Itinerantdaughter's Blog

My friend T lives in Lithuania (the reason for my visit there back in April) and he sent me this, to be disseminated amongst the more “aware” populations:

“OH! I was about to finish there, but realized I had an experience that I PROMISED to pass on to the civilized world. So I was talking to this Lithuanian woman, and she was criticizing the midwest – I was fine with it – she would fit right in over there. Anyway, she said something about how Americans are “racist” and I replied that it was certainly still a problem, but its easy for people like Lithuanians to make such accusations when their is absolutely no racial diversity in their country. I continued to point out that Lithuanian treatment of Jews and gays is pretty indicative of its overall low level of tolerance. She looked at me sternly and said – “well . . . I AGREE with that behavior.” I stood there dumbfounded momentarily, mostly just trying to understand how I ended up talking to someone so stupid. She continued on to tell me about how “the gays” have a secret manifesto and they plan on enslaving women and cloning only men (which means the female slaves would die off – seems like a waste – but i kept that to myself). Furthermore, according to my source, this plan was very realistic, because “everyone knows” how rich and influential “the gays” are . . . and how they have “infiltrated” the American government. I began laughing, because, well, how else do you react to something like that? But I have to say that part of me was petrified of the ignorance and self-assuredness in this woman’s speech. She clearly isn’t the only person with such views, and none of the Lithuanians standing around me shared my complete disgust (they didn’t defend her, but still seemed to be mulling over the discussion as if it were an interesting and complex debate – instead of one person spewing filth and the other trying desperately to digest what was being said without exploding). I eventually was able to control myself and told her that I can’t wait to tell my friends back home about her theory. Done and done. “

My father is a Libertarian, and he reads a lot of Reason magazine. When I told him I was blogging, and slightly ashamed of it, he sent me a link to an article about a new book called Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg, one of the founders of Salon. Link is below the excerpt.

Reason: Near the end of the book, you describe bloggers as the “curators of our collective history.”

Rosenberg: In the future, when people write the history of our time, they’re going to have this incredible trove of information. It’s not totally raw, but it is much broader than the material historians have had to work with in the past. It encompasses a much wider swath of humanity. I can’t help thinking of that as a monumental achievement.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/134784.html

There is a Kicking and Screaming other than the awful Will Ferrell one. It was directed by Noah Baumbach, who later directed The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding, and released in 1995, and is probably one of the most quotable post-collegiate malaise movies ever. (Surprisingly a large category!)

“How can you be nostalgic? We only graduated four months ago.”

“I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even happen. I’m reminiscing this right now. I can’t go to the bar because I’ve already been there in my mind, and I didn’t have a good time.”

Question: is there a word that means, “To do something specifically for its value as a memory”? If not, there should be.

PS: also zoloft does wonders for tempering my sex drive, so that helps!
ID: hooray zoloft!
PS: sad egg no more
you remember that commercial right?
ID: tugged at my heart strings, fo shiz
PS: zoloft egg
me: but i was on zoloft once and i never got to be a happy egg!
and it’s the cutest thing EVER!
PS: its so cute!
ID: darling

Don't you just want to hug it?!

Gay and Nan Talese at their house in New Jersey

I participate in this writing program that’s based out of Baltimore, where I will be going in a couple of weeks.  Be prepared for posts with such titles as, “Stalking John Waters” and “Real Hookers, Real Lives”.  I digress…any way, last January I went up to Northampton, Massachusetts to meet with my mentor and the other five people in our group.  We basically talked writing and craaaaaft and drank a lot (writers, psh) and at one point starting talking about the formidable journalist Gay Talese, pictured above with his wife Nan, who had (has?) her own imprint at RandomHouse (damn, girl!)

Besides being the owner of a sort of unfortunate first name, Gay is considered to be the “father of New Journalism”, and is the author of books like Honor Thy Father (about the Mafia) and The Bridge: The Building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. He also wrote the essay “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”, which you can read in its entirety here, along with the other six best Esquire magazine stories ever written:

http://www.esquire.com/features/page-75/greatest-stories

So we were talking about Gay Talese and how he is a member of a small category of journalists who make no effort whatsoever to blend in with their subjects.  Seriously, Talese would show up wearing a white suit and red suede shows in the Congo to write a report on half-naked pygmies.  Baller.

We (collectively, as a group, though someone else may have initiated it) came up with a brilliant idea for an article or essay…a guided tour through Gay Talese’s closet!  Each piece of clothing could be a platform for reminiscing about his many journalistic adventures!  A story in a great outfit!  What more could you want?

The group gave me permission to pitch this story around as long as I give them credit, which I will do but almost don’t even need to as they will be famous, well-dressed writers in their own rights in a matter of years (weeks, minutes).  Let this serve as a record for anyone who steals the idea!  Copyright!  Mine!  Plus I have five other people who will vouch for the birth of brilliance, which occurred in late January, 2009.  It’s a boy!  And we’re naming him Gay…(?)

If someone who edits a magazine or sumpin sees this and wants to pay me to write it (girl’s gotta eat), please let me know!  I was thinking it would work well in New York magazine or Men’s Vogue, though that may have gone under…?

Granted, this may be like the time when I was a kid and I had what I thought was the most incredible concept for a series of chapter books a la The Babysitter’s Club. I almost exploded when I told my babysitter.  “Basically it’s going to be set on a cruise ship and it’ll be about all the people who live and work on the cruise ship…”

“I hate to tell you this,” she said, “But that’s The Love Boat.“

I’ve told her before that she can’t die and leave me here because she’s a much better writer than I am. When she does, which may be soon, all things considered, I’ll fight tooth and nail to be in charge of condensing and editing her writing, but most likely won’t do it justice.

