The Urban Sherpa

Change We Can Believe In

Christopher DeWan — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:11:00 -0500

Blog of the Future

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 22:11:00 -0500

There's a blog that sometimes links to my blog, so people who read that blog sometimes read this blog too. Whenever this other blog links to my blog, I'm flattered: I sometimes doubt that anyone reads my blog. I sometimes doubt that anyone reads anyone's blog, except their own. So it's reassuring to see that someone has in fact read something on my blog, and even gone so far as to recommend that others read it, too.

In fact, whenever this other blog links to my blog, I read this other blog. It's as if their affirmation of my blog confirms my opinion of their good taste, and then I want to see what else they're thinking. I read it diligently, I'll find things I think are interesting, and often I'll add a link somewhere on my blog back to this other blog, so that presumably, the people who are reading my blog (if there are any) are now also reading this other blog, because of my recommendation. I assume this other blog sees that I've linked to them, and this causes them to read my blog more closely, and maybe find something they like enough to recommend to their readers.

It all reminds me of the closed-off glass globe they have at the Natural History Museum which has been sealed for years and contains an entire self-contained ecosystem, but would probably smell really bad if you open it up.

But it seems to work.

The closed-off glass globe and the cross-linking between blogs, that is.

However... a distressing thing has started to happen, because now this other blog is no longer linking to stories I've written. Instead, it links to stories I haven't written yet. It quotes these unwritten stories, and it points its readers to my blog seeking these stories which don't yet exist. It must be very confusing and disappointing for these readers.

The stories which the other blog says I've written, even though I haven't—I don't know if these are stories I would have written sometime in the future; but they seem interesting to me; so I write them.

I worry that the story I wind up writing is not be as good as the story that I was supposed to have written but didn't write.

These recommendations come, and I write for them, trying to catch up with their expectations, always a step behind, hoping not to fall two or three steps back, hoping not to stumble, hoping not to fall, trying to anticipate their next want, trying to fill it, to keep them happy, all of them, the readers and the future readers I don't yet have but apparently someday will. What do you want, stranger? And what will you want after that?

Voir Dire

Christopher DeWan — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:11:00 -0500

After Kant, can anyone ever swear to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"? Can anything be "beyond reasonable doubt"?

Our oaths and standards of proof really need to be brought into the epistemic 21st century....

The Secret Museum

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:11:00 -0500

or, Small Wonders from the American Collection

While walking through the hodgepodge and (to my taste) pretty unremarkable fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum ("American Art": side-by-side exhibitions of furniture, commissioned portraits, Abstract-Expressionist painting, bejeweled flatware, and a few sculptures of bronze, marble and wood—though separate sculptures, and not all those materials within a single sculpture1), this happened:

A couple approached, then unlocked, then opened a small knobless door situated discretely between two (boring) paintings—"Mrs. Sylvester Gardiner, née Abigail Pickman, formerly Mrs. William Epps," (1772) by John Singleton Copley2 on the left, and "George Washington," (1776) by Charles Wilson Peale3, on the right. This door was so unassuming that if I'd noticed it before4, I'd have taken it for a service closet.

Inside—I only saw it for a few seconds—was a small black pedestal, maybe waist-high, with a glass case on top and a single spotlight shining down upon it; and inside the case, centered within the spotlight, a small, abstract bundle of sculpted glass: fragile rays shooting out from a center and then ending in a hundred tiny droplets, so it looked maybe like a representation of pollen, or a snowflake, or, judging by the cascade of light that radiated off it, maybe a will'o'the'wisp, or a model of something powerful and subatomic. It was the most delicate, beautiful thing I've seen in this museum.

The couple took a quick photo, then closed and locked the door. A security guard pushed at it, to confirm that it was locked5 6, and then, their attention gone, it faded unremarkably back into the wall: it all but disappeared.

Then I noticed these secret closets are all over the museum.

And because mystery is more wondrous to me than answers, I never asked what or how or why.

1. The Brooklyn Museum's American collection is a sloppy survey of American art history which resembles your grandparents' attic, if your grandparents were friends of art collectors, but not collectors themselves, except accidentally, e.g., as the recipients of gifts. The following examples are all currently on display in the four smallish rooms that make up the American collection, arranged in such a way as to cause maximum confusion and frisson among museum patrons:

Emblems of the Civil War

Giraffe Head

Green Yellow and Orange

Chest of drawers

Water jar

New Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge, no. 2

2. One inscrutable puzzle of mimesis is how the bearer of such a storied epithet could be rendered so inert in portraiture; but such was the style of the day.

