Author: Amy Batchelor

Fall Fashion

Giving my brain a rest and instead plowing through some of the pounds of fashion magazines piled up in the closet here.  I love fashion, and have torn out and saved magazine pages since I was in about 5th grade.  I’ve never really figured out the fetishitic nature of this collecting and gathering, but I just keep doing it. 

I love the big thick September fashion magazines and am happy to see embellishment and tweeds are hot items for fall, along with structured purses. 

Oh, wait, I’m reading a September 2004 Vogue.  Funny how little things actually change. 

Reading a September 2005 Marie Claire, I see that black is the new black.  Again.

Cloning

I experienced two entertainments this weekend whose central theme was cloning, one a literary novel and one a blockbuster summer movie.  One of these is theoretically "high brow" and one "low," which has started me thinking some about culture.  I’ve moved Nobrow:  The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture to the top of the To Read pile. 

Friday night we went to see the summer movie The Island with our visiting friends, Rachel and Robin Bordoli, and Aaron Cheatham.  The movie was much more scary than I expected from a PG-13 movie, but I think that’s just another sign that I’m getting older.  It was definitely entertaining, and surprisingly thought provoking.  It had excellent visual montages and settings of beautiful contemporary architecture, and the luscious Scarlett Johansson.  As with almost all movies these days, it could have been edited more tightly, perhaps down 10-15 minutes (another sign I’m getting old).  I liked the clean, crisp, well-lit visuals.  There was several good chase scenes that caused actual flinching at several impacts, but when Ewan McGregor gets on a flying motorcycle, my brain is transported into Star Wars and my willing suspension of disbelief was broken.  But it was a good seed for a lively conversation about cloning, definitions of personhood, chattel property, slavery, and immortality — which is more than I usually get from a summer movie.

Yesterday I read Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, who also wrote Remains of the Day (and several other works.  Like The Dogs of Babel, you read along for awhile before you figure out what’s going on — which is actually the same as what’s going on in The Island.  The narrator has a deliberately plain voice as she recounts stories of maturing in a boarding school setting with other clones who are to be used for organ transplants, but don’t seem to realize the implications of that.  Death is called "completion."  The eerie thing about Never Let Me Go is that it’s set in late 1990’s England, implying that these programs are already secretly underway.

Definitely still thinking about what it means to be a person..

The Dogs of Babel

I knew that whatever book I read after Infinite Jest was going to seem sparse in comparison, so I just pulled a random book from the To Read shelves and ended up with a first novel, The Dogs of Babel, by Carolyn Parkhurst.  I’m enjoying books that don’t set everything up for the reader, and this one leaves some nice room to figure things out on your own.  The central mystery is whether the narrator’s wife fell to her death accidentally or committed suicide.  The writing is clear and fluid and the characters reveal themselves gradually.  The narrator’s voice changes as he moves through his grief and brings you along with him.  It’s very nicely done —

Infinite Jest: Victory

Whew! I’m finished reading Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace is a genius. Definitely. Absolutely. No doubt about it.

Don’t read further if you’re thinking of reading this book, because I’m revealing all kinds of goodies in here.

I stayed up late Saturday night / Sunday morning (at 2 a.m. it’s dark outside, even here at the 59th parallel) and mowed through a healthy chunk (up to page 809) which made it possible to imagine that the end was in sight. I finished Sunday night. This is a long book. And difficult. It should have a Tipper-Gore-style sticker on the front saying, (in addition to Adult Lyrics) —  Warning:  Reader is required to pay close attention throughout and to keep a dictionary handy at all times. There were other things that were difficult for me. There were stretches in the middle where I was just kind of slogging through, slowly, carefully, dictionary in hand. It does pick up momentum rapidly toward the end and he starts to weave some narrative threads together, which brings me to another difficulty — I’m not enough of a post-modern lit crit hysterical realism theorist to be beyond all narrative conventions. I kept expecting convergence, but the narrative lines are asymptotic. I kept going back and re-reading to see if I had missed some important moment that explains what happens to Hal, but I don’t see it. I don’t mind being left in the middle of a narrative — I’m left with Gately in a hospital bed, and don’t really "know" what happens to him (or any of the other characters either), but I liked Hal and wanted to know what happend to turn him into a freakazoid in the opening pages of the book. I also hereby publicly confess that I skimmed through an ugly section about a drug addict killing cats and dogs (pps. 538-547) and another ugly part that described in detail a movie showing a homosexual rape where the victim secretly had AIDS, and maybe a couple of other ugly things too bleak and graphic for my delicate sensibilities. He definitely has a flair for the grotesque.

I think my real criticism is somewhere in the neighborhood of admiring the intellectual firewords (meant to type "fireworks," but I’m getting into the neologism thing), which are brilliant — but thinking that the light doesn’t give off a lot of emotional heat. Reviewers (which I spent a couple of hours reading) compare his work to those of Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen and other cranky and hilarious writers in my generation whose work I admire/enjoy/love. I think Infinite Jest gives less for a reader to hold on to emotionally than these writers. It doesn’t connect to things outside its own world. It wasn’t particularly thought provoking/inspiring for me, especially compared to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, where I paused often to consider and ponder and think and reflect for long moments on humanity and history.

