At midday on Friday, June 19^th, 1987, while en route to a convention in Minnesota, Barb and I stopped in Clear Lake, Iowa. I had just started writing my second novel, Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede, and Clear Lake was a logical place to take some pictures and do a little research. It was the town where Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson had played their last concert on February 2, 1959.

At the Clear Lake Public Library, a helpful librarian told me a story about Buddy’s glasses. It seems that someone (the county coroner?) from Mason City (the county seat) had taken the glasses from the site of the plane crash . . . and as far as the librarian knew, they were still locked up in a desk at the courthouse. Buddy’s widow, Maria Elena Holly, had even asked for them – and had been refused. The county, for some odd reason, thought they should hang on to them . . .

(Maria Elena Holly would finally take possession of the glasses in 1994, and they’re now on display at the Buddy Holly Center in Buddy’s hometown of Lubbock, Texas. This story from the May 29, 1998 Lubbock Avalanche-Journal has the details.)

(It’s funny how attitudes change over time. When Barb and I visited Lubbock in late 1988, there was no Buddy Holly Center, and only token acknowledgment that Holly had ever lived there. To be sure, a bronze statue of Buddy had been unveiled in Lubbock in 1980 . . . but when we got lost trying to locate it, we couldn’t find a single Lubbock resident who could tell us where it was. Not even when we asked at the courthouse. We eventually found the statue on our own, but it was saddening to realize that, almost 30 years after his death, Buddy still wasn’t getting much love from his hometown. So I’m happy to say that things are different in Lubbock now, at least with regard to the legacy of Buddy Holly.)

After our visit to the Clear Lake Library, Barb and I went to the Surf Ballroom, the site of that last gig. Unfortunately, the building was closed, so we weren’t able to go inside.

(That’s different now, too. In 2009, the Surf has a gift shop and is open daily.)

But I took lots of pictures of the outside . . .

( . . . none of which I can find right now, although they’re in a box or envelope around here somewhere. So the photo above is one of many that I found on the Web.)

The Surf’s marquee, along with a poster in the box-office window, made it clear that rock’n’roll was still being played there. On Wednesday, June 17^th, 1987, for example, the Surf had hosted a “Rock Mega Party” including the bands “Critical Mass,” “Shark,” and “Tantrum.” (“3 Bands – 5 Hours of Rock!”) I was glad to see that . . . although, as I noted in a letter to a friend, I doubted that Tantrum played “La Bamba” or that Shark opened their set by crooning “Helloo, baaaaby!”

I also noted that the band scheduled to play at 8:30 PM on the 19^th was “Erwin Suess and his Oom-Pah All Stars.” But we decided not to stay for that, and drove on to Minneapolis.

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This past Tuesday, February 3, 2009, was the 50^th anniversary of The Day the Music Died. But I’ve already written about that day in a previous Eat Our Brains post.

Besides, the anniversary that matters more to me is February 2^nd.

You see, when they died in the early morning hours of February 3^rd, Buddy, Ritchie, and the Bopper were actually doing something boring. They were on their way to get some sleep and wash some clothes.

But on the night of February 2^nd, they were still doing what they were born to do.

They were rocking.

So this past Monday, February 2^nd, 2009, I celebrated that.

If I had been able, I probably would have done so at the Surf Ballroom – because that’s where the “50 Winters Later Commemorative Concert” was taking place.

And no, the Oom-Pah All Stars were not on the bill. Instead, the lucky ticketholders at the Surf this past Monday were treated to a jaw-dropping lineup including Tommy Allsup, the Big Bopper Jr., The Crickets, Pat DiNizio, Kevin Montgomery, Joe Ely, Wanda Jackson, Los Lobos, Los Lonely Boys, Delbert McClinton, Graham Nash, Sir Tim Rice, Peter & Gordon, Dave Mason, and Bobby Vee . . . plus a house band that included drummer Kenny Aronoff, keyboardist Chuck Leavell, saxophonist Bobby Keys, and bassist Hutch Hutchinson. Holy moley.

So what was I doing while that grand memorial gig was going on at the Surf Ballroom?

Well, thanks to Barb, Maureen, and drummer extraordinaire Bob Y., I participated in a memorial gig, too.

Bob had been telling me about an Open Blues Jam on Monday nights at a swell bar called Nuno’s (the one on MoPac, in North Austin). So this past Monday, we went. Bob brought sticks. I brought a guitar and some harps. Then Bob & Maureen and Barb & I had burgers while digging the evening’s hosts, Kimo Sabe. (Damn fine band, by the way.)

Sometime around 11:00 PM, Bob and I went onstage with a bass player named Terry and a lead-guitar picker named Rick, neither of whom we’d ever met before. We started off with “Crossroads,” followed by what Maureen later described as “the Grateful Dead version” of “I Just Want to Make Love to You.”

Then I told the audience (mostly other jammers) why we were doing the next song. At which point Bob proceeded to lay down a heavy, driving Bo Diddley beat. It was the stuff, baby. I mean, it made my guitar quake.

Rick and Terry knew what to do, too. Rick was playing a hollowbody Epiphone that sounded darn near as good as B.B.’s Lucille. And Terry hit them thick ol’ Fender bass strangs right where they needed to be hit.

As for me, I just tried to keep up.

