The History of Love

“The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.

During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one’s face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one’s lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn’t go round with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they’d understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love you. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me."

"If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms – if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body – it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less. It’s not that we’ve forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other’s bodies to make ourselves understood.”
- Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

Happy Valentines, my sweets! Take it easy. Keep it sleazy.

Simon Rich: Center of the Universe

This week's Shouts & Murmurs is obnoxiously accurate and undeniably brilliant. Have you read it yet? Eh hem:

On the fourth day, God created stars, to divide the light from the darkness. He was almost finished when He looked at His cell phone and realized that it was almost nine-thirty.

“Fuck,” He said. “Kate’s going to kill me.”

He finished the star He was working on and cabbed it back to the apartment.

“Sorry I’m late!” He said.

And lo: she did not even respond.

“Are you hungry?” He asked. “Let there be yogurt!” And there was that weird lo-cal yogurt that she liked.

“That’s not going to work this time,” she said.

“Look,” God said, “I know we’re going through a hard time right now. But this job is only temporary. As soon as I pay off my student loans, I’m going to switch to something with better hours.”

And she said unto Him, “I work a full-time job and I still make time for you.”

And He said unto her, “Yeah, but your job’s different.”

And lo: He knew immediately that He had made a terrible mistake.

...

They bought some beers at a bodega and drank them on a bench in Prospect Park. And Kate introduced Him to a game her friend Jenny had taught her, called Would You Rather?

“I don’t know if I want to play a game,” God said. But she made Him play anyway, and after a few rounds He saw that it was good. They played all afternoon, laughing at each other’s responses. When it got cold, God rubbed her shoulders and she kissed Him on the neck.

“You know what I kind of want to do right now?” Kate said. God tensed up.

“What?”

“See a movie,” she said.

And God laughed, because it was exactly what He wanted to do.

They decided to see “The Muppets,” because they had heard that it was good. They had a great time, and when it was over God paid for a cab so they wouldn’t have to wait all night for the L train.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2012/01/09/120109sh_shouts_rich#ixzz1iiVxozoQ

Cakes and Ale

One of the better openings in modern lit, don't you think? So well observed! (Click on the photo, it gets bigger.) I get you, William. People are predictable and annoying.

Cheers.

James Stevenson, “Belmont Stakes,” June 22, 1981

This little article from the New Yorker online archives is so random, but totally cracked me up:

I have little knowledge of, or affection for, horses (I have been kicked by them, bitten by them, stepped on by them, and thrown from the tops of them), and I would just as soon see the one hundred and thirteenth swimming of the Dugong Derby as see the Belmont, but I do like events, and I have to take what is available or stay home. (The events offered in this area on Saturday were a crafts expo, an energy fair, and a skate-a-thon.) What I learned from Larousse [“Encyclopedia of Animal Life”] was: “Horses, asses, zebras … are monodactyl, the functional digit being the middle one…. The different parts of a horse’s limbs must be clearly understood. The upper parts … down to the elbow or knee, are enclosed within the outline of the body…. The visible parts of the legs begin with what correspond to our forearms and shins. Thus, what is commonly called the knee in a horse is really the wrist, and the equivalent posterior joint, the hock, is really an ankle.”…

This means, I realized, that if a man were to race against a horse—in a fair race—he would have to “race” lying down, balanced on one knuckle of each hand and foot; that is, “running” with his wrists, forearms, shins, and ankles only. (Illustration A.) The horse would have a clear advantage in such a contest, but you have got to give the horse a lot of respect for running like that in the first place.

—James Stevenson, “Belmont Stakes,” June 22, 1981

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2011/06/takes-thirty-years-ago-at-the-belmont.html#ixzz1OtnVTplP

Hahahhaaa, right!? I am just tired or is it actually that funny?!? Anyway, good stuff, NYer.

The New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue

The best New Yorker of the year should be in all of your mailboxes by now, with that awesome cover of what looks to be a Miami interior. Makes my mouth water.

