ask palinode: where the hell have you been edition
» Wednesday, July 25, 2007

A minimum of three people have wanted to know what happened to my Ask Palinode feature. Wouldn’t they like to know. The truth is I got burnt out. The truth is I can never sustain anything. The truth is I am full of anger. The truth is I was deported to Albania. The truth is international espionage. The truth has lost its hold on virtue.

Here is a months' old question from Aleigh, who asked me a question that had so many possibilities that I couldn’t decide on the best answer. It got lodged in my answer pipe and then nothing would come out of my answer hole. Aleigh asks:

Dear Palinode,

Those who have crossed with direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom, remember us -- if at all -- not as lost violent souls, but only as the hollow men, the stuffed men?

The well-read among you will recognize Aleigh’s question as a quote from the modernist Norwegian poet Ole Stit, who often wrote under the pseudonyms Oil Test, Set Toil, Tile Sot, Eli Tost, ‘Tits’ Leo and Toilets. Scholars have spent decades uncovering the interconnected web of allusions and parodic winks to the history of Dano-Norwegian literature in his bewildering series of pen names. Most of his pseudonymous writing is porn or graffiti.

The quotation comes from one of his most famous poems, “Hometown Hell,” a searing exploration of a man’s quest to rid his village of a gang of vicious bikers. In its gritty detail, its metaphysical underpinnings and its examination of the loss of faith that has cast modern humanity adrift on the sea of flux, “Hometown Hell” remains the best Norwegian biker epic of the last fifty years. The line is spoken by biker gang leader Mads as he lies broken in the remains of his club Endeligt Anden Konge, imploring the main character Tor not to let them the gang be forgotten, or remembered only as “the hollow men, the stuffed men”. I’m going to let Tor answer this one for us:

TOR: What? I don’t get it. Why would people remember you as hollow or stuffed? First off, that sounds contradictory – if you’re stuffed, you can’t be hollow. Anyway, I think people will remember you as that guy with a bike who owned a club on the edge of town.

MADS: We’re hollow because we have no substance – leaning together – headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

TOR: Sorry. If you’re filled with straw, you’re not hollow. Clearly you’re trying to take this somewhere, but I’m not feeling it.

MADS: You know, I just, I just really hate you sometimes. You have no taste.

TOR: (crosses his eyes) Alas!


Lars von Trier is set to direct the film version.


So. You want your questions answered or not? Hey? Email a Palinode at askpalinode@gmail.com.

Labels: ask palinode

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sock varnish crimes
» 

Hey, it's evening. That means Palinode and Schmutzie ain't doing nothing. Nothing. But the television's on. Palinode enters the living room through the hole in the wall.

Palinode: What are you watching?

Schmutzie: Law and Order SVU.

Palinode: Oh yeah. Law and Order. Sock... Varnishing... Unit.

(Pause)

Schmutzie: That's my favourite one of all.

Palinode: Every week? There's a crime at the sock varnishing factory.

Schmutzie: Mariska Hargitay plays a hot sock varnishing investigator.

Palinode: I love it when they say "Let's check out the sock varnishing factory" and there's that dun-dun sound? In the first half of the show they track down the criminal, then they go to the sock varnish prosecutor and his brunette assistant.

Schmutzie: If the formula works, why mess with it?

Palinode: And it's always ethically complicated. For the factory floor workers, for management, for the cops and prosecutors, and especially for the customers.

Schmutzie: I feel bad for the customers.

Palinode: They're trying to slip on a new pair of socks and Wham! varnish. That's the real crime.

Schmutzie: These are their stories.

Labels: conversations, sock varnish

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lunch
» Tuesday, July 24, 2007

A while ago I was talking with a friend about my experience with chronic back pain and I ended up delivering this pithy epigram:

Pain, I said, gives you answers to questions that you didn’t know to ask.

That’s pretty heavy, she said.

Yes, I agreed. I had no idea what I meant.

Xeno, the philosopher who came up with the neat trick of using infinite division to prove that an arrow in flight will never reach its target, must have suffered from chronic pain. Most of the time we live fluidly with our body, letting it get through the basic business of the day. We don’t need to perform any conscious calculations or make minute plans every time we want to get up from a chair and go fix a snack or grab a pen from across the room. Our bodies are full of automatic features, from the basics (respiration, sleep) way on up to the awesome add-ons that we take for granted.

