Hands on

How can people be so dim? Slamming a movie for being "manipulative" is akin to praising a corkscrew for opening a bottle. Was Aeschylus not manipulative? If a movie is to be faulted, it should be for a failure to trigger strong feelings, for a reliance on hackneyed devices, for speaking an emotional language more primitive than a punch in the nose.

Help

She was lying on the pavement, rolling slightly. I stopped my bike, got off, asked whether she needed help. She did. I gave her one hand, but she needed two. A white woman, abrasions on her very pale face, very drunk. I asked where she needed to go and she said the bus stop. We were halfway there when she said something about a man forty feet ahead. Her companion. He marched towards us, several inches taller than I, sober, angry. She'd been pulling this all day long, he said, falling down drunk, getting people to help her, and that was fine. He barely knew her, had never hit her, had let her sleep at his house the night before, but had not, he insisted, had sex with her. I looked at him and told him that I was going to help her to the bus stop. He wheeled and stomped away. She called out to him. He came back, told her he wasn't waiting for her, she'd dropped her bus pass, he was going to Longs, and if she showed up she showed up. Her knees buckled and, as I had earlier, I said to her, "You can make it. Keep walking." We got to the meager bench and she sat. I asked did she have her bus pass, she tried her pockets, nothing. I went back for my bike, felt a pang as I rode past her. A hundred feet further the tall angry man was lurking in a doorway.

Newspapers

If I knew the world better, I could explain it, predict its next moves. Not just financial markets, flows of precious metals, outbreaks of violence, but the complexion of next week's clouds above the Atlas mountains, the number of grains of sand that will lodge in my sweatshirt pocket during a Christmas Day walk on the beach--it would be something fine just to be able to count these. As my determination to master the world grows, as I have cards printed that read "S. R. Gilbert, Supervillain," I lose some of my focus, some of my hair, some of my memories. Cats still come running when I whistle, no matter what alley I'm moving along, and that hardens my resolve.

Life

Come home.
Check mail.
Cook meal.
Wonder what to do next.
Turn on computer.
Peek at others' lives.
Feel cold.
Hear phone ring.
Check email for umpteenth time.
Turn off computer.
Wonder what to do next.
Think about a movie.
Think about a book.
Wash dishes.
Make bed.
Check to see if front door is locked.
Stand on front porch and look at moon.
Wonder what to do next.

Ruby, no slipper

I've told a friend that I'll write something about my injury for his company's blog. The small nonprofit sends doctors to very poor nations to provide those who need them with prosthetic limbs; I suppose many of the injuries are due to American landmines. My experience is only in some distant way comparable to that of a person born with a clubfoot or shorn of an arm, but I will try to convey something of what it's like to move between ability and disability, how confusing it can be, how it directs your vision into the mirror even as you suddenly see every broken person as a sister or brother.

I've been walking for a few weeks without my crutch, but I have a limp, my calf muscle is weak, and if I stand still for a minute my foot becomes bloated and ruby. My surgeon told me he believed I'd always limp, so of course I will do all I can to prove him wrong.

Seeing something else

You're sitting with a friend and you're talking about what you see. It's a field, it's a bay, it's a city. As you talk, it becomes clear that what you see is not what she sees. You keep talking about different things, sort of trusting that your friend simply sees something you'd see if you were in her place. Because masts, trees, rocks, clouds, and cars block your vision, but from where she sits no cloud or giant is in the way. You move over a bit and you say, "Oh! Yeah!"

Everything is a little different for having seen what you couldn't, but you shift back and now you're right where you were.

Walking, not walking

When my esteemed surgeon, Jack Schuberth, told me to wean myself of my protective plastic boot over three weeks, I thought that was an awfully long time. But now I doubt that I'll lose my crutches by the three-week mark. To my surprise, walking is very painful, two weeks after Schuberth spoke. When I do put aside my crutches, taking more or less normal steps, setting all my weight on my left leg, I can go three or four steps before pain begins to shoot from my heel.

