Please, don’t let this feeling end.
Last summer I was sitting outside in my old backyard in the gentle, purply-pink twilit air, weaving a wildflower garland and drinking a tall glass of lemonade with my friend Clara. The evening was sweet, our futures felt limitless and I was rambling to her all about applying to MFA programs the coming winter. Clara said to me, “Okay, but don’t get all stressed.” I looked at her, smiled and threw another length of garland over her pretty, pretty head, laughing. She sighed. “No, you will get all stressed, but don’t completely lose your mind, okay?”

I thought: How bad could it be? Once I get the business of recommendations and transcripts and GRE testing out of the way, I revise some of my actually-good writing and make it the shiniest it can be and send it in to these places along with some paperwork, right?

But it’s December now, and I think I’m going crazy. I am, however, enjoying it, in part. I am no longer carefree and outdoorsy; instead I spent night after night cocooned in my dimly-lit, poorly heated bedroom with the glare of my laptop and my own words, my lights to the future. Instead of living now, I am bent on the months and years ahead. I am writing my way there. And I like having this crazy-making project. I like the challenge of writing 30 pages for this school, 50 pages for that one; I yawn and stretch and Buddy Holly Dangercat looks up from where he’s perched behind my deskchair and yells at me. I wander to the kitchen in my flannel pajamas and bear slippers for a cup of tea. It’s sleeting outside and Buddy Holly follows, slinking himself about my legs and just continuing to yell on and on, so I scoop him up and tell him about the future I’m crafting for the both of us: a move to a new town, two years of writing ahead and no one at the helm of this but me and me.

That would be how it is, if it weren’t for the other people involved, that is. That’s where it begins to feel like I’m being genuinely tested. This is where I begin to understand the insane-gleam in the eyes of others I’ve spoken with while they were going through this same process, in years past. Because if it were just up to me, I would be rocking this thing. Instead, it’s also ETS, the testing system in charge of the GRE, an exam a few of the schools I’ve applied to require. The testing end of it is just fine, but the score-reporting department? where there’s actually like, an office with people? That part’s run by orangutans or some other very un-cute primate. Some un-cute primate with creepy anti-social tendencies.

Sample phone-call between Alice and ETS:
Alice: Yeah, hi. I got a letter from Wainscoting College telling me that they still haven’t received my GRE scores. And I actually mailed a score-report request to ETS a month ago, so I’m just calling to see what happened.
Phone operator enslaved by evil monkey: Social?
Alice: What? Oh. 999-9999-99.
Phone operator enslaved by evil monkey: Okay hold on.
Alice: [Waits. Is standing outside of office in the cold on cellphone because her school-applying process, which takes up Every Single Spare Second outside of work, is not known to her colleagues at Small Pub’. Paces ol’ crappy driveway.]
Phone operator enslaved by evil monkey: Ma’am?
Alice: Yes? [Stops pacing.]
Phone operator enslaved by evil monkey: Please hold.
Alice: Oh, okay. [Resumes pacing. 20 seconds pass. Sighs.]
Phone operator enslaved by evil monkey: Ma’am?
Alice: Yes? [As paces.]
Phone operator enslaved by evil monkey: Sorry for the hold. They were throwing their excrement at me again. Anyway, we shows no record of having received a score request from you.
Alice: [Stops pacing.]But, um, that’s really weird because I mailed a score request, weeks ago.
Phone operator enslaved by evil monkey: [Pauses.] Sorry. You can fax in a request, and we’ll start processing it now.
Alice: [Sighs.] Okay. What’s the number?...

So I fax the request all on-the-sly-like from my office fax machine, wondering if ETS’ll remove one of the charges once my original mailed request gets found beneath the moldy old banana peels or bamboo shoots under Head Monkey’s desk and is processed accidentally, next April.