Last Christmas I left the group behind and joined the small club of people who inhabit stripped-down bodies, the ones where most of the add-ons have been vandalized or stolen. I left my body in a bad neighbourhood, I guess. Some people have lost so much that they’ve Vadered up with wheelchairs, prostheses, oxygen tanks and tubes and leg braces. I’ve taken the cyborg-lite route with an extendable black metal cane.

My cane is the signal of my membership in the club of stripped-down bodies. People in crowds seem to sense the cane before they see it, stepping aside and offering a polite excuse me even from a distance of several feet. Everyone fixates on the rubber stopper at the end of the cane as they scoot aside. I wonder if they’re reacting to a primordial fear of something biting at their feet.

The stripped-down body changes your relationship to time. Time in its tiniest increments fills my mind, dogs me when I move and paces around me when I’m still. I spend as much time as possible completely still these days, partly to mitigate some of the pain I experience, but also to be relieved of an obsessive reckoning of moments.

Let me illustrate by way of lunch. I can only walk for so long before the pain in my legs forces me to stop and rest. That’s about half a city block. So my choices are limited to the coffee shop in the lobby of my building. Let’s say I want something better than a newspaper to read, a book or magazine. If I choose to take a book, then I can’t carry anything else. If I take a magazine, I can roll it up and tuck it awkwardly between the cane handle and the palm of my hand. Taking nothing leaves one hand free, but then I’m usually left with the business section from some paper. Taking a backpack or tote is usually too awkward, and the imbalance of weight makes it difficult to stand upright.

By the time I get to the café counter, having used the shortest possible route, I need to sit down again and let my muscles relax. The relaxation is actually a set of spasms throughout my limbs as the muscles try to hold on to the tension. It feels like water boiling under my skin. I usually sit at the edge of the pool with the koi and the man-eating turtles until I can pull myself up again with my cane.

At the counter I order, say, a coffee and a sandwich. The cashier places coffee and sandwich on the counter in front of me. In order to pay, I have to put down the magazine and put my hand in my pocket, but the slight shift in position sets off the nerves in my left leg and I can’t support my weight. I have to prop the cane against a vertical surface and grip the edge of the counter, leaning my hip in to ease some of my weight off my feet. At this point the spasms in my leg have risen to my arms, and they’re starting to shake. My fingers lose their fine coordination and I’m reduced to pulling bills and coins out of my pocket and slapping them on the counter while the cashier, who is used to this display, waits for me to lay down enough money. Finally I’m done and she hands me the change. I stuff the change into my pocket with a jerk, and when I’m lucky it all goes in my pocket. Usually something escapes and hits the floor, which gives me the comparative relief of squatting down to pick it up. Sometimes the cane hits the floor too, which causes anyone nearby to hop backwards. The story about Moses’ staff turning into a serpent must be the expression of a deep-rooted equivalence buried in our hindbrains.

Once the money is taken care of, I’m faced with the dilemma of having ordered one more item than I can carry. The distance between the counter and the table is relatively short, but the act of paying for the food has set off too many spasms, and the best I can hope for is a forward rush to the nearest seat, using the cane as an intermittent brake more than support. The woman at the counter takes the coffee and I take the sandwich. I have to wrap the magazine around the cane handle to get everything to the table in one trip. If it’s a book then I need to take the extra trip or ask for help, which I do frequently.

Once at the table I need to let the tensed muscles in my legs, back and stomach relax once more. After a few minutes I’m okay to unwrap the sandwich without dropping it or sip my coffee without showering drops on my wrist. Even as I read the magazine and eat my sandwich, I’m thinking of the maximum length of time I can spend in my seat before getting up becomes too painful.

Aside from the particular details of pain, this is still pretty much the same decision tree that everyone climbs when it hits lunchtime. In my case, I need to think carefully about every decision I make, because each action produces a degree of greater or lesser pain, greater or lesser convenience. Time is measured out along nerve impulses. The upside of all this is an increased concentration, a more intense attention to the tiny details of my day. It sets me slightly apart from everyone, leaves me free to think about whatever I please. Pain is probably the most backhanded gift I've ever received. Like the time my friends bought me six Guinness, drank five before I showed up, and packed the remaining Guinness in a nest of shredded pornography with a little figurine that broke the bottle, so what I got for my birthday was a box of broken glass and soggy porn and a figurine that somehow had a smug look on its face.

