Wedding trip

Luggage with wheels is cool. It's like canoeing instead of hiking (the sensible kind of canoeing where the canoe carries you, not the pervy kind where you carry it). I don't know why I haven't had luggage with wheels for years and years, well, except that I for those years I hadn't walking into Bed Bath and Beyond looking for something or other and made impulse buys of a piece of luggage with wheels and a waffle iron.

We went to Laurel and Jason's wedding this weekend. It was a little weird because I didn't know 98% of the people there, but I did get to meet (more thoroughly than the time we visited Laurel and Jason last January) Ben and Tara, who are good. And their animals. Now, I have this feeling that anything I type, Dee has already typed twenty three times faster while I was just heating up the water to a boil for the tortelloni, so you can read all about it in Dee's journal.

Dee admits now that we need a cat. She's not yet convinced that we need a brace of cats, but further exposure to other people's cats will do the trick eventually.

At the Chelmsford sushi place, we had tuna tataki; I have to find out how to make tuna tataki. It can't be that hard. It's a lump of tuna, seared on the outside but still raw three millimeters in, sliced thin and served with dipping sauce and matchsticked cucumbers and suchlike vegetables. The slicing raw tuna thin has got to be the hardest part. Well that's assuming a) the searing can be done at a temperature achievable in my kitchen [1], and b) I can get the tuna. Geagle tuna I don't imagine you can eat raw. I should talk to Benkovitz. If we can get raw-edible tuna and salmon, we could eat a forklift of chirashi.

It's amazing how hard it is to wait patiently when impatient people are waiting with you. United delayed our flight from Dulles to Pittsburgh by about an hour, and they didn't do it with any great grace. But the people sitting around us, they had traveled from Prague that morning and now were held up on this little hop of all things, or they were counting on dinner at their mother's, or they had left the afternoon of the day before if you can believe that, and oh, they were all bouncing off the walls. The scuttlebutt was that United had botched the crew scheduling, so they were past the FAA limit and another crew had to be scrounged up, and all the while people were eyeing the empty plane with gimlet eyes, and laughing and telling each other about how if they didn't they would cry. The fellow next to us wanted to be a ringleader; he kept dispensing advice about the best way to wangle a dollar voucher out of this, dispensing it to everybody because naturally it would work better if
we all coordinated our negotiating position. Everybody had guessed the driving time to their destination, and calculated when they'd have gotten there if they had rented a car when they got into Dulles. When each person's ETA arrived, they announced it to the people around, wandered down the row of chairs and announced it again, shook their heads. And what I'm saying is that I couldn't just sit around and wait for the crew to show up. I couldn't help overhearing the conversations and picking up on the mood. Being swept up in a mob aflame with righteous rage is one thing, but aquiver with impatience and spite is different.

[1] This reminds me, BOO YAH WE MISSED THE HOT CRèME BRûLéE TORCH ACTION AGAIN. Damn my M-u isn't Euro-hip. "CRÈME BRÛLÉE TORCH". Mope.

Steve Erickson, Days Between Stations

I was prompted to read this because Threepenny has a hardcover copy of Arc d'X, another book of his, so I should see if I want that. This one was not my thing, though; I didn't find much story in it. One subplot -- about a boy raised in a brothel, and the movie he made as a young man, and the lengths he had to go to to make it -- made an engaging story, but the bulk of the book -- love triangle, amnesia, shocking discoveries about past, apocalyptic dreamscape -- had a lot of happenings and surreal imagery but not much significance. And it's told in a manner that never lets it accumulate significance, because the writing insistently injects showy metaphorical significance that makes me go "oh please."

This Helprin-in-a-jimsonweed-delirium effect is quite probably intentional through and through, a planned "Story is dead" aesthetic and so forth. I just get tired of reading it.

Mark Salzman, _Lying Awake_

Mark Salzman is apparently a well-known mainstream novelist, wrote a bestseller called Iron and Silk which I do remember hearing of. I just read The Laughing Sutra last week, and liked it, and picked this one up at Avenue Victor Hugo.

It's about a nun in a Carmelite cloister in contemporary Los Angeles, named Sister John, whose mystical experiences prove to be linked with temporal-lobe epilepsy caused by a meningioma; she must decide whether to have the disease treated. She went through a long spell of spiritual aridity, and can hardly bear the thought that its ending was an illusion.[1]

The book is wonderfully written, or it's written in a way that I like, which is that it has an effortless flow of telling details. "The real penance in cloistered life, most Sisters agreed, was not isolation; it was the impossibility of getting away from people one would not normally have chosen as friends."

Salzman almost executes a beautiful technical trick. How do you write a story that contains the ineffable? Sister John is a poet, and Salzman intercuts lines of her poetry (typeset in italics) with the body text; I thought at first that he was going to use this device strictly as a means of representing her experiences -- the text would be in these two streams, one narrative and the other timeless -- but it turned out he used it more broadly.

[1] This idea, that experiences of the Divine are of no value if they can be traced to physical causes [2], didn't seem to be fully worked through. This undercuts Sister John's past, in a way she is terribly aware of, no matter what she decides. By the end she has very little concern for this, and I do suppose I see how she has come by this lack of concern, but it still seems very quick, in a book that knows very well how many years a change of heart can take. One could argue that Salzman has allowed a miracle.

[2] which I profoundly disagree with. If the mystical experiences of `approved' Christian contemplants are ever understood at the neurobiological level, are they to be discarded too? I don't see why "explaining away" ever has to follow from explanation.

Though from the nuns' point of view, I'm one who has already explained away everything, everywhere. I don't see the necessity of any of the religious interpretations or beliefs they attach to these experiences.

not again

My disease had simmered down into a cough and stuffy nose yesterday, but this morning I woke up with sore throat and brain death. Arrarargh.
I wonder if it's travel knocking down my immune system, or a secondary infection.

So once again I didn't get a damn thing written. I haven't churned out any dissertation since, hmm, a week ago. This may be less because I'm sick and more because I hate this chapter and want it to die.