl started giggling hysterically. It was derisive and high-pitched; mating hyenas have more charm. Every neon dress onscreen got a 'haw', every furtive look by Molly Ringwald received a 'woooooo', and increasingly it was clear that the girl and her friends were stoned out of their gourds. One person told her to shut it, then another. The teenager whose unenviable job it is to police cinema silence with a flashlight walked sheepishly up and down the aisles on three occasions. The girl was stretched across the entire row, dressed in a faux prom dress, jumpy and stupid.

Finally, in the touching scene between Molly and her hangdog dad (I suppose it's sweet; I couldn't actually hear), the giggling turned to shouts and catcalls.

The tracksuited woman across from us turned around. Stood up. Flexed her fingers. "You'd better hope I don't run into you on the way out," said the woman. A short giggle, then blissful silence.

My love clapped and hooted her support. On the walk out, T walked with me arm-in-arm as we decried the youth of today.

"That was a great Valentine's Day," she said.

And it's true. Justice feels a lot like love.

--

WNYC has an excellent program called Studio 360 that I used to listen to when I was living in New York. Today, back from the gym, T had me listen to a brilliant segment from the Valentine's podcast of the show.

"This is us," she grinned.

In my dream of a house, this is what life with my love is like.

Playful, competitive, hyperbolic, tender.

Superdelegates and the White Men Who Love Them

2008-02-15T11:03:00.000-08:00

The superdelegate situation in the Democratic nomination process just gets more depressing.

Politico.com has an interesting article out today about the superdelegate demographic. While it's not exactly a shocker that white men in power seek to control the voting rabble, I think it's certainly interesting to note how few Democratic voters are white men. To wit:

The percentage of white male superdelegates is disproportionate to the share of white males who make up the overall Democratic electorate. According to a January 2008 national poll by Zogby International, 28 percent of Democratic voters are white men. Women account for 55 percent of Democratic voters.

But superdelegates have never reflected the diversity of the Democratic party as a whole, nor were they designed to. They represent the party insiders, a group that white men still dominate.

Among the superdelegates, including Michigan's and Florida's, there are 28 governors (21 white men), 49 senators (33 white men) and 228 representatives (137 white men). Members of the Democratic National Committee are also superdelegates, and among this group, there is more diversity.

Not that I have a huge amount of respect for Tad Devine -- uncommitted Democratic strategist, architect of the 1980 rules changes within the DNC, frequent guest commentator on practically every cable /radio political show I tune into these days -- but he's got one thing right.

In a New York Times editorial last week titled "Superdelegates, Back Off," Devine notes rightly that the American public is likely to sour on the Democratic race if superdelegates become a major factor. [The irony that he has helped to create this paternalistic, Tammanyesque mess does not appear in the article, however.] Devine opines,

The superdelegates were never intended to be part of the dash from Iowa to Super Tuesday and beyond. They should resist the impulse and pressure to decide the nomination before the voters have had their say.

The party’s leaders and elected officials need to stop pledging themselves to either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama, the two remarkable candidates who are locked in an intense battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

If the superdelegates determine the party’s nominee before primary and caucus voters have rendered a clear verdict, Democrats risk losing the trust that we are building with voters today. The perception that the votes of ordinary people don’t count as much as those of the political insiders, who get to pick the nominee in some mythical back room, could hurt our party for decades to come.

The damage would be amplified if African-Americans or women, two of the party’s key constituencies, feel that a candidate who represents their most fervent hopes and aspirations is deprived of a nomination rightfully earned by majority support from voters.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, and their campaigns, are pressuring superdelegates to pledge support to them before Democratic voters in the remaining primaries and caucuses have made their decisions. But Democratic leaders need to let the voters sort out which one of these two remarkable people will lead our party and, we hope, the nation.

After listening to the voters, the superdelegates can do what the Democratic Party’s rules originally envisioned. They can ratify the results of the primaries and caucuses in all 50 states by moving as a bloc toward the candidate who has proved to be the strongest in the contest that matters — not the inside game of the delegate hunt, but the outside contest of ideas and inspiration, where hope can battle with experience and voters can make the right and best choice for our party and our future.

Wouldn't that be nice? Politicians with something to gain simply going with the popular mood? But then, if superdelegates should simply follow the popular vote / momentum / ideas and inspiration, the question must be asked: why did you create superdelegates at all?

Oh, that's right. Kingmaking. Nothing's more rewarding for your superdelegate vote than a nice quid pro quo for your district or a swank Cabinet position.

Sometimes, my chosen party is so foolish it hurts.

The Magic Kingdom

2008-02-14T16:58:00.000-08:00

It's a curious valentine, this poem. Kathy's a friend and former colleague of mine, and consistently one of my favorite poets.

This week her poem "The Magic Kingdom" was published in The New Yorker Magazine -- no small feat, alongside Robert Pinsky. Read it, read it again, and then for a dark, wise read, buy her book Correspondence. You won't regret it.

--

The Magic Kingdom
by Kathleen Graber
The New Yorker Magazine - February 11, 2008

And as in the daily casualties of life every man is, as it were, threatened with numberless deaths, so long as it remains uncertain which of them is his fate, I would ask whether it is not better to suffer one and die, than to live in fear of all? —St. Augustine, “City of God.”

This morning, I found on a slip of paper tucked into a book

a list of questions I’d written down years ago to ask the doctor.

What if it has spread? Is it possible I’m crazy? I’ve just returned

from Florida, from visiting my mother’s last sister, who is eighty

& doing fine. At the airport, my flight grounded by a storm,

I bought a magazine, which fell open to a photograph

of three roseate spoonbills tossing down their elegant shadows

on a chartreuse field of fertilizer-production waste.

Two little girls emptied their Ziplocs of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish

onto the carpet & picked them up, one by one, with great delicacy,

before popping them into their mouths. Their mother, outside

smoking, kept an eye on them through the glass. After my cousin died,

my father died & then my brother. Next, my father’s older brother

& his wife. And, finally, after my mother died, I expected

to die myself. And because this happened very quickly

& because these were, really, almost all the people I knew,

I spent each day smashing dishes with one of my uncle’s hammers

& gluing them back together in new ways. It was strange work

& dangerous, even though I tried to protect myself—

wearing a quilted bathrobe & goggles & leather work gloves

& opening all the windows, even in snow, against the vapors

of the industrial adhesives. Most days now I get up late

& brew coffee & the smell rises from the old enamel pot

I’ve had to balance under the dark drip ever since the carafe

that came with the machine shattered in the dishwasher last month.

One morning I found a lump in my breast & my vision narrowed

to a small dot & I began to sweat. My legs & arms felt weak,

& my heart thrashed behind its bars. We were not written

to be safe. In the old tales, the woodcutter’s daughter’s path

takes her, each time, through the dark forest. There are new words

for all of this: a shot of panic becomes the rustle of glucocorticoid

signalling the sympathetic nervous system into a response

regulated by the sensitivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

And, as I go along, these freshly minted charms clatter together

in the tender doeskin of the throat as though the larynx

were nothing if not a sack of amulets tied with a cord & worn

around the neck. But I tell you I sat on the bathroom floor for hours,

trembling. And I can tell you this because the lump was just a lump

& some days now I don’t even dread the end although I know

it will arrive. The garage is filled with buckets of broken china.

The girls chased each other & waved their arms, casting spells,

the trim of their matching gingham dresses the electric pink

of the birds’ wings. They turned each other into princesses

& super-girls & then they pretended to change back.

Oh, no. You forgot to say forever—they took turns repeating

with dramatic dismay, melting into puddles of themselves,

their sandals & sunburned knees vanishing beneath their hems.

