A Frolic of My Own

Jazz, Books, Food, and the Writing Life

Blogging from New Orleans, La

31 January 2004

Other people’s prose:

Now you have reached a point in your life when you realize that you were not meant for youth, that you were in fact always a little older than everyone else and merely waiting for your age to catch up to you, so that you might live partly through memory, as you were meant to.

From Rachel Cohen’s “Lost Cities,” collected in the Best American Essays (2003).

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29 January 2004

Instead of eating lunch today, I ran to a lab between Dupont Circle and Foggy Bottom to pee in a cup. I may still be a temp, but now that a major corporation wants to examine my bodily fluids I feel that I’ve taken another important step into the working world.

As I rushed back to work, trying not to stain my tie with the juice dripping from a lamb pita I picked up at House of Kebab, I happened upon the National Geographic headquarters, which fills a full city block and rises several stories. I always assumed they shot the magazines on location, but I guess all the photos must be done on sets. I can’t imagine what else they would be doing with all that space.

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28 January 2004

Looks like I’ve scored a nice little raise and the option to enroll in health insurance I can actually afford. I’m still a temp, but I’m going to be an in-house temp. Once this goes through, I’ll be able to live without the generosity of my parents. Being independent feels good.

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Three years ago, Jay Hallen was touring Cuba with the Yale Glee Club and arguing that the Indigo Girls suck. The Bush administration recognized his keen judgment, moved him to the Bagdad palace, and charged him with rebuilding the Iraqi stock market. Sure, he has no previous experience or interest in finance, but he’s been cramming real hard for the last few months. According to the Wall Street Journal [not online], Jay managed to allay the suspicions of some Iraqi businessmen with his “confident tone and his repeated promises to quickly open a stock market that is the envy of the Arab world.” Overconfidence alone has served the Bush administration well in Iraq, so we have no doubt that Jay will be the next Dick Grasso.

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27 January 2004

The tiny eastern state has spoken, and they decided that at this moment in history a phlegmatic New England patrician is the right man to lead the nation. If Kerry actually wins this nomination, I’m afraid the debates will be a rerun of 2000, when I felt like a teenager constantly afraid that his parents would embarrass him in public.

I spent the last few months trying to figure out Howard Dean, and now I got blind sided by Kerry. Perhaps I’ll just ignore the whole thing until after Super Tuesday, and then examine my choices.

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I’m cold even with the heater cranked up high and its too danger to walk down the block for a beer. Wonkette reminds us that “it’s just a little ice on the road, people. You know, what you put in your drinks.” Easy to say when you’re a professional blogger who never has to leave the house, but tomorrow morning I have to skate down the sidewalk to the metro.

Over the weekend, Andrea and I saw a French woman wearing nothing warmer than a jean jacket happily walking through the cold and chatting on her cell phone. Europeans, Andrea noted, seem immune to discomfort. From a young age they become accustomed to thin mattresses, stiff chairs, and drafty rooms. As an America, though, I will proudly exercise my birthright to wear a pained look on my face when it’s so cold my ears hurt.

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Other people’s prose:

I’d be willing to shave years from the end of my life to go back and intercept that evening under a cantilever when we both put our coats over our heads and rushed through the rain after coffee and I said, almost without thinking, I didn’t want to say goodnight yet, although it was already dawn. I would give years, not to unwrite this evening or to rewrite it, but to put it on hold and, as happens when we bracket off time, be able to wonder indefinitely who I’d be had things taken another turn. Time, as always, is given in the wrong tense.

From André Aciam’s “Lavender,” collected in The Best American Essays.

Posted by Todd at 7:13 pm | No Comments

25 January 2004

The blogosphere giveth and the blogosphere taketh away. Invisible Adjunct, one of the few bloggers I read every day, has taken an extended break. I’m not sure what I’ll do without a daily entry on the ill state of the academic job market, but I suspect it will be good for my mental health. I’m leaving IA in the blogroll, since the comment section has become even more active since the host stop posting. It just shows that academics will do anything to avoid grading papers.

The Antic Muse has returned in the guise of Wonkette, a snide guide to Washington. Wonkette is latest franchise of Gawker Media, the Starbucks of the internet. Wonkette went online Friday, and she demonstrated enough piss and vinegar her first day out to prove that she has more testosterone than Howard Dean.

In other good news, Dublog is again posting pretty pictures everyday.

