This Post Doesn’t Deserve a Title

When I don’t update this blog, I don’t check in on it because it absolutely ruins me to think of hundreds of visitors coming here every day (PS, who are you? I love you, thanks for coming, tell me what to read) and getting nothing except the same old links to my hack writing about how I like children’s books because they are the most appropriate to my attention span so pure. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that my blog still exists and functions when I don’t pay attention to it, but I feel so bad about not improving it and so undeserving of my traffic that sometimes I pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s a similar situation to Peace Corps, when I had no way of exercising, no way to bathe, and no mirror, which led to a convenient mental illusion that my body was a metaphysical object rather than something devolving into a spinal column surrounded by sheep fat.

But that’s a terrible analogy, because the reasons I haven’t updated my blog are much more surmountable and can be summed up as follows.

1) This puppy.

Her name is Luna! Two Saturdays ago, my boyfriend and I got up at 3 AM, drove to a suburb of Dallas, picked up this nugget of fluffy rescue joy, and took her back home so she could sleep in front of a different air conditioner. I’m an anxious, doting mama and every time I consider writing something asinine about how the main character in Ian McEwan’s Saturday clearly wants to fuck his daughter–”Despite my fantasies, this is no child” is the line that really set that theory in stone for me–I look at Luna and decide, incorrectly, that she needs something.

2. The series.

I mean, what a time-suck. A worthy one. But a time-suck nonetheless. I’m not going to say that I’m glad that it’s over, because I was really enjoying a) watching basketball all the time, which I haven’t really done since the Space Jam days, and b) switching my loyalty to first the Bulls and then the Mavs, which–since I moved to Houston in ’94 and naturally used to loathe those teams–gave me a certain transgressive pleasure. It was like having an angry threesome in the room where I used to hook up with my middle school boyfriend. Actually, I was in third grade in ’94, so that analogy is not just bad but also totally foul, please excuse me.

3) I’m writing a book. Not about me or related to me, don’t worry. It’s about a health care company running an amazing clinic in Africa. Turns out this is a lot of work! Turns out when I take tons of notes all day about business practices and international development (which is what this fascinating tome will be about–but actually I swear it’ll be good!) I have a hard time switching to the part of me that wants to sit around reading and kvetching all day. Which, in the long run, is probably a good thing.

4) I spend 75% of my free time just drinking water. This is a fact. It is like 100 degrees in Houston every single day, and one of my major hobbies is–yes this is stupid–hot yoga. (Not Bikram! Bikram is for people who make better to-do lists than I). So literally I drink out of a vase from Ikea and consider setting me and Luna up with an in-home salt lick.

5) I don’t have a good reading list. Again, if you’re reading this, I love you and I need your help! I just finished The Possessed, which I liked a lot, but I’ve been reading so much business nonfiction that I need something seriously good to get me going again. An Atlas of Impossible Longing is on my list, so is A Visit from the Goon Squad (I really hate the cover of this book and it’s keeping me from buying it), but other than that I’ve got nothing except David Foster Wallace titles that I am afraid will depress me. All the titles I see on the best-seller lists look sappy. I just want to read something by a fiction writer who has something new. Help me help me.

Baby I Was Born This Way

Let’s say that all famous literary characters were born in 1985. What would they be doing today? Let’s imagine.

Anne Shirley (of Green Gables) is always cold. She has her own Etsy shop, where she sells flower headpieces and an assortment of wedding “tablescape” items, including her most popular piece, a wooden bluebird with a musical note in its beak. She is still a virgin, but gets aroused when watching The Tudors or reading historical fiction of any kind. During college, she studied abroad in Ireland and it totally changed her life.

Sherlock Holmes was diagnosed with ADD at age seven, but dislikes taking medication and has been trading pills for BJs since middle school. He was recruited by Bain & Company halfway through his freshman year at Columbia. He travels between Sao Paolo and Shanghai for work, and is gender-indiscriminate when seeking the company of an escort.

Humbert Humbert is that pale, greasy guy who always wears inappropriate hats, like a fedora or a tweed newsboy. He clears his web history every day.

Alice in Wonderland is a Phish head who likes to take her shoes off. A quiet girl, she nevertheless possesses remarkable party stamina and quietly orders five drinks minimum every time she goes to brunch.

