To hellholes and back

I wanted to pull out my favorite parts of To Hellholes and Back: Bribes, Lies, and the Art of Extreme Tourism by Chuck Thompson to tell you why I liked this book so I sat down to flip through its pages again. Three hours later I was on page 77, devouring each chapter new. I should have underlined my favorite passages but instead was transcribing entire paragraphs and pages into my journal like homework, but happier. Chuck Thompson is FUN-NAY.

If you've ever, like me, done stupid crap while traveling - hopped in the pickup of strange men I met while they were machete-ing a snake to death on the side of the Mexican highway, or spent way more time with arms dealers and drug traffickers than my naive dumb ass ever should have let happen - then you will probably appreciate Chuck's approach to travel. Not that he was really out of line because STUFF JUST HAPPENS when you choose to go to places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo over, say, Club Med. The only exception possibly being when Chuck wrote of leaving his safari group and guides to wander through the plains alone. Whaaat? That chapter made my hair stand on end; I apparently fear lions more than I do Interpol.

The four locations he writes about are those he spent a year investigating solely because he was afraid of them. And, of course, maybe for reasons he wasn't fully aware of at first and needed a strong dose of travel-inspired reflection to tap into.

1. Africa
2. India
3. Mexico City
4. Disney World

There were surprises, none more unexpected to me than his reaction to Disney World. If a man who says, "And no, it doesn't make me un-American to have assiduously avoided setting foot in a fabricated dream patch plopped in the middle of a morally rudderless state of bogus elections with a half-baked citizenry who think absolutely nothing of supporting an idiotic fifty-year embargo of Cuba or taking the Camaro with the slave-days flag decals to the corner market for a pack of smokes without bothering to put their shirts on. So, Disney," can end up liking Miley Cyrus then none of us should presume to take anything for granted.

Lauging quietly to myself

About the topics of books I'm reading right now:

- Southern cooking
- Vegetarian cooking by my friend Lukas
- Espionage, intel, the FBI
- Country music

Anne of Green Gables

I spent the weekend in Canada on Prince Edward Island, the source of inspiration and setting of L.M Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables book series which is exactly what I thought of and what every person said, "Anne of Green Gables!" when I told them I was going to PE Island. I haven't read an Anne book in a long time but my mind instantly conjured images of a lively red-headed girl in a white smock, a boy named Gilbert, and Anne's "bosom" friend, Diana of the raven hair. I thought maybe I was belatedly clutching onto the symbol of a place whose time had passed and that the island itself would be nonchalant about that claim to fame but no, not so. Lucy Maud Montgomery brought her island's land and character to readers all over the world and the island's 140,000 residents are proud of Anne Shirley.

I walked to one of the main streets in town from the hotel my first night there, turned onto Queen Street and saw the theater's banners for the Anne of Green Gables musical currently in its summer run. On the corner of Richmond Street the Anne of Green Gables store sold Anne-inspired clothes, food, bricabrac and books. I read that Anne books are required reading in Japanese schools and that Japanese tourists pour onto the Island to visit the Avonlea farm in Cavendish, some with their hair dyed red and in braids, Anne style, and I confirmed this today with a French-Canadian friend who used to live in Tokyo. I couldn't help feeling twinges of excitement as the van driving me and the band got further out of Charlottetown and closer to Cavendish and our destination, the Cavendish Beach Music Festival, right in Avonlea. "This is where it happened!" I thought.

Or didn't happen, since the books are fiction based loosely on LM Montgomery's life and people she knew in the late nineteenth century. But it didn't matter because I was young when I read those books and when I read as a kid, I lost myself in stories. It was real to me. It didn't matter if my mom was calling me for dinner a few feet away, the roof was being shredded by a tornado, the first floor on fire, with gutter rats nibbling at my heels. I READ HARD. And Anne Shirley was kind of a bad ass; she was always getting into trouble for being a spitfire with the kind of curiosity and imagination and action that bothers people who prefer the stolid status quo. I totally wanted to be her or be friends with her.

