Quietly Judging
More of me:
  • Home
  • Publications
  • Bio
  • Contact
  • Yesteryear Blog
  • A Few of My Favorite Things

pets

5/12/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
Dogs may have good instincts but not for interior decorating. Cat refused to be photographed in outrage, but can you spot her litter box and food bowl?
I’m not a cat person or a dog person. I’m more of Tamagotchi guy. As a teenager, I also had a Furby, but it became too high-maintenance.

I marvel at the existence of pets. What makes people want them? I ask in earnest, because the answers I’ve heard so far are not satisfactory. Companionship. Unconditional love. But why would you want a companion whose poop you have to clean up? What’s the value of universally available affection?

I’m not contemptuous of pet owners but in awe of them. Many I know are smart and sociable, more so than the general public. Clearly, their devotion to a Dandie Dinmont Terrier or whatever cannot be attributed idiocy or insecurity.

A former roommate exemplifies almost everything that makes me incredulous about pet ownership. She’s a jolly good fellow, only female. She shared a two-bedroom apartment with two people and two pets, both hers. She’s been clinically diagnosed with insomnia, and sometimes her cat, hungry for a midnight snack, would wake her up. She lived in New York City on a job that paid respectably but not fabulously. Last year her dog (adopted from a rescue shelter) needed $1500 in medical treatment, enough to make her cry and consider giving him up. She didn’t. Instead, she continued to walk him through a mercilessly snowy winter.

Why?


0 Comments

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

4/12/2012

2 Comments

 
Picture
More like a montage. Consider this book a less artful counterpart to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. Or a lumbering primogenitor. The two novels were published only four years apart (Portrait in 1916 and Paradise in 1920), but they seem to have been written on different planets or at least by different species. Whereas Fitzgerald coasted from one genre to another (prose, drama, epistle, poetry) and sometimes back again, Joyce careens through them on a trajectory that is at best jarring and at worst arbitrary.

This lack of cohesion reflects the aesthetic ideology of 
Portrait. The novel tries to represent experience as it’s lived: a series of sensory impressions, thoughts, and memories—sometimes flowing smoothly, sometimes knocking into one another. The readers too ricochet from thought to reality and back again until eventually they begin to ask, “What’s the difference? What is reality, after all, but a perception of it?”


2 Comments

a painting

11/6/2011

2 Comments

 
Picture
Edgar Degas, Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub, 1885
This painting turns its back—in more ways than one—on the conventions of Western art. Degas refrains from flaunting the female body with the frontal view popular in nudes from Titian to Manet. Instead, this woman bends over and slightly away from the spectator, her face invisible. The sense of anonymity is reinforced by the commonplace objects in the painting: a washbasin, a pitcher, a towel. The message is clear—we are not observing Diana at her bath, but she could be pretty much anyone else. Such unglamorous realism, accentuated by the bather’s awkward pose, dissolves the distance between viewer and viewed. In this image, life and art are almost touching.
2 Comments

9/11/11

9/11/2011

1 Comment

 
Picture
As Rent and high school show choirs across the country ask, how do you measure the life of a woman or a man? The most accurate answer may be the most boring: in decades. Sorry, Joanne.

The distance between now and 2001 is so extreme that it seems less temporal than spatial. Not so much another era as an alternate dimension. The disparity applies to me as an individual and to my country. One of my biggest concerns Back Then was doing my hair, an extravagant routine that typically involved some combination of shampooing, conditioning, soaping, gelling, moussing, spraying, combing, brushing, mussing, and drying by speedwalking down the hallway. I can’t say what the U.S.’s biggest concerns were, because I paid almost no attention to politics.

But now? The unemployment rate wakes me up at night. I sign political petitions and email my Congresspeople. I typically listen to NPR multiple times a day and top forty music once or twice a week. Back Then it was the other way around.

Now the U.S. is weaker, but I am stronger. I am wiser, and my country is getting there.


1 Comment

the almost beautiful

7/24/2011

1 Comment

 
Picture
Picture
These people are nature’s A minuses. One or two flaws deny them physical perfection. A gap between their top front           teeth, chimpanzeesque ears, a big nose, small breasts, thinning hair, diminutive height, or—the possibilities are infinite. The anomaly explodes like a bomb among the otherwise impeccable features.

Aren’t these people at least as intriguing as Zac Efrons and Penelope Cruzes? They can’t coast through life on their looks, so they’re obliged to develop other components of themselves. Do they do so resentfully or gratefully? Or are they “sorry-grateful, regretful-happy?"

Their lot is not tragedy—that’s the Elephant Man’s—but rueful comedy.



1 Comment

loneliness

4/29/2011

1 Comment

 
The first thing you should know about this post is that I’m writing it on a Friday night. If that doesn’t qualify me as an authority on the topic, I don’t know what would, except maybe another entry Saturday night.

Loneliness isn’t always piteous. Sometimes it's consensual. Bookworms know its succulence, as do monks, painters, and anyone who likes long walks. Other times it’s worse than piteous. Extended time alone sharpens self-awareness, and if you don’t like your self—or any of its component parts—agonies of insufficiency will wrack you, perhaps to the point of despair. Alone, you judge without a basis for comparison. Reference points dim and disappear. Yeah, your menial job and history of dead-end relationships make you doubt the possibility of anything better, but communicating with others can put your plight in perspective. One of the most useful functions of a friend is to remind you that your predicaments are not unique. They also remind you, some by personal example, that beneficial change really happens.

The less mediated the communication, the better. Instant messaging is unignorably mechanical. Phones and Skype bring people closer but not exactly together. Face-to-face conversation stands head and shoulders above other options, especially now. In this digitized world, so much has become remote, including many relationships. The fact that you can unite apart doesn’t mean that you should.

1 Comment

a sonnet

2/5/2011

0 Comments

 
"I will put Chaos into fourteen lines" - Edna St. Vincent Millay

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon --- his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines                                    5
Of this sweet order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:                                                10
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.

The binary construction of word and deed—words and actions—is embedded in our cultural consciousness. Right? Thinkers and writers since at least Thucydides have yoked the two ideas as a pair, implying a difference between the two, if not a contrast. What happens when that distinction collapses? One answer is this sonnet.

Here words are actions. The speaker states her goal—putting Chaos into fourteen lines—and accomplishes that goal by means of her statement. The poem’s closing line is also an enclosure, imprisoning Chaos within the 
structure of a sonnet. Of all the limitations placed on “his essence and amorphous shape,” meter restricts him most. As a prescribed quantity (i.e., iambic pentameter), it acts as a boundary of content. Five even steps allowed per line: no more. Chaos’s “strict confines” are a verbal room of five by fourteen square feet. While other structural features such as rhyme, punctuation, and capitalization also impose order, none exercise as much control as meter.

Need I address the significance of this poem/incarceration for our own times? Probably. This sonnet offers hope to those reeling from the Great Recession—hours and years of duress if ever there were any. These lines illustrate the capacity of art to control and conquer pandemonium. The victory is not final, but it is encouraging. Art can make us good.

0 Comments

    About

    Not my real blog, just a few samples from it. For the pièce de résistance, go here.

    Archives

    May 2012
    April 2012
    November 2011
    September 2011
    July 2011
    April 2011
    February 2011

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.