favorite spring fabric trends, and some shopping in manhattan tips

anytime i have anything vaguely stressful to do in manhattan (and every possible reason i might have to go to manhattan is stressful), i wind down afterwards by going shopping. i don't always buy things (though i buy a lot more than i need), but it is very soothing to touch all the different fabrics and think about the future.

so here is your trend report (click through if you dare):

Some light reading about aliens

I've really been enjoying this article called Alien Minds by Susan Schneider, a philosophy professor at the University of Connecticut. I've often heard that it's likely that if we ever encounter aliens, they'll be postbiological-- more like superintelligent machines. Schneider sketches out this possibility, noting how humanity is getting more cyborgy already:

"...in the United States the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has started to develop neural implants that interface directly with the nervous system, regulating conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, arthritis, depression, and Crohn’s disease."

And then the article gets even more interesting--Schneider explores what it would be like inside the "mind" of a superintelligent alien. Would they be conscious? This reminds me of this classic piece on personal identity by Derek Parfit. Schneider casually points out:

"...even humans wishing to upload their minds will fail to transfer their consciousness. Although they may copy their memories onto a computational format, their consciousness will not transfer..."

It makes me both sad and excited to try to picture the distant future.

For further reading: The Fermi Paradox, in all its terrifying glory

source for the schneider: kottke!

Our Lady of the Airways, Boston Logan International Airport

I've always been curious about the chapel at Boston-Logan International Airport. In Durham the old airport chapel was a small, dark space with fake stained glass. I was surprised to discover that the one at Boston-Logan is as big as a church.

 

It's hard to explain why I find this place so moving. It's partly because it reminds me of Robigus, the rust god--this narrow category, the recognition of its need for a deity. Also because we're willing to travel extreme distances for mourning, and the fact that airlines make exceptions for that kind of travel. I feel like an airport chapel must be used more often for sadness than happiness.

It's partly because airplane flights, especially the overseas, night-to-morning ones, are really an ascent into heaven, and also because they require total surrender, and I am gradually getting more and more afraid of air travel, and sometimes I am jolted awake from one of those noisy airplane-naps by a sudden terrifying awareness of how fast we're going.

Sunset on the way to Boston

Sunrise above the Hebrides, Iceland to Paris

Highlight of the day

Seeing this post, from this tumblr, in my reader.

Starting to wonder--do I feel uglier when I'm never around people? (The answer must be yes.) Do I overeat more when I feel fat? (The answer must be yes.) What other things work like this? When a good thing happens, I feel sad because I know how quickly it will fade.

Teju Cole: "I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: A warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy." Open City, p. 131.

ETA: This is the first post I've written since Norway that seems to me exactly like the posts I wrote in Norway.

No news is good news

Is it [[no news] is good news], or [[no] news is good news]? I mean, does it mean that hearing nothing from someone means that they're doing just fine, or does it mean that everything you read in the paper, see on TV, etc. is always bad, like no one cares for positive news? This is really important.

The best thing in Berlin, other than the terrifying mutants at the Museum for Natural History, was Martin Honert's Kinderkreuzzug show at the Hamburger Bahnhof, which is a huge contemporary art museum in an old train station. Honert was trying to recreate memories of childhood, which happens to be one of my favorite hobbies these days as well. (I am back in Durham, and in my house it's hard to tell if I am seeing things or the memory of things. If you could map the views in the living room where I am sitting, it would be a map with a lot of spikes and bulges. Every object opens up a very-distant view onto where it came from. There is Sam the Dot Man's birdhouse, and there's his packed store in Winston-Salem. There are the silhouettes of my sister and me from 1996, and there is the darkened room in the now-demolished South Square mall.)

Anyway, Honert went about recreating his childhood memories in a lot of different ways. He turned grainy, faded photos into grainy, faded statues.

He turned childhood drawings into big installations.

He made scaled-down models of important childhood objects, like a Linden tree or a favorite house, and put them on pedestals like busts. He put a half-sphere of green jello on a plate on a table that was rigged to shake and jiggle the jello from time to time. (He made the table so that it was too big for one person and too small for two, which I found beautiful and moving.) He did a lot of other things. But the most exciting part of the exhibit was the dorm bedroom that he created to look like a photo negative.

(If you use a Mac, press control+alt+command+the numeral 8, which inverts the colors of your screen, and you can see the negative-image of this bed. To switch back, just use the same shortcut.)  

So everything that is dark in real life is light in the room. Everything that would be wood-yellow is blue instead. Everything that would be white is black. And shadows are lights instead. It was an easy idea that played out so eerily in person.

How would you recreate your memories of childhood, if you had the skills of an installation artist and a very big budget? I think I'd want to make big things that you can actually crawl around in. A huge glass-topped coffee table to lie under, or a huge bed to try to climb up on. A lot of my memories of childhood are memories of impotence. How horrible it is, for example, to have a picture in mind and be unable to draw it with the shitty markers and colored pencils that people force upon children. 

Honert seemed more interested in the frozen moment, the way that photos shape your early memories. (Along with all his statues-from-photos, he made a statue meant to look like a bonfire in the midst of burning.)

The most evocative of his installations might have been one of the least visually interesting. He made a full-scale model (in styrofoam and plastic) of the sidewalk in front of his house, which he displayed on the wall like a mural. He also made a streetlight identical to the ones of his childhood street, and a glassy sculpture that looked like a ghost’s face, and displayed them in front of the sidewalk. His goal was to recapture that time of the evening when the streetlights turn on and the parents call the kids to come indoors. I liked this one because it was more of a nudge than a push.You couldn't help but see the sidewalk like a kid who's about to fall on a sidewalk. And what does the ghost have to do with the light? Unlike his children's crusade tableau, as clear and impermeable as a storybook illustration, the sidewalk one let you live in it for a minute.      

