Dear diary,
Why does my sweetheart not notify me when I have gnats on my face after a bike ride? We returned from riding to the park and stopped at our mailbox, and our neighbors were checking their mail too so we chatted for a few minutes. Then we went inside, and I glanced in the mirror, and there were two big black gnats on my forehead: one was smashed over there, and one was mashed right here. Yuck, gross.
MORAL: If you really care for your loved ones, kindly tell them when they have bugs all over their face.
What else is new? I’ve been visiting the old dog park again – the one that I began avoiding after raging hounds lunged at me twice in one trip. I’ve decided to give it another chance. The last few times I’ve gone there, there wasn’t a human or dog in sight; I had the whole park to myself. Then this morning I went for a walk there and only met one single passerby. It was a man, and he had a small dog on a leash. A tiny little pup. This man’s defining trait was a bright white mustache, which was impeccably trimmed, situated directly beneath his nose. But he didn’t look happy. When I waved my hand and voiced a greeting as we passed, he mumbled and nodded; and his face had a strained look, as if it was causing him intense physical pain to be forced to acknowledge me.
Sorry about the dull nature of this entry. The truth is that nothing has happened in my life worth reporting. But when you have almost zero contact with human beings in your daily circuit, encountering a clean-cut misanthrope with a divinely white mustache can be easy to misconstrue as a newsworthy event.
And you, gentle reader, perhaps dine out regularly; but I DO NOT; so the fact that I dined out on Saturday evening is newsworthy as well. The last time I dined out was years ago (unless I’ve undergone this ordeal more recently and even reported it here in these weblog pages, in which case I will feel ashamed and beg your forgiveness for the unruly nature of my memory). The attendees were as follows: my sweetheart; two of her colleagues from work; the wife of one of the latter; and I myself. So we had to ask for a table for five, which apparently was considered an odd request by the restaurant’s staff, for they had to convert one of their standard square tables into a round one by unfolding all of its circumferential leaves. And the eatery was simply called “Pho,” which I was told is pronounced like the English word “Fur,” which I was told refers to a type of Vietnamese soup. (I ordered some, it was good.)
Now when you are, as I am, a United Statesian, and you find yourself in a place that advertises itself as “family owned” and as offering “the best Vietnamese cuisine in this particular city,” it’s hard not to click on the Internet computer’s search engine’s section called “People also ask…” and then to expand the tab titled “What is the meaning of the Vietnam War?” and to copy-paste the text that you find there into your Chip Log:
The Vietnam War (1955–75) was a Cold War conflict pitting the U.S. and the remnants of the French colonial government in South Vietnam against the indigenous but communist Vietnamese independence movement, the Viet Minh, following the latter's expulsion of the French in 1954.
Again, I’m just relaying what I found on my Internet computer. If anything’s inaccurate, don’t blame me. Instead, blame my limited liability company (LLC: “a business structure that combines the pass-through taxation of a partnership or sole proprietorship with the limited liability of a corporation,” according to Wikipedia.) Or, on third thought, go right ahead and blame Yours Truly for all the inaccuracies that you find online. Just be thankful that I didn’t copy the answers accompanying the other tabs in this section: “What is the food like in Vietnam?”; “Is Vietnam a country?”; “Why did the U.S. and Vietnam go to war?” (They speak of this like we’re cowboys settling a feud.)
Did you ever wonder why the system of communism was (or still is?) such a threat and blah blah blah. Now that the opposing system has won the day and dominated the planet, is it really so much better or worse or blah blah blah...?