Pulphead

My favorite book so far this year: Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan. I found it at Parnassus Books, an independent book store in Nashville opened by Ann Patchett and Karen Hayes, and until these essays I had no clue I was so interested in Bunny Wailer, Christian rock festivals, ancient cave paintings in Tennessee, Tea Party marches, strange and violent animal behavior, the One Tree Hill house in Wilmington, DE, Michael Jackson, the questionable death of a census worker in Eastern Kentucky, long-lost Blues recordings, or the forgotten work and possibly repugnant personality of French German naturalist Constantine Rafinesque. Oh, and Axl Rose.

Frippery

What I'm going to take from reading The 19th Wife, besides fuel for my ongoing fascination with Mormonism, is the word frippery.

Frippery:

1. finery in dress, especially when showy, gaudy, or the like.
2. empty display; ostentation.
3. gewgaws; trifles.

Thank you, David Ebershoff.

Blue Highways

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon was recommended to me almost two years ago and it's been sitting in my room unread since then. I read the back cover over and over and it sounded good but for whatever reason I didn't want to read more.

Packing up the bedroom for the move, I pulled it out again and put it aside thinking I might want to read in the car. As a kid on road trips, I always brought multiple books, Mad Libs, travel bingo and was still bored after ten minutes. These days I can stare at the passing landscape for hours on end, content to let my mind wander, so I didn't open Blue Highways until I was in bed two nights ago. And the twenty or so pages I managed to read before passing out were good. So good. I soaked in the words, willing myself to slow down and absorb them as much as possible.

...a man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him.

Etymology: curious, related to cure, once meant "carefully observant." Maybe a tonic of curiosity would counter my numbing sense that life inevitably creeps toward the absurd...Maybe the road could provide a therapy through observation of the ordinary and obvious, a means whereby the outer eye opens and inner eye. STOP, LOOK, LISTEN, the old railroad crossing signs warned. Whitman calls it "the profound lesson of reception."

Do new things make for new ways of seeing?

What we find when we unpack

This week my apartment got turntables, a library card catalog, and a church pew. I'm still waiting on the mannequin head I found on eBay.

A mouse was living in the card catalog before I bought it from a guy on Craigslist so as soon as I clean out the turds, I'm putting random objects in the drawers and ask Matthew to assign them Dewey Decimal numbers.

I also went through my books and found a handbound one that Taryn made for me five years ago. I used it as a journal in 2003 and I took this morning to catch up on what was up with me that year.

Woah.

Life must be lived forward but as Søren Kierkegaard said and I scribbled on December 31, 2003, it can only be understood backwards.

Baltimore cloudgazing and the art of travel

Baltimore, Maryland

It was Monday so the American Visionary Art Museum was out.

I considered the brains and human bodies exhibit at the science center on the harbor but the hundred children running around the lobby turned me crotchety. I wasn't feeling like a kindly spinster; I was the kind who rolls her eyes and wonders why people breed such little hellcats.

"I wish all these KIDS would get out of the children's museum so I could ENJOY MYSELF."

I walked along the waterline, past the sand volleyball court and the trapeze school and up Federal Hill where I settled into the grass at the top. From here I could barely hear the traffic. The red and white striped carousel turned below and the tinkle of carnival music rose and fell, first blotting out the noise of cars then chiming softly, almost inaudibly. The skies were blue with billowy clouds. Past the trees to my left were rows of brick townhouses, the historic district of Baltimore, and to the right downtown and the harbor.

Aaahhh.

Behind me, on the sidewalk, a woman in an Army shirt followed orders from a guy who made her do sit ups and push ups. "Run down the steps, do fifty jump ropes at the bottom, and run up the hill. Take a breather and do it again."

"I should get a personal trainer," I thought for about five seconds, tops. 

"Or I should not get a personal trainer because I will hate the personal trainer for ordering me around to do more than sit in the grass and stare at clouds."