Rhett Butler de-pledged his fraternity in the middle of hell week and, after pretending to be Rhett Butler the poker player a couple of times, became addicted to playing the game online. He amassed $20,000 that he intended to use to start a jalapeno vodka craft distillery, but the girl he was hooking up with lost the money when she was playing on his computer and didn’t think it was a real game. He has vowed to stay away from girls he meets at Bikram from now on.

Atticus Finch won the “RA of the Year” award for four years in a row. Halfway through 2L at Duke, he took a hiatus and flew to India, where he took residence in an ashram. His blog, http://insearchofpeaceandrighteousness.blogspot.com, has not been updated since January.

Daisy Buchanan lives in her parent’s pied-à-terre in Manhattan and, thanks to her trust fund, has been successfully crawling up the ladder of unpaid art internships for the last three years. Although her stainless steel fridge is plastered with printouts of Gwyneth Paltrow, she has developed an appropriately cynical sense of humor about her lifestyle and is the secret author of “White Girl Problems.”

Nick Adams actually exists. I am sure there’s a guy out there named Nick Adams who acts exactly like Hemingway’s character would. Nick Adams, the real one, works at a family friend’s wind energy company and just broke up with his sweet, laid-back girlfriend because she kept asking him “What are you thinking, right now?”

The Little Prince is a tweaked-out Grindr addict who lives in San Francisco and conducts “space Pilates” classes, where all the equipment is shaped like planetary objects, and each session takes place in a dark room lit only with glowsticks. He is dating Peter Pan.

Nancy Drew just got her real estate license and is worried that her friend Georgia is fooling around with Ned. She goes to the gym every day but totally hates her ankles and has hired a physical trainer just to slim them down. When she’s drunk, she has a tendency to take off running and return with shoplifted candy that she calls “clues.”

Romeo and Juliet were taken straight to the ER after their tragic teenage double suicide attempt. The pair recuperated fully in the UCLA teaching hospital. Saddled with two children, the couple’s most recent fight was over whether to watch American Idol or the Mavs-Thunder game. They stalk their elementary school crushes on Facebook and wonder why they rushed into things so fast.

Lord Voldemort received a Fulbright scholarship in 2007 to study the intersection of voodoo, microfinance, and modern medicine in Haiti. He raped the dog guarding his hostel and hasn’t been seen since.

Never Have I Ever Seen Oprah

Generally, I’m willing to try anything once, stopping short at injectables, carb-free living, and anything that could result in more than five years of jail time. I’m also generally willing to read anything, even things I don’t like, the latter being part of my quest to fully understand Republicans.

But there are some things I can’t bring myself to do and some books I can’t bring myself to read. Here they are, in correspondence.

I have never watched Oprah. Thus I’ve never read Tuesdays with Morrie. One peek in that book at Starbucks was enough to make me feel like I could make fun of it forever.

I have never worn Spanx. Thus I’ve never read Skinny Bitch or He’s Just Not That Into You. Life’s too short for things that make you disappointed in your natural self, which is the one that carefully assesses whether that’s Manchego or Gruyere on the cheese tray.

I have never used an ear candle or a Neti Pot. Thus I’ve never read The Secret.

I have never owned a Burberry scarf. Thus I have never read The Jewish American Princess Handbook.

I have never visited an author’s grave. Thus I’ve never read Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past.

I have never bought a country music CD. Just kidding, I’m from Texas. I bought a Faith Hill CD in fifth grade and listened to it every day. But I will never read Heaven Is for Real.

I have never used a Blackberry. Thus I’ve never read either The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. 

I have never worked or considered work outside of the “creative class.” Thus I’ve never read anything by James Patterson, Danielle Steele, or Nora Roberts.

I have never shopped at Lululemon. Thus I have never read If You Think He’s Cheating… He Probably Is.

Op-Ed 2: Peace Corps Boogaloo

My op-ed in the New York Times has been leading people here (hello everyone!) so I wanted to add some tertiary information to reflect my personal perception of the experience. I won’t deny that I spent plenty of nights just seething with rage at every man I saw, and plenty of days screaming “Fuck Peace Corps” into my hardy third-world Nokia. But neither Kyrgyzstan nor Peace Corps is exclusively comprised of hordes of swarthy rapists and bureaucratic co-conspirators–something that I hope my article conveyed. Despite the never-ending stream of turbulence and cynicism that permeated my anomalous year in Kyrgyzstan, the experience was humbling: dirty, embarrassing, transcendent, grounded in staunch, painful idealism till the end. And maybe more than anything, it was funny!

