Tom & Alissa

After a somewhat harrowing week, I had a lovely weekend at home with my mom, my brother, and his girlfriend. We did some shopping and went to the farmers’ market and ate lots of yummy food and went to Terra Nova.

But we also went to the movies, and so the most important thing I can impress on you is this:

GO SEE WALL-E.

That is all.

Three years ago today was my first day at Bank of America. How time does fly . . . well,kind of. On the other hand, that was a lifetime ago.

After class ended last night, I met up with Sarah and Matt, friends from forever ago, and a few more recent friends and went to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a lovely night, and we caught the sunset just right. We walked from the Manhattan side to Brooklyn, then had ice cream at the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, which sits on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights and looks directly toward downtown Manhattan. Good ice cream, lovely view.

Though walking across the Bridge leans toward the touristy side, I had a good reason for wanting to go: the aforementioned Waterfalls in the East River, which “opened” yesterday. They are lovely and fascinating to watch, and at night they’re stunning (see the pictures in that article). If this is the future of public art, I heartily approve.

Tom left early this morning to meet up with his father in New Jersey and head south to Virginia. I’ll join him on Thursday. In the meantime, I am traipsing home to Albany tonight, and will be back in town Sunday night, ready to start learning about the modern British novel. I have a seedling of an idea for my paper for that class, which is more than I can usually say. Maybe that means I am starting to catch onto this humanities stuff.

Have a good weekend, and in the meantime, if you are one of the ten people who haven’t, check out Garfield Minus Garfield.

Tonight is the conclusion of my class on Moby-Dick. It’s been really interesting, and I’ve learned a lot about reading texts, understanding them in their historical context, considering them through various reference frames, and American in the 1860s, but I can’t say I’ll be sorry to shelve the book after tonight. We’re presenting our final papers - mine is on literary critics, Job, and the twenty-first century reading of Moby-Dick - and then we’re done.

My next class starts on Monday, but in between I am heading Albany-ward to see my family for the weekend and to write frantically on the way up. Thank God for electrical outlets on trains. Tom is going in the opposite direction and will be in the DC/Virginia area for about a week and a half to see his grandpa, other family, and a lot of friends. I’ll be joining him on Thursday.

Yesterday I went uptown on my lunch break and met Tom to see the Olafur Eliasson show at MoMA before it closed. It was fascinating. I especially liked a few pieces where he had film-style spotlights aimed at mirrors so that the spot reflected off the glass and landed in a place on the floor that seems very removed from where the spot would normally fall. Hard to describe, but really cool. I sadly won’t get to see the P.S.1 part of the exhibit, but I’m glad I saw what I did. You can see the online exhibition here.

Speaking of Eliasson, today is the first day of his Waterfalls installation in the East River! I won’t have any trouble seeing that, since I cross the East River at least twice a day to get into Manhattan.

Also, Wall-E comes out this weekend. Please go see it. Pixar is apparently making bold moves with this one, which bodes well for the future of animation. You might find this interview at Christianity Today with Andrew Stanton (Wall-E’s director) interesting.

Grumbling tummy. Must find food.

Hey kids.

Well, what a weekend. I was feeling rather under the weather on Friday, so I took a sick day. I pounded out most of a paper as I sat on the couch and drank copious amounts of water. We don’t really have any food at home - no time to shop lately - but thankfully, our neighborhood is full of wonderfully healthy and moderately-priced eateries, so we had brunch at Olea and dinner at Lil’ Pig. We spent the evening watching Hellboy - the first one - and it was, well, awful, though made a bit better because it does not take itself seriously at all. I’m all for movies with very vague plots, but not in that genre. But I try not to demand much from movies based on comic books; that way, I’m delighted with things like Batman Begins and Iron Man. (By the way, I am totally psyched for The Dark Knight. Moving on.)

