Liquid Logic

Anyone in the New York area should make it a priority to see the Murakami show, which runs through July 13 at the Brooklyn Museum. It is a mad delusion to believe that words can sufficiently capture what took fantastic explosions of color and shape to get across. Nevertheless, here are some phrases that come to mind:

exuberant naivete
Willy Wonka
adorable pornography
product placement
edible landscape

As a writer, I should probably try to string those phrases together into an actual review, or, at the very least, a description of the show, but I’m not up to it. I just turned in the first draft of my sequel to Cycler, inventively entitled Cycler 2, so I am still in recovery mode. Note to those considering careers in fiction: think twice.

The good news is that the Murakami show is very much an installation experience. One does not merely look at Murakami’s pieces but rather enters into them. And, in fact, this fantastic landscape of candy-colored, anime-infused future-porn was just the nourishment I needed to begin to appreciate being alive again.

Check it.

If you ever find yourself in a jam, lunch-wise, with nothing in your refrigerator except a few eggs and some blue cheese, do NOT be tempted to combine them into an omelette.

Blue cheese + eggs = unmitigated disaster.

I know. It doesn’t make sense, right? Separately they are both wonderful ingredients. But for some reason when you combine them, the result is almost traumatizing. You know that smell from your basement that you can’t quite place and you hope will go away on its own some day, but it never does? That’s what a blue cheese omelette tastes like.

Thankfully, this discovery was made today along with another happier one. Our oven broke unexpectedly, leaving me with some beautifully risen dough and no way to bake it. Woofy came to the rescue with some butter and a cast iron pan. What follows is a bread recipe that will shock and delight you:

Combine 2 cups of white flour, 1 cup of wheat flour (just 3 cups of white flour is fine too), 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt, one package of dry active yeast in large bowl. Add approximately 1 2/3 cup of water and mix with your hands until it’s combined but shaggy. Do not knead. Cover with plastic overnight (up to 18 hours if possible). Then scoop it out of the bowl onto a floured surface, sprinkle with flour and fold it over a few times. Let it sit for 1 1/2 hours covered with a clean dish towel. Cut the dough in half. Take one half and flatten it with your hands to about 1/2 inch in thickness. Melt a tablespoon of butter in a cast iron pan on medium heat. Put the flattened dough in. Cover with foil. Flip after 7 minutes. Cook for another 7 minutes. Repeat with other half.

You’re welcome.

My brain doesn’t work as well as it should. And I have only myself to blame. I have been abusing my brain and now it’s getting back at me. It’s not exactly on strike. It hasn’t walked off the job. But it regularly shows up late, sometimes not at all. And then, right in the middle of a work day, it gets up and leaves. No good-bye, no apologies. Just gone.

Why?

Simple. I am a professional writer, but I’ve been working like an amateur. Thankfully, I am married to a former professional athlete. Not only is Woofy always ready with a cycling metaphor, he understands the long-term approach to performance. And writing, like cycling, is all about performance. Every day when I sit at my computer I have to perform. If I’m tired, if I’m bored, if I’m overworked, my performance suffers.

Now way back in August, Woofy looked at me with my bloodshot eyes and thousand yard stare and said, “Lauren, you need to take a break from writing.” “Hell no,” said I. “I have far too much to say.” I kept on writing. I wrote like a demon. In between two novels, I wrote a screenplay. While I was waiting for my deal to be finalized at Random House, I squeezed out another novel. I was unstoppable.

And now I’m paying the price.

When you exercise, you are actually hurting yourself, by damaging muscle tissue. When you rest, your body repairs itself. And because your body is smart, it makes those abused muscles extra strong in preparation for the next onslaught. The rest period is as important as the exercise period.

As Woofy never tires of reminding me, mental fitness works the same way. You have to work very hard to become a good writer, to become good at anything. But only by resting can your brain absorb what you’ve put it through and “repair” itself. Often times, I’ll struggle with a particular chapter or scene. I’ll spend all day re-writing it. I’ll stay up late working on it. But it’s only when I’ve gone to sleep and woken up the next morning that the solution comes to me. And it’s not because I’ve dreamed the solution. It’s because I had worked my brain into oblivion and it needed time to repair itself.

Basically, what I’m saying is that a writer, like an athlete, needs an off-season. Most likely, all people need an off-season. This is something they seem to have accepted over in Europe where it’s standard to get a minimum of 6 weeks holiday. I bet those Euros are good and rested. I bet when they come back from their sun holidays in Ibiza, they are raring to go.

I am taking my off-season this year. Probably in May, when I’ve turned in my Cycler sequel. But the really scary thing about it–I mean the thing that identifies me as a card-carrying puritan work ethic type A-American–is the fact that it’s only by zombifying myself with overwork that I can even stomach the thought of more than two weeks off in a row. Lance Armstrong wouldn’t think that way.