So. How did we celebrate the 50^th Anniversary of The Night the Music Lived?

How else?

We played “Not Fade Away.”

And for a few minutes, I could have sworn I heard them playing it in Clear Lake, too.

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A Few More Links:

“Fans Pack Surf Ballroom” (CMT.com, 2/3/09)

“La Bamba” jam at the Surf on 2/2/09 featuring Los Lobos, Los Lonely Boys, Maria Elena Holly, and the Valens family.

Writer and musician Michael Hall visited Clear Lake and the Surf Ballroom for the Surf’s 60th Anniversary Concert in June 2008, and he wrote a terrific article about his trip for the February 2009 Texas Monthly.  He narrates an equally terrific slide show here.

Singer-songwriter Kevin Montgomery (son of songwriter-producer Bob Montgomery, who played with Buddy Holly in the “Buddy and Bob” duo) performed at the 2/2/09 “50 Winters Later” concert and has posted videos from the show . . . including interviews with Tommy Allsup and Maria Elena Holly.

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My 1991 novel Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede is now available for free reading and downloading from the front page at www.bradleydenton.net.  (It’s in four big pdf files, ranging from 75 to 87 MB.  I recommend 100% zoom.  Y’all let me know if something doesn’t work.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you — Mr. Jesse Hawkins and Mrs. Rachael Hawkins.

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They were married last Saturday afternoon in an outdoor amphitheatre at Brownwood State Park, to my delight and to the applause of approximately 45 friends and family.

This is the terrible loss that I suffered, mentioned in my previous post. I gave up my most beloved daughter – but gained both a wonderful son-in-law and a vast herd of cattle in payment.

More below the cut.

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I had planned to video the event, but the cam packed up at the ultimate moment, so I can offer you only pictures and the audio that was recorded on my laptop by Barb. This is what a traditional Asatru wedding ceremony sounds like:

Wedding Ceremony Audio – Part One

Gordon Fossum acted as their Godi, and performed the sacred rites. Travis Arnold acted as Rachael’s maid of honor, and Stephen Merritt was Jesse’s best man.

Eagerly awaiting the bride’s appearance:

Rachael and her father descend to the circle:

Mid-ceremony:

Public display of affection at the conclusion of the first part of the ceremony. Please note the red cord that bound them together. They’re not allowed to ever remove it:

Then the wedding party adjourned to the tree that Jesse and Rachael had chosen together. We all stood in a semi-circle to witness, and to toast the bride and groom when appropriate.

Wedding Ceremony Audio – Part Two

Tom serenaded us as we broke and congratulated the newly-wed couple. I wish I’d caught that on disk, ’cause he’s good.

Though he had been ill nigh unto death, John Horrall, accompanied by his glorious wife Becca Wood, was required to attend as Chieftain in order to initiate Jesse officially into the Tribe:

Valna, Rick, Ziroby, Jamaika,Tom, and Debbie also came to represent the Tribe. Unfortunately, I can’t find any non-blurry pics of them. Also, there are many other beloved ones who were there, but I’m near the edge of the number of pics I should post today. And my sister Cheryl and her husband Charlie seemed to have eluded the cameras entirely — that Federal Witness Protection Program thing kicking in, I think.

Many, many thanks to everyone who made the trek!

Rachael sewed her own wedding dress. As you can see, she didn’t have time to finish making their shoes.

The wedding feast followed.

Next, Two Headed Baby took the stage. First came the traditional father-daughter dance to ‘Waltz Across Texas’. This was as poignant a moment as I’ve ever had in my life.

Yes, I was wearing a kilt. I did not go Commando, but did flash Caroline a couple of times, causing her much trauma.

Then the party kicked in and we rocked out for about four hours.

Travis belched fire behind us as we played, and Danica spun fire – unfortunately, I don’t have any handy pics of her.

Jesse and Rachael did a tremendous amount of work to make this wedding come off as brilliantly as it did. I’m immensely grateful to Gordon for being their Godi, and to Two Headed Baby (and spouses) for all the labor involved in preparing for and playing at the dance.

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I like Jesse tremendously. He’s bright and funny and works his ass off. In order to be with her, he gave up a career path that paid him absurdly large amounts of money, but required that he travel to other states for long periods of time. He’s going back to school with Rachael next semester, and, though no one knows what the future may hold, I’m optimistic that they’ll grow together over the coming years and decades. And he’s a guitarist. I don’t think that Rachael could have found a better man to share her life with. I know that he couldn’t have found a better bride.

I’m a happy Papa.

Here’s a final pic of them, taken this past Beltane by Kathi S. (who is an astonishingly good photographer), that says a lot to me about the life that they can build together.

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Pics credits variously to Cheryl Collum, Stephen Merritt, and Rachel Merriman.

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Two Headed Baby played a special gig last weekend.

It was a good weekend for me, in many, many ways. I’m planning to post in more detail on that later today or perhaps tomorrow.

I set up a laptop to record the gig as best I could through a single mic off to the side, and seem to have caught about two-thirds of it on disk. I’ve just finished processing a couple of the songs, and thought you might enjoy listening to THB in full fury.

Rachael was there, and told me that we sounded awesome, but she was being especially kind to her Papa last weekend, because I was suffering a great loss. The audience danced their asses off, and didn’t throw anything sharp or too hard at us. I figure that we probably didn’t suck, much.