Viral Accountability

2008-02-11T16:15:00.000-08:00

While I thought that the Obama/Black Eyed Peas/ScarJo music video...

...was just a tad creepy and sycophantic -- he's more than a politician, he's a prophet -- I have to say that this satire of McCain's "100 years in Iraq" speech gets a little closer to what YouTube's so good at.

Holding us accountable on a viral scale.

Consider the Hummingbird

2008-02-06T21:21:00.000-08:00

Strange that it's hummingbirds tonight that would make me miss New York in winter. Not closely contested politics or the baffled triumph of Eli Manning. Hummingbirds.

I got a note tonight from a former student about a gorgeous short essay we read in one of the classes I taught at NYU. She's taking a class "on the philosophical and literary notion of the Animal, and I have this burning desire to pick up that essay again." How great is that class?

And when I went back to find the full text for her, I read and re-read.

This is language, loves.

Joyas Voladoras
by Brian Doyle

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

Rauxa Prize Shortlist

2008-01-25T08:34:00.000-08:00

In the midst of the busy first week back at school, I discovered yesterday that my story "The Opposite of Animal" was a finalist for the Rauxa Prize for Fiction.

Who did I lose to? André Aciman, for an excerpt from Call Me By Your Name. In an odd turn of events, I'd already scheduled a short essay of his for today's class. You're everywhere, Aciman!

I come back to Aciman's writing about once a year with some new discovery and delight. It's an honor to be just an inch below his name. Nice to get an accolade on a drizzly morning.

The Comeback in New Hampshire: Who's Polling these People?

2008-01-08T21:09:00.001-08:00

Fascinating. I love a good contest, I love the underdog more often than not, and I love watching politics pivot upon small but crucial moments.

But you have to wonder, when Hillary won the New Hampshire primary tonight: how is that polls got the public reaction so very wrong? I mean, wrong on the level that even the HRC camp was apparently surprised about not getting shitcanned.

As Dana Milbank notes in the Washington Post (with hyperbolic title-du-jour "She Lives"),

Even [Clinton's] own aides had seemed to believe the worst. They had booked the big gymnasium here at Southern New Hampshire University -- the same spot Howard Dean filled in 2004 -- and put the numerals "20:08" on the time clock and the words "Hillary" and "Clinton" in the home and away spots. But instead, they decided to hold the event next door, in a dank auxiliary gym half the size -- an irresistible metaphor for a dying campaign -- and the crowd of 400 was too small to fill the place.

Last night Obama was up 13 points in a Gallup poll and most of the newspapers were already predicting a massive overhaul of Clinton's campaign. McCain was fielding one interview after another asking about a November showdown with Obama.

Tonight? Not so much.

I'm reminded of the Iowa polls a week ago, when every indicator was the contest would be a three-way split -- and only one paper got the Obama surge right. When interviewed, pollsters at the Des Moines Register noted they've got a winning set of calculations, as demonstrated by a consistently strong track record of accuracy.

So what happened today? Faulty or imprecise polling (as precise as random sampling can be, which is to say, not especially)? Slate is wondering if we're witnessing the Tom Bradley effect / quiet racism defense from pollsters in its article "Did Obama Supporters Lie?". It was as close in New Hampshire as Iowa was supposed to be, but the truth is that no one knows why. But expectations were raised / lowered, certainly.

Women voters in New Hampshire said in exit interviews that they were moved to reconsider Clinton after her emotional moment in the diner yesterday. Contrary to what Gloria Steinem wrote in today's Times, at least women don't hold other women to a double standard. Muske loses for weeping, but with Hillary women voters said they finally saw a genuine moment of care and candor.

But is that all? I wonder if the old West Wing episodes -- when the President gruffly dismisses polls and sure enough, he defies expectations -- isn't more on the nose than we'd care to admit. Bill Clinton was beating up the press corps this morning for seeming so enthralled by Obama, but the truth is that reporters are only enthralled with hyperbole. They like to push the big story until it becomes its own truth: Obama cruises to landslide! And then the next story: Clinton's comeback a remarkable political resurrection!

The most accurate lede of all, as of 9:45 on Tuesday night, from Politico: "Clinton victory makes fools of doubters".

Seriously. Who thought it was gonna be a landslide, exactly?

From the Onion: Barack Obama Tiger Beat Cover Clinches Slumber Party Vote

2008-01-06T13:02:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama Tiger Beat Cover Clinches Slumber Party Vote

WASHINGTON, DC—According to a poll released Monday by Teen Zogby!, both Barack Obama's approval and dreaminess ratings...

On The Meeting Of Garcia Lorca And Hart Crane

2008-01-05T09:42:00.000-08:00

By Philip Levine

Brooklyn, 1929. Of course Crane's
been drinking and has no idea who
this curious Andalusian is, unable
even to speak the language of poetry.
The young man who brought them
together knows both Spanish and English,
but he has a headache from jumping
back and forth from one language
to another. For a moment's relief
he goes to the window to look
down on the East River, darkening
below as the early night comes on.
Something flashes across his sight,
a double vision of such horror
he has to slap both his hands across
his mouth to keep from screaming.
Let's not be frivolous, let's
not pretend the two poets gave
each other wisdom or love or
even a good time, let's not
invent a dialogue of such eloquence
that even the ants in your own
house won't forget it. The two
greatest poetic geniuses alive
meet, and what happens? A vision
comes to an ordinary man staring
at a filthy river. Have you ever
had a vision? Have you ever shaken
your head to pieces and jerked back
at the image of your young son
falling through open space, not
from the stern of a ship bound
from Vera Cruz to New York but from
the roof of the building he works on?
have you risen from bed to pace
until dawn to beg a merciless god
to take these pictures away? Oh, yes,
let's bless the imagination. It gives
us the myths we live by. Let's bless
the visionary power of the human--
the only animal that's got it--,
bless the exact image of your father
dead and mine dead, bless the images
that stalk the corners of our sight
and will not let go. The young man
was my cousin, Arthur Lieberman,
then a language student at Columbia,
who told me all this before he died
quietly in his sleep in 1983
in a hotel in Perugia. A good man,
Arthur, he survived graduate school,
later came home to Detroit and sold
pianos right through the Depression.
He loaned my brother a used one
to compose his hideous songs on,
which Arthur thought were genius.
What an imagination Arthur had!

Rosestuffing

2008-01-01T10:39:00.000-08:00

I grew up a few blocks from the Tournament of Roses madness on Colorado Blvd. The parade has its history and draw, but locals know the real action lies in everything leading up to the televised event.

There's the ritual of sleeping out on the route the night before, which is huge when you're 14. You grab your sleeping bag and a few friends, plus four bags of Nacho or Cool Ranch Doritos, and you find the ideal spot like a cat circling for the perfect perch. In theory, you're there to secure a space on Colorado for your family, but in reality, you're there to witness the one night of near-lawlessness, near-Mardi Gras that Pasadena has to offer.

Thick lines of happy drunks kiss and holler past. Sleepless kids aim their silly string at cars, especially convertibles. Retirees in their RV bunkers form a long, secure caravan for miles along the side streets, so inevitably it's important to harass the old timers out of their nests by knocking on their plastic doors at 2, 3, 4am. Firecrackers pop up into the cold, clear night. Grilled onions and chorizo on small outdoor barbeques abound, and the smell wakes you up hungry.

Long before daylight people start to claim their spots on the route, armed with blankets and folding chairs. They line up three, four, five deep along the incredibly long street, and the bottles from the night before get swept to the side. The cameras all get set up on the westernmost corner of Orange Grove and Colorado, but the further east you go the less polite the jostling tends to be. People like an unobstructed view.

