My social life lately has been confined to a few brief blizzard-free intervals here and there but I did get out the other night to a gallery show featuring a local photographer whose work I've admired. Later in the evening I was introduced to a woman who immediately started telling me about the thing in life that was bothering her the most at the time, the way complete strangers will do on airplanes and so forth. And it seemed the thing that bothered her most was her twin sister.
It all came out in a rush, and I don't remember most of the complaints, but one stood out—the woman looked at me and said one word—"Men"—and widened her eyes meaningfully. She didn't have to draw me a picture: the sister habitually stole men from her. Then she nodded toward a different part of the room. And there was the sister—also blonde, same height and general appearance, but there were some dramatic differences all the same. My sister had a black business suit on and a grim, dutiful expression. The other sister had a short skirt, dark stockings, flirtatiously tousled hair, and a gaggle of men around her. I couldn't see her face but she undoubtedly wore an expression of naughty glee.
There's a shock of recognition when you first encounter something that you've always heard of but never actually seen before, and that shock came to me in that moment. "She's an evil twin!" I said. "Like in the soap operas! I didn't know that was a real thing!"
She didn't laugh or smile; maybe to her I was just stating an obvious fact. Other introductions followed and we got swirled apart, but I kept an eye on her. That grim expression never changed. She seemed to be contemplating the few possible solutions to her problem: murder, relocating to another continent, various difficult and drastic expedients. I felt sorry for her and still do—evil twins are oodles of fun on television shows, but having one in real life, maybe not so much.
It all came out in a rush, and I don't remember most of the complaints, but one stood out—the woman looked at me and said one word—"Men"—and widened her eyes meaningfully. She didn't have to draw me a picture: the sister habitually stole men from her. Then she nodded toward a different part of the room. And there was the sister—also blonde, same height and general appearance, but there were some dramatic differences all the same. My sister had a black business suit on and a grim, dutiful expression. The other sister had a short skirt, dark stockings, flirtatiously tousled hair, and a gaggle of men around her. I couldn't see her face but she undoubtedly wore an expression of naughty glee.
There's a shock of recognition when you first encounter something that you've always heard of but never actually seen before, and that shock came to me in that moment. "She's an evil twin!" I said. "Like in the soap operas! I didn't know that was a real thing!"
She didn't laugh or smile; maybe to her I was just stating an obvious fact. Other introductions followed and we got swirled apart, but I kept an eye on her. That grim expression never changed. She seemed to be contemplating the few possible solutions to her problem: murder, relocating to another continent, various difficult and drastic expedients. I felt sorry for her and still do—evil twins are oodles of fun on television shows, but having one in real life, maybe not so much.
I feel asleep reading and woke up sleeping and got up to fall asleep again, and at 1:59 a.m. I was looking at dopey stuff on the Intertubes when the cat and I heard a scraping noise—the little town has a snowplow out tidying up the street. It was good to see. Now, the borough council here is a mixed group, but pretty together as a whole. And the borough manager (they're the people who really run small towns) is a smart, good guy. And if the crews are out getting things right in the small hours after a big storm, well, that's kind of cool. I'm a little concerned about the polity at the national level but here in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, we're hard at work getting the snow off the street. If you want to interpret this to mean that I think government should be small, but at least big enough to clear the snow away and accomplish other desirable group goals, that would be a reasonable opinion. At any rate, if I can't be blissfully asleep, it's almost as blissful to be awake to see my tax money at work getting the streets clear in the middle of the night. Heartening, you know? The plow driver is out there, doing it, getting the streets clear, and I'm working to notice and appreciate it, and to some extent all's right with the world.
You saw how people got all dismissive of Apple for naming their new tablet thingy "iPad," like they weren't thinking about some of the associations there. I thought about that today when I saw an ad for a new online dating site called "Zoosk." The first thing that struck me was how they pretty much were on target with the way business names today tend to sound like words from the tropical countries filtered through space alien talk and Dr. Seuss. Lots of vowels and consonants like Z, N, R, L, etc. This gives us things like "Zune," "Roomba," and so forth. But then I thought, okay, the deal with a dating site is that you want your customers to imagine a vast landscape of attractive members of whatever sex or sexes they find appealing, it's just this teeming cornucopia of potential love interests, all stunningly hot. Then I thought, do you really want the word "zoo" in your name, if that's what you're going for?
