someone else's thoughts about George Orwell

"You used to be bullied and sat last in class, but now you break windows with the eagerness a brick has for glass."

"In addition to social connections of a pragmatic or idealistic kind, there is a third way of understanding the relations of individuals to the state. It was first demonstrated, as far as I can calculate, by Socrates, when he refused to avoid his death penalty and escape Athens. We need to see society as an extension of ourselves, an invisible part of our anatomy that assists us every day without dominating us and that, like our own arms and legs, we tend when injured, and whose welfare we consider at all times. The relation resembles that of a violinist to his instrument – useful but more than something useful, cared for like an esteemed friend. If such a part of us fails, we do not discard it for a peg leg, nor are we fired from our job because we cannot play hopscotch. We may be a disposable member of the symphony, but our violin is us to us. The relation is sometimes – oh dear – called love."

– William H. Glass, "Double Vision: George Orwell's contradictions," Harper's, October 2012

jury duty

At first, she felt prepared. Even sophisticated. Ah yes, I am someone who reports for jury duty with my coffee in a thermos. No need to try to dash across the street, in the spittle-like rain, to wait in line for a cup of too-hot brown water, then scramble to arrive on time. 

She opened the thermos and coffee splashed everywhere, on the table, on her skirt. Undeterred, she took out some tissues and began sopping it up from the tabletop. She got a stain-remover pen out of her purse and applied it to her skirt. I am prepared for this contingency, she thought, I am someone who is ready, I am someone who has a plan, even when the coffee thermos has a leak.  

After all, she thought, it's not as thought I knew it had a leak. I borrowed it this morning. I do not own a coffee thermos. I'm someone who has a borrowed coffee thermos. I'm someone who has borrowed a leaky coffee thermos. I'm someone who knows the kind of people who own leaky coffee thermoses and lend them out willy-nilly. I'm someone who is already so used to the possibility of spilling and making a mess – did this stain my skirt? no way!! – that I'm already prepared to clean up the mess I know I'll eventually make. And yes it's true I forgot to clean out my purse before I came and I had to go outside in the rain and hide my Swiss Army knife under a bush and I just have to hope it'll still be there later because I'm not, of course I'm not allowed to bring it in the building and yes it said that in the jury summons but I forgot, I simply forgot until I was standing in line for the metal detector and by then it was too late, although it's true that even when I realized it was too late, I refused to accept it, and when my bag had gone through the scanner and set off all the alarms and they asked me nicely was there a knife or anything in my bag I tried to bluff, I tried suggesting it might have been my key chain, my wine bottle opener which I'd also forgotten to take out of my bag, my bike multi-tool, and, no? Well, oh, dear, how embarrassing, I forgot about my pocket knife, I'm so sorry and now it's under a bush, if it's even still there, if someone hasn't found it already, it's probably rusting, it's probably gone.

I am someone who is accustomed to dealing with my own incompetence.

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a crisis of language

" 'False statements' were useful but mostly superfluous because a peculiar system of regulation left much of the actual regulation to market participants. Rules about 'disclosure,' which specified that an investor be kept informed of any 'material' information having to do with a company's finances, meant that disclosures in a financial report could be buried in the footnotes and, with some clever wording, made sufficiently dull to ensure that they would rarely be seen as red flags . . . All this would merit the word 'monstrous,' except the adjective implies an element of excitement and drama, whereas this is a system that thrives on abstraction and boredom. According to the conventions of this system, the footnotes are more important than the main body of the text. Sentences are crafted so as not to be read. Language should confound rather than communicate. These conventions operate completely counter to those of narrative as we know it. To fixate on 'human nature,' . . . is a sentimental fallacy; it presumes that the problem is not structural dysfunction, the truly tangled web of politics and money, but individual hubris – villains who threaten an established order, a benign status quo."