Labels: autobio, pain, time

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a blockbuster of proust
» Monday, July 23, 2007

Every summer I vanish into the depths of a movie watching binge, a hazy period full of dim memories of lineups, neon accents, the burble of arcade machines and a half-panicked stumble through dark theatres. Throughout this last week I’ve managed to temper the movies with my ongoing Proust-reading project, which has forced me involuntarily to compare everything else I read, see or hear with In Search of Lost Time. How does a seven-volume novel about life in France at the close of the nineteenth century compare to today’s hottest blockbusters? I have no idea. But that hasn’t stopped me from writing about it. Or has it?

Live Free or Die Hard: Bruce Willis stops sheriff-turned-cybergenius Seth Bullock from bringing America to its knees.

If you’ve watched HBO’s Deadwood, you can see the rage constantly being stoked in the furnace of Sheriff Seth Bullock’s eyes. It’s no surprise that he finally traveled in time to the twenty-first century and launched a computerized attack on the infrastructure of the USA. It’s the revenge of the wild past on the complacent village of the present. Fortunately, aging movie star Bruce Willis is wise to Bullock’s ways, teaming up with the I’m A Mac guy to outcool Bullock’s old-timey mannerisms. Against vast odds they triumph, although they lose the obscenity-spewing contest.

Resemblance to Proust Past: Tenacity. Marcel Proust spent the final years of his life in his cork-lined bedroom, patiently writing his 3,500 page opus that would eventually become the towering work of literary modernity. Not even The Great War could stop him. In LFoDH, Willis takes down a Harrier plane, at least one helicopter, scores of cars, several French bad guys, and one Asian kickmaster chick.


Transformers: In every adult’s worst nightmare, the toys that they grudgingly bought for their screaming spawn turn out to be gigantic sentient robots. They speechify, they fight, they die, they turn into eighteen wheelers.

There are always multiple considerations in the adaptation of a line of toys to a screen franchise, but the chief one must be How do we make not this not achingly stupid? For example, why would a bunch of alien robots from outer space look like Camaros and Mack trucks? In the highly plastic imaginative landscape of children, this poses no problem. But in a live-action movie, some of the plastic elements have to settle into a fixed shape. In the explanation, or explanations, provided – there seem to be at least three reasons given for the Transformer’s resemblance to Earth technology – Bay ends up exploring the affinity that we have for machines and the way in which we build anthropomorphic elements into the technology that we use every day. The Transformers movie is ridiculous – would you take aliens with names like Bumblebee and Jazz seriously? – but part of the reason for its success stems from the fact that we envision autonomous forms in our machines and long for their emergence.

Resemblance to Proust Past: Like Michael Bay, Marcel Proust understood the complex relationship between humans and their artifacts, and the process by which we imbue our art and architecture with human qualities, and how those qualities in turn influence and shape subsequent generations. As far as I know, Proust did not mention gigantic transforming robots in any of his finished manuscripts, but early drafts of Swann’s Way refer repeatedly to the narrator’s friendship with Optimus Prime.


Ratatouille: Ratatouille is a movie about a rat who wants to be a chef, who, through a series of unlikely circumstances, gets his shot. Ratatouille and Transformers pretty much prove that computer animation is folding the live-action film and the cartoon into one form. Transformers is a live-action film featuring characters and scenes executed almost entirely on a computer; Ratatouille is a cartoon with surfaces and textures so realistic that you sometimes forget, despite the presence of talking rats, that you’re watching animation. Similarly, Ratatouille’s preoccupations, about artistic production versus consumption and the function of criticism, shoot miles higher than the airy speeches about Freedom in Transformers.

Resemblance to Proust Past: Bodies of art tend to reduce to a small collection of images and lines, and usually not very representative or accurate ones. Our memory of Casablanca is chiefly anchored to an image of two men walking into the night on a Moroccan airfield and the mangled line “Play it again, Sam”. Leonardo da Vinci’s monster corpus is now a small dark painting of a woman with an ambiguous smile.

