Babelblog

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If any of you happen to have about $25 million lying around, now would be a good time to build a luxury condo tower in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi. Just in case you had $25 million and didn't know what to do with it and needed investment advice.

It's been a quiet several weeks in Portland. Christmas came and went, and all the cookies are now gone, their ghosts lingering around my waistline and having the cookie equivalent of a wake. The city's variety of cold (32 degrees and mostly sunny) arrived, and six crumbs of snow delayed area schools for two hours. Everyone at work returned from exotic vacations, and work passes much more quickly since we now stock the fridge with porter, pale ale and stout. My job rules.

My wife and I, per our Christmas gift exchange ceasefire (in which we agreed to halt hostilities, give up arms and overpriced consumer electronics, and simply make our gift together) began our quilt. After several hours of study at the always fantastic Sellwood branch of the Portland Public Library, I realized most quilts fall into two categories: remarkably hideous or unbelievably difficult. Also, after looking at pictures of several hundred quilts designed to resemble the American flag, I'm thinking about making a Ghana flag quilt some year. Just to be different.

Quilting, and sewing in general as it turns out, is rather painstaking. I now understand why most people pay small Vietnamese children to do it for them. My esteem for grandmas and sweatshop children everywhere has risen.

Dear Dustbunnies,

Where the hell do you come from? I swept this morning and you've already returned. Your like zombies. Or the Bush and Clinton families. Or those goddamn loan consolidation letters. Just leave me the bejesus alone.

Sincerely,

Snarl Jones

We traveled to Spokane, WA, yesterday, and since our arrival at the inglorious Castle of Sweets I've eaten approximately five dozen cookies, one tin of caramelized popcorn, a summer sausage and half a pound of cheese. I'm not exaggerating, although I certainly wish I was. I feel like an insatiate horde of locusts, and given the raging of my heartburn, I partially expect rivers of blood, dead frogs, and pestilent boils to shortly follow. It also explains why I'm rarely re-invited to houses.

"Don't invite the locust guy again, honey. The Alvarez's lost their first-born the last time he was here. And some loon tried to part the water and lead his chosen people across the swimming pool."

The inevitable shame and remorse (and heartburn), followed by the compulsory minimum of research, has led me to the following two conclusions. First, as Rilke writes (and I'm about to pervert the profundity of his message), I must change my life. Second, which is less personal and more literary, award-winning novels seem to lack corpulent protagonists.

Excluding middle-aged protagonists with modest bellies (Nabokov's heroes, let's say), and excluding heroes for whom surplus weight serves only as a character flaw to be shed on the way to a happy denouement (Joan Foster in Atwood's Lady Oracle, for example), I could think of only the following:

Billy Pilgrim (Slaughterhouse Five)
Ignatius Reilly (Confederacy of Dunces)
Misha Vainberg (Absurdistan)
Sancho Panza (Don Quixote)

If there's a character under-represented in literary fiction, it's the 20s-something large woman or man.

Digressio: a departure from logical progression in a speech.

Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy is one of the most quotable (and most digressive) books in the English canon, wrote in his novel, "Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine—they are the life, the soul of reading!"  That the novel gets lost in digression after the first page is hardly surprising, and given its turnings and ambulations, we should only expect that the novel constantly delight and surprise us.  It does.

Jonathan Swift, the curmudgeonly satirist who recommended eating Irish babies in order to remedy a food shortage, ridiculed the digression in his satirical novella A Tale of a Tub.  He devoted an entire chapter to mocking my favorite figure of speech: "A Digression in Praise of Digressions."  Sadly, he's not quotable, but if you're willing to persevere through his baroque syntax and Byzantine grammar, A Tale of a Tub proves generally fun.  Plus he writes about pudenda in his digression, and everybody likes pudenda.  In fact, every body has pudenda.  Please stop touching yours.

Both writers lived and wrote during the era that happened to be the most influential in the growth and development of the novel in English, and we could argue that each was a progenitor of a literary path, Swift's path leading to naturalism and realism (George Eliot, Mark Twain and Henry James), Sterne's path leading to Joyce, Nabokov and contemporary writers like Auster, Barth and Pynchon.  Digression, of course, figures more prominently in metafiction than in realism.