3. Not the Gilbert Stuart portrait that we remember so fondly from elementary school, nor quite the other Peale portrait which graced our middle school, but this graceful albeit thin-headed one.

4. I hadn't.

5. As did I, once the guard stepped away.

6. It was.

If wishes were fishes

Christopher DeWan — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 22:11:00 -0500

If wishes were fishes,
the sea would be tea,
and hope like a rope
of pearls around me.

Lemons, pt. 2

Christopher DeWan — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:11:00 -0500

“When God gives you papercuts, don't make lemonade.

The Woman Who Planted Her Children

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 22:11:00 -0500

When the first one died, she buried it herself in her own backyard, and on that spot grew a beautiful tree, which she named Sarah.

When the second died and was buried, another tree sprouted, and she called it Daniel.

So it was for each of them, a tree for a child, till at the end of her own life, she had a forest for a family, and was herself laid to rest in this quiet grove of sadness.

Inner monologue of a Lakers fan

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 22:11:00 -0500

I'm so happy now.

I'm so happy now, I'm screaming uncontrollably.

I'm so filled with joy that I'm hugging a stranger.

I feel so vindicated, I'm tearing off my own shirt.

I'm so exalted, I want to punch a woman in the face.

My life is so complete, I'm throwing a brick into a crowd of strangers.

I'm so happy now, I'm turning this car over and lighting it on fire.

I want to rape you all.

We won.

The world is so good.

The Rowboat

Christopher DeWan — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:11:00 -0500

I had a rowboat but I lost it.

I live in a place, inhabited but not overcrowded, and the boat would take me away from it, through bubbling channels and quiet lagoons, to drift instead among the frogs and the light-footed dragonflies that skate on the surface of the pond. It's not long being in the boat before my troubles disappear; I disappear, into the swirls of water, or swirls of algae in the water, imagining shapes onto them as if they were clouds; or I look into the shapes of the clouds reflected onto the surface of the water; or I look into the clouds themselves. I follow the current's meanderings, navigating its minute discoveries—why is the air cooler here?—why do the fish gather there?—Hello, old rock. I might as well be sailing around the world, I'm so far from my troubles; till I find my way back, more at peace than before, tie up my boat, and resume my business.

Then one day the boat was gone, whether stolen or lost to the weather or a weakness of the rope or most likely the carelessness of my knot, I don't know; but I'm sure it's the last: that one day, I'd have paddled up toward the dock, drifted, bumped it, stepped springing onto the bouncing pier, sun in my eyes, sweat dripping from my brow, smell of summer on my skin and in my hair, some sogginess from water, worry about sunburn, hungry, missed phone calls, impatient to-do lists, life—I forgot to tie up my little boat, or tied it poorly, I'm sad to concede. Waves pushed at it, gently, again and again, into the dock, knocking like a welcome but tentative guest; then, disheartened, nudged by a chance in the wind, pulled it in the other direction. Away. Adrift.

Headless, the boat wandered toward a deeper part of the pond, where, finding an easy current, followed it to the place the pond meets the creek; stalled for a while on a shallow embankment; nudged again loose and away, to the spot less visible to us than the fishes where the creek becomes the river, where the river opens out to the sea, and the boat was free free free, tiny on top of a whole underwater world, rising up on the waves, falling, up and down, the earth's own breath; and in this way, it torqued and turned and traveled the world, following warm waters up, passing bare beaches and thick forests, steep cliffs, crackling ice, breaching whales, flocks of birds, flocks of fishes; vessels too passed it and noticed it or passed it and failed to notice, fishermen from Portugal, from Japan; an ocean tanker which itself contained a kind of ocean; happy people in the heavy sun; sad people; people of all kinds. This little boat saw them all, though it didn't understand or recognize them, but drifted on, oblivious to the richness of its adventures; while I, at home, regretted my poor knot and thought on it often.

String Theory

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:11:00 -0500

String theory. Noun. A single unified model in physics which can explain why headphone cables get so tangled and why shoes always come untied.