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Rockin’ In The Free World

Blues Medley

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As you may know, our old drummer got bored with just hitting things and wandered off to try to learn how to be another goddam dime-a-dozen guitar player. Bob Yeager, who still enjoys smashing the hell out of everything, has gracefully taken his place.

Caroline Spector on bass, cello, and vocals, Warren Spector on rhythm and lead guitar, Gilda Ginsel on vocals and keyboard, my nice friend Bradley Denton on vocals, harp, and rhythm and lead guitar. I was up there, too, mostly played rhythm guitar.

However, we made the mistake of allowing both GreyLion and Bulky Jones to sit in. And they wanked endlessly. Please forgive them.

I’ve whined repeatedly about the Loudness Wars, but – I smashed the hell out these recordings, just because it seemed the rock ‘n roll thing to do. Another mea culpa for that. I tried to leave a few dynamics in place.

This stuff is meant to be played loud, though, so you should turn the volume knob all the way to the right. I hope your neighbors don’t find it too painful to listen to.

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Pics credit to Cheryl Collum, who, incidentally, happens to be my baby sister.

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

Several sf writers have written Sfnal versions of this for Wired.

It cost too much, staying human.
- Bruce Sterling

We kissed. She melted. Mop please!
- James Patrick Kelly

Then comes this book. Autobiography in six words. Online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs and culled the best. Of course, now I lay in bed attempting to compose mine.

An observer; husband, son brought reality.

But in ten minutes I’ll decide that’s wrong.

I would like to give you the impression that my culinary life is one amazing adventure after another. The truth is that much of the time I eat pretty boring food. But when I do have a food experience that I think could conceivably give the impression that I am living the high food life, I like to blog it. For a Chowhound, the ultimate food experience is the unexpected, the hole in the wall that turns out to be great, the different.

Once in awhile it happens just like that.

Many months ago, Bob and I read an article about a restaurant called Little Thailand. The legend is that Dick was in Vietnam back in the day and married a Thai girl. He brought her back to the states. It didn’t work out. But somehow along the way he ended up marrying another Thai girl and building a restaurant/bar called Little Thailand. She cooks Thai and he makes the steaks and Hungarian Goulash and the hot sauce.

A framed review on the wall calls Little Thailand ‘a trailer park temple to authentic Thai food’ and that’s probably as good a description as any. The restaurant is in the front of a low ceilinged building out past the airport. We drove into the Texas dark, out into country where Austin has not yet become cool and found it under the Garfield water tower as promised. It’s the kind of place that has handwritten signs stuck on the wall that say things like “Killer Thai Bloody Mary’s Awesome and Lip Smacking.” Bob orders one.

It is the spiciest-hot Bloody Mary either of us have ever tasted. It is the first time I have ever had a drink that required a glass of water to go with it.

Surin waits on us. That’s Dick’s wife, the cook. Bob orders Pad Thai (called ‘Pot Thai’ on a menu where the Thai dishes are not spelled like any other Thai restaurant I’ve ever eaten in) and I order the Thai fried rice. Surin asks if we want the spring rolls with that. Of course we do. When she brings out the spring rolls, they are still hot from the deep fryer. So hot that we can’t eat them for a couple of minutes. They come with a sweet sauce (like that sweet orange stuff that comes with spring rolls anywhere) and also with a dark and intensely spicy fish sauce that I have never tasted anywhere else. They’re made from scratch.

A couple of Texans in denim—the lean and quiet type—come in and sit down. Dick, white-haired and stumpy-legged, tells them they should have the Thai Tee Bone steak. The older man says in a flat Texas drawl that he’s had it, but tonight he’s going to have the Thai Curry.

One of the signs on the wall tells us that every third Wednesday is family style night. It’s a fixed menu of Lemongrass Soup, Thai Curry, Larb, and a couple of other dishes ending with Banana and A Glass of Wine. Two people is $30.

Our food comes. And it has that smell. That authentic, ‘I am not afraid of offending people with stuff that is too Asian’ smell. It is quite good.

They say that sometimes when you drive up you have to be careful of the chickens in the parking lot. And that sometimes they sell eggs. They sell Thai jewelry and purses on a table by the front door, and they have a book exchange (Leave One, Take One says the sign.) It’s got weird hippy-Asian lights hung all over the place at random, and bad Asian art, and a photo of the Thai Royal family by the door.

We can’t wait to go back.

(This is a reprint of an essay I did for Small Beer Press–I’m headed to the airport and pressed for time. Next week, I promise, back to stuff about food, dogs, and TV.)

When I was in Mr. Fish’s class in fourth grade class at St. Columban, we had a mock election for President and I voted for Nixon. He won by a landslide. Granted, that was the year Nixon was re-elected in a landslide, but I proffer this bit of personal information as evidence that I am, at heart, a rather conservative person. I don’t want to be a conservative person. Studying literature and art, it becomes very clear that the really good writers and artists, the really important ones, are not conservative people. They are the people who institute change. Who make us see and think in different ways. So much of my life has been an effort to somehow convert myself from a mildly anxious, essentially conservative Catholic school girl into a radical, free-thinking writer.

