Roses are Red

A friend of mine is in love. The guy she met is wonderful, is amazing, can do no wrong. But then late one night she calls me, her voice a low rumble on the phone. "What do I do?" I imagine her holed up in the bathroom, her knees tucked against her chest. "What do I do? He can't draw." My friend, an accomplished artist, had been thrilled that her beau shared her passion for art. Until the night she convinced him to show her his work.

My friend and her boyfriend are doing fine. He brings her takeout and stupid presents and she encourages him to sculpt, something she's never tried. She doesn't ask to see his work anymore. But it got me thinking about talent: how we measure it, how we value it, and if it matters.

Because we're definitely not equal-opportunity talent scouts. I don't think my friend would have cared if her boyfriend had been unable to, say, balance a slinky on his nose. Or, for that matter, if he'd stunk at math. No, my friend cared that her boyfriend couldn't draw because that was her area, the craft upon which she'd expended the most effort. She respected people who displayed talent in the area she respected, and she had to expend conscious effort not to disrespect a person who didn't.

Could it be that we measure talent not against some objective yardstick, but against our own capabilities? How terribly self-absorbed! Yet, I think there's some truth to it. I'm inordinately impressed when someone, say, assembles a desk from a box. Or, wonder of wonders, hooks up the DVD player. I'm impressed even though these are skills I'd wager a majority of the population possesses. It's just that -tragically- I don't. In contrast, I'm underwhelmed by the ability to sing happy birthday on key, another skill possessed by the majority of the population, this time including myself.

Once, in college, a guy with whom I'd gone on a single date wrote me a love poem. Now, guys didn't usually write me love poems. In fact, guys usually pursued me with the vigor of diseased turtles. So I probably should have been susceptible to the love poem. Only, well, it was bad. Really bad. Rhyming, wind-blown-hair and ruby-sunset bad. I was so embarrassed I hid it (and myself the next time he dropped by) under the bed.

Does talent matter? What if the poem had been only sort of bad, or slightly less good than what I could have written myself? What if it had been excellent? I doubt it would have changed the ultimate trajectory of the relationship (we didn't have much in common, and fifteen minutes into the movie he put his hand on my thigh) but it might have altered its rate of decline.

Maybe a better question is, should talent matter?

I don't know. But if you think you can put together my dining room table, come on by.

I See Young People

The other day my supervisor and I fetched a sixth-grade boy from his classroom to work on /r/. The boy looked like he'd been dunked in paraffin. My supervisor, making chit-chat, asked him how he got his hair wet, whereupon the boy, drawing himself up a little, told her it was gel.

I laughed. Aloud. And not particularly softly. I mean, the kid was prepubescent. Who was he kidding? It took me only a few seconds to choke off the giggles, but by then I was consumed with guilt. He hadn't heard, right? Please tell me he was distracted enough by the wriggly tide of first graders that he hadn't heard?

It's just that, well, he was so terribly transparent. Being older than someone gives you this monumentally unfair advantage, in that you can often, using your own experience as a resource, see inside people who think they're opaque. My fourth year at conservatory I played on the Orientation concert, arriving several days before any other upperclassmen. I still remember how excruciating it was to watch the freshmen lolloping around with their urgent small talk and desperately friendly smiles.

Really it's indecent: why can't the old allow the young the privacy to fuck up, look silly, and conceive of their experiences as original without someone looking over their shoulder? I certainly don't want some fifty-year-old snickering at the transparency of my flailings over career and personal relationships.

Except it's so hard to avoid. As a child, I was pretty much in a state of constant indignation that people, especially adults, didn't take me seriously. It was the bane of my existence: why couldn't I vote, why didn't my opinions count, and who on earth did these adults think they were to be able to force me to do things I didn't want to do? (This particular brand of obnoxiousness might help explain the vaguely constipated expression that flitted across my preschool teacher's face when she ran into me the other day). Anyway, as a kid, I SWORE that when I became an adult I would take kids seriously. I would always listen. I would never laugh.

Damn.

Whole Grain Wheat Flour, Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Salt, Dried Yeast.

Some people seek perfection in their mates. Others look for it in nature, or art: this perfect sunset, or that immortal bronze. These people are all barking up the wrong tree. True perfection lies in grape nuts.

Every morning I wake up excited about my day. Is my day really that exciting? Well, no. But by the time I wake up, I'm usually starving. And there is nothing so piquant as lying in bed hungry yet replete with the knowledge that soon as you stop ineffectively mashing the snooze button, you can get up, go downstairs, and down a bowl of grape nuts.

Really I can think of nothing more closely approximating sublimity than the grape nut. It's malty, salty, coy in its denseness yet receptive to the advances of milk. It plays well with others. It resists through yielding, yields through resistance, and tastes, delightfully, of nothing so much as itself.

And of course, like a cherry on top of the world's biggest ice-cream sundae, there's the name. Grape nuts. No grapes, no nuts: just those two little words dangling their denotations like fishing line over the edge of the pier.

Take the bait.

M.D. and the Girlz

Merton Densher, he of the stupid name and stupefying passivity, has this to say about the straits in which he finds himself in the last tenth of his creator's novel: "There had been in all the case too many women."

And yes, our Merton has been led around by the nose a little. But too many women? Is there such a thing? I firmly believe there can be too many men: witness Jihadists, packs of fraternity brothers, and the White House. But packs of women don't seem to have the same destructive power as packs of men. (Discounting the Maenads, but I suppose it's never a reach to assert the existence of too many cannibals.)

