Hippo Dignity

Overheard in passing on 7th Avenue, in Park Slope, en route to buy some Thai penicillin:

“It was the biggest Nerd Scruffle I’ve ever seen.”

I’m not sure what a Nerd Scruffle is, but I’m pretty sure I’ve been in at least three of them.

How you can tell you’re in the Bay Area: the late night NPR call-in radio show is hosting a spirited conversastion about computer usability.

Home tonight, just in time for the temperatures to hit 90+.  Global warming, yay!

Part of the pleasure of working with industrial designers is watching the way they interact with stuff — people who make physical products think about those products very differently than most, in the same way I obsess over details of interfaces. I’ve learned so much about how the world around me is made, in the most basic ways, from working with them, listening to them, asking them questions. So it was a delight for me to have my MacBook get delivered to the office and watch the industrial design team examine it like doctors doing a physical.

I did refuse to let the mechanical engineer open it up, even though I count the day that her boss took apart an iPod nano among the more mind-bending experiences I’ve had at this job. But I wanted to take my new computer home in one piece, and I did. I’ve spent the weekend catching up on errands and sleep, and playing with the cool toys on the new computer. Unexpectedly, I have some UI complaints — the new iPhoto I find harder to use than the older version, and switching states in PhotoBooth is totally unintuitive — but overall it’s a pleasure to use.

Best of all, I think the built-in iSight could change the way people interact with their computers: it’s almost impossible not to have fun with it, to want to play with it, and once you get enough of an installed userbase, the opportunities for networked interactions get a whole lot richer. For now, though, I think it makes the relationship with the computer both more intimate and more performative — you want to watch it watching you. And of course it opens up whole new vistas of procrastination…

Hunting down the airplane quote from yesterday in Everybody’s Autobiography, I found another passage I’d marked out of sheer homesickness when I lived in Ann Arbor:

I also lectured in Brooklyn and that was interesting… because I met Marianne Moore and because an attentive young man accidentally closed the door on my thumb and we had to go into a drugstore to have it fixed. It was dirty the drugstore, one of the few things in America that are dirty are the drugstores but the people in them sitting up and eating and drinking coffee and milk that part of the drugstore that was clean that fascinated me. After that I was always going in to buy a detective novel just to watch the people sitting on the stools. It was like a piece of provincial life in a real city. The people sitting on the stools and eating in the drugstore all looked and acted as if they lived in a small country town. You could not imagine them ever being out in the streets of New York nor the drugstore itself being in New York. I never had enough of going into them.

I got name-checked on Eschaton, for noting (in comments) that an article Atrios pointed to misquoted Kanye West’s famous “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”* in a way that introduced stereotypically “black” grammatical errors.

This can only reinforce my street cred as a massive, massive grammar, spelling, and punctuation nerd. Holla!

* One of my favorite throwaway moments in the last Arrested Development episodes was the T-shirt Franklin had on that read “George Bush doesn’t care about black puppets.” Perfect.

Last week, I went to the dentist, and he suggested that instead of living through a lot more not-necessarily-successful dental work on two dodgy back molars, I “proactively” decide to pull the suckers and get implants.

I will admit, I was kind of freaked out by the idea of it — both the thought of undergoing the removal, and the thought of walking around for the rest of my life with prosthetic teeth. Then, after about half an hour, I calmed down enough to realize that I was having this freakout while wearing glasses on my eyes, an iPod around my neck with its earphones in my ears, a partial denture in my mouth, a brace on my right wrist, and my cellphone in my pocket, where I could be certain to feel it if it rang. I am already living my life with a whole mess of detachable artificial parts I either can’t or wouldn’t want to do without*: adding a few that would at least consistently be where I left them would be a nice change of pace.

* allow me to add to this list my work notebooks, which are my outboard brain in the office. I briefly misplaced the current one and was twitchy for hours till I found it.

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, I have an injured wrist ligament, which makes typing unfun. I’m finally seeing a specialist about it, and on anti-inflammatories, and wearing a soft cast, which blows, so hopefully I’ll be back to typing and knitting and twisting knobs with my usual panache soon enough.

Thursday evening, my friends Amy, Lisa, and Ed and I went to see Sweeney Todd, Lisa and I for the second time, Amy and Ed for the first. Lisa felt that it was a less intense experience from Row N than from Row F, which I mostly agreed with, though I did also appreciate from an aesthetic perspective the opportunity to see the entire stage clearly at once — for such an intimate production, there’s a lot going on. Also, I was fascinated by some of the changes they’d made to the text, particularly the added lines of dialogue in “A Little Priest” and the improvements to Act 2. It’s nice to be reminded that theater, as a live art, is also an art that changes over time in ways that we the audience, who attend one performance and leave, don’t usually get to see.