With this in mind, I recently took a class at the University where I teach, a graduate class in Modernism and Postmodernism. I like some postmodern works quite a bit — particularly The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien; the flawed but tremendously interesting novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace; and Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. (I know Jonathan from his days of slumming with science fiction people, so he is my brush with the glittering circle of literati.) I thought I had a sense of what postmodernism does in literature–that it draws attention to the fact that a text is written, made up, an artifact. In The Things They Carried there is a character named Tim O’Brien and he both narrates the story and acts in it. But his narration makes it really clear that some of the things that happened to the character Tim O’Brien never happened to the writer Tim O’Brien and that, in fact, this whole book is a lie, a work of fiction, perhaps based on the real wartime Viet Nam experiences of the writer.

I liked that a lot. I suspected I liked it because as a writer I was really familiar with the way that once I took a piece of my own experience and wrote it into a story, then trimmed it, the way you trim a hedge, it became harder and harder for me to remember later which was the made-up version and which was the memory version. And I knew that memory was flawed anyway. I am forever remembering things that I am certain were this way — the painted mallards mounted on the wall of my sister’s house in 1970 that I remember so vividly didn’t actually exist until maybe 1975 when they had moved to the bigger house in Springboro. So memory is malleable, fiction is malleable. The truth will not stay fixed.

That seems very postmodern, doesn’t it?

I figured I was a shoo-in for this postmodern stuff.

I didn’t actually write this way. My characters have faulty memories, but that’s not because they are postmodern, that’s because they are something much older than that, unreliable narrators. My characters are sometimes forgetful, always biased, but always in an attempt to mimic human failings, to let you pretend, dear reader, that they are real. That you might walk down the street in New York City and see Zhang, the Chinese-American guy from my first novel, window shopping in the Village. Zhang has never once stopped to suggest that he is a concoction of evocative descriptions, a handful of sentences, that you are in fact taking a bunch of random shapes (26 of them) and decoding them the way a telegraph operator decodes Morse Code into a voice in your head — since I assume that you are not reading this aloud although I won’t mind if your lips are moving — and without ever having heard that voice out loud. Furthermore, Zhang has never even pointed out that you don’t really know that much about him, that the things that you think you know about him — that he is neurotic, generous and a little vain — are based on one or two things. I don’t tell you most of the everyday things about him. I don’t even tell you the date, although often I tell you what day of the week it is. I don’t think it matters. I count on you to go along with me. I count on you to be seduced by what is there. I want you to pretend.

So I take this class and I have this suspicion it is going to be about the bones of things. I assume that it will say, “Look at what you pretend.” The first thing I read for the class is Jean-François Lyotard’s opening essay to The Postmodern Explained(1), a shimmering chimera of an essay which is really a letter full of sentences like “The first hypothesis, Hegelian in inspiration, does not call into question the notion of dialectically totalizing experience.” I haven’t ever real Hegel. Or Heidigger or Descartes, or, if you want to know the truth, Plato or Aristotle (and if I wasn’t taking the class with at least two graduate students who had taken my class and who I knew to be quite sharp but not, you know, astonishing in the way, say, Samuel Delany is astonishing, I might have quit at that moment). Instead, I hoped that by the end of the class that sentence would actually mean something to me.

In class, we started with, of all things, a linguistics text. Linguistics is interesting, but difficult because a lot of linguistics involves skills that have to be learned the way you learn a musical instrument or a language, by lots of practice. This text, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics assumes you are pretty good on grammar in German, French and Latin. I’m not. But that was okay because all that grammar was going to illustrate a point that makes a lot of sense if you’re a writer. (Or maybe it doesn’t. It made a lot of sense to me, but every time I read that writers are good at something, I’m not, and life is too short.) De Saussure had a couple of points to make about language, one of which was that if you don’t have words for it, you probably can’t think it, and I believe that. The other was that words are arbitrary noises, signifiers, that we attach to meanings, the signified.

There is a kind of athleticism of thought, a kind of extreme thought. Philosophy is one of the events in the Olympics of thought. Postmodernism is a kind of thought aerobics for me. Reading these texts was like doing long division in my head, and if, as I was following Theodor Adorno’s careful analysis of the contradictions at the heart of the dictum “form follows function”(2) and I got distracted by the phone ringing or the dogs wanting out, I would lose the whole thread of the last page and a half and I would have to back up and start again. It was so exciting. I read a little of this a little Georges Bataille, a little Fredric Jameson (whose familiar Marxism felt like finding a McDonalds in a foreign land). After three weeks of steady reading and discussion in class, we finally got to Jacques Derrida and deconstructionism.

