September 20, 2004
In the anthology I'm reading, there's a story by Ann Beatte I initally thought was annoying, but which after a while I started to like. It's told from the point of view of a woman who shares a house with her husband and his arty male friends in New York. The men are portrayed, mostly successfully, as hopelessly aimless and neurotic. I wish I felt more superior to these characters than I actually do (as it is, I feel like a less-cultured version of some of them--for instance I just left a rather rambling and inept-sounding voice mail with a potential employer). It's almost like a Nick Hornby story.
Anyway, at one point Ann Beatte sort of uses typical lines of dialouge that describe the men in the mind of the main character:They make the illogical logical. I don't do anything, because I'm waiting, I'm on hold (J.D.); I stay stoned because I know it's better to be out of it (Freddy); I love art because I myself am a work of art (Tucker).
Not that I think Tucker is a particularly sane character on the whole, but I think his little snippet is a pretty good way of describing things.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 4:16 PMSeptember 18, 2004
Do I see a trend here?
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Who Is Jill Scott?
The Diary of Alicia Keys
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 5:31 PMSeptember 6, 2004
I came back from the Japanese Festival wishing I could make a tie-dyed shirt. Not concentric rainbow suns--just impossibly dark indigo with a little mottled white circle in the middle.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 11:22 PMAugust 26, 2004
My Japanese teacher claims all television anchormen in Japan must speak in the Tokyo Dialect. It's like in America, he said, where all reporters are expected to speak in midwestern english. I'd never noticed this before--but I suppose it's true. I think almost all the reporters I've seen sound like a college-educated person from St. Louis. So I suppose the midwest really is the standard. To my best knowledge, anyway, no one's ever accused me of having an accent.
My theory is, though, that people who've been here a while actually do have a rural Missouri accent they keep in their back pockets for use in special situations. Like if you notice there's a heat advisory, and you perversely decide to go running in the middle of the day just to feel the pure miserable-ness of it. A government worker is doing some landscaping or something, and he mentions to you
"If it gets any hotter, it might be a warm day!"
Answer: "Yeah, yeah. It feels that way." (Stoically, like you're the quiet husband in Robert Frost's "The Death of the Hired Man," and drawing out your sylables a little in a moderate, Missouri way.)
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 4:18 PMAugust 7, 2004
(found in an abandoned front yard littered with old papers, some kind of flyer rolled up, too weathered to be unrolled)
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 11:00 PMAugust 2, 2004
I was just reading Psalm 19, and there's something interesting about it. In the original language (I admit I got this from a note on the text) a general name for God is used in the first six verses. After that, a personal name is used. It's like how Jesus calls people by their first names. A first-name basis.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 1:16 AMJuly 29, 2004
For practice, my mom reads me a children's book about fruits and vegetables. After she's done I notice I've been mesmerized. I'm going to help her tomorrow with her preschool class. She talks to me about engaging the administrators with "warm eye-contact," and I help put small velcro squares on the backs of paper stars bearing the children's names. -------------------- The next day is rainy, and the kids have pent-up energy. My mom uses songs such as "Clean Up" to get the children to perform certain tasks in an orderly way. They work amazingly well. I feel like asking the kids if they realize the songs are only ploys to get them to behave. But I suspect the answer is no, and I wouldn't dare tip them off. After all, a paper sign in the bathroom quotes Bertrand Russel as saying "teachers, more than any other class, are the guardians of civilization."
Requisite Orphan Sentence: I seem to come across interesting bathroom reading surprisingly often.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 11:21 PMJuly 24, 2004
After two days of heat advisories and one day slated for a long rain that never happened, the high today was 70. I sat with my family by the concrete arches on the very top of the very upper deck of Busch Stadium and watched the Cardinals lose in the tenth inning to the Giants. I’d brought a 1950’s paperback copy of Frankenstein with me but ended up not reading it because the game was never delayed, and it was always close until Marquis Grissom hit a home run and pretty much ended things.