I was feeling much better on Saturday, and because I got so much done on Friday I was able to tag along to the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island, along with Tom and a few friends who we met up with there. It was everyone’s first time, and it was certainly . . . interesting. On the one hand, I enjoyed the whole borough pride aspect. Brooklyn is proud to be Brooklyn, diverse, nutty, and happy. People from neighborhoods where you can have a house and garage brought out their antique cars, which were really cool. And some of the costumes were fantastic and well thought out. On the other hand, lots of people like to use marching in the parade as an excuse to get tipsy and wear very little clothing, and that’s their (legal) prerogative, but it gets old after a while and isn’t something I feel the need to experience repeatedly. So it was a one-time must-see event, but probably not one that will get any better year to year, and I don’t think we’ll do it again.

After the parade we went back to our apartment and cooked hamburgers for everyone, which was good fun, and watched trailers for scary movies. An excellent end to a Saturday.

After church on Sunday, we went back out to our ‘hood and had brunch at Red Bamboo, a vegan Thai restaurant (you won’t believe it’s not meat, etc.) with friends and ended up at Brooklyn Flea for a bit, where we did not buy anything but admired lots of things, including some imported and salvaged furniture. We wandered over to Smooch, which I immediately adopted as my coffeeshop, because it has really, really good coffee, great decor, eclectic decor, and a relaxed vibe.

We headed uptown shortly afterwards for the “Jesus Hopped the A Train” benefit reading, which was simply remarkable. Original cast plus Stephen Adly Guirgis, who is fast becoming my favorite playwright because he’s so remarkably profound. His plays are messy and profane, but somehow grace and forgiveness always explicitly slip in.

Our seats were good - on the floor, but near the back - and we were serendipitously seated directly across the aisle from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s perch at the soundboard as director. He still laughs, despite having heard this play and these actors a mind-bogglingly enormous number of times, and it was fun to be that close. I could have reached out and tapped him. He’s the most refreshing kind of famous New Yorker - still strolls around outside the theater and smokes before performances (this was the third time I’d seen him doing it), frequents the same random coffeeshops that I do. When we saw “The Little Flower of East Orange” a couple months ago, he got in an elevator with a bunch of the audience as they were going up to the theater on the third floor. They looked a little thunderstruck.

But! Our brush with celebrity was not complete. Yesterday I woke up with one of those stark-raving-mad headaches, and as this is not a week in which I can afford to be sick, I called in sick again and slept in very late. I had a dull headache all day, even after lunch at Pequena down the block, but I worked a little more on my paper and then went to class.

After class I took a few painkillers and dashed across town to met up with Tom at Madison Square Garden for the Coldplay concert. Coldplay gave away all 30,000 tickets for this performance, which was kind of awesome, because it was the first time they’d played through that set, which included a bunch of songs from Viva La Vida as well as some older stuff. They came into the arena seating - three rows behind us!! - and sang “Yellow”. And they didn’t play an encore - vaguely disappointing, but I’m kind of glad. I find encores a little pretentious. Everyone pretends they’re special, but it happens every time. Let’s save the encores for truly spectacular concerts. This one was an experimental concert, they flubbed a bit, but they were good-natured about it and very funny, and everyone enjoyed themselves. The only black mark was the drunken people to our left and in front of us who decided to get into a fight, just short of throwing punches, during “Fix You”, which is probably my favorite song. Oh well.

I’m finally back at work today and swamped, but tonight I’m planning to meet up with our dear friends Sarah and Matt and bring them up to the NY Philharmonic’s free concert in Central Park, as long as it doesn’t get rained out. This is my last week of the Moby-Dick class, and next week starts “Modern British Novel”. I admit that I’m a bit dubious about how I’ll manage to read all eleven novels and write two papers in the six weeks, but they don’t call it a “master’s degree” for nothing, I suppose.

The dark spot on my weekend is that it looks like I won’t get to see Wall-E on its opening night. Alas.