Having settled the personal trainer issue, I pulled out a book.

I last read The Art of Travel in 2004. That time, I underlined favorite passages. This time I highlighted some of the same words, plus new parts. The first time I read the book, I'd traveled enough to know that trains are my favorite transit and that my brain chemistry alters when a plane takes off.

I know that I won't be a different person just because I'm in a different place, no matter how much I want to be. I've tried that and it doesn't work. There is, however, a a correlation between the expansiveness of thought to the expansiveness of view.

Expansive views can be big: Yosemite's El Capitan, the edge of the Grand Canyon, or Baltimore's Federal Hill. They can be small: a room that's foreign in touch and feel, the sounds leaking under the door from the street outside. The room might be dingy and tiny but it is new and so, therefore, are your thoughts.

Alain de Botton, the author of The Art of Travel, says that large thoughts may require large views and new thoughts, new places.

I thought I connected with the book completely in 2004. This time, though, as I picked through the sections devoted to hotel rooms and airports, I laughed anew. Alain de Botton NAILS IT. From unexpected angles. With pictures! This book was either written for me or I wish I'd written it myself.
Would it be creepy to legally change my name to Alain de Botton? Would I seem like a stalker? Would it be worth it?

Now that I've spent several years touring, living for months in a another hotel room in another city, I want to give this guy a high five more than ever. Or, since he doesn't seem like a high-fiver, just cock my eyebrow and say something extremely witty and dry.

The Last Lecture

I sat on a concrete step on the south side of Pittsburgh and wondered who to call. I wasn't in the mood for small talk. My brain felt heavy, at least 10 lbs, more than its usual three. That's right, I weighed it. It was bloated.

"Gail," I wondered, "Where is she?" She'd sent me photos from Alaska. I didn't know if she was back in Minnesota but I'd been thinking about her ever since Salt Lake City. When the tour got to Salt Lake a couple weeks earlier, I called Gail and left her the message that I could see her and Dave living in Salt Lake City.

It was probably the mountains but right away I thought, "I have to tell her they could live here."

Later, on the phone, Gail told me that she'd quit her job and her family was going to move, probably to the west coast but they'd been considering Salt Lake, too.

I've shared parallel moments with Gail ever since we met in Minneapolis in 1994, all kinds of little similarities in thought and detail, many of them from a distance.

So it made sense that at the end of that phone call she mentioned a book, The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.

She told me that it was a lecture by a professor who died of cancer, who spoke not of death but of life and how he lived. "That's exactly what I've been thinking about today," I said, "Living and dying and optimism."

I didn't really know what I meant, my thoughts were playing bumper car in my brain and probably still are. I definitely didn't know that Randy Pausch had died only three days previous and that he'd been a professor at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. I was on his turf.

The book looked small when I bought it. "Uh oh," I thought, "I hope this isn't chicken soup for the soul." I was skeptical because a lecture on achieving your childhood dreams sounds treacly. The fact that he'd been watched by millions of people on You Tube and by another few million on Oprah didn't, in my mind, help.

But that is an example of me being too cool for Oprah. Sometimes I have to get over that.

Do many popular inspirational writers make me want to choke myself with the crayons that I'm so whimsically instructed to color with? Yes. SARK, I will let you know when I'm in the mood to "build a fort with blankets" and "giggle with children". Or better yet, I'll just go ahead and DO THAT STUFF without consulting your magical poster first.

But guess what?

I appreciated The Last Lecture. A few people told me that it was "heavy" but it wasn't heavy. It was LIGHT. Surprisingly, I didn't mind. I usually like it when books make me work harder. I mean, Randy Pausch was smart - nerd smart - but these stories are simple. No need to refer to your engineering or philosophy degree to get it.

He was dying of pancreatic cancer when he gave the lecture, stories for his kids that he wouldn't get to tell later, on how to take your dreams seriously and set a high standard for yourself and not settle. How to keep learning and having fun while doing hard things and being a big old kid.