Towards late afternoon a light drizzle started falling. There was also a stiff breeze blowing, and despite it being the middle of July I found myself ingesting a non-competitively-priced black coffee and hot chocolate to stay warm. A street musician played outside the whole time, shielding his amp from the rain with a lime-green poncho.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 9:42 PMJuly 21, 2004
A friend and I went camping last weekend with a bunch of people we hardly knew. We found ourselves sitting by the campfire playing one-card poker on the top of a cooler. I was having even more trouble paying attention than I usually do, unable to keep myself from eavesdropping on the conversation between two guys sitting a short distance from us in lawnchairs.
The one that did most of the talking was an engineer by the sound of things. What I noticed most was his sense of wonder. He had sort of a fresh excitement about how architecture can actually make people feel good, and how the bumper of a car is designed to crush in a certain way so you don't die.
Later he mentioned he'd had a really horrible day at work.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 12:11 AMJuly 20, 2004
I've been interested in two books lately:
1. Jonathan Franzen's How To Be Alone, because I seem to like books with ironic how-to titles. I knew I would buy this book from the time I saw it in an airport newsstand. It was a book of essays almost personally advertised to me--the sticker on the cover compared him to Joan Didion. When I finally bought it a week later, I found it contained an essay called "Meet Me In St. Louis." Apparently, Mr. Franzen is originally from Webster Groves, and the essay is about the emotional awkwardness that surfaces when he makes an agreement allowing The Oprah Book Club to film him at his childhood home.
2. Fault Lines--Stories of Divorce, because if there is any vocational group other than celebrity actors that should know about divorce, it's writers.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 1:37 AMJuly 13, 2004
Saint Louis doesn't have any four-story record stores, especially in the city proper, so when I was in Boston I was fascinated by even a mundane (for the capital of MA) fixture like Virgin Records. Even though it's expensive and lacks marker-drawn posters and signs, the huge number of CDs (especially jazz and classical) makes it hard to avoid. It was also right by the hostel I was staying in just off Mass. Ave.
So after failing miserably to get tickets for a sold-out Iron and Wine show (the Middle East even had three cops outside to prevent scalping), I somehow decided I had nowhere else to go in all of Boston than Virgin Records.
This isn't much of a story, but I was pretty thoroughly interested in two CDs I found of Duke Ellington's second and third sacred concerts. Apparently he considered the performances to be "jazz masses" which seems like almost a contradiction in terms.
I read the titles of the pieces to see if I could imagine what they would sound like. Some of them were what you'd expect. Others were longer and more descriptive, like the titles of spirituals. Two of the longer ones kept returning to me even after I left the store, walked back to the hostel, and sat on the bottom bunk of my assigned bed:
Don't get down on your knees to pray until you have forgiven everyone.
and also:
David danced before the Lord with all his might.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 5:54 PMJuly 9, 2004
I think my reasoning goes something like this: not being assertive equals being oppressed equals being heroic.
If this reasoning is correct, I've been heroic for a long time now.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 11:56 PMJuly 3, 2004
More notes on Boston:
The word I've been using to describe the subway stops in Boston is "immaculate"(although there is one mouse who lives at the Park St. stop). When a drunk approached me in Copley Square to give me directions, he told me that when I passed the firehouse, I should tell the firemen "The Drunk" said hi, and at that point I almost believed he got this nickname by being the only drunk in Boston. About midnight last Sunday, though, when I walked in that dark parkway along the Charles River, I started thinking otherwise.
It appears Boston does have a dark underbelly after all, and hooray for me for finding it (I seem to find it necessary to find the "dark underbelly" of cities I visit).
It's nice to visit cities where you actually have to look for the underbelly. I wonder if St. Louis could ever be like this.
In Boston, everyone seems astonishingly literate, even the bus drivers. People read on the subway, and Cambridge supposedly has the highest concentration of bookstores anywhere in the United States.