My family refuses to go in person anymore (unless we get out-of-town visitors, which poses a dilemma). They still wake up early on New Year's Day and watch the sky for the high-tech bomber that buzzes the route (a worrisome ritual) and catch the first telecast of the parade, with all its awful announcer-chatter.

To grow up in Pasadena is to watch the parade on someone's shoulders when you're little; to mock it in person when you're a teenager; to roll the more mobile trash at the wheels of passing RVs on Jan 2nd. In short, the parade is such a manicured, family-friendly delight that it takes a lot of effort to not subvert it.

Which brings me to the other unseen part of the Rose Parade: people volunteer to build the floats. Unqualified kids and adults immerse themselves in a process so laborious and painstaking in its application of individual rose types and minute seeds that it's a wonder the floats emerge on time at all.

In honor of the New Year, a poem I wrote when I was 19.

Rosestuffing

Pasadena turns on men, arouses
with roses. Blisters each new year
with gobs of American Beauty.
In warehouses the night before,
we scramble, shove puffs of Paradise
through chicken wire and plywood,
string up White Lightnin’,

Red Devil. The foreman
for a day drawls “Don’t forget
they’re worth more than you”:
the exotic shipped, sprayed
to last, arrayed with precision.
Our float, pelted with Simplicity,
“the largest mobile possum

in the parade’s proud history.”
Complete with leering wink
and waggle, my friend finds it
cute, wants hot pink Puppy Love
flanking its revolving eyes.
The supe barks for Buff Beauty
and I run to the platform

built for fourteen
bovine ex-Queens; on their
girdled trash can risers (the theme
tomorrow being Fun
in the City), the Strumpet
and Cupcake keep wilting.
Our rodent starts to throb and quiver,

shakes thick scent across the workers,
cautiously extends its tail as it heads
toward the route. Starglo snout
to the night sky, it squeaks and winks,
warming up for tomorrow’s prance
under the scrutiny of cottony
crowds, cameras, stripping souvenir

Charisma. Our opossum will proudly
chug past the pimply bands and albino
ponies; it will take its place
in the unfailingly bright California
morning as we sleep through the newest
day, dreaming of Voodoo and Shot Silk,
Camelot and Bronze Masterpiece.

The Scattershot Hello

2007-12-30T22:35:00.000-08:00

I had intended to write about the Democratic caucus absurdities, the many tied polls and tensions in Iowa. And how I can't stop reading news and commentary. And watching cheap shots.

Also: the excellent series about Chinese growth and pollution in the Times. And Rob Gifford's new travelogue, China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power.

Or: my first hockey game ever, Sharks vs Ducks, where no less than three full-fledged fights erupted as the crowd lost its collective mind.

And: thoughts about the pleasures of a year ending, of finitude, of how much we need these arbitrary rituals of transition (preferably punctuated by champagne). Especially insofar as I'm going to miss the Year of the Pig (though it ain't over just yet) and are we really ready for the Rat?

I'd planned to write about all of these things to entertain you, the reader. But I really haven't got much of a clue who reads this.

You, the friendly ghosts who check in on me periodically from West Covina, Puerto Vallarta, Bowling Green Kentucky.

The accidental tourists from Sydney, Bangkok, Neumnster Schleswig-Holstein.

The brave commentators from London, Mesa, Haverhill, Brooklyn.

I want to wish you all a very happy New Year. Thanks for checking in, for the passing / recurring interest. Next year, don't be a stranger -- tell me what you think, what's funny, what's afoot with you. Thanks for reading; I'll keep writing.

What's the Relationship Between Natives and Nativity, Anyway?

2007-12-24T16:08:00.000-08:00

Did you ever catch this commercial parody? Happy holidays, Tiny Tim.

The Bends

2007-12-18T14:56:00.000-08:00

Yesterday my friend Eric invited me over to make Ginger Pear Preserves and Tangy Cranberry Butter. He and his wife do this every year to make gifts for their families. After the Peach Preserves they gave us last winter, I wanted to see the process up close. But the timing was tricky: we'd both been grading for days, with more still to come, and yet the pressure to get something done before the holidays was real.

I assured him when I got to their place in Oakland that I'm on the short bus to cooking school. It's not exactly that I'm clueless when it comes to cooking, but some things are not exactly intuitive. Zesting a lime, for instance. How much zest do you zest? Is zest a verb? Do you scrape the poles or just the hemispheres? Does anyone enjoy the white bitter pieces I zested into the mix? I see.

It turns out, of course, that making preserves is extremely simple if someone else is an old hand at it. You start to listen for the language of canning, artful language mingled with science. For instance, you boil the chopped pears until the sauce thickens. How do you know when it's ready for canning? When the sauce is thick enough to slide like a curtain from the back of a wooden spoon.

Eric seemed untroubled by the rookie mistakes that would get lesser cooks in trouble, especially regarding the problem of bacteria and one's hands. It can ruin what's in the jar, of course, if you touch the rim or the lid (but how hard it is to pour hot liquid fruit neatly into a glass jar!). Turns out, this is what hot wet handtowels are for, as well as a healthy dose of good enough.

We used red and black tongs to place each jar in boiling water; they're not necessary, Eric assured me, but they look cool. Also helpful: a magnetized tool for plucking lids from their own hot saucepan (half-effective, as the lids hung by an edge).

And beer. It turns out that the final, time-honored technique for canning involves nursing a bottle of beer, as the pureed cranberries settle, while it rains outside and steam rises up from the neighbor's white Christmas lights. The big old pot cradles four jars at a time, immersed in a slow roll of water.

I've been feeling the holiday melancholy lately. No doubt you have too. It's not just the time of year, or the weather, or the commercialization of the season or the impending family obligations. For me, it's a pressure so varied and firm that it accumulated over many weeks, many months. I feel unmoored here much of the time. My community, my sense of place and friendship and comraderie and yes, even a clarity of purpose feel less certain here. The pressure is self-generated. I am deciding what I am, week by week. Some weight lifts, through new friends, a new love, new connections, but the pressure shifts rather than dissipates. In some ways I am forced by the pressure itself to make choices that distill me to my essence.

Eric passes me another beer and we talk about politics and family.

Slowly, invisibly, the air in each jar escapes.

Canned Goods
(Greg Brown)

Well, let the wild winter wind bellow and blow.
I'm as warm as a July tomato.

Cho: There's peaches on the shelf, potatoes in the bin.
Supper's ready, everybody come on in.
Taste a little of the summer.
Taste a little of the summer.
Taste a little of the summer.
Grandma put it all in jars.

Well, there's a root cellar, fruit cellar, down below.
Watch your head now, and down we go.

Well, maybe you are weary and you don't give a damn.
I bet you never tasted her blackberry jam.

Oh, she got magic in her, you know what I mean.
She puts the sun and rain in with her beans.

What with the snow and the economy and everything,
I think I'll just stay down here and eat until spring.

When I go down to see Grandma, I gain a lot a weight.
With her dear hands, she gives me plate after plate.

She cans the pickles, sweet and dill,
And the songs of the whip-or-will,
And the morning dew and the evening moon,
I really gotta go down and see her soon.

'Cause the canned goods that I buy at the store
Ain't got the summer in 'em anymore.
You bet, Grandma, as sure as you're born,
I'll take some more potatoes and a thunderstorm.

[As sung by Greg Brown on "One Night" (1983), "One More Goodnight Kiss" (1988),
and "The Live One" (1995).]

Lexical Conundrums

2007-12-12T18:43:00.000-08:00

Featured song in the midst of my grading, the very important & topical questions asked by The LeeVees:"How Do You Spell Channukkahh?"

(Not like that, buddy. Obviously more like Chaka Khan.)

Happy holidays, one and all...