Édouard Levé quotation, or, Not feeling alone is just another form of self-recognition

"When I am returning from a trip, the best part is not going through the airport or getting home, but the taxi ride in between: You're still traveling, but not really."

-Édouard Levé, from Autoportrait (more here)


I find something about the way Autoportrait is written (which reminds me of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Here We Aren't, So Quickly") incredibly moving.

Disjointedness used to be a big problem for me, in my own writing and others'. I despised what I thought of as the facility of spitting out a bunch of random images and forcing the reader make the depth. I hated any small, fragmented, poignant moments. She's washing the dishes! Now she's remembering a time when her dad pushed her on the swingset! Now the news is showing a story about a lost cat! The End! Stories that are as unassertive as a limp handshake and blink sweetly and mundanely at you and ask you to sit back and carefully consider why all those casual details are in there, so the burden left from the author's laziness is transferred onto you. (Part of the reason why I loved The Magic Mountain so much is that it never does that, unlike so many "good" workshop stories. Among its other great qualities, it is in no way casual. It reminds me of my drawing teacher telling us we ought to go look at Titian paintings but we will learn nothing from them because they are so perfect.)

But there's a different kind of disjointedness, a not-shitty kind, the kind in Autoportrait/"Here We Aren't." Association, not straightforwardness, is what makes the transcendence in those two, and by transcendence I mean a feeling of not-aloneness. I have always loved the idea of association-as-analysis.

Proust says, "The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth." I more naturally think, the recognition in yourself of what the book says is proof that you're not totally alone, which is of course encompassed in what Proust says, because feeling not alone is always self-reflexive anyway and you can't get past your own perception etc. Paradoxically, in these cases, that not-aloneness comes from the story letting you draw the connections on your own. You don't need a voice to guide you, or an opinion--just a set of impressions, the raw material.

But I am over-generalizing. All I mean to say is that Autoportrait is awesome and so is a structure of fragments, sometimes, because sometimes it's just so exactly right. I feel I have to mention some complicating factors, such as: "Gusev" is transcendent but doesn't make me feel not-alone; Proust never stops opining and guiding you but his stuff is some of the least-alone-feeling artwork in the universe. Right now I'm reading American Psycho, and as fun as it is, irony is not really a part of this discussion because I never find irony transcendent, because I am a big warm bleeding heart. Rilke: "Seek the depth of things: Thither irony never descends."

(I think I could rename this blog/my life "Thoughts on aloneness." But --- is a more catchy title, don't you think? Another memory from childhood: Being obsessed with that e. e. cummings poem l(a. I think it is a good poem for kids.)

The Rules of the Game

I recently bought this book on "the art of attraction" for a guy I know, and of course I read most of it first. (One of my college boyfriends had this book on his shelf, and I was amazed that he wasn't embarrassed about it. I was embarrassed enough for the both of us and never looked at it.) The book's best section is the section of "Routines," actual scripts for how to start a conversation, or how to move towards the first kiss, etc. One of the routines (meant for "demonstrating value" to a girl you just met) purports to reveal your innermost motivation in three questions.

1. "If you had to choose one thing you need to have in your life in order to feel like life is worthwhile, what would it be?" (Alternatively: "Name something you really enjoy doing.")
2. "Okay, if you have [worthwhile thing] in your life, what kinds of things does that allow you to do or experience?" (Alternatively: "Describe your perfect experience of [worthwhile thing].")
3. "Okay, imagine a time in the future or even now when you have [worthwhile thing] in your life. And this enables you to do [various things]. How would that make you feel inside?" (The answer should be more specific than "good" or "happy.")

The answer to question number three is your "core value." Now the guy doing the hitting-on is supposed to recommend, "Whenever you have to make an important life decision, whether it's about a job or a guy or a friend, just ask yourself if it brings you closer to that [feeling] feeling." (If you want to read the whole thing, it's on the Amazon "Surprise me!" preview, pp 245-246.) Imagine having this conversation at a bar! It would only work if everyone was a drunk. It's like hitting on someone by ripping open their chest! (C.f. fav ever Mary Gaitskill metaphor, from "A Romantic Weekend": "His gaze penetrated her so thoroughly, it was as though he had thrust his hand into her chest and begun feeling her ribs one by one.")

What is your answer to question three? The conclusion of the questionnaire caught me off guard, and as a result I think my answer does reflect something true about me. My answer was "not lonely." Which is why it's funny that I've ended up here, in a country where I don't have any friends and have no ideas or plans for how to meet some. Someday soon, my personality might flip inside out, and the embarrassment and trouble of using the Internet to find friends will seem less awful than my very complete loneliness.

Until then, I have been thinking a lot about a new word to describe extended travel, namely, "Renunciation." This is from Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be, and she is quoting the I Ching: "RENUNCIATION: Voluntary retreat brings good fortune to the superior man, and downfall to the inferior man" (76). I'm not as interested in whether I will turn out superior or inferior (probably the latter)--the sticking point is more, why would you retreat (reject, abandon) voluntarily? (I also keep thinking about what, exactly, characterizes a Pyrrhic victory.) This seems utterly different (and better, for now) than my previous thought about extended travel, from Tobias Wolff's Paris Review interview: "It's good for a while to be dropped through the bottom, to be a little helpless, to have to scramble to make do, because as you get older, you do less and less of that, and it's good for you, it takes the rust off." I wasn't rusting in college, I was having the time of my fucking life.