I don’t know what I thought of deconstructionism. I thought I had a vague understanding. But I didn’t realize that it is, among other things, a branch of philosophy. Derrida’s texts are abstruse, erudite, playful, tricky observations of language and thought, and using language to talk about language is, well, problematic. Derrida exposes some of those problems, or attempts to. Still, there is a lot I would recommend in Derrida. He is not a nihilist, he doesn’t say that things have no meaning. He observes the contradictions of thought. His essay “The Law of Genre”(3) is a pretty interesting read for a science fiction writer. It’s a perennial argument, a writer’s and fan’s parlor game to try to define science fiction and fantasy.
“As soon as the word genre is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn,” says Jacques Derrida in that essay. And it’s true — whenever you create a category, you are implying that there are things that fit in the category and things that don’t. It’s like bird watching. It’s either a duck or a finch or a hawk. And how do I determine what category it’s in? By its traits. The shape of the bill, the coloring of the feathers, its size, its feet.
It should be very neat, very scientific. What are the traits of a science fiction story? It takes place in the future. Or it has a spaceship. Or it has a historically accepted scientific conceit like time travel, or a scientifically speculative conceit, like a ring built around a sun, or an asteroid bearing a plague. Or it is alternate history, which is science fiction because it comes from the science fiction premise of parallel universes. Of course, my list is incomplete. And that’s the problem. The list gets longer and longer, adding more and more things to cover the books that I think are science fiction (some of which you may not), until I have a definition that is not so much a list of defining traits, as a list of texts.(4) And what about works that have traits of a couple of genres? In a sense any historical novel with fictional characters is a an alternate history. E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime mixes actual historical characters with fictional ones, and since the fictional characters couldn’t actually have interacted with the actual ones, doesn’t that mean Ragtime depicts a history that didn’t happen? Of course, the premise of an science fictional alternate history is that some crucial historical event happened differently. But I wrote an alternate history that won an award, and some readers didn’t recognize the event where everything changed. Someone asked me if after the Civil War, recalcitrant slave owners from Louisiana were really resettled in the West. So for that reader, is my story alternate history or historical fiction?

Give me any definition of genre (excluding perhaps the Damon Knight definition) and I can pick it to pieces. Derrida says that at the heart of the idea of genre is a corruption, a dis-ease. If I can’t define genre, does that mean genres don’t exist? Of course not. In some ways, asking for a definition of science fiction and/or fantasy is asking the wrong question. It other ways, it’s one of the most interesting questions, although what it says about SF and fantasy is perhaps less interesting than what it says about how we see things. That we categorize. That we establish definitions and definitions imply limits, and sometimes we make limits that we think are very clear, when they’re not. Look at the edges, the limits, and that’s where you can catch the assumptions, the shapes of the ways we make meaning.(5) And that was one thing very useful about my brush with Derrida.

Republicanism, Marxism, Feminism, Deconstructionalism, Fascism. These are ways we ascribe meaning to the world and to experience. Each one is a perspective, each one of them sees certain things very, very well, and other things, not so well at all. Postmodernism felt to me to be an interesting place from which to look at the world — playful in a complicated sense, distrustful of the easy answers of ideology, and sometimes very, very strange. Sixty pages into The Truth in Painting things felt very strange indeed.(6) But I’m a science fiction writer, and if I find the thought of one Frenchman, my contemporary, alien, what does that say about the future? Maybe it’s a good idea to spend some time thinking about different thought perspective, to find a different place to stand. Good for a writer who wants to provide the reader with the sense that they have entered a world that is a little different from their own. Good for a person who doesn’t wish to become too trapped in their own prejudices and habits.

The air is awfully thin up there for me. I want to be postmodern. I like thinking up there and I wish I was a member of the thought Olympics. This work is not, I hope, a thinly veiled explanation that says the reason I am not postmodern is that there is something wrong with postmodernism, because while there is a lot wrong with postmodernism(7) the reason I’m not postmodern is because at the core of the ideas I associate with postmodernism is a certain skepticism, a critical distrust of authority. One entire section of The Truth in Painting is a discussion of one footnote in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. Derrida admits Hegel was interested in something else, that this is a lot of discussion for one footnote, and that people will accuse him of making a mountain out of a molehill — but of course, Derrida’s critique of the footnote opens up a whole discussion of just how we define the boundaries of art. In some ways Derrida is The Angry Young Man, forever critical and combative, standing up in the middle of the lecture to say to the teacher, “The United States is not a democracy. It’s a republic.” Which is true but not the point right now at all — I am the student who wants to hear the teacher’s point and wants the Angry Young Man to sit down and shut up, thank you very much. I want to go with the flow. I guess much as I want to be watching the edges, in the end it is very hard for me. It’s hard for me to write books with plots and believable characters, so I don’t have a lot of energy left to look at the edges, to see how plot and character work. Postmodernism often requires me to be smarter than I am.

I write rather conservative fiction, structurally. Zhang never points out that he is a character on paper and when I try to do that, I’ve never yet managed to be either clever or illuminating. My books and stories assume you go with the flow, that you pretend, that you, in the cliché we use in teaching, “suspend disbelief.”

This last century has not been a comforting century for people who want to get with the program. Too often the flow has been racist, classist, oppressive of women (of which I am one), and going with the flow has meant collaborating silently with devil. I voted for Nixon in the fourth grade because I didn’t know any better and because my dad was going to vote for Nixon. I am still the girl who would have voted for Nixon, and so I think maybe it is good for me to study these skeptics, these critiques, these people who will not trust. I am not postmodern. But I haven’t given up hope.