The Working Life

2007-12-10T16:36:00.000-08:00

Before I begin the two-week melee of grading, I've been pondering what to use for next semester's Berkeley course. I think it'll be a broader net than Muckrakers & Robber Barons (as fun as that was). It'll be called "The Working Life."

A tentative course description:

What do we mean when we talk about a life spent working? What do we value, as Americans, in the types of work we choose for a profession? Do the institutions and corporations that we support pay any notice to what we want to be -- or do they shape those wants directly?

In this writing course, we'll research contemporary controversies and read the rhetoric of advertisers, journalists, bloggers and television talking heads. How do emotionally charged issues like "green-washing," economic nationalism, universal healthcare, illegal immigration, gender and racial disparities and the outsourcing of jobs affect our consideration of the facts at hand? What are the tensions between work and life in our society?

We'll read oral histories, novels of white-collar absurdity and investigations into the fast food industry. We'll write our own personal narratives and interview those at work around us. Most important: what is the role of the reflective writer in the midst of this debate?

Book list: Course Reader, Fast Food Nation (Schlosser), Working (Terkel), Then We Came to the End (Ferris), The Norton Field Guide to Writing (Bullock).

Films: The Corporation, Supersize Me, Fight Club

What do you think? I'm excited about adding some new texts, like Terkel and Ferris, plus utilizing a broader range of interviewing, oral history and essays on the work-life struggle.

Then We Came to the End in particular intrigues me. Just nominated for the National Book Award, it's a novel described as "the Catch-22 of the business world". We'll see, but I hope it lives up to the glowing, debut-novelist hype.

Speaking of the life one wishes to work.

What's Worth Knowing

2007-12-04T12:51:00.000-08:00

I just taught my last class of the semester at University of San Francisco. Sweet bunch of transfer students, most around 20 years old. Each of them has endured multiple comp classes at their previous colleges, so their good humor and patience was especially appreciated.

Each was to write me a letter over the weekend about how they'd grown as a writer over the semester. We spoke around the room as they munched on holiday-frosted sugar cookies, talking about what they could see now in their own writing process that they couldn't in August.

The inevitable comment I get every semester at this time: I thought this class was going to blow, but despite all the work I've figured a lot out and I liked coming here. To which I reply: you want one more semester? Because I teach in the spring... And they grin and say not a chance and the class roars.

But then we got to my favorite part. I try to do this with every class, because the range of answers is so diverse, and after a few months together, there's enough trust and good humor in the room to say almost anything.

Each person talked about something in the outside world that intrigues them, something I really ought to know about. It can be a book, a song, a film, a social movement, a strange dynamic, a bit of dialogue in an overheard conversation.

Here's a sampling of what my students said:

- You can only really know someone after you've heard a dozen of their favorite stories about the world.

- Favorite found artifacts of underground or foreign culture via YouTube: Leslie Hall rapping in gold spandex, the Chilean artists Los Mono, and of course 'Flight of the Conchords' (I agree heartily).

- Why is it that the homeless of San Francisco cluster in the valleys of the city and avoid the hills?

- Go see Ang Lee's Lust/Caution. Also, Pushing Daisies.

- Favorite guilty pleasure: reality shows about trashy relationships, especially Rock of Love.

- What if Title 9 denies equal access for men in college sports?

- One shy student has been to 19 countries, is learning Chinese and realizes she might need to become an explorer.

- What's great about country music is that it doesn't revolve around fads. It has a fairly consistent ethos.

- If you're camping in southern Utah, avoid the overrun national parks. You'll find beautiful, desolate canyons in the state parks and not run into people for days.

- Ritual Coffee Roasters on 21st and valencia in the Mission District has the most amazing cup of coffee in the city.

- The Crazy Robertson, a tights-wearing roller-skating semi-homeless guy in LA who has his own clothing line.

And as one student ended her letter, "you're welcome... for changing your life (for the better)."

Reverse Chic and the Fall of Empire

2007-11-25T11:09:00.000-08:00

There's a growing body of articles this weekend mulling over the nation's imminent financial slowdown. And with them, some dark little metaphors.

A summary, and true enough: We spend what we don't have; we support tax breaks instead of budget surpluses; we gobble down cheap imports from China and can't understand why eventually the dollar starts to so dramatically weaken.

The metaphors, then: We are the next British Empire, unaware of its long-term decline. We have a viral case of imprudence that threatens to unbalance the world economy. We are little duckies fattening our livers only to be eaten ourselves.

What amazes me is the extravagance of the metaphors. I'm leaning a little toward the economic alarmism myself, this holiday season. But I do wonder what sort of effect (if any at all) these images are supposed to create. Who's their intended audience: the center-left, the newsmagazine middle class, the Ron Paul and Chuck Norris libertarian ticket?

The best of the recent bunch:

-- Michael Hirsh in Newsweek

One has to wonder now whether the American superpower is also experiencing a terminal illness, with its decline marked by the dollar's downward drift. The one difference being that there is no successor on the horizon (the Chinese have a long, long way to go), and the currency that is replacing the dollar, the euro, is backed not by an emerging superpower but by the feeble cacophony of voices that is the European Union. Yet the signs of imperial decadence are unmistakable. The world is losing confidence in the dollar, in no small part because it has lost confidence in America's strategic judgment and in its sustainability as a great power in the face of record budget and trade deficits, which are forcing the United States to borrow ever more money from future rivals like China and Russia.

-- Peter Goodman's sharp, succinct commentary in today's New York Times on the financial trends.

The most telling passage begins with a reference to the (fiscally) invigorating pleasures of pain and ends with Americans being cheerfully force-fed by Asia (fatty liver! didn't we read Hansel & Gretel?):

To grasp what may at first seem perverse — pain required to get back to gain — it is worth recalling the genesis of our current predicament.

A decade ago came a financial crisis in Asia. As losses rippled around the globe, credit dried up, threatening the willingness of consumers to spend and businesses to invest. With the health of the global economy menaced, central banks lowered interest rates, fueling a wave of spending that, for the most part, has kept things rolling along.

In the United States, cheap credit added momentum to the boom in technology. That story ended badly, of course, with many companies extinguished along with tens of billions of shareholder dollars. But it did not deter the American consumer, whose spending amounts to 70 percent of the American economy. The Federal Reserve again opened the taps of cheap credit. Spending went on.

As Americans have carried home mountains of goods manufactured in Japan, China and elsewhere, they have sent trillions of dollars across the Pacific to pay for them. Asian central banks have taken these winnings and parked them back in the United States, buying up Treasury bills, stocks and property. In so doing, they have kept American interest rates low and the dollar stronger, ensuring that consumers have the wherewithal to keep buying.

-- Finally, against this backdrop, behold the shameful cost-cutting of the Washington elite, as observed by the wryly incredulous Ashley Parker in the Times' Fashion section. Oh, ignominious Costco, can it really be that your five-pound pretzel bag and the desperate fashion of Pabst shall sustain us through the dark winters and cocktail parties? Are we reduced to bulk caviar?

Against the backdrop of an unpopular war, rising oil prices and a subprime mortgage crisis, a certain thriftiness seems to have crept into the city’s dining rooms.

“I don’t think anyone would dare serve caviar as a first course today, and instead of filet mignon, there are a lot of other beef dishes,” said Letitia Baldrige, the etiquette writer who was Jacqueline Kennedy’s social secretary. “Embassies don’t have the pocketbooks they used to. And to have these opulent menus for these parties here, it looks bad.”

In that sense, catering by Costco is a style statement, like drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.

“Reverse chic is a very powerful phenomenon in status-oriented circles,” said David Kamp, the author of “The United States of Arugula” (Broadway, 2006), a book about the American fine-food revolution. “I think Costco is the same thing. It gets discovered.”