On the title of this blog/the nickname I gave to myself:

Notes of an Itinerant Daughter is inspired by/a smushing of two well known literary works, Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin and Notes of a Native Daughter by my beloved archnemesis, Joan Didion. Itinerant Daughter came about because I happen to work for an egomaniacal writer whose essential paralysis has not quelled his wanderlust at all, and so I am dragged from place to place in search of the muse, if you will. In the past eight months, I have “lived” in three different places (question: how long should you reside somewhere before you can say that you “live/d” there?), all pretty interesting in their own right.

Now I’m back to my “Native” urban land, and am happily much more appreciative of what this city giveth and taketh away than I was before spending time elsewhere. People love to talk about the authenticity of this city (from my own travels, I’ve determined a little more than most other cities.) It’s not the way it used to be, they lament, all hookers and peep shows and real diversity, not this gentrified BULLshit. The issue is that of course, no one really wants to live in a cesspool, and no one is willing to get rid of their comfy jobs and replace them with gigs as streetwalkers. Can you imagine tearing down the various Le Pain Quotidiens in favor of fifties-style “cafeterias”? In the end, does anybody really miss the old Apple, minus out of work pimps? Those of us who like grit (myself included, even though I maybe just talk a big talk) have to settle for glimpses of the ephemeral “Old” city. I was fortunate enough to get one the other night.

My friend MH and I were in a park downtown eating Thai food and hopping from one small jam session to another. We ended up finding a pretty decent one, with just the right amount of bongos, and parked ourselves next to it listening to the band’s rendition of Wild Horses. A man with a thick Jamaican accent (who, I swear, was the actor who played Sanka in Cool Runnings) walked up to a resting drummer. The two clearly knew each other. They slapped hands.

“Mon, ChiTown just got arrested!”

“Shit, man!” the drummer responded. “What happened?”

“Some cop saw him parking his car, said, ‘You can’t park there, sir!’ ChiTown says, ‘Go fuck yourself!’ and the cop says, ‘Excuse me?’ and ChiTown says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, fuck your mother!'”

It’s good to be “home.”

From Susie Orbach’s book Bodies, which is a great text on the contemporary conception of the corporal…

“Robert Sylvester, Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, asks us to reflect on a very ordinary action between a parent and an infant. The parent sticks out her or his tongue and the baby responds with the same gesture. We might laugh seeing this and think no more about it. But ‘how can an infant possibly master such a complex motor act immediately after observing it?’ It’s a good question. Projecting the tongue is an intricate task. While we respond delightedly to the infant’s action, if we do reflect on what it takes for a baby to reciprocate our sticking-out tongue, we recognise how many processes must be occurring in the baby’s mind to enable that spontaneous response. The baby has to see, then translate that seeing into an invitation to respond and then activate the muscles which control the tongue and the mouth to facilitate the tongue’s extension.

“If we were to look inside the brain, we would see a thin band of cells in the motor cortex which extends from ear to ear and is activated when movement occurs. In front of the motor cortex, closer to our forehead, we’d see action in the pre-motor cortex, the area that prepares for movement. A chance observation by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese in a laboratory in Parma, where they were studying monkeys just over a decade ago, led to the naming of a new class of neurons which are involved in this dual phenomenon of seeing and doing. Rizzolatti and Gallese were tracking the firing of brain cells as monkeys stretched their arms out to reach for peanuts. They were interested in what happened in the monkeys’ brains when this movement was made. They observed that every time the monkeys reached for a peanut, a specific group of cells in the frontal lobes fired. One day, a scientist from another lab came in to see Rizzolatti and Gallese and casually picked up one of the peanuts. Rizzolatti and Gallese were astonished to see that the same cells that were fired when the monkeys picked up a peanut fired when the monkeys saw the man picking one up. The act of seeing the scientist pick up a peanut induced the same neural behaviour in the monkeys, as if they were performing the action themselves. This extraordinary and unexpected result implied their brains mirrored the movements the monkeys saw whether or not they were making the movements themselves.

“Many experiments on –– including some involving humans observing other humans in action — this group of cells was named and designated as the mirror neuron system. When we watch another human being making a movement, whether it is sticking out a tongue, carrying packages, swerving, dancing, eating or clapping their hands, our neurons fire in the same way, as if we ourselves were making the movement. From the brain’s perspective, Rizzolatti and Gallese found, watching is pretty similar to doing. The brain has a built-in empathic and mimicking capacity. It translates what is seen through the eyes into the equivalent of doing and is structured to absorb and prepare itself for what we may not yet have mastered.”

If someone told you they were really into “Holocaust Porn”, would you think that:

A. The porn was set in a concentration camp
B. They got off on watching genocide itself?

Anne Louise Lambert as Miranda in Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock

JUSTIN MURPHY, JOURNALIST: One of those is Ann-Louise Lambert. Her character, the enchanting Miranda, had a surreal presence in the film – ethereal, untouchable, mysterious. One of her experiences on location connects eerily with that character. After one tough filming session where nothing went well, Lambert, in full costume, wandered off into the bush to be alone. She soon realised she was being followed. She turned to find an old woman clambering over the rocks towards her. Instantly, she recognised Joan Lindsay.

ANN-LOUISE LAMBERT, ACTOR: And she came up to me and just threw her arms around me immediately. And she said directly into my ear, um, “Oh, Miranda. It’s been so long.” And she was very emotional. And, um, and she just hung on to me for what seemed a long time. And finally she let me go and sort of stared at me. And she was, you know…she had tears in her eyes. And she was quite shaky. And it felt very…like a very powerful, very true thing, you know, that she was feeling. She was remembering somebody or something that was true.