We had a pretty big snowstorm yesterday and today here in the eastern part of the United States, and one thing that's always predictable about the weather is that more and more, the weather people scream their lungs out over any major snowstorm. They've dubbed this one "Snowpocalypse" and "Snowmageddon," two terms that suggest a biblically horrific end to life on earth. The problem is that even a biggish snowstorm is a mild inconvenience in some ways and a lot of fun in others. There's no need to literally scream about it or describe it as the end of the world. It leaves you with nowhere to go rhetorically if an all-out nuclear war or asteroid did, in fact, destroy the world.
Ah—it looks like the snow has slowed to a stop. And the world is still here! Whaddaya know. I'm playing inside today but other people I know are sledding or making snow angels. I'll have to dig the car and walk out sometime soon but actually I can use the upper body work.
Ah—it looks like the snow has slowed to a stop. And the world is still here! Whaddaya know. I'm playing inside today but other people I know are sledding or making snow angels. I'll have to dig the car and walk out sometime soon but actually I can use the upper body work.
I hate people calling me to sell me stuff. See, I figure if you want to sell me something, you should pay for the medium you're doing the selling in. You should pay for the overhead at the grocery store or car dealership, you should buy the air time for the TV commercial, and so forth. Me, I pay for the phone service, so I don't want you to call me on it to sell me things. Just doesn't seem right. I'm on every do-not-call list there is.
But! I'm in the market for insurance, and a while back I filled out some information on this online listing deal so I could get a bunch of quotes. Got the quotes fine, but as I suspected, I've gotten a lot of calls too. A lot of calls. They say I filled out an application, which I didn't. And they're very avid—there's profit in selling insurance, I imagine—and there's a lot of them. And last night the phone buzzed just as I was getting the collard greens out to cut the ribs out of them and sauté them in olive oil and garlic. Ringy-dingy!
"Hello?"
"Hello. Can I speak with Matthew?"
"Well, not if you're calling from an insurance company."
My tone was pleasant, sort of nothing-personal, and bless the fellow's heart, he was cool about it. There was silence for a couple of moments, and then a low, amused chuckling. It was the kind of thing a person with a measure of ego strength would do if he were playing checkers, say, and his opponent saw he was wide open and did one of those bam-bam-bam-bam-bam deals and wiped him off the board in one move. That's life, the bear ate you, it happens. Best you can do is laugh to yourself.
Obviously there was nothing in the script about this situation, and just as obviously this guy was an authentic, down-to-earth person, a pretty cool person, really. I loved it that he just laughed. But I've learned to be firm, so I just said "Matthew is going to make dinner now" and hung up.
And then I felt bad. A guy who can take life's little setbacks philosophically is a guy I might want to buy insurance from. So call back, buddy, if you're reading this, OK? Just not at dinnertime.
But! I'm in the market for insurance, and a while back I filled out some information on this online listing deal so I could get a bunch of quotes. Got the quotes fine, but as I suspected, I've gotten a lot of calls too. A lot of calls. They say I filled out an application, which I didn't. And they're very avid—there's profit in selling insurance, I imagine—and there's a lot of them. And last night the phone buzzed just as I was getting the collard greens out to cut the ribs out of them and sauté them in olive oil and garlic. Ringy-dingy!
"Hello?"
"Hello. Can I speak with Matthew?"
"Well, not if you're calling from an insurance company."
My tone was pleasant, sort of nothing-personal, and bless the fellow's heart, he was cool about it. There was silence for a couple of moments, and then a low, amused chuckling. It was the kind of thing a person with a measure of ego strength would do if he were playing checkers, say, and his opponent saw he was wide open and did one of those bam-bam-bam-bam-bam deals and wiped him off the board in one move. That's life, the bear ate you, it happens. Best you can do is laugh to yourself.
