Month: December 2005

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Resolutions

I’m not sure what resolutions I can make for 2006. In the past year, I read more (and more deeply) than I ever have, experienced that revelation of love that culminated in popping the question to Amy, and did all sorts of charitable activity. I didn’t write as much as I want, so maybe that oughtta be it.

My big project (and those never work out for me, so it’s silly of me to mention it) is to read a lot about urban planning and city dynamics, to get a better idea about the historical development of American cities. If that leads to an essay of some kind, you’ll be the first to know.

Another resolution: I resolve to revamp my music-oriented Mad Mix blog and post more often. I have some ideas for a new graphic layout for it, and a way of making sure there’s a substantive post at least once a week, but it’s a matter of execution (as ever).

Here’s yet more Proust, quoting a doctor:

“Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realise how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not kow what they cost those who wrought them in insomnia, tears, spasmodic laughter, urticaria, asthma, epilepsy, a terror of death which is worse than any of these, and which you perhaps have experienced, Madame.”

That said, Woody Allen’s films have sucked for more than a decade now.

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Slap-Happy New Year

New Year’s Eve is usually a time of reflection and drunkenness, dear readers, and I hope you all engage in plenty of both tonight. I’ll do a little reflecting right now, but no drinking, since it’s morning and I allegedly have standards.

The official VM fiancée & I are heading over to Café Matisse tonight for a five-course New Year’s dinner. It’s an early meal, so we’ll have time to get hammered at home tonight. Last year, we watched the first two Lord of the Rings flicks before the clock struck 12. We’ll have less movie-time this year, so we might just groove with Sun Ra instead.

Tomorrow, we’ll go to Princeton for our traditional New Year’s Day get-together with our friend Cecily, who will likely grill Amy about all sorts of wedding plans. We’re still trying to figure out what (if anything) I oughtta get engraved on my wedding ring. It won’t be this.

How would you go about recapping a year of your life? The gist of mine: helped Dad deal with / recover from heart surgery; proposed to Amy; read Proust; walked around a near-empty city.

There are plenty of other details, many of which you longtime readers have been subjected to: bought her a ring; gained new perspective on 9/11; bought a giant TV; saw a world of comics-geeks; moved this blog to a new provider, then a new platform; visited Cracker Biodome; watched Ric Burns’ 8-part documentary about New York City; read plenty of other writers. There’s more for a recording angel to catch up with, but there’s only so much room for memories. Sez Marcel:

If the name, Duchesse de Guermantes, was for me a collective name, it was not so merely in history, by the accumulation of all the women who had successively borne it, but also in the course of my own short life, which had already seen, in this single Duchesse de Guermantes, so many different women superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as the next had acquired sufficient consistency. Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years. Our memories and our hearts are not large enough to be able to remain faithful. We have not room enough, in our present mental field, to keep the dead there as well as the living. We are obliged to build on top of what has gone before and is brought to light only by a chance excavation, such as the name Saintraille had just opened up.

All of which isn’t to say much but Happy New Year, everyone. Live well.

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Don’t Go Back to Rockville

I’ve been reflecting on Proust for the last few days. Here’s a passage about going home again:

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But there are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. And great fatigue followed by a good night’s rest can to a certain extent help us to do so. For in order to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to light up the interior monologue — if the latter does not itself cease — fatigue followed by rest will so thoroughly turn over the soil and penetrate the bedrock of our bodies that we discover down there, where our muscles plunge and twist in their ramification and breathe in new life, the garden where we played in our childhood. There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain fugitive and fortuitous impressions carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal flight, than these organic dislocations.

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Present Day

Made it home safe and sound yesterday afternoon, but the final approach was a bit shaky. By which I mean, the plane was wobbling from side to side for the last 10 minutes before we touched down. I pounded a G&T at the terminal bar to steady the old nerves, then Amy & I headed over to baggage claim.

The Christmas-day exchange of presents was kinda funny. Amy told her parents that they could shop for me off my Amazon wish list, but I think they misunderstood her and bought nearly everything off my wish list. When they first checked out my list (and hers), they told her, “But you guys only have books and CDs on your list!”

Not anymore! It became a running joke on Sunday afternoon, as I opened package of books after package of books:

Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies and The Substance of Style

Paco Underhill’s Call of the Mall and Why We Buy

Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker

Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History

Collections of essays from Emerson and Orwell

Robert Strassler’s Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, for when I feel like redelving into that subject.

Her father said, “That oughtta keep you occupied for a week or so.”

Now, I was mighty appreciative of all the books (on top of the aforementioned copy of Black Hole), as well as the 5-quart stand mixer, but the problem arose the next day, as we began packing. We started to consider shipping all the books home (including the stuff I bought at Faulker House, and the Sam Cooke bio I just finished, and the copy of Little, Big that I brought down, as well as the multiple books that Amy received), before a severe redistribution of clothes, toiletries, etc., enabled us to get all the books into our one suitcase. Fortunately, Amy’s clothes don’t take up too much space. All I brought with me on the flight was The Future and Its Enemies and the Jane Jacobs book.