Which may be at least part of what he’s saying: the anomie of our generation — whose earliest memories include Watergate and helicopters lifting from embassy roofs in Saigon and Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army and stagflation and a whole plethora of institutions falling down.

And on a lighter note, for those of us who really did spend time reading the dictionary as children, the Vocabulary Development section:

Here’s a list of words I didn’t know before and managed to look up. There are other medical and pharmacological terms that I understood from context and didn’t feel compelled to look up, and I can only imagine that I missed a few others scattered about here and there, but these are some juicy ones:

And an entirely new category of words not found in dictionary.com:

  • pedalferrous (p. 93)
  • ascapartic (p. 290)
  • semion (p. 101) which I’m going to relate to semiotics since it’s about making a sign
  • spansules (p. 1078, footnote 368)
  • fremitic (p. 353) [frenetic?]
  • omnissent (p. 599) [omniscient]?
  • lalating (p. 788) [ululating?]
  • votaried (p. 434) [votaries does exist]

I went to Google, typed in ascapartic and found a blog post of other words from Infinite Jest that are exciting and new and imaginary. He also uses ‘mobiusizing," thereby making a noun into a verb. I have a college friend who did her PhD work on this syntactical magic which I can’t remember the name for right now. Examples: fax, FedEx, office, and many others from the world of technology, but also the New England-y verb "to summer."

In this whole huge book the only thing that stood out in my mind as a possible error was a description of a scream on a B#.  B# is almost always called C natural and I didn’t think B# really existed as a notation.  But I’ve been trolling around on wikipedia, brushing up my music theory, and B# exists as the final and 7th sharp in the key of C# major.  Have I mentioned yet that David Foster Wallace is a genius?

I’m sure I have lots more (prolix, verbose, bombastic, circumlocutory, diffuse, flowery, fustian, gabby, garrulous, grandiloquent, involved, long-winded, loquacious, magniloquent, palaverous, periphrastic, pleonastic, prolix, redundant, prolix, repeating, repetitious, repetitive, rhetorical, talkative, talky, tautological, tautologous, tedious, tortuous) things to say about Infinite Jest — but I’ll save something for tomorrow.

Quad Shots

Yesterday I went to the drive through espresso place to get our morning coffee beverages.  The owner was taking the orders instead of the young woman who knows our usual order (Denali-size soy latte with 3 sugar packets for Brad, Denali-size skinny latte for Amy).  So when I told the nice man what I wanted he confirmed the order by saying, "Quad shots?"  And I thought, holy shit, is that what we’ve been drinking?!?!  Quad shots of espresso??  No wonder I’ve had some trouble sleeping this summer.  I was attributing it to the late shining sun, which is certainly part of the trouble — but I’m thinking that it’s really the radical increase in caffeine consumption that’s to blame.  I don’t know why it didn’t occur to either of us what the extra-big cup contained.  In Boulder we don’t drink coffee very often, and usually drink decaf when we do.  We have a terrific espresso maker that is fully loaded with decaf beans.  It’s a long way from a single decaf all the way to 4 shots each day.  Today we made coffee at home with strong oily French roast beans, and are starting the slow taper process back down to a low-caffeine existence.  No more Denali-size lattes for us. 

Happy Birthday to Mom

Today is my mom’s birthday, which is a good day indeed.  Her birth date is 8-6-4-2, which is a cool date.  I have a childhood friend, Hemai Parthasarathy, whose birthday is 2-4-6-8, and another friend, Dean Fiala, whose birthday is 4-5-6-7.  Those are cool birth dates, too. 

I just called my mom to wish her happy birthday and she is delighted with her new rototiller, which was a gift from her sister.  My sisters and I gave more mundane gifts of flowers and online gift certificates to Amazon and Lands End — and we all send our love.

Happy birthday, Mom!

Counting Down

I was trolling around Wikipedia after watching Wedding Crashers with Brad which I’m wont to do these days.  Our friends Dave Jilk and Maureen Amundson departed from our cloudy town on Thursday morning, just before the sunshine finally returned.  During their visit we engaged in lively conversations ranging in topic from the identity of Maria Bartiromo’s husband and the Iditarod sled dog race to various Stoic philosophers, including Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.  I thought I’d continue exploring a bit and ended up reading about Mark Antony and Cleopatra and noted that their history descends from 33 BC to 32 BC to 31 BC to 30 BC when they commited suicide and it struck me as obvious but strange that as they were living their lives they weren’t counting down in time.  They didn’t mark their own days the way we mark them now.  I’m fascinated and bewildered by time zones and calendars and the way humans create and change them.  I still don’t really get the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar by Pope Gregory XIII.  In high school chemistry, our teacher, Miss Pomeroy, had a bulletin board in the back of the classroom with the title "I Wonder…" and we could paste different items on it.  I remember putting up diatoms, but if I had to do it over again, I’d put up Time.

Who knows what we might be counting down to, what some future beings might mark our days as?