Big ups to header-quote-provider Richard Powers, whose new novel The Echo Maker won The National Book Award for fiction last night.
I have a copy of The Echo Maker, bought at a Borders in Chicago with the Zombie Queen and King last month, still in my suitcase. I'm looking forward to sitting down with it soon. Ahead of it on the reading queue? The End, the last of the Lemony Snicket books, and Rory Stewart's The Places In Between, bought at the Powell's mothership in my new second-favorite city, Portland, OR. (Also bought at Powell's: the awesome David Chinitz's long-awaited T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, which does me the great honor of citing my paper on Eliot's interest in, and criticism of, mystery fiction.)
After the elections
As regular readers of my non-posting know, I've spent a lot of the past year traveling to do user research.
Part of what all that travel does to you -- or, at least, to me -- is make you value the specificity of your own local life all the more. At my coffee store, this past weekend, not only did the guy behind the counter know what I get and how often I generally come by (Vienna Roast, every other week), but he handed me a box of tissues as a way of gently telling me the cold was making my nose run.
But that also means you value the specificity of other people's local lives, too. And so it was especially heartening, I think, to see the election results come out as clearly a national trend as they were. We're different in a hundred thousand subtle and endlessly fascinating ways, but in the end, there are some things Americans can agree on, and that's just got to give you hope.
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
So, yeah, I haven't been posting, but in my own defense, since I've posted I've been to Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Halifax, and a small city in rural Nova Scotia that will remain nameless for the anonymity of the research we did there.
I am almost, almost done with my travel for the year, but next week will take me to Chicago and Boston. I have the weekend free in Chicago -- Christine, Maggie, Heimbaugh? Anyone up for the Field Museum and some beer? (Non simultaneously, of course.)
As to the Boston trip, I might have either Wednesday or Thursday evening free, but I don't know yet. We fly home Friday night so the team that are going on to the second round of research can get a weekend at home before it starts.
I love a parade
So, today is the West Indian Day parade, which takes place down the major boulevard in my neighborhood and is generally one of the things I look forward to the most about the end of the summer. Today, though, I can't go, as I'm about to head back out on the road for a week and a half. (Fear not, as my apartment is guarded by the superstitious paranoids next door and my robotic cat.)
Instead, I went down to Duane Reade to pick up some items to help me with a long flight in the middle of our government's War On Moisture. (Towelettes, cough drops, the like). When I turned back up my block, a cop stopped me.
"Do you live on this street?" she asked.
"Yeah, I live here." What was going on? I wondered. An accident?
"Can I see some ID?"
"No, I don't have any with me. Why?"
"We're only letting people who live on this street go through. What's your address?"
I gave her the street number. "What street?" I repeated the name of the street we were on. "Cross streets?" I told her.
"What's going on?" I asked.
"Extra security for the parade," explained her partner. "We want to make sure no one's walking through here with a bomb or anything."
I just stared at him. "Extra security? I've been living here for seven years," I said, "and I've never seen these streets get blocked off for the parade." (Mind you, at this point we were a good five or six blocks from where the parade route goes.)
"Well, you know, 9/11?" he said sneeringly. "It changed things."
I wanted to note that I hadn't seen it change things in 2002-2005, inclusive, but I have a plane to catch for work and I really couldn't risk getting picked up by the NYPD without ID on me and missing my flight. So I just said, "Look, I know you're just doing your job, so I'm not gonna make an issue with you, but this is stupid," and walked away as they laughed. There were no more blockades as I walked closer to the parade route.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are always a lot of cops on the street for the West Indian Day parade -- there are a lot of people out, many of them drinking, and some crowd control is a good thing. But blocking off streets -- and, again, these are streets within hearing distance of the parade but a good five-ten minute walk TO the parade -- and saying that it's "because of 9/11"? As I said to Terri, who used to live down the block, "of all the targets on al-Quaeda's list, the West Indian Day parade is not one of them."
All I can say, as I try to decide if it's more worth it to me to wear my orthotics and not have foot pain or to put them in my bag and spare myself the five minute quiz at security about what I have in my shoes, is thank God the terrorists haven't taken away our freedom, right?
Three cheers for sprezzatura
While the lefty blogs are enjoying the downfall of The New Republic's culture blogger Lee Siegel, who was canned for creating a "sock puppet" commenter called "sprezzatura" to defend him in comments, I find myself torn. For while I as an observer of web culture love the idea of the coiner of the term "blogofascists" losing his job over a blogging malfeasance, as a big literature geek, I hate the thought that this is most people's introduction to the very useful and far-too-underutilized concept of "sprezzatura."
The term comes from Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528), and it means, basically, hard-won graceful mastery that betrays none of the effort of its creation. Something that seems effortlessly perfect, even if tons of effort goes into it. Think of what Martha Stewart might be like if she were able to unclench, and you'll get the idea.
When we learned the term my first year in grad school, I understood it immediately. In college, sprezzatura had been the unnamed goal of all my friends: even the papers you pulled an all-nighter on, you'd claim gave you no trouble at all. Dense philosophical treatises? You skimmed them before class, of course, although how anyone could have made such a good point about Husserl on only a brief acquaintance with the material boggled all your friends' minds. It was an attitude I had to unlearn in grad school, because of course in grad school the thing to do is bitch and moan about how hard it all is.
There was, however, one of my grad school cohort who managed to embody what can only be called a surly sprezzatura -- Mike, who would famously say things like "I'd rather be asleep than having this conversation" and yet was probably the most incisive reader of the lot of us. It was Hilary who first started calling him "Spretz," and it stuck for a while, despite Mike's wanting to have none of it. As a result, when I think of "sprezzatura," I don't think of the chain-smoking semiotots of my undergrad years, but an amused bearded guy who told me that if you didn't wake up every morning of your graduate education and think "do I still want to do this?" you were doing it wrong. I'd hate to think that the term will be associated for a larger public with a James Kincaid-hating, Jon Stewart-bashing, pretentious jerk. Take back the spretz!