Incidentally, about a month ago I re-watched Oliver Stone’s 1993 film Heaven & Earth, which was based on books that Le Ly Hayslip wrote about her experiences during and after the Vietnam War. I had seen this film a while ago, when I was progressing thru Stone’s filmography (I’m a great admirer of his art); but I chose to request it from my library’s system again when I heard Stone in an interview say something like: I wish that more people would see my film Heaven & Earth because it’s personal and underrated and very important. So I was game to give it another shot. I didn’t fall in love with it the first time, but I remembered the film accomplishing certain things very well – and now after having re-watched it, I think my initial impression was mostly right; yet there is something uniquely rewarding about the story, tho hard to explain: it’s not exactly an aesthetic masterpiece, but it puts you through the wringer with Le Ly (the film’s protagonist) – the way the movie contrasts the different worlds that Le Ly must navigate, eventually ending up in L.A.; and this is an accomplishment – I can’t recall another work in any medium affording me the vivid contrast between so many actual types of modern existence. So, like Stone’s other recent documentary series (and books) The Untold History of the United States, I say that Heaven & Earth more than makes up for its aesthetic shortcomings by offering you a genuinely personal comprehension of historical events.
But why am I writing ad copy for a nonexistent film festival? I only meant to tell you about my journey into the store that sells Fur Soup.
So anyway, all five of us ordered our delicious choices, and many minutes passed while we waited in nerve-wracking suspense for our cuisine to arrive (the place does not offer alcoholic beverages, I inform you through many sobs); and, at a certain point near the end of our wait, one of our tablemates decided that this very instant was the best time to ask the waitress if the food that we all ordered contains MSG (monosodium glutamate). (Now this person, my sweetheart’s colleague, is a great mind—he loves Dostoevsky and Jane Austen, which makes him a uniquely excellent individual—so in case he reads this entry someday, I want him to know that I’m only joking about the detrimental nature of the timing of his question: I’m only writing this for laughs.) So I said “What’s MSG?” And someone at our table explains: “It’s something they put in the food that enhances the taste but it also makes you sick.” Then the waitress reassures our tablemate that the dish he ordered does not contain MSG, and neither do the meals that our companions ordered—only mine and my sweetheart’s soup will have MSG added. No kidding: she actually said this. This is my worst nightmare: I’m always convinced, when I dine out, that I’ll be struck down with some form of food sickness; which is why I rarely ever leave my house.
But when the meals eventually arrived, they tasted fine and didn’t make us ill. But my sweetheart said that her fortune cookie was chewy, so I got angry at her for eating it. (Why wouldn’t you spit it out and ask for another?) But when I got home, I researched monosodium glutamate and discovered some good news—here’s a few sentences taken from Wikipedia:
A popular belief is that MSG can cause headaches and other feelings of discomfort, but double-blind tests have found no evidence to support this. MSG has been used for more than 100 years to season food, with a number of studies conducted on its safety. […] A 1995 report from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology for the United States Food and Drug Administration concluded that MSG is safe “when eaten at customary levels.”
So just avoid ingesting “3 g of MSG in the absence of food,” and you should be fine, O hypochondriac Bryan. For “the median lethal dose is between 15 and 18 g/kg body weight in rats and mice, respectively, five times greater than the median lethal dose of salt.”
My lazy research also led me to this other new term, which I like for being so gently, straightforwardly braggadocious:
A loanword from the Japanese, umami can be translated as “pleasant savory taste.”
But it saddens me to think that scientists actually spent a certain amount of time torturing rodents to death with salt and MSG, just for the purpose of noting the effective dosages. This makes me doubt that there is a God who watches all of our actions. For how could God gaze on passively like a television viewer and not SPRING TO AID ALL VICTIMS while humans kill and rape each other and poison their fellow creatures and don’t even lift a finger to help their countryfolk who’ve been ravished by everything from natural disasters to mismanaged water supplies? And why does God not dial down the severity of WIND? (Hurricanes; tropical storms.) For it bloweth where it listeth.
I realize that I’m now so tangled up in my non-story that I can’t even remember why I began to recount its half-goings.
Ah now I remember: I wanted to note a rewarding topic of conversation that occurred over dinner. While we were all enjoying the Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), our good dining companion asked after my writings—apparently my sweetheart had shown him my author page on Evilzon and this made him wonder what was wrong with me: Why publish so many books? Ecclesiastes 12:12...