Obviously there was nothing in the script about this situation, and just as obviously this guy was an authentic, down-to-earth person, a pretty cool person, really. I loved it that he just laughed. But I've learned to be firm, so I just said "Matthew is going to make dinner now" and hung up.
And then I felt bad. A guy who can take life's little setbacks philosophically is a guy I might want to buy insurance from. So call back, buddy, if you're reading this, OK? Just not at dinnertime.
Look, I don't mean to complain—it just seems to happen. But weather.com has been saying pretty much all day that it would snow here, and it never snowed, and it says that it's snowing right now, the region is overspread with blue on the radar map, but when I look out the window I don't see any snow. None. Not one flake. Who am I supposed to believe—a respected television channel and website, or my own lying eyes? Confused, that's me.
Well, for instance, yesterday I was at least personally happy for several things. I went up to the post office, stood in line to get stamps, and when I got them the lady gave me nice, genuine smile. I have no idea why—maybe because I was thinking with some private amusement that this has to be the simplest, easiest thing a person can walk up and ask for, and I might have been smiling to myself about that. But if you get a real smile from a civil servant—or from anyone, actually, especially a stranger—that's kind of nice.
Then I went out and dark clouds and cold winds were blowing about, and it started flurrying. I like that kind of weather: it makes me imagine scenes of adventure, warriors on horseback, trumpets blowing, hooves thudding, banners flying, the scrape of sword swept from scabbard, the harsh clang of steel on steel. Other kinds of weather, a cold, steady rain, for instance, don't make me think of adventurous scenes at all. So at that point I had two things to think about with some pleasure.
Then I was halfway home and heard a noise in a backyard. I stood on the sidewalk and looked through a hedge that only partially screened the yard, and saw a young girl, seven or eight, in a red coat, bouncing with a kind of relaxed, offhand expertise on a pogo stick, her blond hair rising and falling. Just bouncing and bouncing slowly, with a pensive, inward air, as though bouncing on a pogo stick helped her concentrate when she wanted to think about something.
And those are some of the things that made me happy yesterday. I haven't been out yet today but I plan to be.
Then I went out and dark clouds and cold winds were blowing about, and it started flurrying. I like that kind of weather: it makes me imagine scenes of adventure, warriors on horseback, trumpets blowing, hooves thudding, banners flying, the scrape of sword swept from scabbard, the harsh clang of steel on steel. Other kinds of weather, a cold, steady rain, for instance, don't make me think of adventurous scenes at all. So at that point I had two things to think about with some pleasure.
Then I was halfway home and heard a noise in a backyard. I stood on the sidewalk and looked through a hedge that only partially screened the yard, and saw a young girl, seven or eight, in a red coat, bouncing with a kind of relaxed, offhand expertise on a pogo stick, her blond hair rising and falling. Just bouncing and bouncing slowly, with a pensive, inward air, as though bouncing on a pogo stick helped her concentrate when she wanted to think about something.
And those are some of the things that made me happy yesterday. I haven't been out yet today but I plan to be.
Well, I finished Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy the other day and loved it. The ending moved me as much as any I can think of. It's one of the most poignant, sweetly sorrowful situations I've ever seen a writer put characters in. And thinking about it, I have to say it wasn't so much that I cared about the characters. It was more how much they cared about each other.
It's the kind of book you recommend to all your friends, except in this case I'm not going to push it on people who are religious. Pullman is an atheist, and the book vividly illustrates the abuses of religion, and in its hypothetical world there is no divinity as we know it, no separate, pure realm apart from the world we see around us. But the real energy goes into arguing that we ought to treat each other well in this, the one world we can all agree on the existence of. The books may be explicitly antireligious, but I still feel like I'm a slightly better person for having read them.
It's the kind of book you recommend to all your friends, except in this case I'm not going to push it on people who are religious. Pullman is an atheist, and the book vividly illustrates the abuses of religion, and in its hypothetical world there is no divinity as we know it, no separate, pure realm apart from the world we see around us. But the real energy goes into arguing that we ought to treat each other well in this, the one world we can all agree on the existence of. The books may be explicitly antireligious, but I still feel like I'm a slightly better person for having read them.