Reverse chic, the most powerful metaphor of all. And lo, irony shall save even the rich.

Facebook'd

2007-11-21T12:02:00.000-08:00

We had a great discussion in both Berkeley classes Monday about the far-reaching implications of a Facebook world.

- Virtual Crack Addicts. What makes the Facebook a compulsion for college kids, checked many times in a day? The ever-updating News Feed. Oooh. New photos. Werewolf-Zombie beatdowns. Did he really post that comment knowing that everyone would see it? The hot girl from high school wants, at long last, to be your friend.

- Performance and Creation of Self. There are intriguing limits on what you say you are, and those limits are entirely friend-generated. You can falsify relationships, join bogus groups, apply ironic images of Yoda as your profile picture, but the moment you claim to have been to a party you weren't at (or worse, claim to have been tending to family emergencies during your trip to Cabo) you get called out publicly with Wall comments. Snap.

- Death & Rebirth. What happens when you delete your virtual profile and create a new one? Can it be a spiritual cleansing? Will your friends still try to tag you with embarrassing photos at the Tau Delta beer-pong kegger?

- Big Brother Lovefest. This notion comes from the essay they were reading, written by NYU student Jim Kuerschner last year, which essentially wonders why we're so eager as a society to be seen, tracked, monitored. What does it say about us that we're so interested in the minutiae not only of those we know well, but by the tangential friends three degrees removed? Do we voluntarily enter Bentham's pantopticon determined to ignore the walls in favor of the familiar reality-show cameras and the waiver we've signed?

- Big Mother Lovefest. More pressing a concern for collegiates, of course, is not the abstract curtailing of their civil rights but the lack of peer-privacy now that Facebook's been opened to everyone. Potential employers. Creepy dudes. Parents checking up on you stealthily. The existential but familiar dilemma of whether or not to accept your mom's request to be your friend.

After Thanksgiving, they'll read Michelle Slatalla's hilarious, slightly troubling take from the New York Times.

I HAVE reached a curious point in life. Although I feel like the same precocious know-it-all cynic I always was, I suddenly am surrounded by younger precocious know-it-all cynics whose main purpose appears to be to remind me that I’ve lost my edge.

Many of these people are teenagers.

Some of them I gave birth to.

One was in a breech position.

And the other day, as I drove home with one of my tormenters in the passenger seat, she started laughing at the way I pronounced “Henri Cartier-Bresson.”

“Ha ha ha, is that how you think his name sounds?” my daughter said. “Oh, my God. Who told you that?”

It was my college photography professor. Twenty-six years ago.

Rather than draw attention to my age, I tried to trick her into thinking of me as someone cool, as we said 26 years ago. “I hope you don’t think this gives you the right to make fun of me on your Facebook page,” I said.

“My Facebook page?” this person asked incredulously. “My page? Is that what you think Facebook is?”

Suddenly a vague memory from my childhood — the time someone else’s mother left her family, wrote a few young adult novels and ended up in a sad apartment complex on the edge of town — welled up, unbidden.

I needed to banish it, along with all evidence of this humiliating conversation. But how?

I vowed to fight on her turf.

My students feel strongly that opening Facebook to all is a violation of all things sane. Because if there's anything worse than outsiders snooping, it's those wannabe high-schoolers.

Let Them Eat my French Revolution

2007-11-17T19:59:00.000-08:00

So, you know, being engaged is great. In many ways, hardly anything's changed. Neither of us is particularly obsessed with notions of the perfect wedding.

But I understand that it's not entirely about just us. And I get the power of social ritual. I've long maintained that weddings, as with funerals, aren't actually for or about the persons most directly involved.

There's a multipart sequence of things that People Must Do because without them there will be popular revolt. Cake, for instance. Got to have it.

People freak out without cake, they leave groggy and disoriented, cheated somehow of a crucial marker of time and culinary happiness. Also: wedding registries, floral arrangements, booze, the main course, garters, booze, suitable hotels for out-of-town guests, rehearsal dinners, speeches, flower girls, booze. Preferably not flower girls with booze, as this is frowned upon by Ranger Bob, who guided us through the many park rules this week.

Even though I want to have a small, grand gathering with those I most love in the world and karaoke all night long in Tilden Regional Park... Part of me would rather just already be married, embarking on a year-long (and extravagantly free) honeymoon that takes in various parts of the world both balmy and luxurious.

Obama, Where Art Thou?

2007-11-13T18:06:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, my fiancee confronted my infidelity head-on: I've got a thing for Barack Obama, and as everyone knows, the odds are long. Right?

But then he sent me a note today. Then his campaign manager, followed by Obama's wife Michelle. They send me emails on a regular basis now; they got my email address back in June, when I was flush with a move west, faced with the prospect of far too much free time to work on my novel. I contemplated doing field work for the campaign, but I'm a funny sort. As a teacher of rhetoric, I'm far more interested in the competing arguments people make than in taking a firm stand of my own. And this includes actually getting off my lofty ass when those do-gooder types are out there pounding the pavement thanks to my tiny campaign contribution.

I obsess about politics. Here are my podcasts for the 6.30am bus ride to San Francisco: KCRW's Left Right & Center, NPR's It's All Politics, NY Times Politics, Washington Post Politics Podcast, On the Media, Political Lunch... Even occasionally the Roman bread and circus of Real Time with Bill Maher.

These are things I listen to, people. The list of printed and online news sources is just as large. I can't even finish my New Yorker each week, but I still roam through The Economist, Atlantic, Slate, the increasingly gossipy Huffington Post.

My point, of course, is this: Obama is in the city tonight, and I'm in Berkeley, writing this after a run and a full day of teaching. I keep telling myself that if he can't pull ahead in Iowa -- or let Edwards play bad cop long enough for him to get in the good cop pole position -- it wasn't worth my effort anyway.

He's too reasonable. He's too moderate. He doesn't have the killer instinct. And yet this is exactly why I want Barack Obama. I want him precisely because he doesn't bash Hillary. For the longest time, Democrats have chosen as their candidate someone who shifts all too easily but looks stiff doing it. Isn't it something to see mostly principled, only slightly stiff confidence?

The problem, of course, is this: what do we do, as Democrats, with Hillary the dynastic lightning rod? (And yes, I will cheer her on mightily next year -- but we've got a few months to go). Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic piece says it best:

The paradox is that Hillary makes far more sense if you believe that times are actually pretty good. If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do. And a Clinton-Giuliani race could be as invigorating as it is utterly predictable.

But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.

And I realize, for me it's not ever going to be about carpetbombing Oakland with Obama buttons. For me, it's simply calling your attention to this speech right here and letting you make up your own mind.

Which in theory is what it's all about. So they say.

(Okay, so the intro is a little WrestleMania XXI. And Pelosi's strangely out on a limb. And the crowd's a little too adoring. Watch further.)

Muckrakers & Robber Barons

2007-11-07T18:43:00.000-08:00

So I've been teaching this writing class at Berkeley that I call "Muckrakers & Robber Barons: the Rhetoric of Corporate Controversy." The Cal freshmen are great -- quite different from my business students at NYU's Stern school, and also different from the older transfer students I teach at University of San Francisco. For one thing, most of my Cal kids never read the course description; I've got smart, sweet-tempered kids from many countries and economic backgrounds interested in almost anything other than corporate controversy.

And yet the class has been a blast (though only intermittently for them, I suspect). I have two classes three days a week in two hour blocks. We've written familiar essays, watched full-length documentaries like Supersize Me, read whole books like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Naomi Klein's No Logo. Today was show and tell, basically, as each student had to present a controversy from the outside world -- with some interesting intersections to business -- and I refused to speak. Debate bubbled and erupted, even among my mostly non-native speaker class. As Pat Hoy once said, you've got to get out of the way.