Issue Number 5 of Sybil’s Garage is here and within its dark is embrace is an interview I gave to the very inquisitive Devin Poore. I think I might have said some smart stuff, but don’t hold me to that. Devin did ply me with wine if I remember correctly. It’s a steal at $5 and you can purchase it here, something I highly recommend.

Here is editor Matt Kressel’s description:

A spectrum of stories and poems from the past, present and elsewhen. It is intergalactic love ballads, evil supermarkets, the bad girls of myth, and nostalgia for things that never were. It is our largest issue yet, with ten stories of fiction and eight poems, and everything else you’d expect from the magazine that Behind the Wainscot calls, “a saturation tank of isolation and the sublime.”

I can’t wait to get my greedy hands on it!

Oh and one more thing on the whole collapsing Ponzi scheme that the entire American economy is turning out to be.

Can’t we use the concept of eminent domain to seize the assets of the pseudo-geniuses who engineered this mess? I mean, it’s all well and good for the main dudes at Bear Stearns to lose millions of dollars courtesy of their own malfeasance/stupidy. But they still have millions squirrelled away somewhere. They still have homes, right? Why not seize all of it. That might prevent future generations from earning their living by playing beat the regulator. You know, if there were real consquences for such things.

Just a thought.

David Brooks writes a reasoned, sober, mostly sane defense of the Fed bail out of the financial industry in today’s New York Times.

The main arguments are familiar. Some companies are too big to fail because their failures, while justly earned, will hurt too many people. People shouldn’t be “punished” for being naive. Etc. Etc.

I can agree in principle, sure. There’s just one problem. It doesn’t feel right to me. I have a gut (possibly knee-jerk) reaction against it. I realize that some decent people will be harmed if we let the whole real estate market collapse. But won’t this also end up rewarding some people? You know, people who earn modest livings, pay our rent, stay out of debt and keep our material hunger in check? I realize that people who upgraded to McMansions when normal sized homes would have done, are not necessarily evil, but the effect they and their enablers have had on the economy is. A free market doesn’t merely reward smart (or lucky) investment; it also punishes stupidity.

If the entire housing market collapsed, then a lot of people who saved their pennies rather than gambling like drunken sailors would finally find themselves in a position to be the new home-owners. Personally, I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to own a home. I’ve been kept out by inflated prices and prohibitive down-payment requirements invented by co-op boards who only want to live among other super-rich and privileged people. Should these people pay the price for the collapse of the system they created? Of course, they should.

What will their sentence be? What is the horrible fate that befalls a person or family who loses a home? Why, it’s a sentence I’ve been enduring for a long time. It’s called renting. And it’s not that bad. It mustn’t be, or the government would have been busy trying to save me from it all along. Right?

Apparently this little gem of a movie is experiencing a bit of a backlash. Some have even compared this backlash to the irrational Hillary-hatred currently gripping our nation.

Listen to this quote from S.T. VanAirsdale of Vanity Fair:

Frankly, I don’t want to see Juno within a thousand feet of the Kodak Theater. I want her and her twee champions stopped at the metal detector. I want her turned away for being underdressed.

VanAirsdale feels that No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are the “milestone” films of the year and that it will be a terrible travesty if these “graver” films are overlooked thus allowing Juno to squirm tweely into a Best Picture win.

David Edelstein of New York Magazine, goes to bizarre extremes to attack Juno by criticizing both director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody (whose name he snarks on) for having successfully “engineered every response” from the audience, as if that’s not what filmmaking is at its heart.

Blogger Mark Asch, apparently mourning the fate of the more important and manly films on the nominees list, writes:

If There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men split the smart-person vote, and Juno actually wins, I will understand, even better than I do now, how the Unabomber felt in his cabin all those years.

Asch goes on to accuse the academy of nominating Juno because of screenwriter Diablo Cody’s “backstory” as a stripper, as if that makes any sense.

Whatev, dudes.

I’ve seen neither No Country For Old Men nor There Will Be Blood. I’m told they’re both excellent. Fine. Good for them. One thing they can not be, however, is “milestone” films. They’re both historical films and while history is both important and darn fascinating, I think it’s also important and darn fascinating to pay attention when a bona fide cultural phenomenon is prancing tweely across your radar. Juno is that dancer. Among the many wonderful things about this movie is the fact that it could not have been made at any other time in history. It is positively fresh on the subject of teen sexuality and reproductive choice and it manages to be hilariously funny and gut-wrenchingly poignant at the same time.

No surprise that its writer, Diablo Cody, is herself a supremely modern phenomenon.

Perhaps VanAirsdale, Asch, and Edelstein hope to nurture the women-optional trend in Hollywood movies. Perhaps they believe that only stories about men killing each other count. For that reason alone, I hope Diablo Cody and her wonderfully modern film kick ass come Oscar time.

