A Certain Kind of Death

Every so often, I stop watching trash and start watching documentaries. Usually it's when I forget to check my Netflix queue and am ambushed at home by something I stuck in the queue while pretending to be someone who watches documentaries.

As opposed to, say, someone who watches endless remakes of Jane Eyre.

I never want the documentaries when they come. I watch them anyway. I know from experience that documentaries are like practicing: you never want to start, but one you do, you can't regret it. I've seen some great stuff. I've seen some galvanizing stuff. I've seen some gross stuff. A Certain Kind of Death, a documentary film by Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh, falls into all three of these categories.

The great: The film, which follows the progress of unclaimed bodies through various City of Los Angeles departments, is spare, silent, and graceful, a ballet of bureaucracy.

The galvanizing: Through grudging accretion of detail, the bureaucratic machine actually manages to humanize these most dehumanizing deaths. Slowly -painfully- a life takes shape: a stepmother's will, drill bits, roaches, receipts from a homeless shelter thanking the deceased for his weekly contributions. Everything sold at auction for $300. The $300 goes unclaimed.

The gross: dead people. Decaying on the toilet, spread-eagled in the shower, passed out from rectal bleeding on the bed. Death is uncouth.

Uncouth, yet commonplace. A crime scene investigator takes a call from her husband with one hand while dragging a corspe on a sheet with the other. An assets investigator, bent over a cache of the dead man's papers, tells her coworker that no, sorry, she can't go to lunch; she brought a frozen meal. A sign above the morgue's drinking fountain admonishes workers against washing out their food containers there. It's unsanitary!!! the sign screeches. 30 feet away, a pathologist scrapes the maggots from someone's shins.

I recognize this disjunction, the slow collapse of the extraordinary into the ordinary. I know it intimately, as do most of the other inner-city-school folk I know.

Somebody's homeless!

Shrug.

Somebody's abused and neglected and has no food!

Eh.

Somebody's drug-addled baby justifies supplemental social security income which is spent not on the child but on more drugs!

Same old, same old.

It's alarming, how quickly you adapt. Wondrous and awful and terrifying all at once.

Skink

18 Degrees

Winter farmers' market booty: arugula, butternut, bread.

The bread was made twelve hours ago by a math PhD student I've known since I was eighteen. That year, he took me to my first and only contra dance, which I wanted badly to like but did not, because sometimes you are not the person you want to be, and also because the contra dance is the group project of the dancing world, plus sweat.

Three years later he served my then-roommate and me mushroom sandwiches made from a specimen he'd found in the scrub land just beyond town. We are, miraculously still alive. Six year afters that, he married a girl who teaches French to preschoolers. They moved to my hometown. They are building an oven in their backyard.

There are the people you can't unravel from your life, who run like the warp to your weft. And then there are the people whose lives glance against yours, just a few skips on the surface, a stone thrown low and true.

I like to eat their bread.

Heap O' Cats.

I've birthed an ensemble! This is a little like birthing a litter of kittens, except with more yowling. Hopefully that yowling will be -mostly- tuneful.

We've wrangled players, taken pictures, put up a website, scanned avelanches of sheet music, researched program ideas, programmed, and recorded some sample tracks. It's been more work than herding fifteen preschoolers to the toilet.

On the other hand, it's kind of fun. Plus we've settled into natural -and naturally complementary roles. One of us does logistics, booking, and marketing. One of us does research, writing, and programming. Some of us just play the pants off things. It's so nice when your weaknesses click, like puzzle pieces, with someone else's strengths. The thought of marketing, for example, makes me want to change genders and experience kidney stones. (HINT: I'M THE ONE IN THE LIBRARY).

Anyhoo, I wrote a deeply empurpled website blurb for the group (anytime you use the words passion and turbulence in the same sentence you are either an pilot fetishist or a shamelessly self-promoting musician). I also used the word innovative. As in, Wxxxxxx Sxxxxx is committed to sharing the music of the early Baroque through "innovative programming."

One of my oldest friends, a smart seventh grader transformed, via the magic of adulthood, into a policy wonk, called me on it: "How can you be innovative," she wrote me, "if you're playing music from the 1600s?"

