Why I'm Not a Character in A Farewell to Arms
There is a saying about Hemingway: "He never says someone is sad; rather, he makes it rain."
There is in this a great conflation of setting and character, a way of taking the mood of an individual and making it environmental. (There is also a lot of truth in the sentence, as well, and it reminds me of one of my favorite jokes. Q: Why did Ernest Hemingway's chicken cross the road? A: To die. Alone. In the rain.)
It was always hard for me to understand the "mood" of a novel. People have moods. Houses, trees, activities, the stuff of fiction: no moods. It's all an elaborate metaphor. And that would be fine, except that they test for this sort of thing on the SAT.
The flip side of this metaphor, however, I understand. My own moods are tightly linked to the weather around me. Yesterday was the first wind-whipped day of the year, and walking outside, I felt the same energy that I could watch blowing tree-leaves upside-down and newspapers across the avenues. When skies are grey and greying, or even tinged with a menacing green, I internalize a certain excitement that anticipates the electrical storm that is to follow. When the air is cool and brisk I want to play; when it is hot I am miserable (and not just, I think, because of the uncomfortable temperature or the too-bright sun); when it snows I am happy.
This is not entirely crazy. I may be highly attuned to the weather, but everybody is somewhat attuned to their environment. When lights are bright, we are all less likely to sleep (and this explains the well-lit garishness of malls and casino floors); when it's warm, we're more likely to be drowsy; if there's techno music and strobe lights, our pulse is likely to be relatively fast (even if we're not dancing); if we smell food, we're more likely to salivate and to feel hungry.
Still, I can't help but think that I take this to a strange extreme. So I don't think books have moods, and I certainly don't think rain makes this day sadder than the next (even if I do think Hemingway uses the conceit to excellent effect). But I do like to entertain the notion that I am myself a metaphor for the environment around me, that my moods reflect the world (and not the other way round). It is a nice reversal of the literary.
Jimmy's from Georgia
I went to see Jimmy Carter speak last night. In many ways, he was a compelling and interesting man, full of a desire to do good in the world and pleased to be using his post-Presidential time realizing that desire. Much of the event I was at was a question-and-answer session, and that, too, was interesting, with discussion running the gamut from the role of the UN and the appropriateness of the Iraq war to people's moral obligations in everyday life to this country's changing political landscape.
With all of this as food for thought, it might be a bit surprising that the thing I have been chewing on is the fact of Carter's amazing identification with Georgia. Carter, so a friend tells me (I haven't looked it up), is 82. And he is firmly, staunchly, happily from Georgia. He lived there, he built his Presidential library there, he returned after his time in the White House, he talks with an old Georgia twang and he made a point of centering the Carter Center in Atlanta. This is Carter's home. He doesn't want to live anywhere else, and when he was in Washington, by his own admission he missed his home.
People of my generation just aren't like that. We are citizens of the world, or at least of America, far more than we are of this or that state. There is a kind of cosmpolitanism that has taken hold across this country.
That's not to say that we forget where we come from, or that New Yorkers and Bostonites aren't in some ways fiercely loyal to their cities, but that those identifications are no longer as geographical as you might think. A friend of mine here in New York thinks of himself as a Chicagoan, to be sure, but it isn't anything geographical or even practical that he misses. He has explained to me that he will probably never live there again, in fact; his preferred jobs are in New York, while his idealized retirement is in Europe. Clinton may have grown up in a small house in Little Rock, and he may have put his Presidential library there, and he may even have been governor of Arkansas, but he's a New Yorker now.
Or, no, scratch that. He's not really a New Yorker. He's a citizen of the world, in a way that Jimmy Carter simply is not and could not be. Clinton could be at home in New York or Arkansas, London or Tokyo or Seattle or Toronto. Jimmy Carter could spend time in each of these places, could live there, but he'd never make them his
home.
I don't know what to make of this. It's just a reflection...
9/11 in NYC
This whole thing is fucked up.
I don't want to participate in the glamorization of 9/11. I don't want to participate in the hijacking of this date for a political agenda, right-wing or left-wing or even appealingly moderate. I don't always feel like compromising or being nice. I don't see what thanking the Marines has to do with remembering the collapse of the twin towers. I don't think all idologies are created equal. I don't like people's morbid fascinations. I don't want to hear another one of those calls from people trapped inside the buildings to 911 crews who couldn't get to them. I wish people noticed the flags at half mast. I'm tired of the bickering over the WTC site. I hate the World Trade Center movies and I wish people wouldn't watch them. I'm disgusted by evocative video montages that toy with emotions just for the sake of toying with emotions. I'm tired of people who pretend not to remember that anything happened. I'm tired of people who remember too much, too vocally, too voyeuristically. I'm tired of this whole goddamned thing.
like a puerto rican rocket, perhaps?
Every Thursday afternoon there's free music in the marble-and-pavement, fountain-and-9/11 memorial park on 45th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. Usually, this means that a bunch of corporate types are serenaded as they take a hurried lunch before running off to go do something corporate again. Sometimes, however, the music is good enough that people really listen and enjoy it.
Sometimes, it's good enough that we dance.
And this, my friends, is how I spent my lunch break today. There was a three-man band, featuring a drummer, a keyboardist, and a trombonist/trumpeter/flutist (floutist?), playing fantastic Puerto Rican music, bantering with the audience, inserting lyrics about the various people eating lunch. And at some point while I was there, a random fellow started to dance. And then a girl with him. And then somebody else, this one in shirt and tie. And pretty soon, there were a bunch of us, some of us in pairs salsa dancing to what was obviously not quite a salsa beat (it was close, though), others on their own just doing their thing. It was great.
My friend
MJS has this great obsession with fads. (Perhaps weirdly, he has now been published in
Science and has had his research splashed all over the pages of the New York Times and the BBC. You can make anything academic if your research is good enough.) Years ago, back before he was academical hot stuff, MJS was trying to figure out
pogs. You remember them? Everybody I knew collected the cardboard disks. We played at school. On school buses. At home. It was a dumb game: you throw one pog at a stack of other pogs (to which you've contributed your fair share), and you get to keep the ones you flip over. Then your opponent does the same. The point was to relieve your friend of all his pogs without losing very many, or any, of your own. It was gambling for eighth-graders, the most positive outcome of which was that one might win some cardboard circles.
What MJS said, and he was right, is that it's an awfully weird thing that this game would take off like a rocket. I mean, lots and lots of kids play hearts on the busride in to school, but those of us who don't do so don't feel particularly uncool and don't particularly wish that we did. Lots of adults play poker and make winnings, but people who don't play certainly don't feel left out. So what's the difference between hearts and poker, on the one hand, and pogs, on the other?
MJS posited that it had to do with numbers. Surely, he said, there had to be some critical mass of kids who played pogs before suddenly
everybody felt they had to get in on the action. If
enough people played hearts, the rest of us would want to, too, he thought. MJS likened the process to a state change in chemistry: just as one can add heat continuously to a solid and it just becomes a warmer solid until suddenly it hits that critical temperature at which--wham bam!--it becomes a liquid, one can add people to an activity and it just becomes a slightly more widespread activity until--wham bam again--it takes off like a rocket and becomes a fad that we all have to get in on.
I like the analogy. I like the question of why people are wired like that, if in fact we are. And I like the uncertainty about just what that critical number of people
is. (Just think how much money you could make in marketing if you knew how many people in a given population you had to get on board before your product's popularity would snowball on its own!)
In the case of dancing in the marble-and-pavement park on 45th Street, though, I posit that we can know that critical number. It's three.