A half-hour later, I call back to ask if they received the fax. The enslaved operator puts me on hold again because they keep yanking at her hair and then running away while screeching at the tops of their lungs. “Goddamn it,” she mutters and finally asks me which number I faxed the new request to. I tell her and she says, “Well, that’s all the way across the building, so I can’t tell you if it got here or not.” And she actually tells me to call back *the next day,* because by then, they’ll have it on file, if it arrived.

Which I do and am then told by a third enslaved operator, the Least Sympathetic of All, that they received it, and it will take them APPROXIMATELY 20 DAYS to process before they can mail my scores anywhere. The deadline for Wainscoting College is like, totally in five days. Which I tell him, in a manner that I’m sure comes across as just ever-so-seeeee-lightly petulant and sniveling. And he responds, “Well, we can’t do anything about that,” in a way that makes it crystal clear he’s looking at the clock on the wall over the banana tree across from his cube and thinking, I-get-out-of-this monkey-ruled-hellhole-in-15-minutes. Which I would be, too. But then I went and got angry, anyway, in that way that you do when you just start talking and you can actually feel your voice spiraling out of control in perfect accord with your emotions. Like, if they were a figure-skating couple, your voice and your feelings, they just completed the most beautiful creepily-identical tandem triple-lutzes, ever, and then made identical smashing leaps straight into the glass window and got blinded for life in the exact same way. That’s how it was: this dawning clarity of just how goddamned S.O.L. I was. Which I added at the end of my crazy-person diatribe, in a really cool and likeable way before hanging up like a big old wanker: “Well, I guess I’m just totally S.O.L., aren’t I?” Click. That was so freaking awesome of me.

On the whole, this process is really helping me get out in the world and be a real woman.

More Cultural Corner, Just quickly.

Gasp-!
Oh, Peter Jackson, you hold me safely in your directorial palm. I am terrified, grossed out, but then –wait! – I’m laughing my arse off, crying like a damn baby through the last 45 minutes of your new great-big-sprawling adventure movie. Safe, and not, like Naomi Watts in the hand of the beast.

Movies are ugly when no one really fights (for them).
You have spoiled me for adventure movies. I have to admit I was looking forward to seeing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe more than King Kong, since I read those Narnia books eleven or twelve or three-hundred times between the ages of nine and 11. I was one of those overwrought youngsters who got so involved in the saga, I started looking for fricking Narnia both in closets and in the company of bratty cousins. (Hah! A Voyage of the Dawn Treader joke! I slay me.) See, it should have been easy to entertain the likes of me with Lion/Witch/Wardrobe; I came to the theater already under its spell – and I’m not even a Christian.

People who liked the movie point out that it was true to the C.S. Lewis book. True, but that’s about…it. A scene that required Lucy to walk from Point A to Point B did just that and nothing more. No love and care dedicated to camera shots or character development. About halfway through the movie, it had the kids still arguing with one another about whether to stay in Narnia or go back home to England; by that point in the book, their minds had been made up; they were dedicated to the quest. The movie should have taken that cue and held to this; it would have made it easier to make the audience care, too.
The bummer here is that Lewis gave the moviemakers so very much to work with. But the computerized animals looked chintzy. The character development was nil. Narnia and its visitors just didn’t feel real.

Ruined.
And this is all the fault of Peter Jackson, of course. With Lord of the Rings, he scrimped on nothing. Did you know that every last set-piece for those flicks is the genuine article? Handcrafted swords, pipes, clothing, archetecture, down to the butter-churn in the corner of Bilbo’s damn house. And the scenes were shot like that, too. Lovingly. Every moment lingered over and cared for. Although Lion/Witch/Wardrobe was, well, okay (the kids were certainly good actors), it failed on this count. It left Me-as-Viewer feeling cold because it looked like a kids’ movie, not a world. It did not bring to the viewing experience, what those beautiful, precious books had brought to my mind. (And I’m actually re-reading those books now. While yes, they *are* kids’ books, they hold up, too; they paint amazing pictures.)

