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October 27, 2001
Detritus: What's Shakin'?
No, seriously -- would someone tell me please? We seem to have had an earthquake here in New York again, at about quarter to two this morning. Either that or they finally blew something else up. I can't stand it. This is the worst possible place to be in the case of an earthquake. All these bricks. I'm reminded of what the Whittier quake did to the quote from D.E. Lawrence in Old Town Pasadena. Not only that, but the gaddam news outlets don't get on the quake report as quickly as the good old L.A. press do.
Update as of 10/27, 1:10 pm: Mom said she heard about the quake on the radio this morning, so that confirms. Oddly, I've looked to the US Geological Survey's New York seismology site, and they're reporting that it happened at 5:42 am... Either they're reporting from another time zone (don't know which that would be...) or I slept through another quake, which is really alarming.
* * *
In other disaster news, I was right about the air quality downtown. They're finally admitting it's not safe to breathe; the Daily News broke the story today. Mind you, the EPA's website still says nothing about unsafe conditions. My boss finally showed indications of reconsidering her search for a new office further downtown. I'm mad that she didn't listen to me.
Something is very, very not right about all this. Cancer, I tell you.
* * *
Those days are over, those days of mailable art are over... I was going over Red Cross materials today and found, on page five of their brochure on anthrax (that's a .pdf, you'll need Acrobat to view it), an updated list of things to watch for in a suspicious package -- leakage, lumpiness, lack of return address, etc. These guidelines, thanks to the Unabomber, have been around for years, posted around my dad's office at Caltech and other targets, and I've always proudly pointed out that Robert and I have violated almost every recommendation known to man and still never lost one of our elaborate packages in the mail. Robert sent me a package that leaked butter, and later, one that dripped white powder... I still have no idea how they made it through, even some eleven years ago; they could well have checked them out for drug smuggling; and I would hope the Feds would feel suitably cowed when the white powder turned out to be dish detergent... but no more, no more communications creativity or virtuosity anymore, no surprises with mysteriously omitted return addresses.
this ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no foolin' around.
* * *
On a much lighter note, I had what may be the single most embarassing and revolting experience of my swing dance career tonight... I'm doing Lindy with this good-looking short Black dude; he's spinning me a lot; and in the middle of one of these spins, the bandaid on the shuto edge of my hand LEAPS OUT and GRABS HIM and TRANSFERS ITSELF TO HIS HAND. Faux pas of the caliber of those "Ah mah gawd I was SOOOOOO embarassed!" columns they have in girly magazines. I can only be thankful the papercut underneath it was healed enough that I didn't BLEED on him too.
* * *
Reading a lined notebook page over the shoulder of the guy next to me on the subway home:
ALDHEMAR
ALDHEMAR
ALDHEMAR (written first in an exemplary hand, then twice in a shaky one)
Puebla, Mexico (same handwriting)
Then, in accomplished script:
How much does it cost to go there?
and
Send him back home!
Posted by me at 2:58 AM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2001
My CCS Div I, Continued: Sociolinguistics of Like
My boss Abby asks me today if I'm a Valley Girl. Yes, I say, and then reconsider, and say No.
There are reasons to say Yes, most of them simply linguistic. A former Humboldt County-area boyfriend of mine, visiting my hometown for the first time, remarked with alarm that I turned into a Valley Girl when I returned from college. I do lapse into "like"ness, and my speech does speed up, when I get back to the Land of Smog. I'd like to note, however, that I know kids from Jersey who sound more like your stereotypical Valley Girl than anyone I knew back in Pasadena, and anyone who's paying attention will notice that kids in the Bronx and rural Maine now say "like" as much as anyone else; it's more a youth thing than anything else.
I have been known to call myself a Valley Girl, more as a regional identifier than anything else. I had this dumb thing about how I was a double Valley Girl because I also went to college in Massachusetts' Pioneer Valley. I generally told people there I came from LA, to spare the poor ignorant New England micro-mini-state residents from asking whether I hung out on the Haight; saying I was a Valley Girl made it clearer that I hadn't even been in LA proper. But even in that sense it's not geographically correct: Pasadena is in the San Gabriel Valley, and if I remember correctly the Valley in question is the San Fernando Valley.
All that aside, something snagged in my mind when I was talking to Abby. When she asked why I said No, I told her that I went to private school. "Well, weren't there Valley Girls in private schools?" she asked, wrinkling her forehead in confusion.
And it came back to me, suddenly, that Valley Girl was my classmates' shorthand for White Trash. All of us spoke quickly and our speech was crawling with Likes and we tended to pronounce R-E-A-L-L-Y as "rilly," but we made the distinction anyway, distancing ourselves from people we knew did not speak proper English. We fully expected to grow up to speak the standard radio English of our parents. Most of us knew how to tone it down and talk right.
