something clever

A few months ago, at a book party, I met one of my favorite authors. I had read her book years before, between "real jobs," and I say that to the real waitresses out there because I am not a good waitress, if I were I might have worked at a real restaurant.

Anyhow, I could not justify $25 on a hardcover. But I read her book, all 400 some pages of it sitting in the window at Barnes and Noble overlooking Union Square, back when they would let you sit on the sill. I loved her book. I chose my next job, because of her book. I looked up the name of her agent and wrote him a letter--it was more complicated than that--but basically that's what happened. Still by the time I met her, all I could remember was a scene where time slows and light puddles next to a sleeping baby in his crib before making it's way over to him, to blanket him. It was brilliant.

We got into a conversation about travel and I tried to explain just how strange plane travel really is. I said something about the fact of not experiencing the time and the place in between. It's being so easy made it feel artificial, and the new place less wonderful, "unearned" is the word that comes to me now. And looking back on her expression, I think she could tell, I admired her and all I wanted was to be remembered.

So last night I went to a book reading. I had heard of one of the authors, had picked up his book "More Than It Hurts You" at least once or twice without buying it. The poets names both sounded familiar. Had I heard them read before? It was raining and I felt I the way you sometimes need a movie or a book by a fire, or an empty park all to yourself, I needed to be read to.

Readings are complex things, because once you've sat there and listened and watched the author turn themselves inside out, plunge into their mind and yours, reminding you of some strange, ineffable moment in your own life, you know you'll want to share it. It's stealing. The book is their own and it's their story not yours. It didn't happen to you, you only feel that way, all fifty people in the audience feel that way. But still you can't resist.

And everyone there in the audience is some kind of frightened writer, though most will deny it and the ones that are proud of it make you crazy with envy and also a little sick.

When the reading is over, I always want to ask, did you ever think that you would stand in front of a total stranger with something in your hand, something illustrated, with a bolded title, a bar code and blurbs if you are lucky, and say, "Who should I make this out to?" Would they be kind enough to lie? Or would it be more refreshing to hear the truth?

This reading was at a spa, but the space that everyone goes to when the reading is over is a writing space. I go through a couple glasses of wine before I feel brave enough to tell the author, Darin Strauss what I want to say. I want to say, " I have been standing here for half an hour throwing up and swallowing back different phrases in my mind but none of them seem original, I won't be able to tell you anything you haven't heard before,"" but even that sounds pretentious, planned, writerly or worse want-to-be writerly.

So maybe it's better to just say nothing. I will say nothing. And I think something about his line, "How do parents know the things they know" which is clinging to some corner of my brain, just scraping and gnawing, it's so much more than what it sounds like. It is spoken as he is walking into a church next to his father to attend the funeral of a girl he killed, "half a lifetime ago" he says. There had been a car accident and the story he told was true, but I won't give it all away.

Instead what comes out is something entirely unplanned about rawness, richness and honesty and hanging on every word. "I know it's a cliche." I'm so used to that saying that to authors I want to punch myself in the gut each time but it comes out.

Still his book was all of these things and I did hang on every word. But the story begs the question of exploitation. From the first line, "I killled a girl, half a lifetime ago," you think, "And you're writing about this? You're turning this girl's death, her family's loss into art?" You want us to feel bad for you for killing a girl? But because of what happened, the way it happened, he got more than pity, he got anger and grudging forgiveness and then a lawsuit.

But people were compassionate too, empathetic. You can romanticize death, he explains it's possible. You can make it into a story, you can make it about you and your hurt, your anger. It's your ace in the hole with friends, with the opposite sex. But the whole time, you know it isn't yours to own, and as soon as you start to feel okay about it, you wish you didn't. This is what he says, and I don't know why I connect with this.

So, even though people might cringe thinking of the family of this girl, the one he killed, and the friends of this girl who will read this book, I understand why it has to be written. Because it makes you feel something. And whether you need to define it, mold it into some recognizable shape, with a name, and explain how in some twisted way you can relate to even the worst parts of his confession, it is up to you, because it isn't your story it never was, and maybe it's enough to just say, "I was moved."

Guide to Hiring Women: 1943

My friend Kate emailed me this very helpful article,written by a man for a man who is toying with the idea of hiring women to work for him. Strangely when I found a re-published version online at the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the writer, Alyssa Rose had gotten it from her own friend Kate.