And then there’s Kong. Sure, the first twenty minutes or so are kind of goofy. Jackson feels a bit out of his element with the scene of the heroine who’s told by a fellow vaudeville actor/father-figure that she mustn’t, mustn’t give up on her dream, no matter how hopeless, no matter how faaaar… Blah blah and blah. Let’s get to the adventure.

And we do. From the moment the movie’s little boat leaves New York with us inside, we are utterly caught up; beguiled; all that. I found myself sprawled across two theater seats, comfily munching popcorn, flinching at all the right scary parts, laughing in relief and then feeling so, so much for the best animated character ever to hit the screens: the giant ape – whom, to his credit, Jackson did not overly anthropomorphize.

Kong is so action- and drama- packed, I felt wrung out and spent when it was through. And that’s the way Jackson works: his action sequences are just a little too long; they exhaust you. His icky creatures are just a little too repugnant for simple mindless entertainment. His situations are just a little too wrenching to let you just observe and think about tomorrow’s dentist appointment. Remember the battle in Fellowship of the Ring that finally, finally ends with the showdown between Gandalf and the Balrog on the Bridge at Khazad Dum? Remember, oh, the plot of Heavenly Creatures?

Maybe that’s just what I needed now, having gone this entire year without having seen a single movie in the theaters I’ve cared much for. I was ready for passion.

Lively, Lively Rawk Tawk
Back when I first started going to a lot o’ rock shows here in Atlanta, I was put off by the large numbers of people who seemed to have paid fifteen dollars just for the express purpose of talking as loudly as possible over the bands who were playing. In recent months, I’ve noticed a strange trend in the opposite direction: audience members who are utterly zealous about the music they’ve come to see, like, Way out of proportion with what’s actually coming out of the instruments up on stage. I talked about this with a friend who lives in Chicago, and he says he’s noticed the same thing up there, of late. While it could mean that he and I are just getting to be all curmudgeonly in our advanced years, I doubt it: He’s the one I went to see Sleater-Kinney with a couple years ago, who out-danced and out-jumped-around all the sighing ladies around us. And me, I’m a dancer, too. I’m a clapper and a “YAY!”-er. In a polite way, though: I’m very golden-rule-conscious when it comes to being an audience member. Anyway.

This new trend spooks me. The first time I really noticed it was when I went to see Pitchfork Internetsy Phenom, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, a couple months ago. I like this band lots; they’re bitter and biting and peppy. They’re catchy and sad and smart. All this.

And here, for you, is what happened at their Atlanta show, direct from the report I sent to said Chicago-friend, that very night:


“*Just* got back from that sold-out show full of twenty-one year old screaming, jumping kids and five confused-looking introverts up on stage. You just get the feeling the last bands any of the musicians were in did Not receive this sort of attention. Because you also get the feeling the last bands they were in were not powery pop. It was completely weird.

I mean, there was the guy, Mr. Singing Guy, who reminded me rather of John Linnell (from They Might Be Giants), snearing his bitter, clever, funny lyrics into the mic, and no matter what those lyrics might've been, if the drummer backed it up with a tha-THUMP, tha-THUMP, everyone was a-jumpin' and a-dancin' and a-doing that weird pointing-thing audience members sometimes do (though I've only Ever seen guys do this.) You know, that, point-at-the-singer-as-he-sings thing. Which I've never understood.

It was a well-performed show, and again: I like this band. And what's funny is if it had been at all empty in The Earl or if no one had been showing them proper attention, I'm sure *I* would have been all jumpy-dancey (though not finger-pointy). But I tell you: It was as if the room had reached the Maximum Enthusiasm it could possibly take. I was just physically unable to add any more without something real, real bad happening.

And again: Yes. Like the band. But they're not, how you say, the most challenging, breathtaking music ever to hit one’s ears. Even if I had been both jumpy and dancey, it would Not have been with the same implied message of "YOU. ARE. THE BEST. BAND. EV. ER!!! T.L.A.! XOXO!!" It would have been more like, "Hey, I'm having fun out here and totally getting you. This is fun."

It was, again, lord, just weird. Because people Were acting like this band is the Ultimate Shit. And they were just flies, you know?”