But then, because I'm me and it's two hours, I jumped back in. We talked about Klein's notion of branding as a force more all-encompassing than mere advertising. It's true, the students said, the only companies they find interesting about are the ones that understand who they are, the ones whose name connotes a feeling. Apple. Starbucks. Nike. Disney. Caterpillar, even. It struck me that this generation is the first to have grown up thinking of Apple as a music company; in an era where the middle-class coffee klatch is the standard for every half-mile; where Disney really is less about family than perpetual youth. They've grown up under the centrality of brand as ethos.

We're going to listen to this great NPR piece Friday on the creation of the Marlboro Man (as anticipated by Jonathan Franzen's masterpiece of ambivalence, "Sifting the Ashes").

But today, just to relax into the notion, we watched the pilot episode of Mad Men (AMC's dark, whipsmart show about an advertising agency in 1960 New York).

It's a shock for them to admit, but amid all the small group debating and the spinning plates of class planning, the craft of writing's emerged in full force. And it's such a pleasure to get out of the way, built into the edifice, as they figure out the world for themselves.

Read All About It

2007-11-02T22:43:00.000-07:00

Make a slide show, scrapbook or ecard

Well, I Did Play a Vampire When I Was 16...

2007-10-20T18:25:00.000-07:00

You Are A Vampire

You have a real thirst for bliss, and you consider yourself a true hedonist.
And you're not afraid to walk alone in life, if it means getting what you truly crave.
You truly enjoy entrancing people. Not to mention the ensuing pleasures of the flesh.
Your tastes have been called decadent and bizarre. You usually give in to your temptations, no matter how primal

Your greatest power: Your flawless ability to seduce and charm

Your greatest weakness: Human flesh

You play well with: Werewolves

What Kind of Monster Are You?

Only Connect

2007-10-16T17:57:00.000-07:00

All the way from South London, the illustrious Sarah D (writer, director, dramaturg) writes a response to my melancholy Schulzcloud.

It deserves its own piece of sky (such as it is under the kitey header). And my thanks. Pockets of possibility on this autumn afternoon.

--

"With theatre you have to catch characters caught in a drama. Those with dramatic, eccentric and marginalised youths, it can seem, have more to draw on, than those of us whose greatest drama was a brief flirtation with an eating disorder at aged 18 and a failure to get into Oxford University (great dramas at the time, predicatably normal, not to mention privileged, we find out). Audiences and the industry have an insatiable hunger for the new.... a new voice, a new experience, a new perspective. Those who experience extreme conflict first hand and have a gift will trasmute this utter understanding into art and we will step back breathless at the extremity of the experience.

"We falter. In the light of this what could we possibly have to say?

"But I think writing for theatre is about a number of things: 1. the craft of the storyteller, 2. a uniqueness of voice 3. having stories that you burn to tell 4. having an utter passion for humanity (to name but a few).

"We do not need to be marginalised to have these things, but we do need to accept the seriousness of the endeavour. We have to think of our relationship to our audiences, our relationship to our world in general. We have to think of our intention when we create. Whatever that might be. And we must be passionate and curious.

"And sometimes, in times of pleasure and purpose, the only story we wish to tell is a gentle one of ourselves witnessing the world transform itself. It is a story told to an audience of one, staring deep into our eyes.

"Thereby comes the hope at the story's conclusion, and the pockets of possibility when the conflicts fall away.

"It's a story that will be told many times in many moments in many tales: dark and amiable alike."

Shorty Puts a Cap in My Posterior

2007-10-14T15:03:00.000-07:00

Also, in unrelated news, Mac and I were walking in an upscale North Berkeley market the other day when I was shot dead.

We rounded the corner from spirits to cereals and nearly bumped into a young mom who blinked in surprise. Two steps behind was her adorable little girl, no older than three, who solemnly looked up at me and jabbed her pudgy little index finger toward my face.

"I keel you," she squeaked. And then ran up and grabbed her mother's outstretched hand.

It took a moment -- we were halfway into coffees and teas before it sunk in. "Did she say..." my girlfriend began.

"Yeah," I said. "She killed me."

Gosh, but kids say the darnedest things. Don't they.

The Melancholy Two-Step of Charlie Schulz

2007-10-14T13:16:00.000-07:00

It was the image that got me first: Charlie Brown as suffering Van Gogh, sans ear. As Randy Kennedy observes in the NY Times piece out today ("You're a Good Prop, Cruel Muse"), if we need to see even Charles Schulz as tortured for his art, what exactly is the expected ratio of angst to art in a given genius?

Reviewing the new Michaelis biography of the Charlie Brown creator, Kennedy provides some wry, Romantic comparisons: "Stacked up against the sundry misfortunes that were courted by or fell on the heads of history’s best-known tortured artists — prostitute mothers (Jean Genet); drug addictions (Coleridge); physical deformities (Toulouse-Lautrec) — those that Mr. Michaelis describes in Mr. Schulz’s youth sound tame and sometimes a little silly."

In a fit of pique, I once declared that if it hadn't been for my stepfather drinking himself to death, I really wouldn't have any claim to suffering at all as an artist. This defensive gesture is, of course, complete horseshit. Really? Only the marginalized get to be artists? Isn't there room for creation of something beautiful or even painfully true without the hairshirt?

It seems like those with the fiercest demons compulsively mine their earliest troubles again and again. But part of me is skeptical. We so fetishize suffering, especially suffering that is authentically one's own, that aren't we simply training artists (and critics and readers) to wallow in their muck? Write what you know, but if what you know is middle-class white amiability, there's no heat. If, like Charles Schulz, you experience the kind of misfortunes we all do and feel a general sense of restless gloom, then it's important for your biographer to imply you suffered more deeply than we know. Or else your life's work is not worth taking seriously (and he created comics -- get it? The irony? Get it?).

I used to compulsively read Peanuts as a kid on the floor in my stepfather's house. He had several volumes in the bookshelf; while not much of a reader himself, Mel had the complete Peanuts archives from the very first comic strip to the late 1980s. Did Charlie Brown, as George Saunders claims, prepare me for Beckett, for recursive absurdity and melancholy struggle? Perhaps Peanuts simply let me coexist with a tricky, loving drunk, when Lucy yanked away the football and Charlie Brown fell flat on his back, and my stepfather and I laughed with familiarity. And we moved on.

Lately, I've been absurdly happy, and not particularly motivated to write anything anywhere. It's not just that I feel lately like I have nothing insightful to say; it's also that this feels like a healthy realization. I want to create things I can be proud of, but I also want to enjoy this period of love, and place, and purpose.

Art is a thin blanket indeed if all we ask is that it describes our suffering.

Our Lady of Market Street

2007-09-28T22:56:00.000-07:00

At 7:45 every Tuesday and Thursday morning, a woman sings hosanna to the #5 bus. Or she sings to the crowd, gathered wary and sleep-strewn along this section of Market Street somewhere between the business and homeless districts. She’s a soprano, maybe in her sixties, a stout black woman with a thick, grey chin beard. She has a sense of flair for an early riser; most mornings, she favors a pantsuit made of gold and purple sequins. Sometimes she wears a beret. You hear her before you see her: it’s a joyful song. She smiles as she sings it, with her eyes sometimes closed, rocking on her heels, triumphant. What was it we used to sing at Christmas? Songs of exaltation.