National bestsellers are almost by definition accessible to lots of people, easy to read and easy to follow. I can be a snob about it when I'm not stooping, Steve Martini style, but I didn't get all SARKed out by this one.

I just felt psyched that someone so shamelessly dorky about computer science and virtual reality and f'ing Disney World, where I never even wanted to go when I was 10 years old, and football - FOOTBALL - made me sit up straight.

I don't think it hurt that I started reading in the cafe of the American Museum of Natural History when I had time to kill between the space movie and the dinosaur movie I'd bought tickets to.

Thanks, Gail.

Summer reading and reading gender

I was inspecting my room at the hotel in Arizona when I saw the books. I stood on tippytoes to read the spines: The Tommyknockers by Stephen King and Undue Influence by Steve Martini. Fittingly, wedged between the two, was Stop the Insanity! by Susan Powter.

Okay. Stephen King, whatever. Beloved by many people, I've never really gotten into him but I thought his book about the writing process, On Writing, was pretty good.

Susan Powter I remember from television commercials in the 90's. I didn't pay attention to her and there's a part of me that regrets that because I suspect that I'd agree with some of what she had to say about health and fitness and the horrible diet industry.

But I was too busy being turned off by her aggressive approach. She always spoke in caps and couldn't stop telling everyone to stop the insanity and was so fucking JAZZED all the time that it made me want to immediately turn off the TV, light a cigarette, and eat a whole box of non-fat cookies.

People on a mission are passionate, I know. I just happen to prefer that they'd casually mention their passion and then give me some time to let it sink in. They don't have to yell in my face; that makes me anxious. The third book on the shelf, the one by Steve Martini, stopped me for a minute. Why is his name so familiar?

OH YEAH. I decided back in April that I hate that guy! Before I found a good crime story to read in Berlin, I tried to read Steve Martini. I hung in there for like 180 pages until I finally admitted that the book was formulaic and boring. I decided at the very end, with only a few pages to go, that if I died I'd be happier NOT knowing what happened. Knowing which yuppie lawyer got pushed off a Mayan pyramid would actually make my death less meaningful. So I closed the book.

And now? Two months and nine time zones later? Here he is again. In my bedroom. What Steve Martini needs to know is that I've moved on.

These are the books that I packed in my suitcase for the summer:

1. The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of the City by Joseph Rykwert
2. The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton
3. Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, Edited by Mattilda AKA Matt Bernstein Sycamore.

I brought the one on cities because I like thinking about how environments affect people and vice versa, the one by Alain de Botton because anything he writes inspires me and makes me laugh, and the one on gender for a few reasons.

I heard about Nobody Passes on mimi smartypants and I perked up because the book was published by Seal Press, where I interned in Seattle.

I read an excerpt or a review and caught some of the following words in the context of BELONGING: gender norms, genderqueer, mixed-race identity, white liberalism, immigration, sexual liberation, domestic violence prevention, ecstasy, academic tokenism, SM, do-it-yourself hypocrisy, the psychiatric industry, international travel, anti-Arab hysteria, marriage, fetishism, consumerism, personal responsibility, gay male fear of female bodies, motherhood, homeless shelters, public school, private school, the suburbs.

AMONG OTHERS.

Some people may find this book overwhelming, others a primer, but either way I think it's essential in asking you to CHECK YOUR ASSUMPTIONS. Do not assume that you are normal or that you are automatically right. Definitely don't assume that you are not accountable.

Everyone should question themselves as much as they question others.

I don't always do this. I can be a self-righteous and assuming and that's why I liked this book. It reminded me of going to school at the Evergreen State College in 1996. I drove to a Gender Studies conference in Portland, Oregon with my professor, the only student in my class who wanted to go. I went because I was curious about gender regardless of the fact that I was fairly f'ing certain that I was a straight girl. I wanted to know what other people thought.