This injury has marked one of the few times in my life when I've desperately wanted to be normal. The discovery that I suffer from osteoporosis exploded that hope. But I do want to be able to walk, and I do not think this much pain is normal.

How my foot looks

Until Thursday afternoon, I'd been permitted only occasional glimpses of my injured foot. Between casts, while wheeling from podiatry clinic to X-ray, I stared and on occasion touched the strange flesh that had once been part of me but now belonged to doctors and nurses and technicians—and to that same category of existence that lodged many of my life's unpleasantnesses, and which was understood to fall outside of The Meaningful, The Useful, The Relevant.

Now the foot and the leg attached to it are naked, and though they are far from perfect, their care and improvement have been left to me and to an occasional black boot, no longer to a bent plaster tube.

This is not my foot as I remember it. The skin is dry, peeling, wrinkled, splotchy. The area around my ankle is swollen and I don't recall that freckle. There is a cut along the left side of my heel, with tape strips crossing it. Some dried blood. Much of the skin is shiny; what isn't tends to ruddiness. I can wiggle my toes and rotate my foot, but I don't do much of the rotating because it hurts a little.

The leg, too, is foreign. Bruises streak and stripe it, and I did not know that bruises came in such colors. Much yellow, some purple. The calf muscle is gelatinous, unsightly.

Lots of skin is flaking and sloughing from the toes and between them. I've been leaving the cut alone, but I suspect that while I sleep the cat or I may try to lick it. Maybe it tastes metallic, or maybe it's like licking a battery.

My heel

On July 25 I broke my heel bone. Since that time I've been unable to set any weight on my left leg, which has changed things for me. For instance, here's how I get my mail. I put on my knapsack and crutch my way to the mailbox. I then lean my crutches against the fence, balance on my right leg, and unlock the mailbox, hanging onto it for extra balance. I then struggle out of my knapsack, unzip it, and use my right hand to hold the knapsack while using my left to stuff mail in, all the while wobbling quite a bit. I then zip closed the bag, shoulder it, close and lock the mailbox, and lift my crutches from the fence. Soon I'm back inside--unless I'm so tired by all this that I make it no further than the chair on the back porch--and I set my crutches against something and allow myself to fall onto the floor. I love the floor.

The furthest I've walked since my injury is around the block. I've done that three times. Mostly I just sit inside or, better, lie on the floor, listening to Mitsuko Uchida play Mozart's piano concertos. Which is not all that different from how I spent my time before my injury. Except now I don't even walk to the grocery store, the prospect of which makes me anxious. I may try tomorrow.

I was misdiagnosed. My ankle was terrifically swollen and the nurse who looked at the first x-rays concluded that I must have strained a ligament since the ankle was not broken. She missed the line running through my calcaneus. So I went home. Later I had to visit the San Rafael emergency room to get a cast put on. That was July 26.

On July 31 Jack Schuberth opened my heel, aligned the odds and ends that had once been my calcaneus, and drove four metal screws through them, an especially long one from the back of my heel up at a forty-five-degree angle, the three others at a right angle to that. I think I now have some titanium in my left foot, but I keep forgetting to ask Jack what sort of metal he chose.

The operation left me with a nasty case of contact dermatitis all over my back and sides, but I've had no pain and have consumed none of the vicodin I was issued early on.

And sometimes music is something else.

Wow, his ear is really big.

Music, the net

Music connects us. We went to the concert together, I gave you the CD, we sang along as we drove the moving van from Chicago to San Francisco. I wrote a song with John that he sang with Erika at Pam's house. I brought a record to the Mallarkeys' party that Peter danced to ten times in a row. We could never agree on what the words were. You mentioned a record and I bought it before you knew my name. We saw the band play it on Saturday Night Live, twenty years before we met. I know the words and you know the tune. Together we can just about sing it. Come on, let's try it now.

It's good to be a boomer.