At the terminal yesterday morning, we discovered that the suitcase weighed more than 60 lbs., which should’ve led to a $25 overweight charge. Fortunately, they waived the fee because of my Elite status on Continental. Then we were allowed to cut into the security line, right in front of some crippled kids and nuns. Yay!

On Monday, we returned to the French Quarter, got more beignets at Cafe Du Monde, and walked around for a while. Plenty of people were out walking; nowhere near pre-Katrina numbers, but it was still heartening to see so many people vacationing there.

That led us to wonder about who’s choosing to go. Were they people who’d booked their trips pre-Katrina, or did they decide to go after, to boost the economy (and find cheap deals)? We should’ve asked, but we’re morons, so hey.

Instead, we bought cheap T-shirts at a souvenir shop! We picked up a couple of “I (Heart) NO” shirts, a NOPD (Not Our Problem Dude) shirt and a great one that read “I Stayed in New Orleans for Katrina and all I got was This Lousy T-Shirt, a New Cadillac and a Plasma TV.” How could we resist? If you heard some of the stories about how people are spending their FEMA money, you’d blanch.

And that’s about all I have to report on. The Quarter looks like it’s doing okay, but I can’t say anything about the rest of the city. I still don’t know how they’ll manage to get people to move back, and how they can jump start any industry besides tourism in NO,LA. Amy & I entertained some idle thoughts about what it would take for us to move down there, but were stumped as to what sort of city it could possibly become.

Maybe some of the books on my new reading list will help me answer that question.

(Update: Witold Rybczynski at Slate just posted a piece about this subject)

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Ho-ho!

Happy Chanukkah and Merry Christmas, dear readers! Sorry I didn’t post anything since before our French Quarter trip, but we’ve been pretty busy, and I don’t like writing on the WinXP machine that Amy’s parents own. I tried setting up a wifi network here with a wireless router from CompUSA, but their machine wouldn’t even start correctly when the thing was plugged in, so I gave up. Thanks, Mr. Gates!

As it turns out, one of the neighbors has a wifi network set up, which shocks me to no end. Since the neighbor would likely be just as shocked to find out that another person in the neighborhood is wifi-capable, he or she didn’t bother putting a password onto the network.

We spent last night visiting several of Amy’s relatives, then went to a family Christmas party. Unbeknownst to me, there was some sorta NBA draft lottery set up beforehand, and we’d all drawn names of other family members to a buy a present for.

Fortunately, Amy took care of my responsibilities on that one, but I was awfully puzzled when her aunt came up to me and thanked me for the gift.

What did I get, dear reader? Well, my Amazon wish list served up some interesting choices. In this case, Amy’s dad bought me a copy of Charles Burns’ Black Hole book. While it’s an amazing comic, I’m really hoping that none of the family flipped through it before wrapping it for me.

Before the party, as I mentioned, we visited some family members to exchange presents. I met one of them last March, when she was waiting for a diagnosis for a condition that turned out to be ALS. We hit it off last spring because she’s a big fan of the Hornets, and I can talk NBA with just about anyone.

She was pretty optimistic about the team’s chances this year, contending that a couple of trades and a high draft pick would bring the team on the road to respectability. On the way out of her house that evening, I said to Amy, “With all due respect, she’s going to get better before that misbegotten team does.”

Turns out she was right, and I was unfortunately wrong. The Hornets have been better than expected this season. Not playoff-worthy, but winning a fair share of games.

On the other hand, Joyce has deteriorated pretty badly, and now uses a keyboard-driven speech-box.

Her condition (and the team’s relocation to Oklahoma City) hasn’t stopped her from watching the squad, and we started “talking” about the team last night. Amy ventured the question, “Are you still waching the Hornets?” and Joyce spent a few moments keying away on the box with her stylus before, “THEY HAD A BIG LEAD LAST NIGHT BUT LOST TO THE BUCKS” came out.

“I saw the final score, but didn’t know they had a lead,” I told her.

“THEY PLAYED AGAINST BIG CAT LAST NIGHT.”

“Yeah, the Times-Pic played up the Mason-Magloire trade,” I said, smiling.

“THAT TRADE WAS DUMB.”

I mean, this woman’s trapped in a deteriorating body by this disease. She just asked us to turn off the Home Shopping Network’s cooking show because “IT MAKES ME WISH FOR FOOD.”

But here she is, conversing with me like we’re a couple of NBA lifers. Amy’s dad told me that she “shouts” at the TV during games still. We joked that there needs to be shortcut keys for “DEFENSE” and “REBOUND”.

Anyway, it’s time for yet more eating, here in Cajun country. Have a fun holiday, everybody.