I Thought That You Were My Friend

Andy Roddick drew his good friend Justin Gimelstob to play in Round One of the U.S. Open and Gimelstob chose the occasion to announce his retirement from tennis, like anyone will miss him. Sorry, but I saw him play when he was a teenager and he was a brat. I’m sure he’s grown up a lot but he has nothing like Roddick’s class.

Take this bullshit match for example! Gimelstob comes popping out of the gate like a fucking firecracker. He’s fires fast, potent serves that he practically rocket-propels with the scissor-like snap of his long body. His long limbs also aid him at the net where he rushes to successfully block nearly every return, volleying them in a sickeningly showy, point-winning way.

Andy, who’s going to beat him, is tight and nervous. Why? Because Gimelstob is his friend – it’s awkward to crush a friend. But not for Gimelstob! He’ll stop at nothing. He even volleyed a ball onto the court after Andy had turned his back thinking the point was over. “Oo! He’s supposed to be his friend!” John McEnroe exclaimed. “Stabbed him right in the back!”

Andy needs a hard, grueling match like he needs a hole in the head. But Gimelstob doesn’t care. He’s determined to push Andy to the limit and I’m sure Andy wasn’t psyched up for that. I’m certain it’s taken him by surprise the way any friend’s sudden competitiveness does. It’s like the sting of a surprise lash of a whip. Huh???

Andy fights and fights, but Gimelstob is all pumped up with nothing-to-lose brio and he repeatedly outplays the struggling champion. I find it miserable to watch Andy looking so stressed and furious. “Fuck!” he yells at one point. The whole stadium hears it, we at home hear it. He does not need this kind of clobbering in the first round by his friend.

But he pulls it off. Or out, as you Americans say. He manages to serve enough aces, and Gimelstob hits some wild shots and slowly errors himself out of the running. When it’s over Andy walks to the net with a strange, set look on his face. He’s angry, I think. He can’t believe his friend put him through this kind of near-ass-kicking. But when they meet, the two men embrace with all evidence of total affection. They seem to speak in an easy, friendly way. And I realize I never will understand men. This kind of pounding is not taken personally – it’s just sheer testosterone, nothing out of the ordinary. They’re joking and laughing as soon as it’s over.

Well, they feel fine. I’m too upset to sleep!

Summer Is Over

We all needed jackets and socks today. My mother said it got down to 45 degrees in Vermont. Up there, she thinks it won't be warm again.

Freaky deaky. Floods in the midwest. Hurricanes in Mexico. A cold summer in the northeast.

Does anyone else think there might be something up with the weather?

Poem #5

This polis is not hectoring the dean elect.
Instead we plant our tranchions near a near-extinct
egret.
Lemon-dressed and barely breathing but still for let.
A lovely nymphet of an egret. It dances barely
breathing but is still lemon-dressed.
Lemon-dressed and half-expressed. A purple-bellied egret
dying to commit egress. Let it wander half-expressed.

Darkling, I Listen

James Wood writes a convincing defense of Ishiguro's bland prose style in Never Let Me Go, here

Isn't it awesome how I can do links now?

Thanks, beckett.

#2 is up

Robot Secretary 2


I don't know what I'm doing.

I don't understand where I am.

I don't know which end is up.

I don't know my ass from my elbow.

I couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.

Free the People

Freebird bookstore in Red Hook is my favorite place in this city. It's on the waterfront, it's stuffed with books, and there are easy chairs to sit in and coffee to drink. What more do you need? It's got this out-of-the-way feel that's unlike anything else in NY, and there are usually no more than two or three people in it (counting you and the owner).

Mercer Books in Manhattan is as good a bookstore. And there's a similar you-can-stay-all-day-and-read-an-entire-book-without-buying-it ambience, but no chairs and no coffee.

The owner of Freebird told me today she's looking to sell. It might be turned into a restaurant. Aggh. It's the coolest little spot right now. There are zines and 7-inch records by local artists and old cds and great ancient books as well as a very respectable current-fiction section. Or you can just sit and stare out the window. It's the best.

I signed their mailing list and wrote "please don't close" under comments. But how often does a 2nd-hand bookstore win out over a restaurant? The owner said there were several people interested in buying it and keeping it a bookstore and I pray they follow through.

Dude, Everyone's Talking About Robots

Robot Article

Never Let It End

Microsoft Word suddenly announced it was full, or wouldn't save anything anymore, or something. This was while I was typing in my journal, detailing some malaise that I naturally was seeing as the apotheosis of a downward trend and the last straw in a haystack of missteps. Suddenly I was cut off, which of course I interpreted as the universe telling me to stop whining and go enjoy the day. But I can't.

I feel sick. I think I was getting sick last night, which is one reason I couldn't enjoy the date* -- I went on a date -- as much as might have been possible. Dating is super-nervewracking, at least for me. So much anxiety surrounds every aspect of it it that no wonder I crash into illness as a response. (*Don't worry, he doesn't know I have a blog.)

For instance, I'd pretty much decided the evening should not end up at my apartment but I had to clean every speck of it in case I wavered from my avowed course -- but naturally I partially hoped we would end up at my apartment -- but I also knew if I left it filthy I'd be ensuring I didn't weaken in my idea that it would probably be a mistake.

So naturally I cleaned with no clear sense of purpose and a mounting terror.

Good times.

In other news, I just finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Isihiguro. Whew. What a load of codswollop. As everyone probably knows by now, it's about clones and it's written from the point of view of a clone. All I could think after plowing through 280 pages of blah, lax writing and clumsy foreshadowing devices, was: wow, I guess clones aren't good writers. Whaddaya expect? They're clones. But I still thought Ishiguro let himself off the hook with this conceit. He gets away with a lot of slack writing and the characters are flimsy and shadowy, though I'm sure a chorus of "They're supposed to be shadowy" will arise in response to this.

If you're going to have characters, why leave them uninteresting outlines? I get that the clones' world in the book was flat and poorly defined. They were secluded and no one told them what the real world was like so they live on some weird assumptions and treat each other with a bizarre combination of concern and lack of affect. I thought that was interesting. It could have been a lot more interesting if I knew who these clones were. Even clones have a few characteristics, don't they? It comes out that two of the girl clones are highly sexed. You learn about one of them early on, one of them later. But Ishiguro never gives you the slightest whiff of sexual urgency. The clones just report on needing to have it, sometimes really bad. That's what I mean -- the story comes mostly through reportage. Couldn't you have a few scenes that convey the interior world of a clone, in all its limitedness and strangeness? What's it like for a clone to have sex?

I can hear everyone yelling at me: It's supposed to be mysterious! You're asking for the regular demands of genre fiction!

Someone once said that to me and I was stung to the core.

Why can't criticisms of an artwork have validity if they're connected to conventional needs for understanding someone's person-hood (or if they aren't a person, the specific quality of their experience)? I'm happy to let that go if there's a great style experiment going on, but there wasn't here -- the weak writing bothered me more than anything. Or I'm happy to let it go if there's some other energy on hand. But if the point of the book is a love triangle and there seems to be a suggestion the reader should care about the three involved, how can you skate by characterization like you're writing the day's menu for a cafeteria lunch?

It feels like Ishiguro tossed this one off in about two weeks, ran his first draft by his publisher and was startled when they said "We love it, we want it just as is!" "Really? Er, well... " (that will save me several years' work) "okay."

That's what I imagine happened. The world rhapsodized about this book. I can't understand it.

That's Another Good Point About Dogville