Assorted things

People who are readers should probably read Lydia Davis because she is interesting. Lots of things are interesting--sports, movies, the lives and more specifically loves, or even more specifically, failed loves of celebrities, stories about what we had to eat on a night that we cooked--to varying degrees, but her stories certainly fall under that ever widening veil of things that are interesting. Dirt, if properly understood, can sometimes be interesting. Lydia Davis wrote a short story about things that were interesting. The last part goes like this:

Here is a very handsome English traffic engineer. The fact that he is so handsome, and so animated, and has such a fine English accent makes it appear, each time he begins to speak, that he is about to say something interesting, but he is never interesting, and he is saying something, yet again, about traffic patterns.

She also wrote a short story about a fish and a lady that is good. Here it is:

Fish by Lydia Davis

She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her--there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.

Also this story is pretty damn good, especially for new parents.



I hope this essay has convinced you to read Lydia Davis, or at least to read the stories that I've excerpted. If not, I forgive you because I'm forever doing things that other people advise me not to do, like eating past ten o'clock and feeling sorry for myself rather than doing something about the very thing that's making me feel sorry for myself. What I'm saying is that I forgive you in advance.

Also, people like listening to music even it is cheesecake for the mind. And I saw that Matt and Kim were having a concert in Baltimore that I would, once again, not be at. I'm rarely at their concerts or concerts of any kind. But I still enjoy cheesecake just not at concerts.



Wait, this reminded me that I had one other thing that we should all talk about. It was an article about liking things on facebook by Jonathan Franzen. And as I was reading the article and enjoying it I went up and checked who the author was, and I was shocked to discover that it was Jonathan Franzen because he's always struck me as being rather douchey and less inclined to write an article about love. But, you know, the time to make up your mind about someone is never.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html

Here are some high points if you're the sort of person who would never follow a URL to an outside article. Though you really should because the article is short, and I think in our current configuration in the universe short is a particular type of virtue.

"There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie."

Or this one:

"Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self."

There, now go love someone.