Parents would even attempt to get us to code-switch. I specifically remember one time my dad and stepmom drove me and my friend Michelle to music camp. Michelle and I hadn't seen each other all summer, and so we were speaking excitedly. Dad and Jill were giggling a little in the front seat, and out of nowhere Jill calls out, "Forty two." Forty two? "You've said 'like' forty two times since we got in the car," she pointed out, with inordinate glee. That settled us down quick.
I did my cognitive sciences distribution requirement at Hampshire on the syntax of the word "like." I went back just now to see if I'd mentioned the social ramifications of the word, but aside for railing against prescriptivist grammar I hadn't, probably because I didn't do most of my thinking about code-switching, language, and power until later that year when I started working with Martin Espada.
I think what jarred this thought loose was spending this last weekend among some people who were working on reclaiming the word "redneck," thinking about the ways that people make cultural others along class lines. Also, being with the Second Maine Militia I was blissfully bathed in the Maine accent, which just fascinates me. I spent maybe half an hour transfixed, listening to Carolyn Chute's (apparently, that's "Choot," not "Shoot") husband, Michael, talk about the "guvuhment." Then I spent the rest of the weekend calling James and Jen "Deah" and finding excuses to talk about rhubaaab and baaahns. I'm not making fun, really, I swear; I'm just cutting my teeth on new sounds for the sheer joy of it.
Posted by me at 10:29 PM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2001
We Bring More Than A Paycheck To Our Loved Ones And Families
I went a little nuts at the hardware store today.
Paranoid? Well, the environmental health director of West Harlem Environmental Action says there's elevated levels of lead, dioxin, chromium, and asbestos in the air in Manhattan. I work just blocks from the World Trade Center. I can taste them. On their own, we know these substances do bad things, though probably not at these levels; what we don't know, she says, is what happens when they are all breathed in together. This mask, according to its packaging, protects against lead, asbestos, paints, pesticides, and the Hanta Virus.
I may wear this to work. I've been feeling a little self-conscious about wearing a dust mask; it's an overt reminder to everyone that things aren't back to normal. Someone needs to acknowledge how terrible the air is, though. I grew up in LA, and when the air got half as bad as it's been here they used to tell people to stay inside. We've had no warnings here. Just admonitions to get back to normal.
Bit of an outlay to buy the mask, but it'll be worth it in the long run. I'm in enough situations where there's a threat of pepper spray and tear gas. So if you're a bin Laden supporter out there thinking that my wearing this is a sign I'm afraid of you, know that I'm just as afraid of my own government's military and police forces.
The headlamp I got just because it's cool.
Posted by me at 12:22 AM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2001
Magical Thinking In The Modern Technolgical Age
The communications karma gnomes have been particularly capricious in the last few days.
Today they caused Galataea, my computer, my beautiful blue second mind, to have a catastrophic grand mal seizure resulting in an hour of blankscreen and a mangled article pitch.
Yesterday, they tweaked my cel phone so that it rang all squeaky and made it impossible to hear or speak to the person on the line. "I can't hear you, it sounds like your office is full of aliens!" yelled Jen when I called her during the phone's fit. The phone today is getting hot and making my fingers tingle when I make a call.
And now I go downstairs and find that not one but BOTH of the copies of the Village Voice I picked up today are bereft of page 73, the page on which my article appears.
What is on their mind, these gnomes?! What's the big idea?! Don't get comfortable, I think they are saying. Remember what it was like right after the towers came down. We can't always be on your side.
go on, torment me, you twisted little postmodern pseudo-mytho-Scandinavian future fsckers. I know this blog isn't really changing shape and color as I watch...
aaaa! typos in the headline! They're everywhere!!!!
Posted by me at 1:57 AM | Comments (0)
October 10, 2001
Got Published, Still Down
Exchange from the Xephreniaq listserv:
Casey: What a society we live in where hermaphodically themed soloperas are performed in nonsense languages, hundreds of people flock to see them, movies are made about them, and our close friend from high school writes about them in a major metropolitan newspaper.
me: You're tellin' me. You know, this is exactly the kind of article I want to
make a career out of writing (a staff position and more column inches
would be nice...) but I felt like such a parasite writing it. You walk up
to these people, and it's like, "Hey, can I use you to make some money?"
grrr. If I had more space to write I'd be happier, because then I could
meditate on the meaning of Thoth. As it is, I had to do what Colson
Whithead called a "Bob is Hip!" shmear to get people out to see the guy.
Not a heinous thing, I guess, but I'm not an advertiser by nature.
Posted by me at 9:02 PM | Comments (0)
I'm Totally Unable To Do Anything But Rant Tensely and Self-Mutilate
Mom: you should see how much her handwriting is like yours, when she writes small.