And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
So I did the whole spiel where I try to explain that although we live in a time where the worth of everything, even art (especially art?) is determined by how much money the thing rakes in, I engaged in bookmaking simply to compete with the beloved writers who’ve gone before me, and not to make too big of a noise about it.
Now I wonder: Am I lying to myself by explaining my attempts like so? I feel that there’s something false about my insistence on this type of innocence. Because why would I not want fast cash AS WELL AS the chance to fail among distinguished company? If someone offered me riches for my writings, would I say no? No: I’d say yes. Gimme the loot. Put it in umpteen cardinal moneybags. Smaller bills, preferably. So the fact that my box office returns are less than optimal…
Forget it. One last quote from Wikipedia and then I’ll share a rap track in the postscript.
Patrons may perform the transaction at a countertop, thru a hole in a wall, or at a wicket.
P.S.
Here is today’s rap song that I uploaded on the Tumblr network as per my new bad habit:
7 comments:
I find the mundane little details of your life - opening the mailbox, going to a park or restaurant - more intriguing than you might imagine. I was talking to Erica about this phenomenon when she was here and we were thinking it might a response to the glut of other things omnipresent on the internet - politics, murder, sports, etc., plus social media where people only display the beautiful and most one-sided versions of their lives. As for you being a hypochondriac, you are in good literary company. I read somewhere recently that Turgenev was one too, and I always keep in mind that in the end, hypochondriacs are always right. So that's something.
Ah, thanks for saying so; thanks for the kind words!! I agree about the attraction of the quotidian mundane: I secretly am banking on the fact that the BORINGER we writers allow ourselves to be, the more intriguing we’ll seem to future readers. (I trust it’s clear that I mean ironic-boringer.) Just for the sake of humor I am self-deprecatory. Nevertheless, all of my misgivings are genuine, until I give them a third or fourth thought!
And YES, excellent point: “politics, murder, sports, etc., plus social media where people only display the beautiful and most one-sided versions of their lives”; THAT’s exactly (I second the notion), at least for ME, what exhausts the mind and causes me to yearn for the daily nothings of our individual routines. Celebrity culture, and the underlings’ worship and aping thereof is trying my patience, precisely because the so-called underlings (anyone not a 1% celebrity) are so much more interesting BECAUSE NATURALLY DEEPER.
I hope all this makes at least one bit of sense—I feel that I’m writing obscurely because clouded by passion. There’s something going on with our time that’s difficult to explain, the way a mountain is difficult to see all at once—you’ve gotta walk around the thing and “piece together” many fragmented views before you can get a clear notion of its magnitude. And yes I stole this last analogy from Bertrand Russel.
And I hope you’re right about hypochondriacs being always right: I mean I hope that our prophecies come true; but I’m totally fine if we’re proven wrong about our heath anxieties hahahaha!
There are some contemporary novels out there that are so mundane and slow moving, I never would've predicted success for them, but they seem to be riding on that new need for dull minutiae wave. I like the Russel magic mountain analogy! Maybe I need to light some candles and start beating myself with a leather strap so I can have a shamanic vision of it and see what the hell is going on.
hahahaha!! inducing “a shamanic vision of it to see what the hell is going on”—I’m sure that you could make this work! (It’ll be the one instant classic I snatch up.) …And just a small thought on “contemporary novels”: your criticism of them makes me feel less bad for my ignorance; I always wonder what I’m missing, because I don’t have a trusted critic or review source to point out what’s worth pursuing; so I often feel guilty for avoiding most newer books and instead sticking with the tried-and-true (I don’t want to be a mere worshiper of what is past, to make an idol of all that is old; but it’s such a thrill to have one’s reading efforts rewarded with compositions that have stood the test of time); I guess I’m saying that your verdict of “so mundane and slow moving” reassures me that even if a good work does spring up among the heaps, the whole literary process is slow enough to render the state of being out-of-the-know almost advantageous.