This is not, however, the point of my post.

The point of my post is that after seeing Lisa and Ed off to the subway and helping Amy negotiate a cab fare back to New Jersey, I started walking to the Times Square subway station, remembered I had an early-morning appointment on Friday, and decided to treat myself to a taxi. A car pulled up almost immediately, I got in and gave the driver directions, and I slumped back into my seat.

“You come from theater?” the driver asked in a heavy Russian accent.

“Yes,” I said.

“You go to theater often?”

“Not as often as I’d like to,” I said honestly.

The driver then explained that he was hoping I would know something about the theater, because he wanted to rent a costume for a poetry reading he would be participating in on Saturday, and he hoped I might have some idea of where he could go for it.

“What sort of costume?” I asked.

“An SS uniform,” he said.

Please feel free to imagine how freaked-out I was by this. I slid a little closer to the passenger-side door, mumbled something about the large number of costume shops across the borough of Manhattan, and prayed for no traffic all the way home.

“Oh,” he said, a few moments later, “don’t worry! I’m Jewish too. I should have said. I’m sorry.”

“Then why do you want to dress up as an SS agent?!?”

The story as it eventually came out over the course of the next couple of miles was this: the cabdriver was a formalist Russian poet (the word “iambs” in a Russian accent is just a joy to hear, by the way) who had a fairly fraught relationship with the editors of this avant-garde literary journal sponsoring the reading, who would occasionally publish his work but mostly looked down on him as boring. For the reading, they had set up a series of rules for the readers that included every reader having to be onstage during the entire evening — which both he and I agreed defeats half the purpose of a literary reading, which is to hang out with your friends and drink — and every reader having to come dressed in only black and white. I at this point mentioned Capote’s 1960s Black and White Ball, of which he had not heard, and we considered this data point together.

Anyhow, his idea was to come to this reading dressed in his SS uniform, sit on stage in it all evening long, and when it was his turn to read, he was going to read one series of poems that used a lot of slang and curse words, and another that was “pornogrrrapheek.” Sort of a you think you’re more shocking than me? I’ll show you shocking! gesture. I suggested that perhaps the people who are already coming to avant-garde poetry readings are the people least likely to be shocked, and he countered with a commentary on the self-regard of the Russian-language avant-garde in America. I admitted that English-language literary movements tended to the same self-regard, with, I have to admit, several pointed examples that I chose not to share coming to mind.

As we crossed the Manhattan Bridge, he launched into a critique of American culture and the marginal role assigned to poetry within it. Come on, I said, it’s always been the case that poetry is a minority taste. Think of Sir Philip Sidney, circulating his poetry in court! Look at Virginia Woolf, founding the Hogarth Press so her friends could have a place to publish!

“No, no, you go back too far,” he said. “Think of Allen Ginsberg.”

“Allen Ginsberg!” I said. “Allen Ginsberg would have been a star whatever he did. The man had incredible charisma. Did you ever get a chance to hear him read?”

It turned out that not only had my poet-driver heard him read, he had co-translated “Howl” into Russian in the mid-90s. There had been a few places where the meaning escaped them, so they’d called Ginsberg up and he’d met with them at Brooklyn College and explained it to them. He was still very grateful for that. He admitted that as he had gotten older, he liked Ginsberg’s work less than he once had, but still “there is a place in every poem that just speaks to me.” I told him I knew exactly what he was talking about.

We shared reminiscences (and in my case, a second-hand story from Ian) about Ginsberg as he negotiated the local turns that led to my corner. When he dropped me off, I did the only thing I could do, which was to give him a fifty-percent tip. “Think of it as my patronage of the arts,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. “Maybe I will use this to rent my costume.”

A break in the holiday-season-imposed radio silence to wish happy birthdays to a whole mess of holiday-clearance-sale birthday girls: my twin nieces, who are one year old, oh my goodness, my good friend and co-conspirator Martha, whose age is code-word classified, and my archnemesis Isabel, who is, if I recall correctly, now nine.

It has been suggested to me that a small girl in the Boston suburbs is setting the bar low in terms of archnemeses, but I think the advantage is all on her end.