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To Do List:

  1. Dance with the dragon this afternoon at the Chinese New Year parade (2:00 p.m. at 6th and H).
  2. See Jeanne Moreau introduce Bay of Angels Tuesday at the AFI.
  3. Hear My Morning Jacket playing something like country music and something like rock Saturday at the 9:30 Club.
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22 January 2004

Paul Wolfowitz orders a lot of take out in Cleveland Park. Just after Christmas I was walking down Connecticut Avenue with my parents, who were visiting from Oklahoma. A large SUV with police lights embedded under the hood was parked outside the Park and Shop. First a young woman stepped out and scanned the area. Then, a man with a shaved head in a dark suit exited the car, signaled to the passenger it was safe, and the two agents led Paul Wolfowitz into Sala Thai. The undersecretary of defense got back in the car a little later with a bag of food.

I assumed my parents would be impressed by spotting a powerful Washington figure, but neither my mom nor my dad had ever heard of Wolfowitz.

Last week, I was waiting in line for a table at Nam-Viet Pho 79. Wolfowitz shoved past to order some food at the bar, and his agent stood next to me nervously eyeing his charge at the other end of the restaurant. Wolfowitz left with enough food for a crowd, so maybe he was having the entire neo-conservative cabal over to his house for spring rolls and pho.

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21 January 2004

Christoper Howse tears apart books and feels no shame, or so he claims. In his confession in the Gravity’s Rainbow for similar reasons. He read the book cover to cover, promptly dropped out of graduate school, and moved to Alaska. After seperating the book into individual sections, he headed off to a tent to reread Pynchon’s masterpiece. Periodically, he would return to Anchorage for provisions and the next section of the novel.

Terry Belanger, who runs the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, liked to destroy a book at the end of his class on bibliography and print. During the lecture, he would fiddle with a book and, as he concluded, draw the class’s attention to it. Some 18th or 19th century edition, old but not rare. And then he ripped the pages from the spine, tore the cover in two, and turned the pages into scrap. The first time I saw the stunt, I was as shocked as the room full of rare book librarians around me. The second time, I knew it was coming and could enjoy the stunned faces around me. He did this to illustrate a point, but I remember only the illustration and not the lesson. [via Maud Newton]

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19 January 2004

Ben’s Chili Bowl has been clogging arteries since 1958, when the soul tunes on Ben Ali’s jukebox were just hitting the charts. That Chili Half-Smoke with cheese fries may have taken a year off my life, but I’ll tell you it was worth it.

From the outside, Ben’s looks as glamorous as a movie theater. Inside, customers clog the entryway in a snaking line as they wait to order. As you inch towards the register, it’s hard to resist the urge to add to your order one of the thick slices of cake stacked two feet high at the edge of the counter. Trust me, you don’t want to resist. The chili dogs may have made Ben’s fame, but the cake is as light and moist as your mother’s own.

Andrea and I stopped in at Ben’s Saturday around three o’clock. As we fell asleep at midnight, we realized that we had skipped dinner without even noticing. Neither of us had an appetite again until noon the next day.

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Other people’s prose:

Boston has a metropolitan economy and metropolitan-scale commuter routes–a gigantic tangle of expressways, subways and streetcar lines. But it has never coalesced into a metropolitan city. Its style is resolutely small-town–small-town emptiness, small-town sprawl, small-town isolation; it exudes the wet Sunday afternoon atmosphere of the dull province where there’s no place to go, no big-city freedom, no glamour. Everything about Boston–its architecture and size, its strange concentration of eccentric talents–should have made it an exciting city. But no. This is not what Boston wanted. It craved discreet uneventfulness, the calm of a vast, woody suburb. Like so many American cities, it has succeeded in landing itself up in a terrible, anomalous mess.

Jonathan Raban in Soft City (1974).

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15 January 2004

Other people’s prose:

In today’s great cities, the most visible and vociferous inhabitants tend to be useless (by any standards which rate bread as being of greater utility than circuses), disproportionately well-paid for their uselessness, equipped with the money, the time and inclination to spend a large portion of their lives shopping.

Johnathan Raban in Soft City (1974).

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George Mason University has collected audio samples of almost 300 native and non-native English speakers. If you carefully study the samples for the 15 official languages of India, you might be able to identify the native tongue of your operator the next time you call for technical support. [via Boing Boing]

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14 January 2004

Washington’s Reagan National Airport sits almost inside the D.C. city limits, which makes it both convenient and dangerous. From my apartment on the opposite side of town, I can be at the arrival gates in 15 minutes if I hit all the green lights and the traffic is light.

After you round the back of the Tidal Basin on 395, the road runs parallel to the air strip. You can race the jumbo jets as the arrive over your shoulder and descend a few hundred yards away. In my experience the jets always win.

Photo bonus: All this week Frolic Photo will feature images of National Airport.

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