A study summarized in the most recent issue of Science has shown that guessing Social Security Numbers can be quite easy if one knows the person's place and date of birth--which often appear on facebook, for example.

Every Social Security number starts with three digits known as an "area number." Smaller states might have only one, whereas New York, for example, has 85. The next two digits are "group numbers," which can be anything from 01-99, but don't correspond to anything specific. The last four digits, the "serial number," are assigned sequentially. . .

When economist Alessandro Acquisti and computer scientist Ralph Gross of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, compared SSA's public death records with birth data, they found that area numbers are not rotated until all 9999 serial numbers have been assigned. . . . After 1989, individuals started receiving Social Security numbers at birth, rather than at their discretion (often when they began their first job), so pinpointing these people's numbers is especially easy, says Acquisti.

So easy in fact that Acquisti and Gross were able to do it themselves. Using fairly standard computer algorithms, the duo predicted the first five digits of Social Security numbers for people born after 1989 44% of the time on the very first try. On a handful of attempts, they managed to get all nine digits on the first try, but at the very least they could predict the full numbers of 8.5% of those born after 1989 in fewer than 1000 tries, they report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Road

Here is a sentence Cormac McCarthy wrote:

Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.

You have to be really sick to write that sort of shit.

(Later, same page: he would . . . see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in the waste like a tabernacle.)

The victory of the automobile

Amazing how quickly it happened. First is a street scene from 1903:



Then from 1913 (0:31 to 1:10):

Trash

How do you know trash when you encounter it? Is there any reason to ask the question? Labeling things is often a way of pushing them away to a certain distance, not necessarily a bad thing. When we call someone "distant" we are not offering a compliment, and that's a shame. Compliments sound like this: open, warm, engaging, effervescent. I'm not against Champagne (as long as it's from Champagne), but I don't want it all the time. Four times a year is about right. Compare that to twenty times a year for Riesling, fifty for apple juice, one thousand for water. Water is divine, yet it's still, colorless, kind of distant. I am quite fond, maybe too fond, of labels. As a teenager I was fascinated by what Milan Kundera said about kitsch and figured he had to be right. So Horowitz was forever shit (a subset of k, i, t, s, s, h). The beauty of labels is they come off whenever you peel them. The book I'm reading about Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and (to a lesser extent) Joan's little sister and the man she married is called Positively 4th Street, and it's trash. Very well researched and entertainingly set forth, with plenty of intelligence and a bit too much smartyness, the book is loaded with substantiated gossip, cheap shots, infelicitous turns of phrase (page 181: "a handful of the espoused's friends"), contradictions within the same paragraph (see p. 165, lines 7-11, 21-23), and solecisms (routine use of adjectives as adverbs). But these things don't make it trash. It's the misapplication of talent and smarts that do that: the book succeeds at doing what it intends to, but it never rises to the level of either providing a penetrating insight or moving one to much beyond the occasional laugh.

A voice for animals at The Lancet

An editorial in vol. 373, issue 9679 (June 2009) of The Lancet emphasizes the need to think carefully about the rights of animals before designing experiments. Only in England, the birthplace of the animal rights movement, would such a compassionate essay appear in a leading medical journal.

Though their results are of dubious value, many scientists now use transgenic mice to study human diseases. It seems that transgenic primates are next up for slicing and dicing. I am opposed to all animal testing, so I was heartened when the author of the editorial mentioned Pope's great essay, "Against Barbarity to Animals" in which appears the following precept: "The more entirely the inferior creation is submitted to our power, the more answerable we should seem for our mismanagement of it."