Even if people argue with you and say Boston is a terrible city, chances are they have a favorite musician who thinks it's good enough for them.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 3:22 AMJune 28, 2004
I'm not sure if Boston is for lovers or not. In a city where people are not only generally beautiful, but also seek the improvement of their minds by extensive reading, one might always be looking for a better one.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 10:56 AMJune 15, 2004
On the way home from my trip to the northeast, I was reading Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and sitting by a forty-ish woman who looked not completely unlike Joan Didion herself (in some older pictures I'd seen). I thought about this, but then I did a little math:
32 (the age owned by Didion in a 1967 essay)
+37 (the number of years between 1967 and now)
---
69 (the woman I'm sitting by is far too young to be the celebrated writer)
Even though she wasn't Joan Didion, I liked her a lot. From the time I met her, she told me travel stories for five hours straight and I was absolutely transfixed. She updated me on her periodic attempts to sneak past the attendents and get a peek at the tiny, 300-plus-dollar-a-night rooms in the sleeper car, told me some things I might do when I was next in Boston and gave me some beautifully unorthodox ideas about how I might become employed.
I figured you don't not heed the advice of such people, so I asked her where I should go for pizza when we got to Chicago. She faltered a bit, saying something about Pizzeria Uno, but that she didn't really know much about it.
Here's what I should do, she said. I should ask three people what was the best pizza in Chicago and if they all said the same place, I would know where to go.
Interestingly, when I got to Chicago and bought a paper, it contained an article about pizza places, headlined by "Many still see Pizzeria Uno as No. 1" and also mentioning a place called Gino's East Pizzeria.
I figured people would tell me I should go to one of these places, but I decided to ask anyway. The answers of the three people I asked were as follows:
1. Giordinos
2. Giordinos
3. Dominos
I think I gave Person Number 3 a really pained look. I decided to take the advice of the first two, and that's how I ended up near the base of the Sears Tower on a foggy Friday afternoon eating really, really good pizza.
Maybe I shouldn't have done it, because I missed my train out.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 5:15 PMMay 30, 2004
Do you understand how, as seen in the movie About A Boy, a hippie single mother can go through days-long crying spells? The sixteen-year-old me would answer no to this question and say she needed to change the flavor of her incense sticks or something. The twenty-six-year-old me would (and does) say cautiously yes. And so it seems that life is among other things a progression of becoming able to understand situations that I don’t want to understand. The number of people I can, but don’t want to, live vicariously through becomes ever larger.
It feels good to go to someone’s house where I once thought myself too cool for the company and simply eat the flaky shell of one tostado, breaking a weeks-long string of sameness in my diet.
I’m at the point of knowing I need to save the caffeine for before interviews, when I need to appear much, much less like the dreamer I am and much, much more like the efficient machine they want. I generally want to tell the truth, to say “this is what you’re getting.” I need the opposite of a truth serum to make me follow the directions of the experts, to give the interviewers, when they ask oh-so-sincerely what are my weaknesses, a weakness which is really a strength.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 1:07 AMMay 29, 2004
I've started listening to this new band called Joy Division. Somehow, they're much more listenable than I'd expect. I think it might have something to do with the syncopation of the drums.
syncopation- n. The stressing of a normally unstressed beat in a bar or the failure to sound a tone on an accented beat.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 2:43 AMMay 27, 2004
It would be nice if there were some 24-hour libraries around here.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 1:54 AMMay 26, 2004
Why I like George Herbert:
- While his poems don't always sound modern (sometimes they do!), he doesn’t use any confusing mythological references or posturing.
- His poems have an intimate feel. They sound like someone’s soul talking.
- He refrains from name-calling.
- He does a lot of thinking, like he's trying to find an elusive way out of the problems that are bothering him.
- God always seems sweetly mysterious in his poems.
- The language he uses is beautiful.
He’s got a weird and surprising cleverness. In his poem “The Bag,” there's a quirky story. Jesus comes down to earth and gives away everything he has. Then, just before he returns to heaven, someone stabs him with a spear. He tells people that since he doesn’t have a mail bag, they can jam all their letters into his spear wound, and he'll fix their mistakes and make sure they get to God the Father safely. I think a lot of people would think this is complete silliness, but I sort of like it.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 4:12 PMMay 25, 2004
Today at the Borders on Olive I saw a violent storm that disabled the espresso machine and made the lights flicker. It was one of those times where people start obeying their herd instincts, either to watch the hail at the front windows or walk eerily in unison to the back of the store. An employee and I normally wouldn't have talked, but today we were like a couple of passengers on a plane after a scary landing, agreeing it was the worst we'd ever seen.
Mark wished St. Louis was a yuppie city at: 7:52 PM