Technologies for the Down and Out

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:11:00 -0500

Duct tape
Scratch-off
Bedbug repellent
Plunger
Pennies
Anti-itch cream
Wet vac
Tax lawyer
Pay phone
Cover-up
Glue solvent
Airplane toilet
Gravestone

The Man of Tomorrow

Christopher DeWan — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 22:11:00 -0500

Superman was persuaded to hire an IT guy. "Why do I need email?," he asked. "I can see clear to the horizon. I can hear radio frequencies across the globe." But his mother Martha wanted to send him photos, and Lois was always looking for a decent Scrabble partner. Most compelling, the NSA had evidence that Lex Luther was developing an advanced computer virus to take over the world. "How are you going to save us," the President asked him, "if you don't even know how to open up Outlook?"

"If I can't open up Outlook, I'll be the only one safe from the virus!" But he didn't like to think of himself as ignorant, so he hired a cousin of Jimmy Olsen's to install a complement of hardware and software into the Fortress of Solitude.

"How do I turn it on?," he asked the IT guy.

"The Internet? You don't turn on the Internet. It's always on, like the Sun."

Lois came over to show him how it all worked. "You should Google yourself! Look—one million, four-hundred sixty thousand results! Hey, click on the 'News' link: see if my stories are at the top."

"It says I already have a page on MySpace. What's MySpace?"

"Don't worry about MySpace," Lois answered.

When she came back a week later, he was still sitting at the computer. "Hey Lois! I'm the mayor of the Fortress of Solitude! @ThatSuperman has 400,000 followers!"

"You have a Twitter account?"

"I've got to protect my online brand, Lois."

The Internet afforded Superman with a whole new set of data that he could use to monitor crime, and to keep peace and order across the planet.

"Wait—Lex Luther is your Facebook Friend?"

"Well, we know a lot of the same people from high school. And sometimes he harvests my crops in Farmville. Anyway, he doesn't really have time for world dominion anymore."

The Internet was far more effective at eliminating violent crime than Superman had ever been, because the criminals now mostly stayed at home—uploading photos of old capers, editing Wikipedia entries on classic bank heists, and playing each other at Mafia Wars till they fell asleep at their keyboards, icing each other all night long, from the safety of their dreams.

Koan of the Jigsaw Puzzle

Christopher DeWan — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:11:00 -0500

The Zen master scatters the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle across the table. He does not attempt to assemble the puzzle. Instead, he picks up a single piece at random and contemplates it for the rest of the day.

The solution to the puzzle is the puzzle. The puzzle is the solution to the puzzle.

Longevity

Christopher DeWan — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 22:11:00 -0500

It was one of those silly online quizzes that suck up so much time and you're not even sure why you're taking it. This one claimed to be able to predict my exact lifespan, based solely on my answers to a few pages of multiple choice questions.

"Do you hold on to things?" was the question that disconcerted me. The prior questions had been about diet, exercise, and congenital predispositions. "Do you hold on to things?" I pretended momentarily to misunderstand, but of course I knew that the automated, multiple choice Internet quiz was asking me about her.

* * *

Earlier that morning, walking down the street, I passed by a little girl, a cute Asian-fusion child who hid behind the leg of her nanny. "Why are you hiding?," the woman asked. "I'm not hiding!" Petulant and adorable, and I almost started crying right there on the sidewalk, maybe because this child reminds me so much of her, or maybe because all children do, the idea of children, my idea of having them: this creature is the incarnation of a lost dream, the daughter I failed to have. It's my leg she should've been using for shelter, hiding her eyes in her own hair.

Hair. The word "hair." In itself, it shouldn't evoke any particular association of color or texture or smell. Everyone has hair. But I notice now, to me, "hair," simply "hair," implies the strands of it on my pillow, implies my hands running through it, implies the scent that I want lingering in the air. I've lost the word to her. I wonder how many such words I've lost: how many otherwise-neutral territories of vocabulary I've surrendered to her occupation. Like the strands of hair themselves, I may never stop finding traces of her, hidden in forgotten corners, left behind.

* * *

"No," I answer the questionnaire. "I don't hold on to things," and in its spite for the lie I told, it tells me that I'll live forever.

Sports Talk

Christopher DeWan — Wed, 26 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

The guys at the bar talking so passionately about sports don't realize that if you swap out the nouns in their sentences, they're having the same conversation that the toddlers outside are having about their sticker collections.