My backpack

In 1986 I went to Taiwan for the first time. A few months after my arrival, I bought a blue Rhino brand backpack from a shop near the Taipei train station. I can't remember owning a backpack before that time, but I suppose I must have. Still, for me the Rhino bag was the first backpack in my life that mattered. When I traveled to China with my sister Jenny in 1988, I carried only that backpack, often with an enamel cup dangling from a clip. The bag imposed a limit on what I could take, and I respected that limit, even when I realized that I'd need to buy warm gloves and boots in Chengdu if I was going to spend time with pandas in Jiuzhaigou. The only thing I did not manage to fit into the backpack was the Tibetan coat two American women I met in the Sichuan alps insisted I buy; that was fine, since it was so cold I was always either wearing the coat or sleeping under it.

In Los Angeles the backpack served me well. Every day I rode my old ten-speed from Lincoln and Cedar to UCLA, showered, took my change of clothes out of my bag, went to class, changed back to my shorts and t-shirt, and rode home. Sometimes, on the way home, I stopped at Rhino Records, where the backpack often elicited happy comment.

In 1996 I went to Taiwan for the third time. I had no money. The point was to do nothing but study at the Stanford Center, and had it not been for my friends Jennifer Rudolph and 祝平一, I'd have subsisted on little but soymilk and rice porridge that summer. I brought the Rhino bag, carried it from Yonghe to Tai Da every day, and then, at the end of the school term, I retired a very weary backpack and, at that store near the train station, bought a second blue Rhino backpack.

The second bag has been to New Zealand with me, back to Taiwan, to France, to New York, and has carried my groceries from stores in Venice, Santa Monica, West Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Petaluma. Not just groceries: loads of laundry, sacks of horse shit, library books, duct tape and fabric for capture the flag, bottles of wine, and my pruning equipment. More than once I've repaired it, passing a very large needle through the seam where shoulder straps meet bag, and those straps are not going to come undone any time soon. I need the thing to work because I'm one of those people who rarely leaves the house without draping a backpack over my shoulders, though I'll admit it does not go well with my old Peter Tilton suits.

The zipper that fastens the main compartment is not what it once was. This may mean retiring the bag. I am loath to do this, and it is not likely that I'll be making a trip to Taipei this summer. I managed to coax the zipper into sealing a load of laundry last night, but I was anxious that at any moment my turtlenecks would spring from the bag with the impetus of a parachute. For now I'm using an old bag of my dad's to carry my lunch to work, and even that feels a bit like betrayal. The old Rhino bag, limp, a jellyfish on the beach, lies on the bedroom floor, beseeching me to make a decision. But I can't.

ADDENDUM: I bought this:

Dolphins are still neat

The following is a passage from one of John C. Lilly's early studies of bottlenose dolphins:

"When a female and a male dolphin are confined in a relatively small area in captivity, the courting behavior is rather violent. If they are isolated with a movable barrier between them, they will resolve all kinds of problems in order to be together, e.g., opening a gate to gain access to another pool and closing it behind them. As soon as they are together they start pursuit games. The initial phases of this behavior appear violent and can continue for the first 24 hours. If the female is not receptive, the male continues to chase her, exhibits erections, rubs against her, and tries to induce her to accept him. They bite one another, they scratch each other's bodies with their teeth. During the mating procedure; they will develop lesions practically everywhere on their bodies specifically on the flippers, on the back, on the flukes, on the peduncle, and around the head region.

"The erection in the male occurs with extreme rapidity. We have observed and timed it in our own tanks: it is something on the order of three seconds to completion, from the time the penis first appears in the slit. It can collapse almost as rapidly, and it looks almost as if it were being done in a voluntary fashion. It is very easy to condition a dolphin to have an erection. The stimulus, for example, can be a single visual signal. One trainer chose to raise his arm vertically as a signal, and the dolphin would turn over and erect his penis in response. If Elvar, one of our dolphins, is alone and a small ring, about a foot in diameter and an inch thick, is tossed into the water, he will have an erection, with his penis lift it off the bottom and tow it around the tank."