In the case of Proust, the entirety of ISOLT is remembered for a single scene at the close of the first chapter, in which the taste of a madeleine cookie dunked in tea brings on a spasm of involuntary memory, which is Proust’s term for a specific kind of memory that recollects and resurrects a place and time long gone, bringing it so forcefully into being that it slams aside the present, if only briefly. Behold:

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me… immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents… and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

It’s a longie but a goodie. You read the whole passage because we’re such good friends, you and I.

To discuss the madeleine moment in Ratatouille would spoil much of the fun that the viewer experiences in getting there, but suffice it to say that taste and memory intersect at the climax of the film. And besides, the movie's set in France. That's all Proustian and stuff.

Labels: film, literature

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Palinode's big 5 Harry Potter predictions
» Wednesday, July 18, 2007

There are only two days to go to the release of the latest and last Harry Potter book, and speculation on the contents is still a’brewing. The problem with all the feverish Harry Potter predictions is that the fans are too close to the material. They’ve studied the books, scoured the movies, memorized the characters’ names and generally gotten all crunked over the series. I do not have this problem. I’ve read maybe a page or two from one of the books. I’ve seen the movies but refused to remember anything of what I saw, except for the fact that Ralph Fiennes is made up to look like a big penis. In short, I have no emotional connection to any of the delightful characters at Hog-something academy, which leaves me free to get at the beating, throbbing heart of Harry Potter and the Something-something.

1. It was all a dream.

Harry wakes up in his bed, having dreamed the entire septology after a heated night with a Horcrux. He discovers his wallet has been stolen by the Horcrux and goes to the police station to report the theft. The policeman at the desk asks him to take a seat. Harry gets a Snickers bar from the vending machine and waits around for a while, but after an hour of waiting he gives up and goes in to the office. He doesn’t do much work and ends up thinking about the incredibly involved dream he had the night before. Then he buys some golf clubs online.

This may surprise some readers, but Rowling has cunningly laid a number of clues in the previous books, the chief one being that magic does not exist in the real world.


2. It was all a crazy dream.

Harry wakes up in an insane asylum. The reader finds out that the death of his parents caused a psychotic break from reality, and Harry’s been spending the last seven years calling the psych nurse Dumbledore, screaming in Latin and waving a stick he found in the yard at the orderlies. After a daring attempt to escape from Hogwarts Mental Hospital, he undergoes shock treatment and a lobotomy. Ron smothers him with a pillow, breaks a window and runs away.


3. Harry Potter is Voldemort.

I gather that Harry’s nemesis is some fellow named Voldemort. Time for Boffo Storytelling Rule #5: whenever a protagonist has a mysterious antagonist, they are the same person. At the end of the seventh book, Harry will lead Hermione, Ron and whoever else is important into a dungeon somewhere. Then he will remove his nose and say, “Ah hah! I’m Voldemort after all! Mwahahaha!” Readers are going to love it.


4. Voldemort is the hero.

Boffo Storytelling Rule #7: The antagonist is really the good guy. After Harry tracks down all the Horcruxes and is set to destroy Voldemort, the villain suddenly says, “You don’t understand a thing, do you?” Then he retells the entire story in terms that reverse all the relationships and turn the entire story inside-out. As Harry comes to grips with the realization that he’s been the evil one all along, Dumbledore shows up and starts kicking the crap out of Harry. Hermione and Ron and Draco and the others join in. Then they party with the Death Eaters. They all eat some Death Crepes, some Death Hors d'Oeuvres and big heaping plates of Death Cake a la mode. Those Death Eaters, they know how to put out a spread.


5. Harry goes to the dark side.

Harry has a vision of Ginny or somebody dying in childbirth. Voldemort appears and tells Harry that he can prevent it if he learns the dark side of magic. Based on that brief vision and some hazy promises from a man who murdered his family, Harry becomes a disciple of evil. When Voldemort unleashes his Death Eaters in a coordinated attack on the Ministry of Magic, Harry slaughters the entire student body. In a final battle between Harry and Ron, Harry is horribly burned but ends up starring in a series of inspirational TV movies.


UPDATE: I started reading the latest HP novel and am now up to page 250 or so. So far, all of my predictions have come true. Also, JK Rowling appears to have built in a secret code that, when deciphered, reveals that the entire Harry Potter corpus is a love letter addressed to me. JK, you minx - I'm a happily married man.

Labels: harry potter, lists, literature, predictions

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tv talk
» Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Schmutzie: Do you want to watch anything?