Here are a few choice morsels:

* When you have to use older women, try to get ones who have worked outside the home at some point in their lives. Older women ... are inclined to be cantankerous and fussy.

* General experience indicates that "husky" girls – those who are just a little on the heavy side – are more even tempered and efficient than their underweight sisters.

* Give the female employee a definite day-long schedule of duties so that they'll keep busy without bothering the management for instructions every few minutes.

I think I'll dedicate this lovely slideshow, "Women Who Dared" to the very thoughtful author of this article. Aww snap!

Happy International Women's Day

On Thursday, I went with some friends to see A Powerful Noise, a documentary about three women living in Mali, Vietnam and Bosnia and Herzegovinia coping with issues of war, gender bias and disease and their effects on the people there. For anyone who missed it here are some quick snatches from the film.



Madame Urbain (Jacqueline) a powerful African woman, leads an organization that educates and defends the right of young migrant women living in Bamako. Madame Urbain gives a ground trembling sermon about educating girls, but the old men sit stone-faced and silent, refusing to clap. She takes one young teenager's employer to court for burning the woman's baby with a knife and refusing to pay her her salary.

In Bosnia and Herzegovinia, Nada, a survivor of Bosnia and Herzegovinia's gruesome has started an organization for women, both Serbs and Bosniaks, to grow and sell produce. They also hold open forums to discuss their problems, business-related and otherwise. One woman reluctantly admit that her husband doesn't want her at the meetings, but she comes anyway.

In Vietnam, Bui Thi Hanh an HIV-positive woman describes taking her sick daughter to meet with a doctor who asks her husband, if he ever injected drugs. "He was silent," she said. "The doctor told us to go home and shut the doors." On top of dealing with the illness the family was shamed into isolation. Hanh lost her husband and daughter, then she created the group The Immortal Flower so people with HIV/AIDs could see they weren't alone.

In a graduation speech, a young girl thanks Madame Urbain for teaching her to read and write. Now, not only can she write her own name but when she goes to the market she can make a list so she doesn't forget anything.

Following the film, Ann Curry led a panel comprised of Natalie Portman, Madeleine Albright, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, Christy Turlington-Burns, and Dr. Helene Gayle of CARE. Here is a bullet point summary of highlights.

*Madeleine Albright despite the recession, we have to continue to see beyond our own domestic problems. She said even if you aren't altruistic, helping other countries is a form of national security.

* Natalie Portman described a poignant conversation with women in northern Uganda who would say to her, "I wish I didn't get raped everyday on the way to school." Several panelists brought up the problem of "rape as a weapon" and how it is being used to decimate villages in the Congo.

* Natalie Portman spoke about the role of Hollywood in raising awareness, saying "not every movie should be didactic" but that Hollywood can have an effect on people. In movies like An Inconvenient Truth or Syrianna, she said there's a "collective social empathy" where audiences channel the feelings of character's and try to understand their lives. It something people will remember after they leave the theater.

* Christy Turlington- Burns talked about maternal healthcare, the dangers for women ranging from death to fistula. She spoke about delaying marriage explaining that when girls get married at 13 the chances of ever getting an education decrease.

* In response to Anne Curry's question, Do men feel disempowered when women are empowered, Helene Gayle of CARE said no. She said, "The men look at their wives differently. Now she is contributing something." She added, "Brothers look at their sisters differently when they are sitting next to them in a classroom"

* Albright said that men can be supportive, but they aren't always, sometimes instead they do feel competitive, especially when women take jobs that were traditionally men's.

* Nicholas Christof spoke about microfinancing and put forward the idea that when there are women leaders in government there is less corruption. Turlington-Burns gave Liberia as an example of a country where microfinancing started as a grass roots movement and then exploded and the women involved in it were basically responsible for electing the country's next president. As Ann Curry pointed out, "Africa beat the U.S. "Liberia elected its first woman president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Natalie Portman championed KIVA, a site that lets you partner with one woman in a developing country, through direct communications and loans.

* All the panelist and Ann Curry encouraged audiences to write to their congressmen about these issues and to visit CARE's Web site.
The film's organizers have also designed a downloadable discussion guide.

Cat Power= Real Power.

I was introduced to her music two summers ago and listened to her sing at a park in Brooklyn. She came back a few weeks ago, but I missed her. Most of her songs, even the upbeat ones sound sad in her smoky voice, but oh so pretty. Come back Cat!!