Got a letter from Carolyn Chute today... not good. She says she is losing her house and land; she's hurrying to finish up a book -- two books -- to try to stave off that crisis. She needs a pacemaker, but has no health insurance. She's dizzy all the time, so much so that she can't turn her head. I knew she was sick, but I didn't know how... it had been right under my nose -- Anneka diBiais, a character in her book Merry Men who organizes women to go into the forest and pretend to be deer and disrupt the hunters, has a heart problem. I don't know if she identifies with Anneka herself, but I sure did.
Like all of us, Carolyn's political career (she's running for governor next year) has been altered by recent events, and what with her illness, she has to cut back on the organizing she's doing. There was going to be a meeting of the Second Maine Militia soon -- apparently she has separate meetings for the conservatives and leftists, I was wondering how she was finagling that gap -- but she says she can't afford it right now. I've been admiring her organizing from a distance... now that Michael Moore seems to be reduced to sending out jocular essays over email, I only have hope for Carolyn, who is still out there in non-urban reaches of America spreading the good word... but she goes on to say
...It feels truly hopeless now! I’ve been active in trying to stop corporate power (with other people) since 1995 + by myself since the 1970’s and I have spent $1,000’s on toner + paper + envelopes + postage + telephone + gasoline + now I’m about to lose my house and land or maybe everything but the house + land, and all for what?
Well, we’ve met some wonderful people.
But that’s all it’s done.
I feel at least I haven’t been a damn fool + thought the government etc. were “nice”
I do too. I have met wonderful people too, and aside from that, bupkis. I can't believe the meetings I've been to lately. The Spartacists get up and insist we include a clause about class warfare. The music therapists stand up and give a half-hour lecture on how their field will be vital to our upcoming efforts, whatever they are. It's just like the Indymedia meetings last year where we sat for an hour while people wrangled over whether grant money would corrupt us. I swear, if I have to go to one more meeting where we spend an hour arguing over the rhetoric of a mission statement and all of us get too frustrated by the time we split up to talk about what we are actually going to DO... well, what threat can I make, I can't exactly go join corporate America, because it's hemorrhaging workers.
I finally nailed down today why it bugged me that the Left in New York City leapt so quickly from being anti-globalization to anti-war. It's not that I feel they've abandoned any core values; I know that globalization problems underlie this whole crisis in the Mideast and the flaming turd it has left on our doorstep. The values underlying the anti-globalization movement are the same as the peace movement, and that's fine. This is what bothers me: If your organization or set of organizations' purpose is so flexible that you can come up with a solution for any problem within it, if you can change to meet every crisis, you're not a movement. You're a value system, a culture, a religion, a dogma -- I don't know exactly which, I'm not savvy enough to know the difference, but you're static.
I knew this already, really. You only have to visit Arcata, CA once to realize that the Left is a place that people retreat to in order to avoid talking to people who disagree with them. That's no way to change minds or laws. I guess what's frustrating is that the bulk of what we're getting from the Left right now is statements, not actions. And every time I get another letter from a kid from the writing workshop who says he's signing up for the draft and asks me what the hell I'm doing for my country, I'm reminded of this.
(gaah, awful uneducated stupid ignorant child. the left is not monolithic.)
I feel so totally helpless. I wish there was something I could do for Carolyn, or to stop the war, or to make the Left stop standing on a corner talking to itself. I feel like just last year I had a solution to everything, and usually it was Indymedia, an infusion of free secondhand computers, leftist contacts. Peace-and-prosperity-time pursuits. They don't put food on the table, you know?
Who am I now? A victim of McCarthyism? An Algerian strategist? A Lincoln Brigade fighter? A Hiroshima maiden?
Posted by me at 12:46 AM | Comments (0)
October 3, 2001
Squirrels Are Metaphors For People
The guy who is "fixing" the ""house"" came by at eight this morning, unannounced, breaking a weeks-long AWOL spell on a job he was paid to do sometime in the summer of 2000. I'd been up until three working on an article, so of course, instead of finishing the hatchet job he's doing on the living room windows downstairs, he proceeded to bang the storm windows outside my room around in the process of taking them off.
As a result squirrels have taken up residence in the sash gutter of my bedroom window. Some people have flowers in their windowboxes; now I have squirrels. Squirrel or squirrels, could be a whole family, I don't know; all I know is they make a sh!tload of noise, and I am less tolerant of animal noise than I was as a kid.
I went to see what was up and found one curled up in the corner, nose under tail. I tapped on the window and turned on the light and screamed "You can't stay here!" He gave me the eye. Didn't move. I couldn't open the window, or he'd come in.
Posted by me at 11:22 PM | Comments (2)