1) Top Kyrgyz names (transliterated from Cyrillic): Mufftuna, Chewbak, Temirlan (pronounced “Timbaland”), and the 2 million school girls named the equivalent of Moon Angel and Pretty Sun Rain.

2) My students and Kyrgyz counterpart teacher, on the scale of 1 to incredibly inspirational: off the charts. They have been hard at work in the Chykalov “We Love Reading” Library, and I think there’s a waiting list for Russian Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia. May they never cease to pronounce “8″ as “H” and “cake” as “cock.”

3) “She’s Kyrgyz but she’s really good at English.” -Everyone at the bazaar

4) Kyrgyz students’ favorite yoga pose: Warrior 3, inexplicably. Giggles per mixed-gender yoga class: 4000-10000. Best pose translation: “Princess Bird” instead of “Royal Pigeon.” Here is a photo of average Kyrgyz yoga attire and venue (jeans on a glass-studded concrete block).

5) Average # of people in a taxi at any given time: 10-12, fewer if sheep or chickens are also along for the ride. We once saw a live goat get stuffed in a plastic shopping bag and then placed under the seats of a minibus.

6) Best national game: polo with a sheep’s head as the ball.

7) Best Kyrgyz words: “monpussy” for candy and “buttcock” for mud. Also, how cute are my host siblings?

8: Worst part of Peace Corps safety training: the day when they showed us pictures of STDs that included captions with phrases like “ham-colored floor” and “pussy nodules,” the first word of which is a Rorschach test determining which you like more, sex or medicine.

9) One serious: I really don’t think the Peace Corps main office has nearly as much to do with this issue as do the individual country directors and staff. As we all found out in Kyrgyzstan, a bad CD (i.e. one that hasn’t ever been a volunteer) makes for an awful time. A good one is fantastic.

10) Last: cheers to every single person who is still serving in Kyrgyzstan. You are all amazing. I hope I never black out in an orphanage again.

Hyperreality at the Horse Races

To the right is a before-and-after Photoshop of a Campari ad starring Jessica Alba. Here’s a visual illustration of an image becoming a simulacrum. A simulacrum is an image that doesn’t resemble anything in reality, whose intent is not to represent reality but to signify something to the viewer–in this case, that you should buy Campari, that you should live more glamorously, that you or your girlfriend should get a personal trainer and some prescription eyelash serum in order to look more like Jessica Alba.

As Baudrillard maps it out, there are four steps separating images from simulacra. In the first step, the image is a representation of basic reality. It’s important to note that Jessica Alba’s un-retouched original is already a step past this. 

What’s meant here by basic reality? Well, let’s remember that an original image of Jessica Alba on a yacht for a Campari calendar is not a representation of reality: it’s a representation of fantasy, something which only a million dollars, several teams of stylists, and a celebrity-industrial complex could create. Basic reality is this photo: an ordinary teenager in her bedroom surrounded by (and believing in) simulacra of a woman’s body and life. The un-retouched Jessica Alba photo is already at step 2, where the image masks and perverts a basic reality.

Step 3: the image masks the absence of a basic reality. It “plays at being an appearance.” This is the way we’d view this image if we saw it in a magazine. We know it’s a product, we know it’s fake to some degree, so we happily participate in its fantasy-making. We process it only via the things that differentiate it from other simulated images, relating to it by where its features fall on the consumerist ladder (really, a white jumpsuit? or what kind of douche drinks Campari anyway, etc).

Step 4: the image bears no relation to any reality whatever and is its own pure simulacrum. You can see in this image how Jessica Alba’s body and face, already so hot as to be unreal, must be further perfected by the Photoshops before the image is ready to be reproduced a thousand times in a magazine. Simulacra are so common as to be almost unremarkable today, but it’s important to remember that this photo, going up on thinspiration boards everywhere and taped to the refrigerators of the insecure, is (like most images of female celebrities) a copy with no original.

Here’s a more obvious example of a simulacrum, to the right. Riding the wave of the American public’s endless desire for the hyperreal, this girl has been processed into an (already highly falsified) image of an adult beauty queen; she then takes photos that do not represent anything and stars in Toddlers and Tiaras, which is not a reality show as much as it is a hyperreality show. Like all that glorious trash, it represents not the reality of American life but the churning wheel of simulation in which the most outrageously false representation of reality wins.