Notes:
1. The Postmodern Explained Jean-François Lyotard, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis and London, 1992) is translated from the French. The original title was Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, which makes me wonder what they are putting in the water over there in France that they have such precocious children.
2. “Functionalism Today,” which I read in Rethinking Architecture, ed. Neil Leach (Routledge, London and New York, 1997). I wasn’t familiar with Adolf Loos, or the German architectural movement that Adorno critiques in this essay, but I kept reading hoping it would all become clear, and lots of it did. This is a subtle, supple thing I have read a couple of times. I don’t read it well, or fully understand it, but reading it half-assed is still worth it.
3. “La loi du genre” For English translations by Avital Ronell, see “The Law of Genre” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge. Routledge, New York and London, 1992)
4. In The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of Thomas M. Disch says much the same thing when he talks about the different kinds of science fiction — the hard science work of Greg Benford and Greg Bear; Anne McCaffrey, whose work he describes as the SF equivalent of “girl and horse romances” and a list of others who, as he points out, are shelved alphabetically in books stores with Ursula Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Gene Wolfe and others.
5. Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression’ in Donald Bouchard (ed.) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (trans.), Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977, p.34
6. The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida, again. Well, he’s difficult. I spent a lot of time thinking about his stuff — more than I did the work of other, equally interesting people who I nonetheless found less difficult and therefore spent less time thinking about.
7. Deconstructionism is, in some ways, an ideology of nitpicking. It doesn’t provide a blueprint for a new society, the way Marxism does. It examines things, particularly the language of how we think. A microscope is a fine tool, but it doesn’t help you build a hospital. A hammer is a much less sophisticated tool, but a lot better for building

I’m not by nature a nostalgic person. I think of my childhood as primarily a time when other people told me what to do, where to go, what to eat, when to go to bed, what to wear, and when my options were limited by my lack of resources. Sure, someone took care of me, fed me, bought my clothes, loved me, but for example, I was on a rural bus route that took an hour and I get motion sick. The doctor prescribed medication so I wouldn’t throw up every morning, but no one ever offered me any options other than fly out the door at 6:15 every morning for a dull and mildly nauseating hour. That, as far as I am concerned, summed up a lot of childhood. You make the best of it.

Bob has been consumed by nostalgia lately. He’s reading about Ghoulardi, a kind of cult TV personality who was big in Cleveland when he was growing up. I’m painting a bedroom and I bought some photographs off Etsy to have framed and hung. Then I thought about how all those decorating shows tell you to frame your own photographs so I dug out my box of photos from China and started going through them. I discovered two things. I’m not a good photographer. And I am deeply nostalgic about the girl in those photographs.

I was 28 when I went to China. I had a sense of what my life could be that was very different (of course) from how it turned out. I like how it turned out, mostly because of Bob. But I…regret is too strong a word…I have some wistfulness about the other life, which involved a great deal more travel. The road not taken, so to speak. I wanted to speak another language, live in another country again.

Of course, what I forget about that girl is that she was unpublished and felt a tremendous weight of anxiety. When I was 28 I had a life of rented rooms. I had never owned a couch, which seemed to me at the time symbolic of some sort of rootlessness and lack of seriousness. I had spent several years chasing the dream of being a writer. For some of those years I didn’t have a job or health insurance or a car or a boyfriend or a television. No dog, of course. I felt as if I was falling farther and farther behind in life. I wasn’t sure that I would ever be a writer. Or that I would ever be anything other than marginal.

Of course, being marginal was what gave me the freedom to up and go to China. Now, painting and decorating a room in my very nice house, living as a writer, I know that I wasn’t in fact falling behind. I forget all that. I see that girl and I forget all the anxiety of being young and uncertain. I see China. I see a time when who I was seemed more malleable. It’s a middle-aged kind of nostalgia. One I have no patience for in other people, and swore I would never indulge.

Indulge me?

Bob hates reality TV. What he really hates is the elimination at the end of so many reality shows, where someone is ritually exiled from the group, their torch is put out, the supermodel tells them they’re ‘out’, they are fired, or they are told to pack their knives and go. Which may explain part of the appeal of the show that has snagged Bob. Folding laundry one night, searching the TV for something to distract him, he came across The Real Housewives of Orange County. And now he’s a fan.

The Real Housewives follows six white, upper-class straight women who live in Orange County. They depict the Orange County lifestyle, which according to the show is gated communities of McMansions, Republicanism, rampant materialism and boob jobs. Cameras follow them around to catch them at their most entertaining worst. We are there when one of them goes to a consultation with a plastic surgeon to get her breast implants removed because her doctor says her DD’s are the cause of her back issues and her husband complains that he doesn’t want her to go too small.

Part of it is the unsparing but uninsightful eye of the camera. We see what the women do and what they say, but other than superficial commentary from the women themselves, we never get any real insight into why, for example, Vicki is so driven and controlling in her business and with her children, or why she drinks so hard at parties. (“They say I did a ‘woo-woo’ shot with the bartender,” she says, “but I don’t remember it.” A pause. “I don’t!” And then we see her on film, doing a shot with the bartender and shrieking ‘woo-woo!’ with him.) There is an old saying that people who marry for money earn every dime. The same might be said for these women, who may not have married for money, per se, but who certainly pay a price for their devotion to what they call ‘the OC lifestyle.’ Many have been married a couple of times, several have difficult issues with children, all of them have issues with their bodies.

