Top 10 Thanksgiving Dinner Conversations

Last night my yin and I enjoyed a veritable feast in Homestead: tuna tartare, fresh tabbouleh, homemade vegan marshmallows, pavlovas, barley salad, roasted asparagus, and the insanely delicious lime caviar:

 But this is beside the point.

The point is that yesterday's tofu-making enterprise failed to materialize, squeezed out by the above-mentioned delicacies... and the conversations listed below:

Top 10 Thanksgiving Dinner Conversations

 

10. James Gilligan's disease model of violence.

9. The search for the perfect email address.

8. Game theory and orders of infinity. 

7. The problem with charter schools.

6. Who's worse: AT&T or Comcast?

5. How to make $40 million/year. 

4. Mersenne primes that aren't.

3. "Jeffrey" versus "Jeffery." 

2. Symbiosis with Siri.            

                          1. The Illuminati.

in lieu of turkey

Later today my yin and I will be making the trek south to share a Thanksgiving meal with our cousins in Homestead.  Rather than ranting about the holiday like I did last year, I've decided to take a more measured approach.... by making tofu.

make tofu, not war

This will be just one of the many new experiences I've had over the past weeks (new job, new phone, new wardrobe), and by virtually ant metric, it should be one of the least important.  Nonetheless, I must admit to a certain amount of trepidation.  Sometimes knowledge serves to ease anxiety, but when it comes to food, sometimes the processes involved in their production are enough to turn one's stomach.  In fact, you can read about how turkeys get made here.

i

m

age

(thankfully)

miss

in

g

With regard to the tofu, though, I'm less concerned about the blood and feathers and murder than I am the cheesecloth.  For starters, I don't know what cheesecloth is, much less what, if anything, it has to do with cheese.  I think maybe I saw it once as a kid, somewhere in my mother's kitchen.  Although not a particularly accomplished chef, my mom has been known to get on various culinary kicks, and she sometimes talks about making yogurt back in the Seventies and early Eighties.

These sorts of second-hand reminiscences are odd because they have a way of inserting themselves into one's memory so neatly that it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish the things we've been told a million times from the things we actually remember.  Of course sometimes I wonder if that's all memory ever is – the things we tell ourselves often enough to become real. The past gradually accrues a certain mass, an unmistakable pull akin to gravity, both in its invisibility and its undeniability. 

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I've been looking forward to today for weeks now, ever since our cousin told us she planned to prepare tuna tartare. It's been well over a year since I've had fish, and in the past couple of months I've felt my body craving more protein.   All the tempeh and beans and tofu in the world still fall short when it comes to protein density, and tuna is far and away my favorite seafood. So, I suppose I'' break with my vegetarianism later today and indulge in a hefty helping of animal protein and mercury.

But first, I plan to make that tofu, and instagr.am the whole experience with my fancy new phone. With any luck, I'll be able to eat what we make...

In praise of "friendly acquaintances"...

Orphaned puppy dogs and leaky eyes
rainbows kidnapped by brown and beige and
taupe: the ugly drab colors of nightmare
hues hewn from dead leaves and excrement –
the street sweeper's hangover, the morning after
ticker-tape melancholia.

Whiteboards stained with Expo

exposition stained with boredom:

conversations huddle round the microwave

waiting for the downward timer:

0:03...

(what are the consequences of our decisions?)

0:02...

(what maps lead the way?)

0:01...

(how is one to choose?)

0:00

redux: memory of dreaming, Rumi on a rainy Monday afternoon

To describe this

love is nothing 

 

more than naming 

 

the things it is not.

repost: dots and lines, 2 years and counting...

... . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . ..... . . . . . . . t. . . . . . . ....... . . . . . . .... ... . . . . . . . . . . . . h. . . . ............... . . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . . . . . . . r. . . . . . . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . ........ . ... . . . . . . . . . a. . . . . . . ...... ..... . . . . . r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . ........ . . . . . a. . . . . . . . . . . . . l. . . . . . . . . . . . . w. . . . . . . . . . . . . a. . . . . . . . . . . . . y. . . . . . ............. . . . . . . s. . . . . . .... . . . . . . f. . . . . . . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . . . . . . . w. . . . .......... . . . . . ........ ... ...... . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . . . . . . . r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . d . . . . . . . . . . o. . . . . . ......... . . . . . . t. . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . s. . . . . . . . . . . . . t. . . . . . . . . . . . . h. . . . . . . . . . . . . a. . . . . . . . . . . . . n. . . . . . ........................ . . . . . . l.. . . . . . . . . . . . . i. . . . . . . . . . . . . n. . . . . . . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . . . . . . . s. . . . . . . . . . . . . c. . . . . . . . . . . . . o. . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . . .................. . . . . . . . n. . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . n. . . . . . . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . . . . c. . . . . . . ..... . . . . . t. . . . . . ............. . . . . . . i. . . . . . . . . . . . . n. . . . . . . . . . . . . g. . . . . . . . . . . . . t. . ................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . h . . . . . ............ . . . . . e. . . . . . . . . . . . ................ ... .. m.

11.11.11 (superstitions and armistice)

Is it all

1

or is it

all

One

or is it

all

won

and lost:

baffled

baffled

breaths

(one)

after another
until

one

night

we realize

we are

all
al-

one.

5 years ago, today

sunrise

I woke in a motel room in St. Augustine before sunrise and ran to the beach. It had been years since I had seen the ocean, and at that moment nothing seemed more important. Three weeks earlier, I had experienced a vision of myself as a toddler, sitting on a bench looking out over the water. The beach in the vision was located at the intersection of Memory and Imagination, somewhere off the Outer Banks of North Carolina:

author, circa 1980

morning

My father and I visited the Spanish forts that overlooked the bay. Walking around the ruins, I wondered how much blood had been shed, how many lives had been lost. I thought about the men who died in sight of the bay, the men who never touched the water.

Castillo de San Marcos

midday

We stopped at Cape Canaveral and took a tour of the grounds. I was surprised by the amount of wildlife surrounding the launch pad and fascinated by the sheer scale of the operation. I thought about the men and women who touched the sky, and the perspective that must come with experiencing one's own body as weightless... one's own planet as distant and small.

 

evening

I arrived in a strange town with everything I owned, or at least everything I wanted to own, in a single bag. It was not unlike my move to New York seven years earlier, except that the sturdy green canvas had been replaced with a flimsy blue linen. That night I purchased a college-ruled composition pad and a new pen. I had been using ballpoint for ten years at that point, and I decided it was time for a change.

181st Street and Fort Washington

night

To my knowledge I wrote nothing on November 9, 2006. In retrospect I find it a beautiful coincidence that the date now exists in both metaphorical and indexical limbo – the chain of signifiers was broken on that day; it exists between these journals:

__

and these pens:

__

There is nothing more important than the space connecting one moment of our material existence to the next.

It is empty, 

yet full;

present, 

yet absent.

The pens and journals and sentences left behind are merely the sedimentation of memory, artifacts of a past that (n)ever existed, monuments to the life that was.

Meaning does not come from words;

but from the silences between them.

remembering three days in Gainesville

day 1

Last year my yin and I drove to Gainesville on a Friday morning. I was presenting at a conference at the University of Florida:

She had returned from India only two days earlier, and being a true trooper (a trueper?) she agreed to come with me in spite of the jet lag. Our drive was uneventful, and we arrived in time for me to catch the final afternoon session. Neither of us knew that in one year's time, I would be exiting the academy, rendering superfluous and obsolete the dream I was chasing during those days at UF.  This would not be the first time Gainesville played host to my future disillusionment.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the keynote address was given that night by "mumblecore" director Andrew Bujalski. Prior to the talk, I was wholly unfamiliar with his work, and he spoke for about an hour or so before finally introducing his latest film Beeswax:

This film blew me away: 16mm, understated, and permeated with a wonderful tension of what lies ahead of us, just beyond our field of vision, on the other side of the morning.