To me, the answer is crashingly obvious. You present music of the 1600s in a way that's different from the way people are currently tending to present music of the 1600s. My friend, at a much further remove from the tiny closet that is early music, hasn't seen enough concerts to even register that there is a norm.

This is a problem of vision and of distance. It's as if my friend is far-sighted, only able to see clearly from thirty yards out. Whereas I am nearsighted, nose-to-the-wall, taking in the wood grain, the microscophic chips, the squashed bug. In a way, we are both right -but it depends on where you're standing.

I am reminded, forcefully, of the interview I heard on Tuesday as I was careening around the city from one job site to another. Susan Page (where is Diane Rehm anyway?) was interviewing a man whose research suggests that babies develop an almost immediate preference for faces of the ethnic groups into which they were born, and that both babies and adults are much more adept at distinguishing between members of their own group than between members of others. The researcher went on to outline the sobering implications for our legal system: If we assume that witnesses are color blind, and that a white woman can distinguish as reliably between two black men as she can between two white men, then we are ignoring empirical evidence and helping to institutionalize racist outcomes.

The closer you get, the finer the distinctions you draw. And if you don't think that's something worth looking at, well, there's always kitten piles. Do a Google image search and prepare to die of cute.

Getting Busy with Your Books

Here goes: my to-be-read list of 13 of your beloveds! I'll attempt to read 12 in 2010. Books you love stupidly, helplessly; books to which you are in blinkered thrall; books adored by someone you love.

I confess to doing a smidge of picking and choosing: If a particular person supplied me with more than one read, I picked the one(s) in which I was most interested. If there was a book you loved about love, I couldn't say no. And, finally, I steered clear of books I've already read.

For the most part, though, you imposed these upon me. Like a prison sentence. Or a benediction! Or knighthood! We'll have to see which. Also, I may have to reconsider my overarching adultery metaphor, as it is difficult to cuckold someone who is pimping his or her mate. Good thing the book world is polyamorous.

So thank you! In no particular order:

Time Enough for Love, Robert Heinlein
The Body in the Cornflakes, K.K. Beck
An Equal Music, Vikram Seth
The Thirteen Clocks, James Thurber
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
John Adams, David McCollough
Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love, Toni Morrison
Tam Lin, Pamela Dean
The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
Video Night in Kathmandu, Pico Iyer
Frost in May, Antonia White

Should be an interesting year.

American Nerd: The Story of My People

I'm something of a nerd.

[Pause for discomfiting absence of fainting and gasping.]

Nerds are human and humans are narcissists, so when I heard of a whole book devoted to my particular phylum of humanity, I pounced. The books is by Benjamin Nugent, who has a deliciously nerdy last name, but who, in his cover photo, stares fixedly out at the camera from a far-too-handsome face. The explanation for the disjunction is revealed, casually, in early chapters: Nugent is an ex-nerd, a nerd who ran from, then got tangled up in, his roots.

There should be a neater label for this. There should be a word which circumscribes the dimensions of ex-nerddom. Refugee implies too much will: Nugent believes he tore himself away from nerddom, but I believe he was simply too good-looking. A good-looking nerd, like a billionaire nerd or a computing-giant-founder nerd, bobs helplessly to the top of nerdery's primordial ooze like an opera singer in a salt bath. Although Nugent correctly divines that nerdhood chose him, that he had little choice but to have "a rich fantasy life in which [he] carried a glowing staff," he is less astute about who ditched whom.

Back to words: Judas captures only one dimension of ex-nerddom. Recovering implies an illness. After reading Nugent's book I wonder if a better word isn't survivor. Teenage nerdhood, as depicted by Nugent, is a trauma. It's a natural disaster, a seizing and shaking of the self. However you choose to live your life post-trauma, you bear its marks.

Hence Nugent, picking over the bones of nerddom. Hence me, tracking his progress. American Nerd is part history, part reportage, part memoir. It's a volatile mix, and, thrust into a 224-page test-tube, the history, reportage and memoir explode all over the place. Nugent goes haring off in one direction after another, juggling anecdote and theory, fact and observation. All of it is interesting, but very little of it is thoroughly or convincingly explored.