I've only read one story so far (busted) and-- turns out-- it wasn't even fiction. It sounds like Lahiri and read the same books as kids though:

I learned what my fictional companions ate and wore, learned how they spoke, learned about the toys scattered in their rooms, how they sat by the fire on a cold day drinking hot chocolate. I learned about the vacations they took, the blueberries they picked, the jams their mothers stirred on the stove. For me, the act of reading was one of discovery in the most basic sense.

Also in this issue:

• George Saunders: “Home”
• Jhumpa Lahiri: “Trading Stories”
• Jeffrey Eugenides: “Asleep in the Lord”
• Lauren Groff: “Above and Below”
• Aleksandar Hemon: “The Aquarium”

Images from Jonathan Franzen’s Island of Solitude

While Franzen's essay in no way lacks necessary visual information, I was still excited to find the NYer News Desk posting of actual photos from his journey to the so-called Island of Solitude. That donkey! That blue!

Farther Away

The New Yorker released Jonathan Franzen's latest essay this morning on Facebook, of all places. (Were they commenting on the NYT's wall? Or maybe on Franzen's FB line at the end there? What's going on?) I read it this morning in one big bite, while my friend Lauren--two thousand miles away in Seattle-- patiently waited for me to finish so that we could discuss it.

Farther Away starts out as a sort of overly romanticized adventure story--- all 'I feel like it would be a good idea to find my footing again by being completely alone on a tropical island for a while, and to pack nothing but some iodine tablets and “Robinson Crusoe.”' My favorite part in the essay is actually when Franzen discovers a fully functioning cabin on his campsite with food and a bed and a stove and gets all annoyed and decides to ignore it.

'The refugio’s existence made my already somewhat artificial project of solitary self-sufficiency seem even more artificial, and I resolved to pretend that it didn’t exist.'

Hilarious.

The essay eventually switches into another story all together, one that I wasn't quite prepared for. The intended Defoe/Crusoe literary criticism fest (no one does this better than Franzen, by the way. Franzen writes about books the way that duller people wax poetically along about food. Well, Zadie Smith does it pretty damn well too.) casually morphs into The Big Essay. The one about his dear friend's suicide and the eventual acknowledgement of his own grief.

Franzen's grief is palpably raw and understandably muddled. He writes almost clumsily around his own feelings of anger and regret, love and tension. When it finally comes time to scatter Wallace's ashes on one of the island's many cliffs (at the request of his late wife), he does so with a narrative so nervously honest and confused that it caused this reader to dig at her cuticles until they bled.

'It was late afternoon, and the wind was blowing out over the insanely blue ocean, and it was time. La Cuchara seemed more suspended in the air than attached to the earth. There was a feeling of near-infinity, the sun eliciting from the hillsides more shades of green and yellow than I’d suspected the visible spectrum of containing, a dazzling near-infinity of colors, and the sky so immense that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the mainland on the eastern horizon. White shreds of remnant cloud came barrelling down from the summit, whipped past me, and vanished. The wind was blowing out, and I began to cry, because I knew it was time and I hadn’t prepared myself; had managed to forget. I went to the refugio and got the little box of David’s ashes, the “booklet”—to use the term he’d amusingly applied to his not-short book about mathematical infinity—and walked back down the promontory with it, the wind at my back.

I was doing a lot of different things at every moment. Even as I was crying, I was also scanning the ground for the missing piece of my tent, and taking my camera out of my pocket and trying to capture the celestial beauty of the light and the landscape, and damning myself for doing this when I should have been purely mourning, and telling myself that it was O.K. that I’d failed in my attempt to see the rayadito in what would surely be my only visit to the island—that it was better this way, that it was time to accept finitude and incompleteness and leave certain birds forever unseen, that the ability to accept this was the gift I’d been given and my beloved dead friend had not.'

It takes great courage to write about a failed attempt at anything, and Franzen's pursuit of quietness and isolation gives us hope that perhaps our busy world is good enough as is. He returns to his 'girlfriend and a martini' back in California without regret but also without any clear revelation or spiritual understanding gained from such a dramatic little journey. But it's this lack of closure that gives the story weight and undeniable importance-- 'As long as we have such complications, how dare we be bored?'