Palinode: Mmmh.

Schmutzie: Do you want to watch Look Who's Talking?

Palinode: I only watch Look Who's Talking Too.

Schmutzie: Nothing else?

Palinode: Or I watch Zoe Busiek: Wild Card.

Schmutzie: You really don't.

Palinode: In fact, if you ask me what I'm doing, 75% per cent of the time I'm watching Zoe Busiek: Wild Card.

Schmutzie: They pronounce it Byoo-sek, not Byoo-see-ek. So you clearly don't watch the show all the time.

Palinode: They say it like that because the characters all have a speech impediment.

Schmutzie: No.

Palinode: I guess you didn't catch that episode.

Palinode: Of Zoe Byoo-zee-ek.

Palinode: Wahld Cuh-yaard.

Labels: conversations

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Dear Proust: I beat your ass
» Thursday, July 12, 2007

Actually, I have now officially beaten slightly more than 1/7 of Marcel Proust’s ass, or 14.55%. Proust’s ass is a monumental 3500 pages wide, and it is an ass of such density that a thorough beating must progress inch by contemplative inch. Today at 1 pm, I reached the last word of Swann’s Way, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past, if you prefer the earlier translation. The first word of Swann’s Way is “for” and the last is “years,” which is how long it feels to read the whole thing. In fact, “for years” would serve as a fine précis of this exhausting, endlessly digressive and conversational work about love, memory, jealousy, loss, time, music, art and language.

There is no subject in the world, apparently, that does not remind Proust of something else, no tangent that can’t be pursued, no grain of human emotion too fine to be cut. It doesn’t provide instructions on how to replace the alternator in your ’82 Malibu or give you a step-by-step guide on antiquing your end tables, but after you read the “Swann In Love” chapter, you will come away with the most exhaustive possible picture of the awful pleasures of love. That is, if you’re the jealous type. And your lover turns out to be a promiscuous bisexual courtesan. And you manage to delude yourself about it for years. I know: holy quotidian, Fledermausman.

Sooner or later, you and everyone you know pop up in ISOLT, even though you’ll be sporting 19th century French drag. The bedridden and paranoiac Aunt Léonie will remind you of someone in your own family, and the blunt but attractive de Fourcheville is immediately recognizable to anyone who’s ever had a sexual rival. There’s no cliché about literature more overused than the idea of locating the universal in the particular, but in Proust you may see how far that cliché goes, as he digs deeper and deeper into consciousness and experience. Tiny moments, gestures, carelessly thrown out lines or imprecations are mined for the greatest possible significance.

The book doesn’t really have plot twists – instead, everything turns on details: the line of a path along the river, a smile or an encouraging remark from a woman, a passage from an obscure sonata. At times the details seem to take on such importance that they assume a greater and more intense life than the characters. It is in his treatment of secondary characters, in fact, that we see Proust’s talent for economy, the ability to capture a personality in a paragraph, which suggests that the digressive nature of ISOLT is strategic instead of habitual. That is, I think Proust is trying to duplicate the process of consciousness in the language and structure of his work.

I know that the English majors who read me are now thinking, “Yeah? So? He’s a modernist author, right? Wasn’t that what modernist authors did? Wasn’t that, like, their specialty, reproducing consciousness, taking the subterranean path to the objective correlative?” And they would be right. But it’s one thing to have Professor Englischer explain it to you in a classroom as the fluorescent lights buzz overhead and the asbestos particles float through the air, and another to experience it day after day as you corkscrew like a solitary botfly into the text. And lay eggs, like a botfly. And then do a series of botfly-related activities. Botfly party!

Labels: literature

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there's no such thing as a free lunch, unless your wife is recovering from a hysterectomy
» Wednesday, July 11, 2007

This is not a long story, but it’s a shameful one. Today I ate lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant, which is one of those places with edible cutlery. No, really.

Because of its peculiarities - at least from a North American perspective - Ethiopian food requires at least a few minutes of practice and some basic hand-eye coordination. The menu items are all varieties of wot, which is Ethiopian for oh you tasty goop. Standing in for forks, knives, chopsticks, skewers, tongs and lunch hat is injera, a flat, spongy fermented bread that comes rolled up on a plate, as if you were being served old medieval manuscripts for lunch. You tear off pieces from the scroll of injera and nab the wot from the plate (which is also made of injera). It’s as close as you can get to eating with your hands in a restaurant, outside of a fast food hut or medieval theme joint.