Inspiration from TED

This posting is a simple referral. For anyone in a creative profession, and I'm not only talking about the arts but the sciences as well, I think you might really enjoy these two lectures from TED.

The first lecture is from author Elizabeth Gilbert, who discusses her anxiety over writing her next book, after the "freak success" of her recent bestseller, "Eat Pray Love."

Pointing to a number of authors who were considered "geniuses" and whose creative condition was assumed responsible for their inescapable melancholy or even suicide. Gilbert believes that the problem lies in our perspective. She distinguishes between the constructs of "having versus being genius" and explains that for hundreds of years when someone created a masterpiece you always credited "the muse," or "the genius in the walls" as this theory dissipated, we decided to credit the actual individual and that was where the problem started.

Gilbert explains, "Allowing somebody to think To believe that he or she is the vessel, the fount and the essence and the source of all divine creative unknowable, eternal mystery is like a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun."

Gilbert also touches on others who believe in the concept of the muse, as a force, based on antecdotes from songwriter Tom Waits and poet Ruth Stone.

The second lecture, I'd like to highlight is from a woman named Jill Bolte Taylor a brain researcher who explains what it was like to experience her own stroke. She explains what it felt like when the vessel in the left hemisphere of her brain burst and she narrates each of her thought processes, from trying to move her legs, and trying to decipher letters and numbers, to discovering she's lost the inability to speak. It took 8 years for her to fully recovery from her stroke, but from her perspective the loss was actually a gift.
Bolte Taylor recalls, "Because I could no longer feel the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive ... and it was beautiful."

Slumdog Millionaire

SPOILER ALERT: Do not read this if you haven't seen Slumdog Millionaire.



I took a mini-vacation from blogging, partly because I was busy and partly because I didn’t feel I had anything of substance to share. Since I’m years past being a student, everything I’ve learned in the past 5 and a half years has come from one of a handful of sources, books, the news, conversation, and movies. And frankly, only when and if I discover something insightful, engaging or memorable, do I feel I have something worth writing about. And even then I risk being misunderstood or worse, ignored.

After a week’s worth of dismal recession talk. I 've counted no less than five long conversations in person or on email about people losing their jobs in publishing, television, or the Internet. I worry over which writers, lawyers and banker friends still sitting at their desks waiting to be tapped, will actually be next. Sunday morning, I listened to a two-week old BBC podcast. I don't mean this to sound funny, but the man being interviewed sounded so incredibly hopeless and his voice reminded me of Eeyore. He'd run a forklift for over 31 years and his father, had worked for GM before him. He told a BBC reporter, "We can see that it's all necessary, it's just a matter of giving us you know, a little consideration, down on the shop floor, We'd like to be able to plan a little bit. It is our lives after all."

In the context of all this desperation, I decided perhaps rather appropriately that I needed to see Slumdog Millionaire. The film is in some ways the kind of cotton candy rags to riches fantasy that fuels the Bollywood industry, and it’s interesting to see that in the U.S. it’s the kind of escapism we crave right now.

A boy and his brother are orphaned, in a vivid and very true-to-life scene, where Hindu extremists slaughter Muslims. As they flee the area, they take along a third girl orphan girl, Latika. The three clever urchins scrimp scrounge and steal until circumstance splits the third musketeer , the girl, from the group. The younger brother Jamal, makes it his mission to find her and to save her.

I won't reveal the entire plot but this is where the spoiler begins so stop now if you haven't seen it. Leaving the theatre I noticed, the same Christmas-like exuberance that follows a fairytale ending. I remember feeling it after seeing Amelie in the theater for the first-time. And why shouldn’t people have been happy? Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, it was the formula we wanted. On top of that, and in true Indian fashion, the good guys get rich. It was heart-warming, purist, but not Disney-fied, apart from the Bollywood (Bhangra?) dance routine that ran through the credits.

While I didn’t want to be a buzzkill, it seemed the giddy excitement of the romance triggered some form of instantaneous amnesia towards the much darker ending, Saleem, the protagonist's brother’s suicide. I felt like the entire audience had forgotten him. In a reflection that seemed out of character, (I generally look for the silver lining rather than pointing out the thorny and jagged edges) I wanted to consider the story from a realist’s perspective. And to me it seemed the sadder and quickly forgotten story of Saleem, a scrappy slum kid, hardened by society, taught in Darwinist fashion to bargain, steal, lie, kill, and even rape his childhood friend (while only vaguely alluded to, this seems highly likely) seemed the more powerful and perhaps the truer story. But who am I to say what's real.