I read Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality before I came to Charlottesville, where I have been chugging beer 24 hours a day for two weeks. It began at Foxfield, an event that is many things but certainly not real life. Eco, in his book, talks about Disney World: “It’s meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusion of their real childishness.“

And that’s Foxfield for you. It, the Frat Christmas, is one of my favorite days of all time, but in the minds of everyone who goes there to party, it’s hyperreal.  Year after year people make the pilgrimage to Charlottesville with the aim of reproducing the Foxfield tradition, which in itself consists primarily of reproducing a tradition that never quite existed in the way we enact it, and has only the faintest connection to anything equine.

A sidenote: in the above photo of my college roommates, one of us has been expertly Photoshopped in so we can pretend she was there this year. A copy with no original. Gloriously hyperreal!

The hyperreality of Foxfield is its biggest draw. It is stuffed full of simulacra; it itself is a simulation involving all four of Baudrillard’s steps. You begin on Foxfield morning looking shitty and feeling terrible from the night before, you make yourself acceptable-looking to mask the reality and begin participating in the reproduction of the Foxfield imaginary; you start drinking at 9 AM to ease your hangover. You arrive at the grounds and participate in this adult playspace where everyone is cute, everything is awesome, all your friends are there in the same place and you revel in this mix of trash and class unique to highly fabricated events: say, shotgunning beers in a sundress and floppy hat on the top of a pickup. With all your friends. And you are too drunk to remember the particulars, so you need the photos to make this hyperreality seem like real life. As Eco says about Disney World: “There, you here we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it.”

I have issues with the ubiquity of simulacra in today’s world, and in some very minor ways I try to stay away from it: my boyfriend and I recently watched TV on a TV for the second time this year and our mutual extreme reaction leads me to believe that we’re going to be Luddite cranks before 30. But when TLC’s current lineup includes Sister Wives, Pawn Queens, Police Women of Broward County, Spouse vs. House, Extreme Couponing, Hoarding: Buried Alive, and Mother Knows Sex–how can we live? What’s wrong with us, America?

It’s impossible to escape, even when there’s a surface movement that attempts to. “Farm-to-table” dining: yuppie hyperreal. Volunteerism and voluntourism, temporary, and functioning so often with the end goal of photos and resumes: well-meaning hyperreal. You can try to live correctly, but you can’t help but take it with you.

So the answer is Foxfield, the best kind of hyperreality: the kind that is impossible to take seriously. If, as Eco says, hyperreality creates life as “a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing,” you will find me parked in the Foxfield aisle of the virtual marketplace until it becomes truly embarrassing. See you all at the corn dog stand.

Reading Rainbow: A Tuesday Roundup

I haven’t posted in awhile because work has had me just glued to my desk just kidding I’m freelance and work in my pajamas the couch, where I’ve been trying to craft nuanced, sparkling prose for the people who have kindly taken a chance on commissioning me play as many rounds of Puppy Showdown as I can. I’ve also been catching up on all of the buzzy books from last year, so reviews of Room by Emma Donoghue, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot are forthcoming; other recent reads include Angela’s Ashes, Travels in Hyper-Reality by Umberto Eco and… the Anne of Green Gables books. Reviews will come as soon once someone finds a way to block Puppy Showdown on my computer.

But in the meantime, there’s been a wealth of sweet book-related things floating around the Internet–and here are some of the best ones.

• Remember those Scholastic book club mailers? Here’s a collection of them. I miss ordering books via tiny shitty pieces of paper and then coming into class one day to find a shrink-wrapped bundle of Encyclopedia Browns on my desk.

• This ad campaign (left) for a Lithuanian bookstore is awesome (thanks David!). Reminds me of this more extensive project.

• Penguin releases gorgeous, hand-sewn book covers for Black Beauty, Emma, and The Secret Garden. Actually if you buy them they’ll just be “sculpt-embossed” to mimic the original, but, you know, that’s the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

• Insulted By Authors, a project where this guy Bill Ryan who goes to a lot of book signings asks authors to insult him instead of just doing the “Best wishes -scrawl” thing. The link takes you to my favorite by Amy Sedaris, who wrote “I’d call you a cunt but you lack the warmth and depth.”