Heroism

I don't have many heroes. Thoreau I revere for his love of truth and of beauty; Coleridge I think the greater for all his shortcomings. But I do have a passionate belief that heroes must be courageous. And I do not call shooting three men who pose no threat to you courageous. The assassins aboard the USS Bainbridge were not heroes; they were technicians. Their performance was not daring; it was as routine as a city worker emptying a garbage can. Only a nation obsessed with carnage and starved for military success could celebrate Easter by cheering the deaths of three thieves.

The Alexandria Quartet

I read Durrell's collection when I was in my mid-twenties and was ravished. Today I am less naive, less satisfied by the lazy repetitions, the obsessive obsessing. Still, the achievement, the singularly narcissistic—in its way, far more narcissistic than the unreadable diaries of Nin—quartet, with its mirrors, its scrapbook approach to novelizing, is impossible to dismiss. It is one of the last great acts of Orientalism.

Recognition

It's like seeing sky after years in a closet. Suddenly it's there, and you know it's sky, and it can't be anything else but sky, and there is absolutely nothing better. That's what it means to experience a work of art made by hands born to the task. Often the finished product is far from perfect: so it is with the movie I watched tonight, after quitting a piece of hack work with not a convincing moment in it. It makes little sense to say that someone was born to make movies: it's like saying a cat was born to curl up on my lap. But certain sensibilities do find their finest expression, today, in making people move around and make sounds in front of a camera and some lights and a team of people holding their breath until the scene is over. Tavernier is a recent discovery of mine, and Coup de torchon is a far better work than Ça commence aujourd'hui, which is often preachy and relies too much on cute kids and extreme situations, but it is also wonderful, real, impassioned, hopeful, sad. Still, I felt a disappointment every time the immaculately beautiful Maria Pitarresi appeared: she belonged on a billboard advertising lipstick, and making her a sculptor was another false note. Her looks clashed painfully with the utterly convincing homeliness of the schoolteachers and the slatternly mothers of the kindergarteners. One longed for her scenes to end, so that we might see the scarred and cloud-smeared sky again.

With

Things I have:

lamps
books in foreign tongues
a Tibetan coat
an automobile
100 bottles of wine
preserved lemons
cross-country skis
two bicycles
pens
50 cookbooks
a diploma
deer antler
a vacuum cleaner
2 cleavers bought in Taipei in 1986
spices
teas
photocopied Qing military examination records
lots of records and compact discs
a MiniDisc recorder
dozens of videotapes and DVDs
a sleeping bag
5 pillows
dog toys
the lock from Fred's storage unit in southern California
pictures of Eloise and Lucy and Itzhak
nice cotton shirts
a Brioni suit
other suits
bow ties
a garden hose

Without

Things I do not have:

a cellular telephone
a Blackberry
an iPod
a Wii
a laptop
a big TV
a cable connection
a dog
a baby
debt
a digital camera
a garage
a washing machine
a dishwasher
hired help
self-control
trackmarks
a tattoo
a piercing
discursive flexibility
a table saw
a Ph.D.
Harry Potter books
a couch
a pocket knife
a pirate costume
facial hair
a brother
a leather jacket
a yoga mat
cocktail glasses
a firearm
issues

Baboon vocalizations

Thanks to a kind communication from Dorothy Cheney, one of the authors of the magisterial and utterly fascinating Baboon Metaphysics, I've been listening to a variety of calls made by male and female baboons.

Males use forceful and deep vocalizations, called "wahoos," to assert dominance: rather than attack each other, two males in conflict launch into wahoo contests. The animal who can produce sustained, resonant calls while leaping about is fitter, and this display settles differences without the need for high-risk fights.

Here is a wahoo or two, both from Cheney's research section of the University of Pennsylvania website.

(The second compares a high-ranking male's call with that of a low-ranking male.)

Cheney and Robert Seyfarth's long-term study is a remarkable example of profoundly humane science. No animals are intentionally harmed: the scholars and their assistants observe baboons in the wild, relying on stool samples, for instance, to analyze stress levels in individuals.

Poem

By a Roadside

Waking from drear dreams, a dozen robins
In a bare tree.