Finally, this figure of speech has real-world value.  Research shows that digressions are one of the best ways to disrupt a sales pitch.  The next time you go car shopping, bring a wingperson or two whose sole job is to introduce digressions.  You'll probably save thousands while confusing the salesperson.  True story. I read it in my quarterly USAA magazine.  Really.  It would be tough to sell a car a to a group of digressors:

Salesperson: "So would you like the optional SafePaint for another $200?  It prevents chips like nothing else."

Wingperson I: "Did you say Chips?  I love that TV show.  Erik Estrada looks like a Ken Doll.  A hot Ken Doll."

Wingperson II: "Ooh, I love nachos."

holiday_express

In Portland, particularly in Sellwood, among the quirky old ladies and eccentric homeless and nonconformist mothers and  unconventional fathers and independent bookstores and the maverick, anti-corporatist coffee shops, I have always felt at home.  The city and this neighborhood feel separate from the world, and I rather like the illusion.  It is as though I, too, could detach myself from the world.

The Holiday Express, driven by an engineer dressed as a cowboy, ran the last two weekends.  The tracks are about half a mile from my apartment, and so I wandered down several times to gawk more closely.

A steaming behemoth with 80-inch wheels and an unholy whistle, it seems alive.  Books from the pre-interstate era tend to describe trains as animals, and I always imagined such descriptions as one of the era's elaborate conceits, something akin to the free-love VW Beetle infestation that plagued America's hippies (which, after all, was more a sign of pauperdom than a philosophical rejection of capitalism, the establishment and bad American cars).

I wasn't sure what I expected, but I certainly didn't anticipate a living machine.  I've ridden diesel and electric trains, and they seem more like giant, rocking porta-potties than animals.  Truly, I can't even imagine a station filled with trains like the Holiday Express, and I keep thinking about it.  The closest I've come is this: say dragons were real, and say that you could somehow catch about a dozen and domesticate them, and say you kept your weyr of dragons in a stable behind your country manor.  The riot and rumpus that occurred there would probably seem like a station filled with steam engines.

 Contemporary trains, tiny and quiet in comparison, seem like shriveled snake skins.  And they smell bad.

portland_skyline

The company buys food for its employees. The gourmet cheese in the fridge? I can eat it. That three-pound bag of organic pretzels? I'm going to put them in my belly. It's like the food for oil program, I guess, only minus the oil and plus capitalism's version of slave labor.

I will almost always be the first one to arrive in the mornings, and the woman who lives across from my window will almost always wander around in her underwear until at least 10 a.m. The woman who lives in the apartment below the half-naked woman will need a cigarette every 20 minutes, even if hurricane force winds are hurtling between the buildings. A bearded man in boxers will scratch his crotch every time he walks to the kitchen.

My official title is research analyst and it may or may not have anything to do with my actual job. I've spent the last nine days assembling office furniture, designing a complicated presentation folder and its inserts, editing contracts, and wondering why the hell I didn't demand InDesign before I began most of my projects. Dear God, don't let anything go wrong at the printer.

But mostly I've learned that work leaves one with much less free time. Even when the people are nice and work challenging, it rubs away the edges of the soul.

Bridge

Once per week NPR airs a segment called "This I Believe." Listeners write essays, submit them, and NPR produces the essays they find most promising. Each week's essay consumes about five minutes of airtime.

It began as a 1950s radio show, rose to immense popularity as a response to the shock of WWII, and then disappeared in the face of McCarthy-era dogmatism. Reincarnated in 2005, "This I Believe" has always bothered me. It has proven even more annoying than “Science Friday,” perhaps because most people's beliefs resemble the statements uttered by a patriotic doll after you pull its string.

"I believe in freedom." "I believe in hope." "I believe in opportunity."

I'd like to believe in these things. Indeed, I believe we should all want to believe in these things. But I don't believe in them, not in our current social and cultural system. I'm more likely to believe in conspiracy theories about JFK's assassination, the moon landing, and alien rectal probes.

An essay in this month's edition of Harper's Magazine talks about the American system of belief and “In This I Believe,” and the argument is essentially this: in America, people will listen and accept your beliefs as long as you say them sincerely, and this has proven dangerous because capitalism will say anything to increase profits.

Oil companies believe in protecting the environment. Wal-Mart believes in offering high-quality, justly produced goods. FOX believes in fair and balanced journalism. Yet counterintuitive as all these beliefs seem, most people seem to believe them.

In the end, I find myself forced believe in change, because if I can't believe in change, I can't possibly believe in anything that matters to me. And until others believe in the possibility and the logic of change, we are chained to a dysfunctional system, trudging along like prisoners on work release.