I finished Home on Sunday night, and it was magnificent - probably my favorite of her three fiction books, though they’re all spectacular. I was reading some of the press materials that came with it, in which Marilynne Robinson said that Moby-Dick was one of her favorite novels (my professor appreciated that). Her books were also compared to Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, which I read last year, and that makes perfect sense, though I didn’t realize it until I was reading the article. They both deal with America in the 1950s, and they both write in a somewhat deadpan style (McCarthy far more so) which pleasantly belies the emotion and drama of the story. Robinson, at least, uses punctuation. In any case, do not miss this book when it comes out in September, and you might want to re-read Gilead beforehand - or read it, if you haven’t yet.

We watched Lars and the Real Girl on Sunday night as well, at long last. There were so many good movies in the theater when it came out that we missed it, and we haven’t had much time for movie-watching so far this year. It was great, as everyone said. Ironically, we’d been eating brunch at Tartine earlier that day when Ryan Gosling, very bearded, walked past with a friend. We continually find that life and art intersect in weird ways when you live here.

Which, by the way, reminds me that next week will mark the end of my third year in New York City. I think that makes me an official New Yorker. I no longer need a subway map to get around pretty much anywhere in Manhattan and a lot of Brooklyn’s “brownstone belt”, I don’t need to hold the pole in the subway anymore, I am completely ignorant of gas prices except when they show up on the news, I know the best place to get falafel for $2.50, I no longer venture above 14th Street unless it’s absolutely necessary and kind of turn up my nose at living in Manhattan, I say things like “the city” and “the Times” and expect people to know what I’m talking about, and I walk around saying things like “that used to be that great French cafe” and grumbling at tourists who walk four-across on the sidewalk. In short, I am some combination of the worst stereotype and the actual reality. Oh well. We are all victims of our locations, and this isn’t a bad one. I am so blessed to live here.

Did anyone else out there who grew up in church watch a movie called “Hoomania”? It was about a kid who got sucked into a board game that taught him about the book of Proverbs. There were some gamepieces called “Sluggards”, and a wise owl, and some other crazy characters, and it was partially live-action and partially claymation. I suddenly remembered this movie the other night and wanted to watch it, but it’s out of “print” and I can’t find any clips on YouTube.

There’s a short piece in the July issue of Paste, which subscribers will receive any day, on One Million Monkeys Typing, a “collaborative writing project” on the web. I wrote the piece for the magazine, and then Tom - who is an avid “monkey” on the site - wrote the first piece of the story which was “planted” by Paste on the Million Monkeys site. You can
go there to check it out, join the site, and add to his story: Missing Marcus Mystery.

Keith Gessen, who wrote a novel that came out recently that I really rather liked, All The Sad Young Literary Men, and edits the literary journal n+1, talks about the perils of being a working writer and still making your bills, especially in NYC. Definitely worth a read.

Hello bloglings.

My most notable accomplishment this weekend - besides reading a lot about Zoroastrianism for class - was learning to play Uno last night. It wasn’t that we didn’t play card games when I was a kid (we played a lot of Dutch Blitz), but when we did play games they were usually either educational or something like checkers. So this was fun. I also did well, which is a plus. I still want to take poker back up again.

We had brunch at Lil’ Pig near our apartment. I had a chilled cucumber and avocado soup and a tilapia sandwich with pickled onions on baguette; Tom had gazpacho and I think a cornmeal-encrusted catfish sandwich. Tee-riffic. Not only is the place close, but they serve about fifteen varieties of tea, there’s wine in the evenings, the menu changes daily and is all kinds of local and healthy and innovative, and it’s all pretty reasonably priced. Like Grey Dog, but a little cheaper and with a much more interesting menu.

Tonight, it looks like we’re going to the premiere of the film Tom worked on as first assistant director the summer before we got married. Cool.

What I am discovering:

- I am interested in technology only to the extent that it affects people’s lives. I am curious about how technological advances and products change social interactions and contribute to the development of a culture, but not at all interested in how the technologies work or develop, in and of themselves. This is probably why I leaned more toward software than hardware in my undergrad; software is what people usually know they’re interacting with.