I was in the back of the #5 Westbound, buried in my lesson plan and trying not to spill my illegally smuggled travel mug of coffee. I looked up, prepared to note with some ironic distance the woman, always singing, always with that outfit and that beard and look the people trying not to notice her, look at them waiting so very patiently for the bus which will not come. And yet, our bus paused as a clutch of little Chinese matrons clambered aboard, and I leaned against the yellowed, knife-carved window because she hit a low, sweet note and held it. And still holding it, opened her eyes. And I smiled, embarrassed, irony fading, not quite able to look away. The bus saved me from having to blink. It lumbered up, sighed. She started a new verse, nodding to me with a smile. You know, she sang, what a friend we have in… What a friend… You know, you know.

But I don’t know her. I’m not going to know her any better than I will right now, in writing this, imperfectly pinning her to a board with language. And yet I want there to be something that matters in that moment. The first morning I heard her I thought, Christ. San Francisco and its crazies. That was eleven songs ago.

In Honor of the Palio

2007-08-16T17:15:00.001-07:00

Siena, Palio
Originally uploaded by pedro prats

Ah, the Palio of Siena. One of my favorite travel stories of Italian adventure, intrigue and group sports hysteria. Though there was the soccer match last summer between St Pauli and Trinidad & Tobago.

I'm pleased to report that my friend Austin Kelley (The Modern Spectator) has just published a great article on the Palio race in Men's Vogue. You really ought to check it out .

And go to Siena, before you're too old to think twice about standing on the racetrack in a passionate crowd of thousands, as jockeys get thrown and wild-eyed horses crash past just inches away.

The Opposite of Animal

2007-08-08T10:11:00.000-07:00

Nerve published a story of mine today, as part of their Smart Smut series.

It's called "The Opposite of Animal."

Fair warning for the faint of heart: for a story interested in fertility software, H&R Block and a tattooed woman named Fat Tuesday, it's pretty filthy.

Dusty Beauty

2007-06-13T19:32:00.001-07:00

Dusty Beauty
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

My Sunday hike in the Bay Area. China Camp State Park, Marin Co., California.

The move is official, folks.

Lake Tahoe, California / Nevada

2007-06-13T19:29:00.001-07:00

Tipsy Love
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

Almost there...

The Beauty of Bacteria

2007-06-13T19:28:00.003-07:00

The Beauty of Bacteria
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

Yellowstone, WY

Deadwood Saloon No. 10 - Where Wild Bill Bought It

2007-06-13T19:28:00.001-07:00

Deadwood Saloon No. 10 - Where Wild Bill Bought It
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

At the Saloon

2007-06-13T19:27:00.001-07:00

At the Saloon
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

Mac, my charming road trip companion. Town of 1880, South Dakota

Crossroads

2007-06-13T19:25:00.003-07:00

Crossroads
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

Best Pet Award

2007-06-13T19:25:00.001-07:00

Best Pet Award
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

Oh South Dakota... You make my heart go pitter-patter.

The El Train

2007-06-13T19:24:00.001-07:00

The El Train
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

Chicago...

Cookout on the Lil Cooker in Rensselaer, Indiana

2007-06-13T19:22:00.001-07:00

Cookout on the Lil Cooker in Rensselaer
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

He Needs a Manny Ramirez Jersey

2007-06-13T19:21:00.001-07:00

He Needs a Manny Ramirez Jersey
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

First stop on the Road Trip: Boston

The Sweet Song of Farewell

2007-05-07T16:21:00.001-07:00

The Sweet Song of Farewell, originally uploaded by wrysloan.

As I prepare to move to San Francisco on the 20th, I threw a little bbq bash yesterday. It began with brats and ended with Mafia.

March Madness: Pleasures of the Crowd

2007-03-24T16:09:00.000-07:00

It's published. The Modern Spectator serves up my piece on the virtues of rioting during March Madness. It's a great journal, have a peek:

---

It’s dark and loud, with a hot wet tang of beer and crowd in my nostrils. A couple to my right screams. To my left a hefty elbow pins the waitress against the bar. The clock ticks, the roar goes up… and as the first dunk slams home, I roar too, along with a hundred perfect strangers in a town that could care less.

During these days of late March Madness, New Yorkers are largely oblivious to the crucial ascent of my team: UCLA. And yet last week, a long way from home, I encountered Bruins aplenty in the back room of an East Village pub called Professor Thom’s. Stumbling onto the Alumni Association was dumb luck, but as I talked my way past the fleshy wall of bouncers, I felt the strange thrill of finding people as fiercely excited as I was about our team’s chances to win another championship. For an hour, I managed to forget I wasn’t actually invited, until a woman in powder-blue thigh-highs distributed UCLA pins and pennants. She could barely squeeze past the broad-shouldered consultants and nascent bankers. The shifting mass of bodies jostled for a better view of the screen. I couldn’t see so much as feel Darren Collison’s three-point shot, rolling through and between each of us. We held our breath. Then we let out a moan that became a growl and then finally, ecstatic, the roar.

continue...

After a lengthy jaunt

2006-11-16T11:52:00.000-08:00

Thought it was about time I returned to the musing. I go through periods of dormancy with my writing; life hurtles merrily along, and I realize the past few months have been spent thoroughly preoccupied with teaching and politics and new bands and rediscovering the joys of running and east-village-carousing with friends.

Nicole Hefner, early in the mfa program, said it best: Drinking with writers is not writing, but you'd be forgiven for feeling sure it was at 2am.

- Am I thrilled with the new political climate? Cautiously, I am.
- Am I working on my novel again? Slowly but with enthusiasm. New direction, better characters. Also, headed back into short stories and essays I hope.
- Am I watching too much basketball? Clearly.
- Am I still in love with NYU's Expository Writing Program? There is no more rewarding cult that I'm aware of. But then, I pass out the kool aid.
- Am I planning to live in the East Village indefinitely? Nah. But I do have this amazing community of writers and friends and quirky coffee shops and odd little parks and speakeasy bars and... it takes five minutes by foot to get to work. Even though I bike with speedy sloth.
- Am I aware that no one really cares to read a personal status update, as blogs are far more interesting when commenting on the outside world, when smartly asserting and claiming and persuading? I am. Bite me.

Published in the New York Times -- Does Sunday Styles Count?

2006-08-01T07:35:00.000-07:00

New York Times
July 30, 2006
Sunday Styles

DANCING IN SANDY SHOES

By MELENA RYZIK

"HOT DOGS! Two-dollar hot dogs!”

That is the late-night rallying cry from the vendors at the Water Taxi Beach, which is less of a beach and more of a pier jutting into the East River in Long Island City, Queens, with 440 tons of imported sand.

But with beer, epicurean snacks (unlike the tofu dogs, the elk burgers pretty much sell themselves) and a killer view, it is a near-perfect spot for a night out. It is especially crowded on Saturdays, when there are D.J.’s, dancing, and even some wayward acrobatics at a new gathering called Rebound. Organized by a few downtown D.J.’s, it is intended as an after-party to the Warm-Up series, another D.J.-and-dancing event at the nearby P.S. 1 Museum.

“This is almost better than P.S. 1,” Ryan Sloan, 30, said as he and a friend, Sandar Hla, absorbed Midtown’s glow. People were turning cartwheels, making out and dancing barefoot. A family of ducks floated by; a group of friends buried themselves in the sand. It was as close to a love-in as Queens is likely to get. Why, then, is it only near-perfect?

For one thing, it is in a hard-to-find spot in a borough not known for sophistication. Or as Hiram Bonet IV, a truck driver from Richmond Hills, put it, “There’s no chi-chi-pooh-poohness.”

Well, there didn’t used to be.

“I thought it was going to be full of hipsters and cool kids, and it is,” said Myles Kane, an editor from Williamsburg. Would he prefer fewer cool kids?

“I guess so,” Mr. Kane, 27, said, sighing, “but what the hell am I?”