To count them all, without wanton addition,
Address their silhouettes.

Their shivers and upruffled shoulders
Speak of spring.

An engine throbs past, robbing them
Of something spoken.

A scrub jay peers through lead leaves
Cocking his mutter.

Half a dozen now, no wetter, no colder,
Waiting for an ending.

Allen Ginsberg writing about fucking boys

All Ye Brave Boys

Come all you young men that proudly display
Your torsos to the sun on upper Broadway
Come sweet hearties so mighty with girls
So lithe and naked to kiss their gold curls
Come beautiful boys with breasts bright gold
Lie down with me in bed ere ye grow old,
Take down your blue jeans, we'll have some raw fun
Lie down on your bellies I'll fuck your soft bun.

And so on for three more stanzas full of "studs," "sturdy cocks," "tight assed," "come in your butt" et cetera. He really did produce a lot of tosh, that Ginsberg. And there's no excuse in his remark that he wrote this at 4 a.m. It's simply not a civilized time to be writing a poem.

Twenty-two years later he wrote

I am the King of the Universe
I am the Messiah with a new dispensation
Excuse me I stepped on a nail.

This is possibly even worse. He's like a photographer who elaborately printed and framed every single out-of-focus snapshot he ever took.

Destroy your cell phone

Evidence is increasing that cellular telephones are a direct line to Satan. (More fun if you start the two clips at the same time.)

Saint Valentine's Day entry

For as long as he could remember, Sam had accompanied every meal worthy of the name with a small salad of julienned baked tofu and cilantro dressed with lime juice, sesame oil, soy sauce, salt and black pepper. Today is no exception.

Last night's dream: a love affair with a soft blond woman whose front yard needed work and afterward was bare dirt and tree trunks. She knew her neighbors. I kissed her by drawing her lips into my mouth and holding them there. When I went inside she and Bono were watching her music video, which was a single close-up black and white shot of her hair being blown about. I said something about her fans.

John Updike was a fussy writer, but unlike so many of his epigones, he was able to write the occasional sentence that did not have the padding of artistic adjectives. Memories of the Ford Administration.

Is there an English word that does not rhyme with "pish"?

What Nat and I cooked

(1) Cucumber onion salad
(2) Watercress sesame salad
(3) Taro watercress soup
(4) Braised shiitakes with Shaoxing wine
(5) Lotus root stew with tomato and fennel
(6) Noodles with bean paste and shiitake sauce

We drank California wines with dinner, after Nat and I swilled a Nigl grüner veltliner as we cooked.

恭喜發財

一帆風順， 二龍騰飛，三羊開泰， 四季平安， 五福臨門， 六六大順， 七星高 照，八方來財， 九九同心， 十全十美，百事亨通， 千事吉祥，萬事如意

fuggery, aka "In the great bowling alley of your mind, I am your pinboy"

Last year I bought a biography of Allen Ginsberg and a big, handsome collection of his poems. The poetry is magnificent, funny, wild, and it goes on and on. Reading about AG, I saw he was a gentle apostle of love and pot, a tamer of Hells Angels, traveler, experimenter. One has to love him.

Two days ago, home from work a bit early, I walked over to Vinyl Planet and bought some videotapes (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, 9 1/2 Weeks, Who Am I?) and some records (Bob Dorough, Enrico Rava, X). I got an album by The Fugs, and Allen Ginsberg, who used to open every poetry reading by chanting "Hare Krishna," does just that on this marvelous Fugs record. (It also has a picture of a naked AG inside.)

I think The Fugs are good.

Edges

I am drawn to the places where built meets natural. Gardens, the surfaces of buildings, the tidal zone under bayside houses. Such places are forever incomplete: I take on the role of finishing. Sometimes gardens work different degrees of built into a web. The statues of Cervantes, Emmet, Verdi and Key, no matter how rusticated their plinths, impress me as more fashioned even than the pollarded London plane trees on the music concourse.