Tech Support Our Troops

Christopher DeWan — Tue, 25 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

The people most interested in my blog this week are making repeated visits from Fort Huachuca, Arizona. I can't tell from looking at my analytics software which blog posts they like most. "Therapy" and "Page Not Found" are both popular.

But the visitors from Fort Huachuca, Arizona aren't much interested in reading, really.

Fort Huachuca, Arizona is home to the United States Army Information Systems Engineering Command, and it seems that this week, they've started basic training in "SQL injections"—a process by which a hacker tries to get at usernames and passwords and whatever else, by appending some computer code to the end of a page's URL:

http://site.com/article.php?id=9%20union%20select%20Username,0,1,2%20from%20admin

As the people at USAISEC surely know, it's prudent to add some simple protections to your website, to help prevent SQL injections: a tweak to the php.ini file, for instance, and an extra function to strip the most dubious keywords from the URL's string ($string = eregi_replace($badWords, "", $string);)

Whatever their motive, I'm glad the site's found new visitors! Welcome, USAISEC! Don't forget to "like" me on Facebook and "follow" me on Twitter! I hope you find some things here that you like, and I hope that my usernames and passwords are not among those things.

Thanks for keeping us safe.

An American Dream

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 24 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

The blast of cold air blew through our office and unmoored the various collected memos, contracts, loosely-held Post-It notes, food menus, and business cards, so it looked like a ticker tape parade, or anyway, it looked like our idea of a ticker tape parade: none of us had ever seen a ticker tape parade. None of us had ever seen ticker tape.

"Jesus!," someone shouted. Then another: "Jesus! Jesus!" Jesus was suddenly everywhere.

One of the employees had climbed out his window and was now balanced on a ledge he shared with three skittish pigeons.

I didn't even know the windows opened this high up.

Somehow it fell on me to talk him back inside, maybe because I am the designated fire deputy, or maybe I was designated as the fire deputy for the same reason that I was now being chosen for this task—a reason which has never been made clear to me.

"Doug," I called out.

Nothing in my background as a copywriter had specifically prepared me to help in situations such as these.

"Doug, why don't you come back inside?"

He didn't answer. I'd expected him to look like a crazed person out there on the ledge, but he didn't. He looked collected, all things considered. The pigeons, too, had settled down, acclimated to the idea of him, and the four of them perched there, Doug and the three birds, as if resting, or admiring the sunset, or waiting for the train.

"Doug," I tried again. Was it normal to keep saying a person's name in these instances? I did it naturally without planning, and wondered if it was residual muscle memory from some mandatory management training session. "Is everything okay? You want to talk?"

"Oh, hey," he said to me, as if noticing me for the first time, as if we'd bumped into each other in the kitchenette while fetching coffee.

"What are you doing out there, man?"

A pigeon started pecking curiously at his leg, and he shooed it away till all three birds flew off, flock mind.

"Aren't you cold?," I asked him.

"I'm good."

"Come on, it's winter out. Why don't you come back inside?"

"I don't want to go back inside. I don't want to go back inside ever." He looked at me, and I noticed he was sweating. "I don't want that life anymore," he said, and he shivered, maybe at the thought of staplers and khaki pants and action items, or maybe just the cold air.

"Okay. That's okay. You don't have to. I mean, why don't you come back in, and then you can have any life you want. Start over. Have an adventure. Start fresh. It's the American dream, right? No matter what you think, you can come back inside and then have any life you want."

I helped him climb back through the window, and then security helped him out of the building, and then the police helped him to the hospital, and after three days under observation, the hospital released him into the care of his parents, which, if you ask me, is enough to make any grown man a suicide risk.

* * *

Doug's parents lived in a suburb of Cleveland. He stayed with them for one week: he cleaned up their basement, breaking down the cardboard boxes they'd been accumulating with the purchase of each successive new electronic device: the VCR box under the DVD box under the TiVo box under the box for the plasma TV: it was a sculptural timeline of the forward march of technology, a micro view of the history of man, as seen through a decade's worth of packaging materials for consumer electronics.

Doug started rereading some of the books he'd kept from his college years, Russian literature and French poetry and economics and music theory and the history of Japan. He had open copies of a dozen books and seemed to want to read them all concurrently.

Then, at the end of that week, he disappeared, leaving twelve open books, a vacant corner of the basement where cardboard boxes had been piled, and no note.