Our waitress turned out to be a friend. I’m making it sound as if I expected the server to be an enemy, or maybe even a nemesis, but it’s more accurate to say that I had no particular expectations regarding the identity of the server before I walked in. Actually, that’s not true. I had thought it might be the woman with the big curly hair and the long face, or maybe the guy with the tiny deep-set eyes and the beaklike nose, so when I saw my friend approach the table with a water pitcher and a tray of glasses, I was surprised at the betrayal of my unconsidered expectations. Hey, maybe this is a longer story than I thought.

The owner of the restaurant (the woman with the curly hair and the long face) evidently overheard the conversation I had with my friend about Schmutzie’s surgery, because she wouldn’t take my money. She pinned my twenty dollar bill on the counter under her long-nailed index finger and slid it back to me. “That’s fine,” she said, and turned to the next customer before I could protest or ask for clarification. "Are you sure?" I said. "Yes, yes," she said, waving her fingers at me.

The best feeling in the world is the hard-won bliss of spiritual enlightenment. The second best is the unexpected grace of free restaurant food. Nonetheless, it feels odd to be getting a free lunch out of my wife’s hysterectomy. Part of me wants to go from restaurant to restaurant to see how long I can survive on free food. Eventually (by which I mean the end of the week) I'll end up at KFC at two in the morning, tearfully begging for a cup of coleslaw. Maybe I’ll wear a T-shirt that says “my wife just had a hysterectomy and my back’s totally gibbled and we’re very, very decent people, with two cats and budding literary careers. Have you seen my pirate imitation?”. If the hysterectomy thing doesn’t get me some gratis French fries, I guarantee you they’ll give me anything I want to keep the pirate imitation under wraps.

Labels: autobio, food, shame

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Palinode's domestic tips
» Tuesday, July 10, 2007

For years, people have been coming to me for advice on ways to make their homes more beautiful, more secure, less ketchup-spattered. And I've been giving them the best advice that the twenty-first century has to offer. Here's the advice that, frankly, was simply too amazing, too galvanizing, to deliver face-to-face.


Coffee beans: Warm-climate countries all over the world grow and export coffee, a hard green bean that is usually roasted to blackness. Not many people know that the roasted bean can be ground up and passed through boiling water for an exotic and refreshing drink! Warning: Tincture of coffee bean contains caffeine. Warning: you could be spending your money on alcohol instead of sucking back $4 lattes.

And here’s a handy tip: you can use coffee grounds to help ‘round out’ a bagful of garbage.


Walls: Walls are those vertical slabs set perpendicular to the floor to keep rooms from bleeding into each other. They’re also there to be run into at high speed! Ha ha just kidding. They are there to keep you from moving from one space to another too easily. Architects and builders hate your freedom, people! Reclaim your liberty with a sledgehammer. If you’re in college, you may apply for a license to tape Klimt posters to walls, but unlicensed or overage Klimt users are usually chased through the streets and pushed into the sea. And you know what? They deserve it.


Beds: Beds are designed to make the experience of lying on the floor a little less ridiculous. How many times have you laid down on the floor and thought what the fuck? A good bed will answer that question for you.

The bed industry was initially a marketing gimmick on the part of pyjama manufacturers, who understood that customers would not buy comfortable lounging wear just to lay down on a hard floor. Initially a wooden or steel rectangle on short legs was introduced to provide a kind of ‘frame’ to mark an area of ‘laying-floor,’ but the real breakthrough came when a soft but resilient elevated pouch for the bed was added by inventor Bob Mattress Jr. His father, Bob Mattress Sr., invented a hair mousse that renders users susceptible to mind control.

Peter Garrett famously observed that sleeping in a bed is much more difficult when it’s burning. Usually it is the mattress that does the hard work of being on fire. My advice is to remove the mattress and sleep on the floor, the way god intended. Unless you want to have regular sex with anyone.


Electronics and Home Entertainment: No matter what kind of style you choose for your home, chances are that your electronics are not going to match (unless Faceless Tech is your decor theme). The secret here is to use the hollow chambers of your body and your inbuilt neural system to accomodate your home entertainment needs. Laptops and compact component stereo systems can usually be cut into bite-sized chunks for oral administration. To prevent unsightly cords protruding from your orifices, install a small generator wherever you can fit it.