I just finished reading one of the most amazing books I've ever encountered, and by "amazing" I don't mean "somewhat remarkable" or "really very good," the way you might say "This is an amazing omelet." I mean that reading it, you enter into a new worlds—worlds, in fact—full of danger and staggering surprises and the profoundest possible mystery. What's that? Which book am I talking about already? Glad you asked. I"m talking about The Subtle Knife, the second in Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials.
I discovered the series through a piece that Christopher Hitchens wrote about the Harry Potter books. Hitchens hoped that kids who had enjoyed those would, as he said, "graduate" to the Pullman trilogy. I was intrigued by that: Hitchens is often cranky but rarely flat wrong about anything, and if he put it that way there had to be something going on with the books he mentioned. And to be honest, I'd always felt something missing in Harry Potter, as much as I enjoyed the series. Rowling is a clever writer, diligent, a master of craft, but really not an artist. She imagined a world with witches in it, certainly, but the core of her universe is a sort of joke: The witches are just like us. They're individuals with strengths and weaknesses, and they have institutions that are broadly outlined parodies of real-world ones. And witches can do magic, but there's no real mystery there. They just can, the way some people can wiggle their ears. I'd have to say that the world she imagined is really rather conventional, and she's not the most imaginative or ambitious writer you could think of.
Pullman is a different story. He drops you down in the middle of things and you have to figure out what's going on, and by the end of the second book it's obvious that he's in the ranks of the most ambitious storytellers in history—Tolkien, Milton, like that. In this series he takes the deepest mysteries of science and the deepest mysteries of religion and fuses them, the way parallel lines meet in infinity. And he makes you feel it—there really are times where you have to stop reading to recompose yourself. And it's scary—I've been careful about reading it late at night, or in certain dark moods.
That said, yeah, it's probably classifiable as "fantasy" and it's also classifiable as "young adult fiction," and if you turn up your nose at that fine, go read some Joyce Carol Oates or something, you stupid hopeless snob. But if you liked HP and you're ready for a much, much wilder ride, or if you're open to the fantasy genre in general or you're just looking for a hell of a well-written yarn by one of the most imaginative people living today then check out this trilogy, starting with The Golden Compass.
I discovered the series through a piece that Christopher Hitchens wrote about the Harry Potter books. Hitchens hoped that kids who had enjoyed those would, as he said, "graduate" to the Pullman trilogy. I was intrigued by that: Hitchens is often cranky but rarely flat wrong about anything, and if he put it that way there had to be something going on with the books he mentioned. And to be honest, I'd always felt something missing in Harry Potter, as much as I enjoyed the series. Rowling is a clever writer, diligent, a master of craft, but really not an artist. She imagined a world with witches in it, certainly, but the core of her universe is a sort of joke: The witches are just like us. They're individuals with strengths and weaknesses, and they have institutions that are broadly outlined parodies of real-world ones. And witches can do magic, but there's no real mystery there. They just can, the way some people can wiggle their ears. I'd have to say that the world she imagined is really rather conventional, and she's not the most imaginative or ambitious writer you could think of.
Pullman is a different story. He drops you down in the middle of things and you have to figure out what's going on, and by the end of the second book it's obvious that he's in the ranks of the most ambitious storytellers in history—Tolkien, Milton, like that. In this series he takes the deepest mysteries of science and the deepest mysteries of religion and fuses them, the way parallel lines meet in infinity. And he makes you feel it—there really are times where you have to stop reading to recompose yourself. And it's scary—I've been careful about reading it late at night, or in certain dark moods.
That said, yeah, it's probably classifiable as "fantasy" and it's also classifiable as "young adult fiction," and if you turn up your nose at that fine, go read some Joyce Carol Oates or something, you stupid hopeless snob. But if you liked HP and you're ready for a much, much wilder ride, or if you're open to the fantasy genre in general or you're just looking for a hell of a well-written yarn by one of the most imaginative people living today then check out this trilogy, starting with The Golden Compass.
I was listening to couple of kids talking at a bar a while back, and they were discussing night of revelry in, I think, Pittsburgh. One guy said, "I don't know how many beers I drank—it was in the teens for sure."