I have never been to India. My sister, curiously, was on a flight to India just as I was sitting down in the theater. I texted her as her plane prepared for departure, to let her know that while she was on her way to a town outside Vellore, where she had lived for a year, I was attempting to experience life in India on screen.

I have never been to India, but I have visited Southeast Asia. During my visit, I did see a sliver of the rough side of life there. I saw beggars that had been maimed by roadside bombs in Cambodia. On Kho San Road in Thailand, I saw teenage girls petting and being petted by men decades older and even listened nauseated as an Australian man attempted to explain to me that this was a different kind of a woman, who wanted these things. This was a life that was worked for her, that it was a "good life." I did not slap him, but would anyone have blamed me if I had.

I did not give money or food to every begging child, mother, or grandmother. I took their photos and occasionally bought a pencil or a soda. Much like in the movie, there were so many sad faces, so many beggars, children holding babies, mothers wailing, and I found that in less than a week I had hardened myself to all of them. But in some places the children despite whatever tumultuous past they had, despite whatever horrors they had seen, they actually did seem happy.

I visited an orphanage run by two Swiss women where children ate together, sang together, played together and prayed together. The older girl acted as mothers for the younger ones. They lived with them, as if they were true families in individual huts. Each one cared for every child younger than themselves and seven and eight year-olds took turns carrying around the babies.

Unsupervised, they all played together in a big room, regardless of age. They played games that looked like "buck buck"-- where a train of bent over bodies forms a line with their heads tucked in and a team of kids one by one literally runs jumps and throws their little bodies at the train, trying to collapse it. Some would chat in groups while others would kick and punch helicopter-like in tiny buzzing circles without any regard for who got in their way. But when someone got hurt they didn't cry for more than a minute. They never expected anyone to hear them and to see that they were okay. They liked having their picture taken. They liked holding my hand and sitting in my lap. But as much as I liked seeing them I did not know how to say goodbye. On the day that I was leaving, I was afraid to go back. I worried that the women who ran the orphanage, and had been somewhat hesitant to let me in, thought that I considered myself self-important. That saying goodbye was an invitation to be missed, after only a few days. Or maybe I was afraid that the children would actually miss me, that they might actually cry and ask me to stay. I did not say goodbye and apart from realizing that this orphanage was where I should have started my journey instead of ended it, it was the greatest regret or my trip.

Still, this slip of life, this glimmer of how others live was as close as I have come. If a movie, by inducing pity and horror and then washing it away with a light-hearted, sparkly ending, (though admittedly, traces of darkness did seep through) can bring back that same unsettled feeling, that realization of how little I actually know of the world, I think it's worth experiencing.

Happy Birthday Sweet Search!

Today findingDulcinea declared war on "search engine fatigue" by launching a new product called SweetSearch.

Anne Kostick writing on findingDuclinea's Blog explains, "SweetSearch is the offshoot of three years of research by findingDulcinea’s staff—an ever-growing collection of tens of thousands of Web sites, all evaluated and approved for reliability and ease of use. FindingDulcinea’s researchers use multiple search engines and databases to uncover many sites that don't routinely appear in the search engines most people use (Google, Yahoo! and MSN)."

Make sure to check out the comparison searches link on the blog. In two minutes you can see why Sweet Search offers better results than Google.

And for my own example, when you're having fun on the weekend, drinking some beers and trying to name the 44 presidents of the U.S. just for fun. (Yes, my friends are cool.) After you've spent an hour and a half trying not to look on anyone's Blackberry, you can go to Google for an answer or you can go to Sweet Search. Where the second findingDulcinea result is The US President and the Cabinet which includes results from the History Channel and the Intenet Public Library. The top results on Google's page include the White House's Web site multiple times (which Sweet Search also surfaces along with the Library of Congress) but Google suggests Wikipedia-- an encyclopedia who's credibility is always in question. Decide for yourself.

If your right-handed it's hard to brush your teeth with your left hand instead and it will be hard to switch over to SweetSearch from Google, but try it for a week and let me know what you think.