As I’ve mentioned before in this space, I don’t usually watch the Oscars because I hate timeless classic evening wear. This year, however, I may just have to tune in to see if, after the boring parade of Grace Kelly and Cary Grant wannabes timelessly glide their boring way across the red carpet, Juno does slip tweely into a Best Picture Win. I will count such an event as a much-needed victory for modernism.

Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times writes:

I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers. I suppose J. K. Rowling could give me 1.12 billion reasons in favor of it: get your formula just right and you can enjoy worldwide sales, film and television options, vibrating-toy-broom licensing fees, Chinese-language bootlegs of your work, a kind of limited immortality (L. Frank Baum who?) and — finally — genuine grown-up readers. But where’s the artistic satisfaction? Where’s the dignity?

Where’s the dignity? Does Itzkoff honestly believe that JK Rowling, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville (whom he reviews glowingly in the rest of the article) are merely treading water in kiddieland until they’ve matured enough to write for the “genuine” readers. Are teenage readers not “genuine?” Do they read books sarcastically, flippantly, with their tongues in their cheeks?

Both Gaiman and Mieville wrote “adult” fiction before writing young adult fiction. One could just as easily argue that they had to graduate from adult fiction before being ready to write for teens.

I am new to the field of young adult fiction. In fact, I wrote two “adult” novels before being ready to produce my first young adult effort, Cycler. To suggest that the teen reader is an undignified consolation prize is wildly off the mark. Teens have homework. They have assigned reading. To qualify to enter those crowded, over-worked minds, you have to deliver something truly special. The reward for meeting this challenge is knowing that your target audience is probably not as encrusted with cynicism and literary prejudice as the likes of Dave Itzkoff.

When I’m feeling blue, I always reach for my copy of Scientific American. Inside this magazine is something I find increasingly rare: optimism.

Science is an inherently progressive phenomenon. Sure, it gets things wrong sometimes, but today’s science is always better than yesterday’s and tomorrow’s will be better still. That’s the way it works.

This month’s issue gives us good news on 2 counts.

1) Our sense of justice may be hard-wired. According to this study, when capuchin monkeys were trained to swap tokens for cucumber slices, they became agitated if one monkey was getting more than its fair share, even sacrificing its own slices as an expression of outrage. Such “irrational” behavior has been observed in humans too, of course, but only recently have we found samples of it among our primate relatives, thus suggesting that justice is our birthright. Kind of beautiful, no?

2) Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has donated like a kajillion dollars to establish a world-class graduate university in Saudia Arabia in an effort to restore the formerly great Islamic tradition of science. What’s incredibly cool about KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) is that it will admit men and women, offer full scholarships, and allow women unheard of freedoms on campus. It’s an ingenious idea. Not only will it offer this doomed country (oil revenues ain’t going to last forever) a path to the modern world, but it will provide a contained and hopefully not too controversial experiment in female liberation. I never thought I’d utter such words, but, go King Abdullah.

Oh, how I tried to stay away. From this blog. From politics. I even went all the way to England and France for 5 weeks just to avoid it. I am above American politics, you see. The endless bickering, the misogynist character slander, the pettiness. Not for me, thanks. I’m meta. I reserve the shining light of my superior intellect for the analysis of meta-cultural phenomena only.

But then Hillary had to go and win NH despite (or because of) being reduced to tears by the endless mean-spirited personal attacks against her.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t stay silent.

People (on the Right, on the Left, oh and all you so-called feminists as well), get over it. Hillary Rodham Clinton is running for president, she might win, and, yes, she has boobs. Can we move on? Please?

If I have to listen to one more Lefty feminist complaining that Hillary is not feminist enough, I’m going to puke. Is Edwards more feminist? Obama? Do you honestly believe that if Hillary even mentioned the word feminism, she would ever be elected in this Battle of the Sexes-obsessed country? Get real. Hillary Clinton is feminism. She doesn’t have to talk about it.

What we have here, in this bizarre, protracted witch-burning, is a collective airing of our nation’s unadulterated insanity on the subject of women. Hillary is a stand-in for all of our collective insecurities. Some amazonian paranoia of the rise of an infernal matriarchy (that perhaps we suspect already exists beneath the surface). And moreover, it is a playing field for women’s defeatist bickering about which type of woman is the correct type of woman. So, we’re supposed to hate Hillary because she got where she is through marriage. Why? Because, after all, you and I didn’t get where we are through marriage. And, god forbid, any woman be different from us. We’re all supposed to be exactly identical. And when we discover that some women out there have the gall, the unmitigated cheek, to be different from us, we must engage in a national debate about it.

What a colossal waste of energy. What a distraction.

So, I say, go Hillary. Campaign your bleeding heart out. Are you the best candidate among the democrats? Maybe. Maybe not. To be honest, a dirty sock would be an improvement over what we have now. But I hope you stick it out to the bitter end because we must–absolutely must–get past this moment. We must, one day, elect our first female president. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to choke us. But we simply must cough up this hairball so that we can at last move on.