- I am not interested in the minuteness of academic literary or cinematic criticism (as opposed to what you read in the newspaper). I can’t really get into dissecting each tiny bit of a passage and scaring up every bit of symbolism therein unless i know, or reasonably suspect, that’s what the author intended. What I am interested in is the social and historical context of the book/film, and how it affected the book/film - and how the book or film turned around and affected literature, film, and the greater society around it. This means I’ve done the right thing in not going directly into an English or Cinema Studies program.

- I am fascinated by history, particularly North American history - seeing as I live here - and I know precious little about what was really going on in the US in relation to writers/artists/politicians who were contemporaries, and almost nothing about Canadian or Mexican history. This I must remedy. Are there any comprehensive North American books that don’t segment the histories of the three countries?

- I am very fascinated by culture studies and media studies, which seem to focus more on how humans interact with their surroundings and each other. I love to see how ideas develop in a social context (read: coffeehouses and pubs). And I’m passionate about art, especially the performing arts, and how they have developed and grown with their historical context.

- And I am especially interested in how history, culture, art, and media intersect with religion, especially in the United States, and especially with Protestantism, since that’s something I already know a little about.

So basically, if I were to go on to a Ph.D., it would be in American studies, which tends to be interdisciplinary. And even if I don’t, I can see myself researching these things and writing books someday. Well, good to know.

The NY Times has a report on the N.E.A.’s study of working artists (including architects and designers) in the United States.

Interesting tidbits:
- “More Americans identify their primary occupation as artist than as lawyer, doctor, police officer or farm worker.”
- “More than one in four artists live in California and New York, where their sheer numbers are overwhelming compared to the artist colonies in other states.”
- “Overall, artists make more than the national median income.”

Dana Gioia’s comments are interesting as well.

The NYTimes Magazine this Saturday was all about cities, urban planning, and architecture, and it’s definitely worth a look. You can now read the articles online.

I have been unbloggy lately because of busy-ness, but we have, at home, Sam Phillips’ Don’t Do Anything, as well as upcoming book releases by Amanda Petrusich and (gasp) Marilynne Robinson, and we’re currently set to see Sunday in the Park With George on Saturday (Sondheim!), so despite its busy-ness and sometimes its frustrations, life is good.

We had a good weekend, filled with friends, family, and some good food. But it’s so hot in New York that nobody seems to be able to talk about anything else. 97 today, before humidity, and, well, the city really smells in that heat. Even after some spectacular thunder and lightning, it hasn’t let up at all.

The heat finally forced me into joining a gym; I can’t breathe in this weather, let alone run in the heat, and it was 80 degrees at 6am today and that’s just too much. So I found the Crunch in our neighborhood, which has a pay-by-the-month plan (i.e., pay only for the months when you want to go), and I joined this morning. Hello, being able to read for class while I’m running, or even watch TV if I’m feeling frazzled. Hello, pilates and yoga. Hello sauna!

I have meant to blog, but my life seems to be devolving into madness owing partly to badly written technical documentation, partly to crazy Captain Ahab, and partly just to the limited hours available in the day. No real end in sight. Bring on the caffeine!

What the Writers Almanac website says Garrison Keillor said today on the show:

The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded on this day in 1917. Laura Richards and Maude Elliott won the prize for biography, with their book about the 19th-century writer and suffragist Julia Ward Howe. Jean Jules Jusserand (zhawn zhool zhoo-say-RAWN), the French ambassador to the United States from 1902 to 1925, won the prize for history: With Americans of Past and Present Days. Herbert B. Swope of the New York World won the prize for journalism, and when he picked up his award, said: “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula of failure — which is try to please everybody.”

What Garrison Keillor actually said (I just listened):

The first Pullitzer Prizes were awarded on this day in 1917, and the authors were all writers whom you or I never read, nor does anybody else today.