NY Art Week

New York Art Week has come and gone. I'm so glad I'm not the person in charge or orchestrating the tear-down process. Can you imagine all of those needy egos trying to ship their (very expensive!) works back to wherever they came from at the same time as everyone else? That pier will be cleared within 24 hours. Seriously, can you imagine?! So glad I was merely an ad man in that mix.

Anyway. Despite my busy week/weekend, the world kept spinning.

A few non-art fair related notes:

I recently finished a book of truly exquisite short stories, all (but one) of which brought me to a greater understanding of human interaction. Highly recommend!

I re-watched two films that I loved last year, and loved them both again. Especially Please, Give. I can't get it out of my head.

Each week I read “Shouts & Murmurs” in the New Yorker and often wonder why it isn’t very funny. However, this week's didn't disappoint.

Speaking of the NYer, Tina Fey is back this week with a fantastic piece I read online this morning in bed. I didn't really like her last contribution, which made me feel a little unsettled. Who doesn't love Tina Fey? Luckily this one cured my weird guilt issue.

This illustrator's work made me audibly gasp.

Miss Moss' comparisons of runway fashion to paintings are some of the coolest things I've seen online in a while.

Oh, and I finally saw The King's Speech and I get it now.

I know I just mentioned this, but I want to recommend Miss Moss' notes on art, in general. Not just the fashion comparisons. Seriously smart lady.

Hills Like White Elephants

WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT... this story came to mind when considering Blue Valentine as a story without a middle. Hemingway's short 'Hills Like White Elephants' is alternately a story without a beginning or an end. It's a snapshot of a conversation and a portrait of a relationship written almost 90 years prior to Blue Valentine but with an equally deft portrayal of a difficult and unfair conversation.

A taste:

The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

‘They look like white elephants,’ she said.

‘I’ve never seen one,’ the man drank his beer.

‘No, you wouldn’t have.’

‘I might have,’ the man said. ‘Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.’

The girl looked at the bead curtain. ‘They’ve painted something on it,’ she said. ‘What does it say?’

‘Anis del Toro. It’s a drink.’

‘Could we try it?’

The man called ‘Listen’ through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.

‘Four reales.’ ‘We want two Anis del Toro.’

‘With water?’

‘Do you want it with water?’

‘I don’t know,’ the girl said. ‘Is it good with water?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘You want them with water?’ asked the woman.

‘Yes, with water.’

‘It tastes like liquorice,’ the girl said and put the glass down.

‘That’s the way with everything.’

‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.’

‘Oh, cut it out.’

‘You started it,’ the girl said. ‘I was being amused. I was having a fine time.’

‘Well, let’s try and have a fine time.’

‘All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?’

‘That was bright.’

‘I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?’

I love that last line. It reminds me of something Daisy would say. And that drink reminds me of the "Americano" served at Locanda Vini E Olii, where that photo was taken up top. LOVE that place. It also reminds me that I want to visit Spain. And that Hemingway was ahead of his time.

Full text here.

The Tree Story

And now, to counter my obnoxiously upbeat take on this holiday season, please read this: Lauren Hoffman's newest essay on The Nervous Breakdown

And a bit of our corresponding chatter:

5:25 PM Lauren: Christmas stories have morals – things like “Giving is important” or “Family matters” or “Maybe snoop through your husband’s closet a little to find out what he got you before you up and cut off all your hair” or “If you don’t want the inside of your hotel to be covered with placenta and overrun with shepherds, go ahead and tell that nice pregnant lady that you’re all booked up.”

6:10 PM me: bahaaaaaaaa

did you write that??

please say yes

6:11 PM Lauren: yeah

I changed "covered with placenta" to "covered IN placenta"

6:17 PM me: that makes all the difference

Lauren: are you being sarcastic?

because OMG IT DOES

6:18 PM me: my arms hurt

Lauren: yoga?

my thumbs hurt from christmas button crafts

6:22 PM me: i wasn't being sarcastic! i love little word changes

i do i do! (yes, yoga.)

6:23 PM Lauren: hahaha

I'm trying not to overwrite

but I really hate christmas