Within the first 100 pages Nugent has thrown out:

• A theory of American racism interpreted in relation to constructs of jock and nerd
• A short discourse on Endicott Peabody, Groton Headmaster and anti-intellectual
• A history of the nerd in Western literature from Mary Bennet to Gussie Fink-Nottle
• An eye-witness account of a Thursday meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society
• A survey of back issues of the Rensselear Polytechnic Institute Bachelor
• An SNL sketch
• A memoir set-piece about his Jewish grandmother's interrogation of his poop

There's probably a book down each of these alleys, but Nugent plows through all of them at top speed like...well, like a nerd. Nugent's archetypal nerd is someone who craves order and rules, a way to make sense of the jungles of everyday life and social interaction. But I'd argue that another key feature of nerdhood is interest. Nerds are interested. They wanna know. They turn down every dead end, crack every door, hoist open every treasure chest in the dungeon. It may be tough to be a nerd, but it's also tough to bore one.

Nugent misses this because he is, as he explains in his prologue, blinkered:

"Running through the halls with a backback that was capable of doing real harm to others didn't do much to draw sympathy, so nobody raised serious objections when every once in a while somebody hit me in the crotch with a clarinet case or a hockey stick. All of which is to say my journalistic objectivity with regard to my subject matter is seriously compromised. But I am trying my best."

Nugent's best, fortunately for us, is very good. And when, in the second half of the book, he abandons frantic theorizing for an exploration of his own nerdy past, American Nerd blossoms. Nugent tracks down Darren and Kenneth, two D&D brethren he befriended and -propelled by good-looks and self-loathing- betrayed. He inveigles answers about their shared past, their present, and their future: all of it shot through with nerdhood. Here's Nugent taking his leave of Kenneth:

"We go outside and say our good-byes, lingering, suddenly aware of how much older we are than the last time we parted. I'm almost thirty now; he's thirty-one. Our hairlines have receded by the same amout. He walks the excitable squirrel-mutt, which he informs me was rescued from a nearby house of cocaine addicts who used to shut it in a closet. It noses the ground obsessively, accounting for every speck of dust, until it's finally pulled away. I think about death; that is, I think about how little time we get and how much time we spend inventing and following rules that makes us feel immortal and safe."

When Nugent finally abandons his pose of objectivity, American Nerd coalesces from a loose constellation of facts into a luminous tale of survival. It's a late bloomer -but then, most nerds are.

P.S. I'm still taking last-minute entries for my 2010 book challenge. A huge thank you to everyone who's already given me the names of books they love! Heedless, witless love! Stupid, blinkered passion! Step up, if you haven't already.

Benediction, FL

The waiter kept forgetting the wine so I ordered a sidecar. He had to look up how to make it. He came back and recited the ingredients like a small, besotted prayer and asked, Am I right? I said yes because how would I know? I'd drunk it exactly four times, remembered only the bubbles bursting against the inside of my cheek.

It was a long table in Florida. No one I knew was there. At the concert hours earlier, someone in the audience had handed me a plastic bag of clementines, and now I was eating them them one by one under the table, sneaking off the peels. I had swordfish. I had raw salmon on a bed of seaweed. I rested my head on the table and, just for a minute, closed my eyes.

Across from me there was man with a silver necklace and too-blue eyes. Every morning he walked to the end of the pier to make sure the sun got up on time. He paid a dollar for the privilege. He'd once been a preacher. He wrote his own songs. His wife, the artist, had well-shaped ears a cap of copper hair. They told me marriage was hard.

I said yes. I had nothing left inside me to tell, so I said I was scared of flying. I have to hold the plane up with my mind. I hate when the sky shakes, disrupting the tenuous operations taking place at top speed in my skull. I drink tomato juice, always, and afterwards crunch the ice: this is part of the physics of how the plane stays aloft.

At the end of the night the man said he'd pray for me. The woman gripped my arms, looked deep into my eyes, and told me I was a treasure. Did I know that? I was a treasure. I said yes, because what else is there to say?

The thing that puzzles me is that I remember this. It's that I keep remembering, of all things, this.