This is our friend Nate, who is a rockstar songwriter. Literally. He’s working on his own solo album right now, and he’s looking to raise money to complete the recording. This is a clip of him singing the song with Dutch singer Ilse DeLange.

When we first heard the song, we were at one of Nate’s shows at Rockwood. Tom and I both turned to each other, trying to figure out where we’d heard the song before. Turns out, we hadn’t - it’s just that catchy and that good. Definitely check it out.

Here’s the link to the video’s page on YouTube: Stockholm Paris New York

And if you’re interested in helping Nate make his record, check out helpnate.com.

Don’t worry, weblings, I didn’t forget to blog about the weekend. We spend Saturday having brunch at Stone Park (deeee-lish) with Brandon and Emily, got caught in a downpour on the way back to Fort Greene, watched Brandon install a larger hard drive into Tom’s computer, hung around, went to a stand-up comedy show at the Comic Strip, and hung out afterwards with friends, mostly new, and got home way too late.

And on Sunday, we went to church, then had a wonderful brunch at La Palette - you must try Brazilian eggs benedict before you can say you’ve lived - and went home to watch Mongol for a review (it was great).

It has been non-stop since then, and I think big things are afoot. As I mentioned, Tom is working tonight, but we had a birthday bagel breakfast and I gave him his presents - Maps & Legends by Michael Chabon, Volume One with She & Him (which is M.Ward and Zooey Deschanel and was featured in Paste a while back), the There Will Be Blood soundtrack, Lotta Jansdotter post-its, and a bottle of Macallan 18. I’m awfully grateful that he was born!

We just won Coldplay tickets for the Madison Square Garden concert later this month. Dude.

Well, I totally forgot to post my May book list. I read more than I thought I would this month.

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
This was for my forthcoming Modern British Novel class, and it was good. More Victorian and traditional in feel than the others I’ve read, with a hint of the gothic. I loved Sebastian’s character. As an added bonus, there’s a new movie adaptation coming out soon. [4/5]

The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and “Women’s Work” - Kathleen Norris
I love Kathleen Norris. This was a short transcription, I believe, of a talk she gave somewhere. It’s an excellent meditation on the nature of the repetitive work we do in the home, and of the different roles that women fill. Definitely recommended. [5/5]

Saturday - Ian McEwan
Stellar, and also for Modern British Novel. I love McEwan, but I honestly enjoyed this book much more than Atonement (which was great, but got less great as it went along). Plus, the main character is a brain surgeon, and I love all his descriptions and the way he thinks about people. This seemed to have a lot in common with Mrs. Dalloway (which, incidentally, will also be in class). [5/5]

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
I can recognize the innovative way in which this book is written - it jumps around in time, but not in the way most books do.  It’s more like The Virgin Suicides.  But I couldn’t really get into it.  It’s also for class, so I’ll be interested to see where it goes. [3/5]

I’m in the midst of Howard’s End in my bits of free time, but beyond that, Moby-Dick will be consuming my life for the rest of the month.

Today is a certain member of this blog URL’s birthday (hint: it’s not me). He has to work late so we have no particular plans, but I think he liked his presents.

In my continuing quest to rest from my labors on Sunday, I am trying to avoid reading Moby-Dick that day. It’s a nice break and keeps me from getting burnt out on all the whaling.

So this Sunday, I pull out Howard’s End, by E.M. Forster. (Yes, that is for class, but it’s for a class I’m not taking right now, and besides, it’s fun and it’s not assigned reading yet!) Tom bought this copy sometime before we were married. I flipped open to the title page, and there is this handwritten inscription:

To Francine,
Without whom this book would never have been sold.
     E.M. Forster

It appears this Forster chap had an excellent sense of humor, even at his book signings.

And you think I’m kidding when I say I married Tom for his library.

Gregory Wolfe, editor of the delightfully highbrow Image Journal, on Why Battlestar Galactica is So Frakking Great.

See, I told you.