Bob finds the show to be as compelling as a car wreck. He can’t stop being fascinated. At the same time he’s forever appalled by the fake hair, the botox, the excessive make-up, the clothes, the giant houses, the money, the waste of it all. Still, much as the camera works to catch them at their most stereotypical (Quinn, 52, dating a 26 year old or Tamra, who at 40 has just become a realtor, showing a house that comes with a Ferrari, Jeana, the ex Playmate, complaining that her husband only married her for her looks and the sex and when she gained weight, there was nothing holding their marriage together any more) and there are plenty of ‘do they realize what they look like’ moments, there are also moments when they become people it’s hard not to care about. Particularly in their dealings with their children, sometimes troubled, sometimes materialistic, sometimes touching, but usually as complex, flawed and human as any parent, anywhere.

There is a long strain in America of wanting to see evidence that the rich are not better, but that they are shallow, vain, materialistic and that we, the middle class, actually live more fulfilling lives. It’s a staple of movies and television. It’s part of our fixation with Brittany. We like to think that being rich means being out of balance. The Real Housewives of Orange County caters to that. It’s a cartoon of bleached hair and tans. It works to catch every shallow moment. There’s few moments of poignancy. It’s mostly fast food television, simplistic, superficial. It’s the opposite of The Sopranos, a fiction that dramatized the complexity of the emotional lives of people who could have been portrayed as just as tasteless and excessive. Of course, part of the problem is that The Real Housewives isn’t fiction. Heisenberg’s recognition that observation alters the object observed is really happening here. People are working for the camera and those moment of feeling probably happen off camera, in private, behind closed doors. Even if it sometimes seems as if these people have no shame, that they will say and do almost anything on TV, it’s true that their secret selves, mostly hidden even from them, are probably completely hidden from us.

The season ended last night. I suspect we’ll be there next season, watching to see if Vicki ends up at Hazelton.

To those of you who might have already read my posts about getting a dog in my blog, my apologies. But you know, I’m kinda excited and preoccupied, so:

We’re getting a new dog. We’re getting a rescue from a local Golden Retriever Rescue group. Our son is grown and out of the house. We have some disposable income. This whole exercise is clearly some sort of surrogate adoption experience.

It started with the adoption procedures. (That’s what the rescue group refers to it as, ‘adoption.’ Giving them a dog is called a ‘surrender.’) I filed an application and paid a fee. That was followed by a phone interview. And then a house visit, where we wre again interviewed and our home was inspected for suitability. We discussed what kind of food we would give the dog, where the dog would sleep, and promised to repair a couple of places in our fence.

Then we got a call asking us if we would foster a dog with option to adopt. That’s Hudson, the doofus pictured above. He’s 2 years old and was found running alongside the highway. The woman who rescued him has a child under two and another on the way and although Hudson is really good with her child, well, he’s a dog. And he is more than she can handle. Could we take him? Absolutely.

Yesterday I got the stuff for the nursery ready for him to come and live with us. Because we already have the world’s most annoying mini dachshund, we put up the old giant dog crate in our bedroom where Hudson could retreat to safety. But he needed a mat for the crate, of course. So I went and bought a mice comfy foam mat with a cover that fits in his crate. And he needed a new leash, and Shelly’s food is for Senior dogs and he’s not senior…well, you get the idea.

We’ll pick Hudson up on Friday.

At least there’s no baby shower in the offing.

There’s a commercial for a service that allegedly protects against identity theft. In it a guy sings about why he is wearing a pirate costume serving tourists in a restaurant. (It’s because he was bankrupted when his identity was stolen.) When I think of restaurants that set out to entertain, that’s the first image that comes to mind. The theme restaurant. Mariachi guys serenading over bad fajitas. Chuck E Cheese, where your kids will be distracted enough you might get a moment to just sit and watch them spend your money on games, or it’s adult incarnation, Damon’s, where you can play a quiz using the electronic quiz thingy on your table and play, not only against the other geniuses in your particular restaurant, but against people all over the country eating at Damon’s and ignoring their food just like you are. And although Damon’s food is not horrible, it isn’t exactly a crime to ignore it, either.

There’s been a kind of an upsurge of food as fun for people who might even like to eat. Probably the bottom feeder of this is The Melting Pot, which is fondue. Fondue is a license to officially play with your food. But it isn’t particularly great food. I mean, any time you let the customers cook for themselves, the point is really not cooking technique. I like fondue, but mostly I like it sitting around with friends, getting drunk and threatening each other with the little forks—in other words, I like fondue the way it was done in the fifties, when everyone got a fondue set as a wedding present. The idea of opening a restaurant where I let non-professionals anywhere near hot oil for cooking seems rather scary to me.

My kid, Adam, is a meat eater. He, like me, would really like to be a vegetarian. But the fact is, if we were vegetarians, we’d have to give up meat. I’ve tried. I’ve failed. Now I cook with duck fat and constrain myself to a kind of low level sniping at vegetarians who I resent because I consider them morally superior to me. Texas is a meat lovers paradise and Adam is a fan of BBQ. But I found a restaurant recently that pretty much nailed the food as amusement thing, the Brazilian Steakhouse. I’ve actually eaten steak in Brazil and it’s very good. Brazil happens to be geographically sitting next to Argentina, where cattle is king. But when I was in Brazil, I never ate at anything like Fogo de Chao. First of all, the entire wait staff is wearing gaucho attire—shirts, short pants, black shiny gaucho boots. I said to Adam that at least they weren’t wearing pirate costumes and he gave me a withering glance. He was right, this wasn’t exactly an improvement.