– Jennifer Szalai, "The Banality of Avarice: Why the financial industry never had to lie," Harper's, February 2012

we're all going to die

There were a lot of things I enjoyed about Caitlin Moran's How to Be a Woman. This is merely one of them:

"Personally, I like the fact that we're going to die. There's nothing more exhilarating than waking up every morning and going, "WOW! THIS IS IT! THIS IS REALLY IT!" It focuses the mind wonderfully. It makes you love vividly, work intensely, and realize that, in the scheme of things, you really don't have time to sit on the sofa in your undies watching Homes Under the Hammer.

Death is not a release, but an incentive. The more focused you are on your death, the more righteously you live your life. My traditional closing-time rant – after the one where I cry that they closed that amazing chippy on Tollington Road, the one that did the pickled eggs – is that humans still believe in an afterlife. I genuinely think it's the biggest philosophical problem the earth faces. Even avowedly nonreligious people think they'll be meeting up with nana and their dead dog, Crackers, when they finally keel over. Everyone thinks they're getting a harp.

But believing in an afterlife totally negates your current existence. It's like an insidious and destabilizing mental illness. Underneath every day – every action, every word – you think it doesn't really matter if you screw up this time around because you can sort it all out in paradise. You make it up with your parents and become a better person and lose that final 14 pounds in heaven. And learn how to speak French. You'll have time, after all! It's eternity! And you'll have wings, and it'll be sunny! So, really, who cares what you do now? This is really just some lackluster waiting room you're going to be in for only 20 minutes, during which you will have no wings at all and are forced to walk around, on your feet, like pigs do.

If we wonder why people are so apathetic and casual about every eminently avoidable horror in the world – famine, war, disease, the seas gradually turning piss-yellow and filling with ring-pulls and shattered fax machines – it's right there. Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside of jigsaws."

music makes the people come together

I saw Fiona Apple in concert Saturday night at the Fox theater in Oakland. I've loved her music for so many years that she'd long since acquired a kind of far-away-ness in my mind which meant, somehow, it hadn't occurred to me that someday, I might see her perform. 

When her new album came out, "The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do," I did a flip. Fiona Apple's lyricism, her smart yet raw emotional language, her often catchy, haunting, aggressive melodies and incredible vocal control shoot an arrow the size of Cupid's Span straight through my heart, every time. 

So, housemates John & Kristin & I BARTed over to Oakland to see the concert. We had tickets for standing room, at the front. I was happy about this. I like going to concerts when I can see the facial expressions of the performers. I am not excited by massive crowds, with giant screens projecting the show for the people in the back. If I am paying for a live performance, I want to experience some physical closeness, some sense of reading a real person. I was happy to be standing. Fiona Apple's music isn't stuff I dance to, really, but I figured at least I'd get to see her play the piano. Neat. 

She ran onstage with a painting of her dog I recognized from the photo accompanying this New York Times interview, which she flat on the piano, parallel to it, and did not interact with for the remainder of the show. When we'd entered the Fox, there had been signs warning about strobe lights. At a Fiona Apple show? I'd wondered aloud. It was true. This was a very rock n' roll Fiona Apple. That was fine. I actually quite enjoyed the lighting design, although some of the guitar solos were a bit too much for me. I would have preferred longer solos of Fiona on piano. Still, I wasn't really there to complain, I was there to be mesmerized and have a big emotional experience. And to some extent, so was the rest of the crowd. To some extent, but in a different way than I was. A way than was drunker, shoutier, pushier, and far more raucous than mine. Now, I know that I cannot dictate how people behave at concerts. But just for fun, I'm going to pretend I can. Ok? So here we go:
Rules for Concert Behavior