So I wrote off the experience of that particular show, as a phenomenon limited to poppy bands like Clap Your Hands… And then I went to see Calexico and Iron & Wine play at the Variety last Friday.

I’ll admit, I went mainly for Calexico, because their albums hang out with Sleater-Kinney’s in the beautiful sunlit glades and tranquil pools of the Music of my Heart. Although I am extraordinarily fond of Iron & Wine’s low-fi album that all seems to be about one specific wrenching experience of heartbreak- (The Creek Drank the Cradle), I haven’t liked anything else they’ve done. So, before I start alienating all the world with this snotty record-store talk, let me return to the strangeness.

The show was sold out. We stood up front and Calexico played first. Then it started to get more crowded, as it will do before a headlining act comes on. But *really* crowded. No real movement possible-crowded. So crowded I had to keep reminding myself we really weren’t *that* far away from the emergency exit. That I’d paid money for this because gosh darn it, it was fun. And then the guy from Iron & Wine comes out and starts his pretty singing and there’s this wave of squealing from the people around me. Like JohnPaulGeorgeRingo squealing. The ladies and mens just couldn’t contain themselves, it seems, at the sight of Joe Iron&Wine or whatever his name is, what with his Indie™ scarf placed *just* *so* about his neck and his Beard(also ™)-which is when I realized that it’s his face that’s painted on the cover of every single Iron & Wine album. Which gave me the extreme reservations, I will say. I mean: his FACE. Cheese ‘n crackers.

And then they started playing. And it was pretty and boring and unchallenging and we left about five songs in while everyone around us yelled out at every harmony, their eyes all lit up and liquid.


This does not prove your point, Alice,
you say. And looking over the way I’ve tried to get it across here, I see you’re right. I just don’t understand the appeal of Iron & Wine. Overall, I prefer Low. Overall, I prefer Abba.

Besides: I did not mention that two of the people who shoved up next to us after Calexico’s woefully short set were a couple of about 20 who had unnaturally loud voices. And since they were plastered, they used those voices to declare their love—wait, no actually, I think it was “wuv”-- to each other for the ten minutes I had to stand there, pressed into the boy’s left thigh. The girl, she had this tinny, tinny like, Broadway musical speaking voice. I hated them silently and hard and then transferred no small amount of that hatred to the band.

All in all, though, I still just don’t get why the show sold out, and obviously sold out on the appeal of Iron & Wine. And why everyone gets so fricking excited over those songs when there’s worlds’ better, comparable music out there. Then again, I’m just a snotty old curmudgeonhead.

My mother emailed this to me.

"The ship was well stocked with meat and drink and we sailed north with scarcely a care for many a month. When the wind picked up it was only a few of us who had any sense of foreboding. The first mate told the captain that he didn’t like the sharp whip in the breeze, but the captain was insulted by his impertinence and replaced him with an obedient counselor. When the sky grew gray, the second mate renewed the plaint but the captain took offense at his lack of deference and replaced him with a minion who pointed to the silver lining of the clouds. When the waves grew high and we saw icebergs nigh, a few of us went to the captain and expressed the burden of our misgivings. The captain ordered full ahead an threw us in the brig. Later that night we heard the awful sound of the splintering hull. O Captain, my Captain! We called. But the captain, by now in a well-appointed lifeboat that had miraculously appeared, rowed nimbly toward the horizon, whilst reproaching us for failing to pray hard enough. And that is how I and my poor shipmates were Left Behind to drown."


Nearer, My God to Thee
Patricia J. Williams
The Nation Nov. 7, 2005

Song of the Week
Other blogs do this, right? Like, the real, high-tech-eroo sort? Because we’re usually more web-journal-y than web-loggy, ‘round here. Which, I know, is so ’99.