(One year later, the read prophetic.)

The characters themselves remain largely unknowable, not in the Brechtian sense of distantiation, but in the same manner as our everyday encounters. The film is a fascinating exploration of the forces that structure quotidian, and it begs the question:

How well do we really know what motivates the actions of those around us?

Bujalski spoke to this in his keynote, telling us that he liked to keep his performers confused because real people rarely have the same clarity of intent and purpose as the images of people we see on the screen. This made sense to me, and I thought of a playwright friend of mine I had seen the week before. We were once in a graduate seminar together, and she had written of Brecht and Godard. I wondered what she would think of Beeswax, or if it was any of mine.

day 2

I presented a paper on Chris Marker's Sans soleil on the second day of the conference:

My paper dealt with memory, which is unremarkable given its author, but I was caught off guard by the questions that came at the end of the presentation. I had prefaced my talk by referencing my interest in Vedic thought, and specifically mentioned smriti vritti, a thoughtform of the past that imposes itself upon the present.

(The importance of these questions, 

and of the superimposition of thoughtforms, 

only continues to grow with each passing year.)

A number of questions arose from this brief aside, which was intended as nothing more than window dressing for the paper proper. And yet, this was what spoke to people – this was what people wanted to know more about. It reminded me that one can never know the karma created of our words any more than we can know the reason why we speak them.

This is the sublime space of not knowing what comes next, when we speak from our hearts and rely upon the mind only to provide the words that others might comprehend.

But this, too, is beside the point.

The point is that I saw one of my best friends from high school that night, the one who introduced me to Nancy on a cold January night in 2000. We reminisced our various exploits in the company of two dogs with eight legs and three eyes between them. He apologized for that fateful introduction, and I told him there was no need, that Nancy remains my most important teacher to this day.

(This same friend, 

not by coincidence, 

wrote me this very morning.)

day 3

The third day was more relaxed; everyone knew each other, and my own anxiety regarding my presentation was no longer corrupting my consciousness. The panels were excellent, and the midday keynote helped to wash away the bitter aftertaste of the one the night before, when a windbag from Harvard bored everyone out of their seats. The man on Sunday, though, was humble, soft-spoken, and had the self-assuredness found so often in those who have less life in front of them than behind.

He spoke of stasis and silence, and their ability to communicate knowledge in a way impossible with words. He described a barrier as "that which can be crossed," and of all the speeches and presentations I heard over the weekend, his was the only one that approached the realm of poetry:

But this, three, is beside the point.

The point is that my yin and I left after his lecture, and it was the perfect way to close out the weekend. We both had to teach early the following day, and on the way home we saw one final notable sight, something that made me wish I had my camera.

(The definition of "my camera" has since changed;

the same can be said of all definitions.)

We stopped at a rest stop somewhere south of Orlando, and out of the corner of my eye I saw two Buddhist monks walking inside. The one on the right held a small white box in his hand, and I rushed ahead to see if my imagination had commandeered my visual cortex:

It didn't, and my mind flooded with questions, all of them an attempt to resolve the contradiction in front of me. Why? How? But– maybe... There were a million broken utterances lurking in the central Florida night, but I did nothing. As we were leaving I told my yin, "Maybe i should have talked to him."

"Don't worry," she responded. "You can always ask him next time."

repost: Les faux odeurs de l'automne

Combien des heures devant un clavier?
Combien d'acts contre nature constituent notre journée?

Combien de fois ne nous sentons
les feuilles en décomposition
mélanger avec les aiguilles de pin?

Je me souviens cet été quand la distance
entre le point a et le point b mesurait en l'hauteur.

Pas de heures.
Pas de minutes.
Pas de calendriers.

Je bien m'entends avec les montagnes
et regrette l'absence de les odeurs de l'automne.