Pitchfork-wielding Mobs: You don’t find these items often in the home, but when you do, you’re probably Frankenstein’s monster. If you take the precaution of barricading the doors, installing archers at the windows and rigging tripwires to pour huge cauldrons of boiling pitch on the approaching mob, you can be certain of being a Frankenstein’s monster who’s hip to medieval defense methods.


Balusters and Balustrades: Well la-di-da, Mr. Fancytron. While you’re having your balustrade installed, why don’t you build some faux-classical ruins at the entrance to your hedge maze out back? Oh no, you go on wandering the halls of your plywood-and-vinyl McMansion, listening to the echo of your steps and wondering why nobody likes you and your money. I’ll stay here with the pitchfork-wielding mob. We’ve got hay to poke and monsters to chase.


Dance Dance Revolution: I have no advice for you. When the shock troops of DDR come jumping and turning down the street, you will dance or die horribly. Nothing I say can make a difference.

Labels: domestic tips

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instead of writing about my wife's hysterectomy here's something about apples, but don't draw inferences about my fascination with ripened plant ova
» Thursday, July 05, 2007

I have a difficult relationship with apples. Over the years I've discarded most of the strains from my grocery list – fujis, spartans, smiths, the stoplight spectrum of deliciouses – even as apple growers winnow the genetic variety in the service of volume and sales. Now I'm down to Royal Gala, with its speckled matte skin and al dente flesh, grown in New Zealand and kicked around the globe. In any half-sane world, I would not have the option of refusing apples that don't come from 10,000 miles away, but we get to live with the globalized insanity of the twenty-first century, and these kinds of refusals are the new droit de seigneur for the Western classes.

To top off the arrogance of refusing local, or even continental, produce, I find myself dealing with Creeping Apple Time. As soon as I bite into an apple, my first thought is: How long am I going to have to eat this thing? At first it's a nagging thought, a sensation equivalent to the notion that I've mistaken my own impulses – wanted an orange but somehow ended up with a mouthful of apple instead.



After a while the thought blooms and unfolds to cover the entire duration of apple-eating, such that I spend anywhere from seven minutes to half an hour wondering just how long I have to keep biting and chewing and swallowing, biting and chewing and swallowing. Tiny beads of sweat push out on my forehead, the soft-but-grainy texture of apple pulp invades my mouth, and once again I'm wondering what I ever saw in this strain. Today I washed off an apple and spent three minutes over the garbage can, chewing and swallowing as quickly as possible. Eventually I hit the point at which I felt that I had eaten enough to let the core drop in good conscience to the bottom of the bin.



You'd think that the simplest solution would be to stop buying apples, but I owe them a debt that springs from one of my earliest memories. When I was three years old I lived on Vernon Street in Halifax, a few blocks off Coburg and the section of blocks claimed by Dalhousie University. The street was full of tall narrow houses pulled up close to the sidewalk, with children tricycling up and down the block and trees sheltering the street from sun. I remember a rose bush climbing up the front of our house.

I had a friend named Bo at the time, who lived nearby and went to nursery school with me. I don't remember much about Bo except that he had a huge haystack of brown hair that sat squarely on top of his head, but that described me just as well. Years later I ran into him when we were both trying to date the same girl, but that's a whole other thing, and anyway he was a lot taller than me by 1986. In 1974, though, we were way more interested in tricycles and inflatable swimming pools.

One afternoon my mother had given us each an apple to eat. We took them out to the sidewalk, probably feeling vaguely important to be standing by our tricycles, taking a well-deserved break from whatever the hell we'd been doing. We both took a bite. We chewed.

This is a good apple, I said, in my best approximation of adult food judgment.

It's Macintosh style, said Bo.



I don't think my mother had given us Macintosh apples to eat, but it hardly mattered. The name suddenly attached itself to the apples we were eating, gave them a deeper and more rooted presence in the texture of the afternoon, and really, made a bland and cloying fruit bearable to eat, because even at age three I knew I didn't like apples much. Who knew what Macintosh apples tasted like? I imagined a vaguely candylike flavour, like caramel apples at Halloween. Even now, thirty-plus years later, apples still taste faintly of that name.

Labels: apples, autobio

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