• The Glamour magazine cookbook is titled: 100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know: Engagement Chicken and 99 Other Fabulous Recipes to Get You Everything You Want in Life. “Engagement chicken” is this roast chicken that apparently has the magical effect of making your boyfriend propose. The back cover blurb features a quote from Ina Garten: “That’s the best reason I ever heard of to make a roast chicken.” I’d definitely say the worst, but–different strokes. The recipe book features gems such as “Get Skinny Dip,” “Prove to Mom You’re Not Going to Starve Meat Loaf,” “I’ll Take Care of You Mashed Potatoes,” “Hook Him Apple Pie,” and “Impress His Family Cake.” I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out if that list of recipes was a parody, but it’s not. In conclusion, Glamour markets extremely well to women who get depressed when their friends lose weight or get engaged, but they’re not quite on track with my idea of “Everything You Want in Life” or they’d have included “No One Fucking Cares if You Eat This Whole Thing of Pasta Pasta” and “I’m Hungover and Want to Pass Out Grilled Mac & Cheese + Brisket Sandwich.” The latter is real and it’s better than you could ever imagine.

• And the final link: a website devoted to bookshelf porn (thanks Sean!). I’m a huge hypocrite because if there was a magical recipe to make my boyfriend build me one of these, I’d be in so fast.

Bossypants, by Tina Fey

I’m not big on role models, but I suspect that I’m highly typical among outspoken females in counting Tina Fey as one of mine (if you’re curious, the complete list includes Maeby Funke, Amanda Blank at 4:04 of that song, and… cannot think of any more). I’ve been a big-time fan of Miz Fey’s ever since I bought this fat history of SNL in 2002, and even more so since I found out that she was part of the lovingly, painfully nerd-face theater group I was lucky enough to partake in at UVA. So obviously I pre-ordered her book and signed up for Amazon Prime just to get the free two-day shipping so that this book could arrive yesterday and I could spend an unsatisfyingly short three hours in bed devouring it. I laughed out loud in an empty room about twenty times. Bossypants is funny, perceptive, and perfectly self-deprecating–exactly what you’d expect from one of the few current female celebrities famous for being talented rather than going to the gym a lot. Some critics have been complaining that it’s not quite a memoir and that it lacks some expected juicily emotional depth, but to me that’s why this book was so enjoyable: it’s about work, it’s not gratuitous, it’s there to tell you the things about Tina Fey’s life that are 1) funny and 2) actually interesting, and it’s not there for anything else.

Slate called Tina Fey’s attitude “tough girl feminism“–the kind where someone yells “Nice tits” and you yell back “Suck my dick”–and this is so agreeable to my mode of operation that I’m having a hard time imagining what else you’d do in that situation. As Mick Foley said on Fox News, the world may get an F with women, but we’re getting a C-minus and bragging about it; what else can you do with that other than take no shit and use the language of the shitters? Fey talks about being at a seminar with 200 women who were all asked to pinpoint the moment where they first “knew they were a woman.” Nearly all of them talked about the first time they were harassed, which rings true to the time I was at evangelical Baptist camp when I was eleven and some thirteen-year-old suggested I stick whatever I was holding “in my pussy.” On a semi-related note, I’m not sure too many men would buy this book, because it’s a lot more frankly feminist than everything else that will sell over 10,000 copies, but they should, because it’s funny. And anyway if Tina Fey’s very reasonable gender-equality slant is too much, then we really in trouble.

Some highlights from Bossypants:

On how beauty ideals have diversified admirably since the 70′s, with JLo bringing the butt and Beyonce the “leg meat”: “And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.”

Responding to an Internet bodybuilding forum where someone posted “I’d stick it in her tail pipe”: “Thank you so much for your interest! Whether you meant it in a sexual way or merely as an act of aggression, I am grateful. As a ‘woman of a certain age’ in this business, I feel incredibly lucky to still be ‘catching your eye’ ‘with my anus.’ You keep me relevant!”

About this UVA douche bag who invites her on a mountain hike just to talk to her about another girl the whole way: “He had to stop and smile at the adorableness of this–Gretchen had asked him to tear the piece of Trident in half because it was too big for her. ‘Can you believe that?’ he marveled. A girl so feminine and perfect that half a piece of Trident was the most she could handle. I tried to process what this meant for my evening. ‘So… you and I will not be dry humping, then?’… As I crawled into my bottom bunk, I thought about how I had climbed Old Rag. I thought about Gretchen, the girl who could only accommodate half a piece of gum. ‘I hope you marry her,’ I imagined saying to HRW, ‘and I hope she turns out to have a cavernous vagina.”