* * *

The next we heard, Doug was crossing the Missouri River in a Conestoga wagon, en route to Nebraska. He meant to grab himself some acreage and some cattle, and work the land till the dust had caked with the sweat on his skin. It's honest work, he said, and I'll sleep as well as I ever have.

And we might not have heard from him at all after that, except that some time later, he sent a note that his beloved wife (for he'd married) had died from a fever, and with nothing but sadness keeping him where he was, he packed his things and set out for California. "The air is like oranges," he wrote.

Once arrived, he built an oil derrick by hand, and before long, he was slick with wealth and petroleum; but he knew no matter how much prosperity he drilled from the ground, he would never get his wife back; so he traded his claims for a chest of gold and a seaworthy sailboat built in the Chinese style, and he aimed the boat toward the setting sun, and disappeared again.

Next we heard from Doug, he was missing his right leg from the knee down. He'd lost it fighting a civil war, "to help take back for the people that which was rightfully theirs." Where?, we asked. What country? But the color fell from his eyes. "The wrong side won, and the country I knew doesn't have a name anymore."

A publisher made a book out of Doug's journals from the war, and it became quite famous; but Doug himself had moved on.

We lost him for a while. We heard he moved up north, that he'd remarried and had children, that he'd returned to the city. Sometimes one of us would claim they'd seen him on the street, or at the museum, or stepping into an elevator. We heard he was involved in a real estate deal, had a venture in medicine, heard he had learned to harness the power of the sun. We heard he was building a rocket ship with his daughter. No one knew for sure. Everyone wondered, but then, everyone forgot, too.

* * *

I was at work. I'd done well for myself. I had a corner office with pictures of my family on the desk. I had someone to answer my phone calls, and when I did take a call, I was loud and warm and gregarious, and people were almost always happy to speak with me.

Things moved forward as they should.

But on this day, for some reason, I felt a little flushed, and muddy in the head. "Please hold my calls," I said to the person who answers my phone, as I laid down on my office sofa. "I'm going to try and sleep this thing off."

When I woke, there were loose papers tossed around my office, and a cold wind ripped in through the window. I didn't even know the windows opened up here.

Doug was there, sitting on my window ledge. "I made you some tea," he said. I took it, and, edging out the window, sat down next to him. "Doug! How are you? Where've you been?"

Breaking horses.

Splitting atoms.

Striking gold.

Doug was silent. Then he spoke.

"There's nothing about the world that you don't know already in your dreams, when you're five. There's nothing to accomplish, no satisfaction that you haven't already achieved during your first kiss, and every kiss after that, and when you're holding your first child, and every child after that. There's no adventure you can't have, if only you let yourself. Reality is more real than you think it is. That's the American Dream: you can have everything, because you already have everything inside you."

I couldn't feel the cold at all anymore.

"This time," Doug said, "why don't you come with me?"

And I did.

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The Magic Swing, by Pedro Saldarriaga

The Common Cant

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 23 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

“I am no blog reader,” “I seldom look into blogs;” “Do not imagine that I often read blogs;” “It is really very well for a blog,” —such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh, it is only a blog!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her laptop with affected indifference or momentary shame.

The Man in My Eyes

Christopher DeWan — Sat, 22 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

When I close my eyes, there's a man talking to me. He's little, and if he's making sound, I can't hear it, but he sits on the inside of my eyelid, well-dressed, behind a desk, like a newscaster on a tiny television, reporting sternly and firmly on the passing of pressing events.

I don't know what he's saying but I know it's important.

He's not there every time I close my eyes—only intermittently, usually at the ends of long days. Sometimes he's changed his tie or he's wearing a different colored shirt. Even in a pink shirt he looks composed and urgent.

He's very small, and it's hard to make out the movement of his lips, but one word I think I can make out, because he uses it so often: "Help."

Lately, he's been cutting to other correspondents with greater and greater frequency. They're always on the scene of a terrible disaster—plane crash or hurricane or the death of an innocent child. When the correspondent finishes, they cut back to the original little man, but he always takes a moment of solemn stillness before his lips begin to move again, silent reading of an unknown almanac.

"Help," the little man is saying inside my eyes, and then maybe, after that (it's hard to tell) "yourself."

Slippery

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 21 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

All hands have been on deck, in Washington and in the press, to vilify (the legitimately awful, greedy and negligent) BP in the wake of the explosion on Deepwater Horizon, and to take photos of oil-drenched beaches with sad-looking turtles and herons. (Turtles always look kind of sad, don't they?)