Is there anything really wrong with female-dominated environments? I wonder about this sometimes, mostly because I can't seem to escape them. As much as I would dearly love not to be a girly girl, everything I want to do seems to be something done by, well, girls. For whatever reason, men (with a few exceptions) don't seem to hunger to teach small children, work with the elderly, or cooperatively dine.

Do we lose anything by their absence? Sometimes I don't think so. Other times -when I see a little boy light up for his male therapist, for example- I do. Perhaps the only thing I know with any modicum of certainty is that Merton Densher's an ass.

Climbs Up the Waterspout

I have been trying to figure out what's so terrible about Kate's scheme in The Wings of the Dove (thought I was done with that, didn't you? Heh). I mean, it's not as if she sets out to rape and pillage. There's no high treason. No one is guillotined, or crucified, or tied to a chair and forced to listen to The Itsy Bitsy Spider 49 times in a row.

No, Kate does something much more innocuous, yet at the same time more profoundly icky.

(Pause for SPOILER ALERT. Can you really issue a spoiler alert for a classic novel? Never mind. I just have. Because really, everyone should read the book! And then talk to me about it! At length! With cheese!)

What Kate does is to send her boyfriend to make love to a dying heiress. Now, when I say "make love," I mean it in the nineteenth- rather than the twentieth-century sense. (Though come to think of it, WOD features one of the most minimalistically sexy sex scenes I've ever had the privilege to read. It consists of a chapter break and is both passionate and transgressive.) In essence, Kate sends Merton to make Milly love him.

What's so awful about this? I think I've finally decided it's not so much the badness of the act as the fact that the act is sucking, like a leech, the blood of something good. Milly really does love Merton (god knows why; the man's a sap), and Kate's scheme turns Milly's love against her.

It's like defacing someone's valentine, or telling your husband you've been out shopping for his birthday when in fact you've been making chapter breaks with your secretary.

Nasty. But fun to read.

Help! I Ate the Grand Canal.

I finished The Wings of the Dove. And by God, I think someone should hand me a cookie! If anything in this day in age deserves a cookie, isn't it traipsing all the way through Henry James? (Never mind winning the Nobel Prize or anything. Wait, do Nobelists get a cookie? If not this is a gross oversight.)

As should be clear from the incoherence above, the book is still working its way through my system. For the next few weeks, I'll probably be more than usually given to tangents, complications, and communicative uncommunicativeness.

Tangent #1: The brain as a digestive system. We all know what happens when you eat an apple: down the hatch, out the other end, with certain nutritional contributions made along the way. But what happens when you quaff Merton Densher? How long does it take the brain to process him, and what is extracted along the way? What are the indigestible byproducts of Susan Stringham, and which chapters will end up sticking to your ribs? What's the importance of a balanced intellectual diet, and what will happen if I read too much fiction? Is there a way I can lose intellectual "weight," perhaps by subsisting for a month on a Hollywood Diet of tabloids and US weekly?

Tangent #2: Confession: I've never read US weekly, never even seen a copy. But it's the magazine that writers always use to represent frivolity. So I'm really using a pre-digested symbol here, kind of like a penguin chick subsisting on its mother's regurgitated finds. In fact, if things continue as they are, "US weekly" will lose its physical anchor, its connection to the world of real objects, and begin to exist solely in the realm of language. Kind of like "tarred and feathered" or "back in the saddle."

Back in the saddle: so I finished The Wings of the Dove. Only I don't really feel like I have finished, because I'm still sifting through, sniffing the spoor, examining the tracks of one plot development or another. I'm still reading, only now I'm reading the aftermath. It's an interesting text: grosser, weirder, less complete. Like an inside-out fossil, the kind where a trilobite rested for years, wore the shape of itself into the rock.

Too much metaphor: always the sign it's time for a good dose of US.

Dear John

Recently, I had to set my rates. No, I haven't succumbed to lure of the streets. Rather, I'm a (grossly under-employed) music teacher with one spanking new private student. This student, whom I'll call "Newton" (why aren't more people named "Newton?") pretty much conked me on the head: someone referred her to me, so all I had to do was field her emails about when and where I could teach. I pressed "send" and pressed "send" again. This was easy! I was an impresario of advertisement, a veritable marketing wunder-kind!

And then came the question, tucked at the bottom of an innocent email about parking: "What are your rates?"

I stopped cold. My rates? Sure, I knew I had them. Somewhere. In the drawer at the bottom of my closet, or maybe down around my pancreas, an organ in which I'd never quite been able to muster faith. I mean, yes, payment was part of the deal, definitely... Moving faster than I had since Aram Marks chased me around the playground trying to see up my skirt, I logged off my email, shut down the computer, and left the room.

Because what Newton was really asking me was how much I was worth. Right there, right then, I needed to catalog my capacities, abilities, and strengths, and slap a price tag on them. It was frightening, and confusing. How much did my left elbow figure into the equation? What about my unfortunate weakness for Northern Exposure? The fact that I didn't like Strauss? My double tonguing alone should fetch $3.75...

No one but a freelancer or a streetwalker is so baldly obliged to set a price on herself. It's an odd exercise, and one to which I'm sure I'll be subjected again.

It's $30 an hour, by the way. Ask about the sliding scale.