Anyway, so my friend Marshall and I were sitting around talking about our favorite Abba song, not as one of those so-awful-it's-great-but-actually-we're-mocking-it things, but because we’re That Comfortable around each other: We can just talk about our favorite Abba tune without air-quotes or any of the other communicative trademarks of facetiousness. So, Marshall’s like,
“I always liked ‘Take a Chance on Me.’” And I’m like,
“Yeah! My Dad always used to blast that in his car when he was feeling saucy and cool. But-” I say. “My favorite Abba song isn’t even on the Greatest Hits cd. What’s that about??” And Marshall’s nodding and pointing, his mouth full of the yummy Indian chickpea stuff he’s made for supper.
“M’nthbbbber!” he says. But I understand him. Because we have the telepathy of true friendship. And it turns out that as youngins dancing around our respective living rooms, we each grooved the hardest to the Abba song, “Eagle.” Which I don’t have here for you, because I'm not that high tech, but you can find it if you look, oh, somewhere. As Marshall pointed out, it’s the perfect blend of synthesizer, harmonies and ‘70s quasi-native American spirituality- complete with Theme (The Mighty Eagle) and Flute Part.

Doesn’t this make you want to go out and listen to this song right this minute??!

And then he found it and we sat and listened and had a Moment -- in separate rooms, of course. It was the mutually respectful thing.

I guess that ‘graph back there included some of the ol' facetiousness, right? But you know any irony here to be a total ruse, since you also know I’m listening to the song Right now. Because it’s where? In my I-Tunes library. And there it will stay.

Ann Patchett, Square Corners and Me
Just finished Truth and Beauty, by Ann Patchett. Wonderful. Patchett’s prose are quite simple and so is the parallel she draws in this book about her relationship with a close friend: She is the ant, her friend Lucy, the grasshopper, a’la the familiar fable.

As I sit here tonight, at home on a Friday, trying to add 25 more pages to my MFA manuscript for Pitt, I think of this, of Ann Patchett, the successful writer who is also the ant. I imagine her seated before her Remington: line after line, page (ding!) after page, day after day, neat piles. (How did people do this when they had only typewriters??) I am not her; nor am I Lucy, the brilliant, tragic genius who only knew for absolute certainty that she was ugly but whose writing (according to Ann) was all poetry. I fall somewhere between. I am not crazybrilliant; I don’t know if I can be constant, either. I am not suicidal, though occasionally depressed.

What I do know is that I am always doing this. Comparing. Putting it that baldly makes it look base or hopelessly insecure, but that’s not how I mean it; that’s not how I experience it. I mean simply, that that’s what all of my perception, and thus, my writing, is: Oh, your experience is different from mine because of this and that fact; really? How is that? Tell me the whys and hows. And let me tell you mine.

I think: I am not like those ladies I worked for at those dreary two months at the Events Production firm. Not at all. And I’ll make that feel good by writing Fish so far, far Out of Water tales. Because, I think, even if no one sees what I write or scrawl, I’m still somehow talking to a someone who exists, (why? Because he or she must. Because I write to him, to her, they must. An implied audience is still an audience) who is also not like them, but like me. The uncomfortable feelings of dissimilarity are transformed into charming little tales.

Or, another type of story: In this way, I am not like one sister or the other, though I am like this one in that way. And look, she’s like me, look at what she does/says. I am like my father in These ways; this, I have always known. I am like my mother in these other ways, I am just learning. I rejoice to find I am like this friend in this way, or that I am not like that friend that way, because we can learn from one another. I am not like this ex-boyfriend in this crucial way; I am not like this current whatever-he-is in this crucial way. And I find a thousand metaphors to describe these likenesses and differences. And sometimes I experience times when I feel a panic that no one is like me at all, in all the key respects. That I have only myself to live with here, in my head. But we must live in some sort of hope, right? And for me, this hope is acted out by writing, by trying to express how this and this and this is for me; maybe it’s like this for you, too? Maybe you, whoever you are, whether you’re no one at all or my sister or just my own comfort at seeing these words on the page, maybe together, in this way, we can find something sort of like closeness. I long for closeness. I tire of the feel of square corners bumping against smooth surfaces.