But news outlets seem mostly reluctant to speak the subtext: though we want to act as though we're shocked and outraged at this incident, in truth it's a predictable and inevitable consequence of our dependence on fossil fuels, and we're all of us complicit in it. If we aren't acting to lessen our oil appetite, then we're saying we accept the resultant collateral damage. Who's outraged enough to pass a higher gas tax?

Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

Christopher DeWan — Thu, 20 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

Dear Xxxx,

I never told you, that time we were lying in bed and had made love and then were listening to music while the sun set—made love maybe for the last time? I can't remember for sure; so many times were the last time...—never told you that I disagreed with you and still do disagree with you (unless you've changed your mind) regarding your assessment of David Gray's cover of the Marc Almond song, "Say Hello Wave Goodbye."

You said, if I recall correctly, that the song is "awful!", and that Gray "got it all wrong!", "missed the whole point!", "misunderstood everything!", "stripped it of everything that made the original good!", and "ruined it!" I might be paraphrasing, but I think you'll agree with the gist.

I don't like being put in a position to have to defend David Gray. I'm not a fan. You've heard me say more than once I think he's our generation's James Taylor, and I don't mean it as a compliment. I think his music is soft, gutless, and well-suited to play in the background at department stores while we shop.

But have you heard the Marc Almond version lately? Like so much of the 80s, it hasn't aged as well as we like to think. Nostalgia's funny that way. Listen to it again: it's as gutless- and soulless-sounding as Gray's, though in that 80s synth kind of way (and anyway somewhat more forgivable because it is his song, at least; and since he wrote it, he should be able to do what he wants with it).

Some of those lines are great, even through all the synthesizer.

As pertains to the David Gray version: it's whiny, monotonous, too long by half, and has all the lust for life of an ABC sitcom. It's probably been on the soundtrack of a few ABC sitcoms. If I ever catch my children listening to this song, I'll be ashamed of them.

But this is the version that played the night we were together, not Marc Almond; so that crooning, "Take a look at my face for the last time"—this is the version, not Marc Almond's, that hurts me when I hear it; and that just seems unlikely if the song were as bad as you say.

I should probably stop listening to it over and over. It doesn't get any better from repetition, in case you were wondering.

Yours truly,
Xxxxx

Addendum: I've been reconsidering my position on the Marc Almond version of the song. Once one gets past its robotic qualities—the drum machine, the keyboard, and, in some ways, Almond's own performance—in other words, it's 80s-ness—the song is quite lovely, especially when it goes into the higher notes of its torch-song chorus: "Take your hands off me, I don't belong to you."

It's possible my knee-jerk dislike of 80s music is in fact a kind of self-loathing, to make up for how uncritically I loved the 80s back in the day, and how I still haven't quite escaped them. Ah well...

Agoraphobia.11n

Christopher DeWan — Tue, 18 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

agoraphobia.11n. Noun. An abnormal fear of open or public places that are out of range of free, reliable WiFi.

Eskimo Words for "Brunch"

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 17 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

The common conception that Eskimos have "dozens" or "a hundred" or "hundreds" of words for brunch is a problematic one on many fronts. First, there is no single language called "Eskimo": this is merely a convenient (and offensive) grouping of two major cultural groups of the region, more correctly known as the Inuit and Aleut.

Second, what is a "word"? It is difficult to know when to distinguish between noun-verb pairs, complex or irregular verb conjugations, gerunds, phrasal verbs, etc. Part-of-speech disambiguation is a challenge in any language.

However: the peoples of this region do in fact make many fine linguistic distinctions regarding this ritualistic midday meal. For instance, the Inuit use no fewer than twenty-four separate lexemes¹ to describe in greater specificity what we in English characterize simply as "brunch."

qanuk: Brunch before noon
kaneq: Early afternoon brunch
kanevvluk: Brunch after 2:30pm
sanajait: Brunch cooked at home
namiippunga: Brunch eaten out
muruaneq: Brunch with a lover
nutaryuk: Brunch with a new lover
qetrar: Brunch with your friends
nevluk: Brunch with your family
tuktu: A savory brunch
mutuk: A sweet brunch
mamaqtuq: A brunch mixing sweet and savory
qujannamiik: Brunch with powdered sugar
pirta: Brunch in the air
aniu: Brunch crusting on the ground
qanisqineq: A mimosa brunch
quisuktunga: A Bloody Mary brunch
qanikcaq: Brunch involving three or more alcoholic beverages
qengaruk: All-you-can-eat brunch
utvak: Mother's Day brunch
ajjiliurumajagit: Weekday brunch (seldom used)
navcaq: Wedding brunch
natquik: Breakup brunch
navcite: Unexpected breakup brunch

As you can see, there is meaning to be derived from the truism about "Eskimos" and the number of words for brunch, despite its problematic and non-academic origin.