1. Put away your damn cell phone. Yes, I know: This is an incredible experience, and you want to remember it forever, which is why you're using the shitty, low-quality camera on your cell phone to take bouncy, shaky video that you'll no doubt later upload to YouTube. Let me take this opportunity to tell you I don't care. Your cell phone is getting in the way of my incredible experience. It is a little glowing box in my line of vision, and it is filling me with rage. Put it away before I smack your hand and confiscate your phone. Thank you.
2. Shut up and stop singing. I know all the words too! I love this singer/band! That's why I bought a ticket, to hear them sing their songs. Not to hear you sing them, shouting, screaming in my ear. You are not a good singer, actually. Please stop. Also, all of you sing-screaming at the same time like this makes me think we're at a fascist rally. It's creepy/scary. Let's all be quiet and listen to the beautiful music together, ok? (Note: I am fine with you singing under your breath, softly. But not so loud, please, as though you are trying to drown out the artist we are all here to see. And not in my ear.)
3. No shouting at the singer. This is so rude. This is like the rule that (maybe) your parents taught you about interrupting people: Don't do it! For example, when Fiona Apple is singing a beautiful song, and it's a soft, gentle, sad part, her voice low and full of an ache that, for a moment, we all share, we all feel pulling at the base of our spines and the soles of our feet, this is not a good time to get together with your two BFFs and shout in unison, "WE LOVE YOU, FIONA!" because that is rude. She is showing you her art, and you are shouting at her. That is a bad kind of love. Go sit in the corner and think about how to be a better, more supportive, more respectful lover. Corollary: No song requests! The artist has a set list. They will play the songs they want to play. Now stop shouting.
4. Stop talking. This is so obvious, I can't believe I have to say it. But really? Stop talking. Go outside or something. Jeez. Sure, sometimes there are logistics to sort out. But if you are catching up on the gossip or whatever, at least move yourself out of the front area which is largely populated by people who are excited to be where they are, experiencing what is happening.

Hey, that's it! Only four rules! Basically, they could all be summed up under one rule: Enjoy yourself, but not at the expense of other people. Which I tend to think of as a good life-rule. Apparently, though, there are a lot of people out there who disagree with me.
In the end, it was one of the most isolating concert experiences I've had. I was in a place with so many people, and we were all watching the same performance, and I would even say we were all enjoying it, but the ways in which we were enjoying it, in which we wanted to experience it, were so different. Am I the problem? Should I just sit at home in my bedroom listening to music in private? If I hadn't so many other, positive concert experiences, experiences of joy and dancing and connectivity, I would unreservedly think the problem was me. But here, I don't know. There was a disconnect so engulfing, between how her music makes me feel and how it made so many other people feel Saturday night, and I don't think it can be explained away by alcohol and/or drugs alone. I'm not interested in making the case that I understand or appreciate her music "better" because of the way I wanted to experience the concert, and I am glad she has so many fans. I am especially glad there are so many dude-y looking dudes in polo shirts who know all the words to her songs, her songs that to me are so emotional, and so female. Way to confound my expectations of you, dudes! Now if we are ever drunk together and waiting for a bus in North Beach and I somehow feel obliged to make conversation, I will ask you about Fiona Apple!

I suppose what I am trying to get at is that all of this brought home for me the intensely private nature of experiencing art. Duh, I know; but I'd never had it hit me in quite this way before. I was really happy to have gone, but at the end of the evening, I felt alone. The next day, I sang her songs in the shower and then listened to "Extraordinary Machine" and it felt just as real and near and impossible as always.


Do you have any Rules for Concert Behavior you would like to add? You may submit them here for the committee's consideration.

the rest is noise

"Probably, the young Reiter answered himself, music would just be noise, noise like crumpled pages, noise like burned books. 

 At this point the conductor raised a hand and said or rather whispered confidentially:

'Don't speak of burned books, my dear young man.'

To which Hans responded:

'Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books.'

'What are you talking about?' asked the director.

'I was just stating my opinion,' said Hans.

'An opinion like any other,' said Halder, doing his best to end the conversation on a humorous note, one that would leave them all on good terms, he and the conductor and Hans and the conductor, 'a typically adolescent pronouncement.'

'No, no, no,' said the conductor, 'what do you mean by Westerns?'

'Cowboy novels,' said Hans.

The declaration seemed to relieve the director, who, after exchanging a few friendly words with them, soon took his leave. Later, he would tell their hostess that Halder and the Japanese man seemed like decent people, but Halder's young friend was a time bomb, no question about it: an untrained, powerful mind, irrational, illogical, capable of exploding at the moment least expected. Which was untrue."

– 2666, Roberto Bolaño