To be fair, hipsters aren’t the only ones who have discovered Rebound. “You have your Hamptons crowd, your bridge-and-tunnel crowd, and children break dancing,” said Ms. Hla, 30.

She took in the water, the skyline, the elk burgers. “It’s like sensory overload,” she said, “the moment you fall in love with everything all at once.”

Mr. Sloan added with a grin: “I don’t know how we get home, but other than that, it’s great.”

It’s about to get better. Starting Saturday, a night ferry will shuttle partygoers between Rebound and East 34th Street in Manhattan. It’s $6 each way and takes four minutes. Which is actually pretty close to perfect.

Rebound

Second Street and Borden Avenue, Long Island City, Queens.

GETTING IN Admission is free; check directions at www.watertaxibeach.com.

DRESS CODE Bare feet and bikini tops.

D.J. LINEUP Includes Tim (Love) Lee, Metro Area, D.J. Spun, Justin Carter, and Probus.

SIGNATURE DRINK BlueTini (fresh blueberry and ginger-infused gins, dry vermouth), $14.

Chasing the Perfect Taco Up the California Coast

2006-07-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

Most days, if you ask me, my home is Manhattan. I'm from LA, but my home is here.

But there are times when I miss, deeply miss, where I come from. And then I get a note from a friend looking forward to my return, or my mom starts planning an extensive itinerary of leisure activities, or I read an article like the one below...

And I think -- I'll be home in a week.

(Here is Cindy Price's NY Times travel piece up along the coastline and its taquerias. Read it and eat.)

Why Your Girlfriend Wants to Sleep with that Effeminate Pirate

2006-07-18T20:23:00.000-07:00

So I'm watching the second Pirates of the Caribbean the other day, and there's Johnny Depp, aka Capt Jack Sparrow. The place is packed, a week into its run. The critics hate it (and insist they're hating it for us, which is hilariously fraudulent). I keep thinking, okay -- conflict, got it, more conflict, right, ooh even more conflict. But witless conflict, and Orlando Bloom is as stiff as that starfish mashed on the face of Stellan Skarsgaard.

But Captain Jack is the real disappointment. He's only as deep as his affect this time around, all eye makeup and dreds and arms still up in the air like an effeminate muppet on Disney-writer marionette strings... but for what? He's got one good grin, just at the end, and the girl I'm sitting next to lets out an involuntary moan.

Seriously, a moan. The last time I heard one of those in a theater was when I got draggged to the ballet at 19. Neve Campbell is sitting right behind me as Mikhail Barishnikov, in his farewell tour, leapt through the air and crumpled in front of us, pretending to be dead in his snug white unitard. There it went, right by my ear, an arrow meant expressly for a man whose film greatness climaxed with White Nights: the airborne moan. Ooooh, went Neve. Ooooh.

Which makes me realize part of why women my age love the Pirates franchise. And it ain't fond flashbacks to their inebriated Disneyland grad night.

It's the fact that if you were a girl and you grew up remotely near the Eighties, your sex symbols were sexually ambiguous. Every glam metal band from 1980 onward had lacquered eyeshadow and ion-treated hair and war paint.

- Van Halen, Bon Jovi: big hair
- Duran Duran, Def Leppard: big hair, eyeliner, leather chaps
- The Cure: smeared lipstick, big hair, miniskirts, eating disorders
- Poison, Whitesnake, Warrant, Motley Crue, Cinderella(!!!): don't get me started. "Girls, Girls, Girls" my ass.

But at its primal root, the fey sneering son of Ziggy Stardust, is Adam Ant. Of course Jack Sparrow, mincing and shuddering, hands and eyes akimbo, sidles directly into the collective unconscious. Mr. Ant, with all of his face-painted preening, has done all of that foreplay ages ago. Johnny Depp is, no doubt, shuttling a small sum over to the Ant estate for copyright infringement settlements as we speak.

I've heard Keith Richards was Depp's inspiration. Please. Who ever let out an involuntary moan for Captain Emphysema Bag O'Bones? It's pretty, floppy, arch Adam Ant who ought to take a bow -- or a curtsey, garb permitting -- when the third Pirates installment beaches next summer. And then, perhaps amid the collective oooh, I'll figure out finally how to get the eyeliner right for my next date.

Fruit Bats in Hoboken

2006-07-13T22:56:00.000-07:00

This is not a long, meaningful post, filled with my adventures over the past month.

If you're in search of insight, I was never really your stop anyway.

Instead, I offer this: you need to catch the Fruit Bats when they come to your town, even if that town is Hoboken and your bike breaks on the way to the entrance and you get on the wrong train and you switch, sweating, under the tunnel somewhere below Jersey and you emerge and share a cab with two (attractive) strangers along Washington St. because that's what you do in Hoboken, you pay five dollars flat for a ride any old where, and you get to Maxwell's early because you're a huge geek but that's okay because you are armed... with two hours of This American Life.

And the Fruit Bats themselves, awkward and eager to headline their own show for one night? Small and loud and full of their own kind of folk-tinged plaintive joy, they were phenomenal. Raucous yawps and singalongs, kids.

Afterward, the singer, Eric Johnson, chatted with me for a bit while he sold band t-shirts. We talked about album covers by Chicago illustrator Jay Ryan, of Andrew Bird and Calexico and Fugazi fame. Why do all singers have floppy hair? We'll never know.

Have I mentioned recently I might never move? All the odd build to get to the show just made the show better.

Sweet, Revisited

2006-05-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

Such a tumultuous year thus far.

After much ado, I am officially a Language Lecturer at New York University, with the ability suddenly to pay my rent, house my car, feed my belly, adventure in the world and actually enjoy the city... simultaneously.

How Sweet It Is

2006-05-01T22:36:00.000-07:00

My screenplay's nearly done. My classes ended brilliantly. And the Clips move on to the second round of the playoffs (in convincing fashion) for the first time in 30 years.

Life is really great. Small pleasures indeed.

Birthday Party Part Deux

2006-05-01T21:45:00.000-07:00

Sweet stinky Jesus that was a great bash. To all of you who made it last Saturday - cheers. When the bar owner came upstairs at 3.30 to say it was too loud and Patrick was engaged in horizontal capoeira, I knew the party had finally gotten underway.

Great, great food; an unending tub of libations; sixty or more of my friends from all parts of town. Thanks for making my thirtieth so brilliant.

Let's do it again next week.

30th Birthday Bash - We Want You (To Try To Enjoy Yourself, For Once)

2006-05-01T21:39:00.000-07:00

30th Birthday Bash. Click to see much, much more.
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

30th Birthday Bash - Who's This Guy?

2006-05-01T21:38:00.000-07:00

30th Birthday Bash
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

30th Birthday Bash

2006-05-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

30th Birthday Bash
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

30th Birthday Bash

2006-05-01T21:36:00.000-07:00

30th Birthday Bash
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

30th Birthday Bash

2006-05-01T21:35:00.002-07:00

30th Birthday Bash
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

30th Birthday Bash

2006-05-01T21:35:00.001-07:00

30th Birthday Bash
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

30th Birthday Bash

2006-05-01T21:34:00.000-07:00

30th Birthday Bash
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

30th Birthday Bash - Walldance

2006-05-01T21:33:00.001-07:00

30th Birthday Bash - Walldance
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

30th Birthday Bash - Seventies Smooth

2006-05-01T21:33:00.000-07:00

30th Birthday Bash - Seventies Smooth
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

30th Birthday Bash

2006-05-01T21:32:00.000-07:00

30th Birthday Bash
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

30th Birthday Bash

2006-05-01T21:31:00.001-07:00

30th Birthday Bash
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

30th Birthday Bash

2006-05-01T21:31:00.000-07:00

30th Birthday Bash
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

This is so how the party ended up. So funny. So raunchy.