1. The list is organized according to lexeme meanings. Perhaps somewhat arbitrarily I have counted twenty-four of them. But an even more arbitrary decision is left to the discretion of the reader: the decision of how to count the lexemes themselves. Here are some of the problems you face:

    (a) Are all twenty-four lexeme meanings really 'brunch'-meanings? That is, do words with these meanings really count for you as words for brunch?

    (b) There are some synonyms present—alternative lexemes with the same meaning, like 'effete' vs. 'academic' in English. Are you going to count them separately, or together?

    (c) If you decided to count synonyms together, will you also count together both of the members of noun-verb pairs having basically the same meaning? (The members are, technically speaking, separate lexemes since partly idiosyncratic morphological changes mark the verbal forms, and must therefore be listed separately in any truly informative dictionary, as indeed Jacobson's dictionary does.)

    (d) Following Jacobson, I've specially labelled those lexemes that only occur in a small subpart of the Central Alaskan Yupik-speaking region. Are you going to try to make counts for each separate dialect? If yes, you will wonder if you really have enough information to do so. (You're not alone in this. Such information is difficult to compile, whether or not you are a linguist, and also whether or not you are a native speaker of a language.)

Choke

Christopher DeWan — Sat, 15 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

“The danger of being clever is that your heart will choke on your tongue.

My Movie Pitch

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 14 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

"Here's my movie pitch. Wanna hear it?

"There's this guy—this young, bright, hopeful guy. Like Orlando Bloom coulda played him a couple years ago, before he got old. But not Shia LaBeouf. Smarter than Shia LaBeouf.

"This guy, he gets outta college, he gets a job, everything's going pretty good, and then ... he starts feeling like he's losing himself, you know? Losing track of his dreams. So he says, "Fuck you, job! I quit! I'm gonna chase my dreams!"

"But it's too late, see? Because he's already forgotten them. So he just stumbles around all the time, trying to remember what he wanted.

"It's sort of Reality Bites meets Memento meets The Road."

The Manuscript

Christopher DeWan — Tue, 11 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

“Working on a poetry manuscript is like masturbating to a picture of a woman you've loved for years.

The 100th Floor

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 09 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

In all his days as a window washer, he had never once seen a door on the outside of the hundredth floor, until that day.

They'd started at the roof, as always, plunging their small platform over the edge and then riding it down, little by little. They enjoyed each other's company, but even more, they enjoyed the silence, the silence and the squeaking sounds as they worked over the glass. They enjoyed their own never-ending rhythm, fanning in graceful arcs, fanning and dunking and drying, complementing one other, filling in the limits of each other's reach.

They almost never looked inside the windows; they almost never cared to. The people inside were murky shadows, like ghosts, or underpaintings, or characters in an old, washed-out silent film. Their shapes distorted as the windows were doused, then wiped dry, doused, then wiped dry, and the men on the scaffold noticed the people inside only sometimes, the way one notices shells on the ocean floor, revealed after a passing wave, then hidden, then forgotten.

They loosened the ties on the pulleys and lowered themselves, and started again, window after window, floor after floor.

Outside, the Sun was an arm's reach away.

Outside, the wind was cruel.

Outside, they brought with them their own weather. On cloudy days, their scaffolding would sometimes seem to ascend above the clouds into a sunshine that no one on the ground could see. On sunny days, such as today, the window washers would sometimes disappear into a small cloud that hovered over their platform, perhaps fashioned from the water they were carrying and from the heat of their own breath.

It was from such a cloud, and dangling from a heaven-high roof, they wiped at the windows again and again and again; and in an otherwise unremarkable moment, their little cloud parted, and that was when he saw it—the door, high above him, high and to the right: a glossy black door with a brass knob that reflected the sunlight into his eyes, a heavy wooden door set into the vertical plane of steel and glass, an impossible door.