There are Brazilian gauchos, but gauchos and gaucho cuisine—beef roasted over a fire and a drink called mate—are really Argentinian. I don’t know why Fogo de Chao isn’t an Argentinian steakhouse. But I am quibbling. And Brazil is a big country with a number of different cuisines, including Bahian—which figures big in Jorge Amado’s luscious novel, Dona Flora and Her Two Husbands. Maybe in the south, where the jungle gives way pampas, there are Brazilian steakhouses.

The menu is meat. Fifteen kinds of meat. You are seated. They take your drink order (and they have an extensive wine list which, since the majority of the meat is beef, is probably better on reds than whites.) You go to the salad bar which has, in addition to lettuce and cucumber and tomatoes and stuff, thin slices of prosciutto type ham, cold asparagus, and fresh mozzarella balls. When you’ve had your salad, you have a little coaster sized cardboard sign on your table. It is red on one side and green on the other. You flip it to green.

The guys in the dorky pants instantly start appearing with huge skewers of prime rib, sirloin, filet mignon, sausage, pork loin, ribs, leg of lamb, lamb chops, bacon wrapped tenderloin, and for the faint of heart, chicken breasts. They put the point of the skewer on a plate at your table and start slicing meat. You grab the edge with your little tongs, they slice it off, and depart. In a minute and a half I had a lamb chop, a slice of medium rare leg of lamb, some tenderloin wrapped in bacon, and sliced prime rib. I flipped my card back to red. None of the slices or portions were large, but there were a lot of these guys flitting around in an anxiety of service and I could see how my plate would probably disappear under a mound of meat if I didn’t stop things. I ate through my samples, flipped the card over, and the gauchos descended.

It was amazing. And more importantly, the food was good. Was it profound food? Well, no. It was competently roasted meat. The sides—mashed potatoes, fried polenta, and fried bananas—we fine but not particularly interesting either in preparation or strangeness. They weren’t Brazilian. Or Argentinian. But real gauchos basically ate strips of beef that they dangled over a fire, they didn’t have sides. And I don’t usually have meals that devolve into an orgy of proteins. It wasn’t food as example of the chef’s skills, it was food as theater. Servers hovered. I took a sip of my wine, they refilled my glass. We took a couple of the light, buttery little rolls, the bread basket was whisked away and replaced with fresh rolls.

We had a great time.

I’m thinking that next I’d like to try even more theatrical experiences. There’s eating in the dark—that is, eating in pitch darkness where the servers are either blind or they wear night vision goggles. The idea is that without sight, you really taste and smell your food. Or maybe eating at wd-50 in Chicago, Wylie Defresne’s restaurant. Defresne is a molecular gastronomie guy who makes things like “Carrot-Coconut Sunny-side Up”. That’s what’s pictured below, and here’s a hint, it isn’t actually an egg. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

I’d love to go to Nantes and see this.  But even more, I’d love to ride one down the street.

(via Mysdirection.)

It was, in fact, a contract rooted in capitalist obsessions with property.

But it was also a ritual of extreme importance. When the mayor spoke the vows, I had the sense of something deeply irrevocable happening. Not that I didn’t know of lots of people who got divorced. Not that I wasn’t aware of the utter fragility of those vows. But they were vows, and somehow that meant that this moment would leave a mark, would be scored on us in someway. Tribal scars of the psyche. It was a test of our optimism, I guess. I am not, by nature, an optimistic person. It was like playing a high stakes table and putting money down. Win or lose, you’re putting it on the table.

Tonight we went out with the boys to celebrate. It’s our fifteenth. Which is crystal. (Not as fun perhaps as the 3rd Anniversary, which is leather. But better than the 7th, which is wool. Or, if you’re modern, desk sets. Who is in charge of that, anyway?) There are things no one can tell you about marriage. When it works, mysterious partnership, there is the utter pleasure of being an expert at this one thing, being with each other. Knowing the rhythms of another as you know yourself. The sound of breathing, the physical cadence of a heartbeat. I know Bob across the room without my glasses. I know the way his shirts fit across his shoulders, and what it is like to touch the back of his shirt with my fingertips.

I’ve seen how awful a bad marriage is. There is nothing more lonely than being alone in a marriage, I think. But we are made for this pairing, however imperfectly we do it. However much biology says we are also made to push at it’s boundaries. It is something that suits me better and better with age. And I am grateful.

Oh, well.  Here’s hoping for better luck in St. Louis:

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*If by “World” you mean that long stretch between Austin and Kansas City.

I have some vague idea who might have sent such a thing–it has a US stamp and an Oklahoma postmark. And so I deduce that it might be in Czech. The only words I know in Czech are…well, I don’t know any words in Czech. But I went to grad school, dammit, and I had a language requirement, and if that taught me anything, it taught me how to make a half-assed translation in a language I didn’t know. As best I can figure, the postcard reads:

I cannot resist. Muzete me this translate? “give me spout within beer.”

Much obliged!

And give my kind regards to the French Bean!*

I owe you a beer, Denton. Preferably at the Klášterní pivovar Strahov.

(Actually, it says ‘Give my regards to Bob’ but one translation software came back with this, and how could I not prefer ‘the French Bean?’)