Particularly Ludicrous

On July 18, I went to the Zen Center for a class meeting and then I went down to the Ferry Building to meet Tom for the train to Sacramento. We stayed at Ann and Mac’s that night, and the next day, we had a birthday lunch for the two of them at Joe’s Crab Shack in Old Sacramento. Here’s who was there: Ann, Mac, Tom, Steve, Julie, Dan, Eva, me, and Ann’s friend Geri, who organized our outing.

It was extremely hot, to the point that even Sacramentans murmured a word or two about it, which means it was over a hundred degrees. After lunch, we went on the aforementioned river cruise, which was quite interesting and which I already posted a couple of pictures of.

It was rather offensive (I was going to say “comical,” but it wasn’t comical) to hear the complaints about Sonia Sotomayor’s “empathy” being an ominous sign her decisions would be biased (because of course she would feel empathy only for other Latinos; you know how they all stick together).

We already have a Supreme Court justice—John Roberts—who consistently demonstrates tremendous empathy—for corporations. If we have a new justice who feels actual empathy for actual persons, that sounds pretty good to me.

A movie I enjoyed very much lately was Bull Durham, which I’d never seen before. A young gangly Tim Robbins is in it, and Susan Sarandon, twelve years his senior. He was 30, she 42. This is where they met and became a couple, though the star attraction is Kevin Costner. I’m on a Kevin Costner kick.

I also really liked Donnie Brasco, with Johnny Depp and Al Pacino. It’s based on the true story of an FBI agent (Depp) who was embedded with the Mafia for so many years that he became, in effect, a Mobster himself, torn between his job and loyalty to his criminal friends.

I enjoyed 13 Going on 30—gosh, Jennifer Garner is extremely pretty—and thought Amores Perros was excellent. It takes place in Mexico and features three slightly overlapping dramatic stories.

I read And Now You Can Go, and was surprised at how much I didn’t enjoy it. Didn’t I read another thing by Vendela Vida and didn’t I conclude she was a genius? No! I read a thing by Heidi Julavits (they are co-editors of literary magazine The Believer), and she IS a genius.

The New York Observer said this: “Heidi Julavits is a show-stopping maximalist compared with Vendela Vida, whose elegant restraint is sometimes a little too unflinching.” The latter means, as far as I can tell, that Vida’s writing is utterly without affect or human emotion. I read all of And Now You Can Go and never felt engaged or interested. Instead, read Julavits’ The Mineral Palace and/or The Effect of Living Backward; The Uses of Enchantment is on my library list.

A book I enjoyed lately was Name All the Animals, by Alison Smith, a memoir about losing her 18-year-old brother in a terrible car accident when she was 15 and subsequently falling in love with a fellow student at her Catholic girls’ school, which also did not have a happy ending. (It’s possible that not falling asleep together in the bed of the nun who was in charge of discipline might have allowed the romance to flourish for a bit longer than it did. Ai yi yi.)

Terry Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise is also a memoir, about a summer cross-country bicycle trip she undertook with a college friend in 1977. A week into the trip, a never-apprehended assailant drove over their tent with his truck and then attacked them with an axe; the author’s friend’s eyesight was permanently damaged.

Fifteen years later, Jentz went back to the small town in Oregon that was the scene of the crime and conducted her own investigation, during which she almost certainly discovered the identity of her attacker. The book is a bit heavy on somewhat mystical introspection, but generally well written, and very interesting, if creepy. The description of the evening they pulled into the campground is chilling.

As a side note, Jentz is gay but we don’t learn that until the last few pages of the book, in the acknowledgements section, when she thanks her partner, Donna Deitch. That name sounded vaguely familiar—it's because Deitch is a movie director (Desert Hearts).

One striking fact was that Jentz’s friend had complete amnesia about the entire thing: she went to sleep in her tent, and woke up in the hospital, whereas Jentz was acutely conscious at every moment.

The friend refused, ever, to listen to Jentz describe what had happened, so, while Jentz was physically with her friend during this act of violence, in effect, she was completely alone, because she could never discuss it with the other person who was there.

I lately read Eric Puchner’s Music Through the Floor, a collection of short stories. Here are a couple of my favorite bits. This is from a story about a young man who has a job an an attendant to a couple of developmentally disabled boys:

“Jason never went back to his original self. He sat in the back of the van and saved himself for special occasions, shouting out the window only at particularly ludicrous sights, like a dog or a hippie.”

Here a character in another story is attending a poetry reading:

“After a while, he realized that she wasn’t bowing her head from shyness at all: rather, she seemed to be addressing her own sexual organ, beseeching it in a progressively louder voice.”