The other men were already unfurling the platform down the building and bringing the door farther out of reach, and he knew then that if he didn't reach for it, didn't at least try, then he'd never have a chance again, and never know what lay on its other side; and without a word to his colleagues and friends (for they preferred to work in silence), he stepped off the platform; and they never did understand why.

The Communist Fairy Tale Manifesto, pt. 1

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 07 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

Or, What I Like: Thoughts Toward an Essay

A year ago, in an effort to help cultivate more of the writing that I myself like to read, I sent out a call for fiction, and attached the following statements as a short manifesto:

We believe there are many ways of looking at the world, and you can see a lot by sometimes closing your eyes.
We believe the best ideas come out in unexpected ways.
We believe fairy tales are for grown-ups, who might not always be able to puzzle out the moral.
We believe the medium is a message, and we like the digital medium.
We believe in concision and negative space.
We believe a lot can be built with shoestrings.
And we believe that stories—even short ones—especially short ones—should leave us feeling transformed.

People did send stories. (Thanks!) But I also received one short, unexpected, hateful email from a stranger: four sentences of unsolicited vitriol which can be politely summed up by its final line, "Get a job!" I had a job, but apparently something in my bullet list struck a nerve, and made this man understand me to be lazy, wasteful, and anti-capitalist. Whether those things are true or not is beside the point. (They probably are true.) The point is, with precious few clues as to what set him off, I'd like to guess that he was lashing out at the term "fairy tale."

Nothing evokes childhood and its spendthrift squandering of time—time, the most precious of all adult commodities!—quite so quickly as the fairy tale. These are stories set in faraway times and places, starring princes and frogs and whole casts of characters whom we can never hope to be. These royals and freaks struggle in worlds that don't even share our own laws of physics: wolves speak, at least one parent is always deceased, and the prick of a needle might put you to sleep for years. The world is warped, causality is surreal, and a practical person could reasonably conclude that the morals of these stories must certainly be useless to us. The fairy tale is the most extravagant example of the uselessness of all fiction, and the uselessness of the time that we give to it.

Yet this talk of "use" and "commodities" speaks exactly to the fairy tale's real value. This, then, is a "Communist Fairy Tale Manifesto," because it proclaims that one function of these stories is to liberate you from the belief that your time must be well spent. When you read a fairy tale, your time is getting wasted, and you, the worker/shopper disappear; as a reader, you are transported, however briefly, into a place where the concerns of your job cease to exist, where nothing is being bought or sold, where shopping won't solve any problems, and where things are, in general, much too weird ever to be commodified.

Thus, the act of valuing a fairy tale is a radical act, because it expresses your independence from a capitalist dialectic (working/shopping) that defines so much of our everyday ("workaday") existence. Every time that I decide I "don't have time" for fiction, what I'm actually deciding is that it has too little "value," in the sense that it doesn't help me to get any of "my work" done (though "my work" is, in these cases, usually actually someone else's work). This habit strengthens the value of capitalism in my mind and on my time, and it weakens and devalues imagination—the one place we are most free.

The point of a fairy tale is to enable you and to train you to think fantastically, and expansively. It enables your humanity, and makes you a bigger, richer human being—arguably, I think, even more so than "getting a job."¹

1. I don't at all mean to limit the discussion of "fairy tales" to the Hans Christen Anderson and the Grimm Brothers: these stories are so entrenched and well-known that they may make it harder to think expansively: they are too canonical. But I do mean to include Garcia-Marquez, Isabel Allende, etc.; Milan Kundera; Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, etc.; Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Haruki Murakami, Miranda July, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, many of the writers associated with "slipstream", etc. etc. etc.... in short, I mean nearly all of the writers I read and like.^{2, 3}

2. The occasion for writing this not-quite-essay was a recent conversation with a friend regarding a playwright I much admire, Sarah Ruhl, and the common criticism that her work can be "twee." I disagree both that her work is "twee" and also that "twee" is, in itself, a criticism. Since none of my feelings on this particular subject made it into the above passage, I'd like to hope there will be a "Part Two"....

3. See also, "Mythic Proportions."

Chafe

Christopher DeWan — Sat, 01 May 2010 22:11:00 -0500

chafe. French for "My inner thighs are too fat."

The Second Step

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:11:00 -0500

“The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. The second step is dry-heaves and shakes. No wonder we linger on step one.