I always wonder what I'm missing too re: comtemp. novels. i am hugely underread in that department, and do sometimes feel guilty about it. I don't want to be someone who only reads the old stuff and thereby turns himself into an anachronism, but every new novel i pick up seems to lack whatever it is i'm looking for. humor for one! that in fact seems to be a strike against you in the minds of the critics and academics. 'what? he's doing something akin to comedy.... he can't be taken seriously then... mirth is forbidden. we want serious."
'don't be serious' ~ horace
i was so happy when i found tranströmer. he gave my poetry reading a contemp. balance, which i'm sure ashbery will too when i get to him.
Re “mirth is forbidden” – I am right with you in lamenting this: I’m on the side of humor: I love it, I live for it! It’s that dusty and prudent seriousness that turned me off from academia in general. I think that everything should have at least some element of play to it (as opposed to reeking of work). I stress that I feel this way about all endeavors, all occupations. And in the realm of art specifically, not only do I desire its productions to be comedic but I even prefer that side to its supposed antithesis; tho my preference isn’t a strong bias but rather a small tip of the scale in that direction. Perhaps I’m wrong—I hope someday I’ll be proved so, by reality herself, because (to mingle paraphrases of my nemesis St. Paul with my hero William Blake) I’d much rather learn that, when beheld truly, face-to-face as it were, not darkly thru a glass but after our doors of perception have been cleansed, the infinite, or everlasting life, accords with optimism—nonetheless I consider life to be essentially tragic. If that is so, then tragic art is more of a passive copying from experience, whereas comedic art is a suggested potential improvement. Admittedly, at its lowest, comedy is mere escapism; but even that is a blessing, in a hopeless world. I think it’s less commendable to point out flaws than it is to devise solutions, and I’m most attracted to engendering unprecedented change for the better – this last and best accomplishment is what comedic art, at its apogee, can bring about.
Sorry about all this preachifying! It seems that I’ve developed a tic where, whenever the notion of humor is pitted against seriousness, I end up repeating some version of the above, like a programmed robot. But I really do believe in comedy. And just like our ongoing conversation about weblogging, the examples of great—or rather greatest—artists who dared to be comedic equals the profusion who embraced the demotic. (For these two orders share much common ground.) Again Shakespeare. Again Chaucer. Again Dante—his very title: The Divine COMEDY. So, to make the joke of removing a snippet from its context of doom and employing it as proof text for our pro-delight argument, I sic Yahweh on the contemporary Departments of Literature: “I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.” (Amos 5:21)
Beautifully said, and exactly what I've been thinking for years but haven't been able to put into words. I like this bit especially, which needs to be framed and hung up in the office of every academic and book critic in world: "I’d much rather learn that, when beheld truly, face-to-face as it were, not darkly thru a glass but after our doors of perception have been cleansed, the infinite, or everlasting life, accords with optimism—nonetheless I consider life to be essentially tragic. If that is so, then tragic art is more of a passive copying from experience, whereas comedic art is a suggested potential improvement. Admittedly, at its lowest, comedy is mere escapism; but even that is a blessing, in a hopeless world."
It reminds me of something Delacroix said in his journals, although maybe not as clearly. (Gets book out of nightstand). Here are a couple of his quotes: "These vague yearnings, this chronic melancholy, describe no real human being; it is a school of sickly sentiment, and a very poor advertisement for it." I read that a while back and thought of a couple really popular contemp. novels I'd recently (tried to) read. This quote too, which is even more in-line with what you say: "Cold accuracy is not art. Skillful invention, when it is PLEASING and EXPRESSIVE, is art itself. The so-called conscientiousness of the great majority of painters is nothing but the perfection in the art of BORING."
I put Delacroix's Journals right up there with Van Gogh's Letters, btw.
And your right. Too much comedy often gets in the way. It's important to know how to balance it, or use it with subtlety, which I am often clumsy at, but the greats, or at least my favorites, have always been able to do.
Chronic melancholy, I would say, is the biggest ailment in the stuff going around today.
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