It made me think about how far, at times, I've strayed from that point. How simplistic and limited I can be when reading people. I just recenlty found out how much I influenced Charlie when we met in New York. How my work at the Feminist Press and the people I exposed him to gave him the first few words of a language that he took home with him and began to master. It changed him and now he's fluent while I still speak baby talk.

It hit me one night in Berlin when I was in a room surrounded by people who many others might wrongly - in ignorance and fear - call freaks. Charlie introduced me to someone and said, "This is Jess. I stayed with her for five months in New York. She saved my life." I was struck. I was in a space where I didn't look like I belonged. I'd had, in the past, some influence on someone there yet in the present I had no idea what was going on. I didn't feel uncomfortable, though. I felt curious.

Inga Muscio, another Seal Press author, wrote about how certain books saved her life. I believe that. And when it comes to my life, I'm not relying on Steve Martini.

a quick note on perspective

1. I really need to quit leaving my iPod in public places. This time I left it on the chair of a cafe near closing time, not in a large window on the corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue where I'm sure it was snatched within five seconds of my wandering off in oblivion.

2. When I was packing up to leave the apartment today and realized what I'd done, I felt like a shithead because it's the second really nice iPod that my really nice boss Geoff has given me that I've lost.

3. I decided not to freak and walked slowly back to the cafe where I'd been the night before. I thought about my new bedtime book, The Kite Runner, and compared the loss of an iPod to rape and cowardice and cultural destruction.

4. I considered that maybe I should be less dependent on inanimate objects.

5. I wondered where I can get a new iPod. ASAP.

6. I got to the cafe and saw my iPod sitting on a shelf behind the counter. I'm gonna go read now.

I heart robots

I passed a demonstration on Schönhauser Allee, a crowd of people walking north, followed by a police van. I wasn't really paying attention until I saw the first sign.



Robots, huh. The marchers were chanting something which I couldn't understand and someone was egging them on with a loudspeaker. Which, again, was not helpful to me since my German has reached what we will call a plateau.



Several people held robot signs, one of which read I WOULD DO IT FOR YOU. What, robot, what would you do for me?

This morning I finished a good book, Shadowland by Gordon Stevens, about 1948-1989 Germany and three families in East Berlin, West Berlin and the United States. It was all KGB and Stasi and CIA and exactly what I'd been looking for in those unbelievably lame crime novels I threw temper tantrums over before.

This book was believable because it was well-written and because its premise was true: West Berlin's occupation by American, French, and British forces after WWII and the amputation of East Berlin by Russia. Towards the end of the book, when Gorbachev has gone all perestroika on Russia, the communists are losing their grip, and East Germans start hemorrhaging through open borders in Hungary, the revolution takes off.

There had been defiant people all along getting their asses kicked and jailed for digging tunnels under the wall and for looking cross-eyed at Stasi agents but their numbers grew in the late 80s. People start meeting in churches in Berlin and Leipzig and marching in the thousands and I can imagine the scenes and streets perfectly because I've now pounded so much of Berlin's pavement: Karl-Marx-Allee, Friedrichstrasse, Unter den Linden.

This is what I was thinking when I walked down Schönhauser Allee and saw the robot protest. It occurred to me that I should get a clue as to what makes people march in the street these days so later I tried to translate these signs.



And I'm thinking I need to ask Simone when she gets back in town because the best the online translator could do was A DAY IN THE LIFE MAKE AS A GRASSHOPPER DO I. What grasshoppers have to do with robots, I have no idea.

Breaking up with Tom Clancy

Yesterday I woke up too early, my first Berlin insomniac attack.

I'd gone to see Miss Kittin the night before, got home at 3am, and thought I'd read a gripping tale of hate-crime-happy neo-Nazis and the international agents out to stop them - a Tom Clancy's Games of State - before falling asleep.

I've since stopped because that book sucked. I'm giving this whole crime novel phase one more try and then it's time to move on.

The point at which I threw Tom Clancy across the room was when the agent in a wheelchair, after escaping a high speed chase driven solely with his hands since he has no feet (love it), turns around and pursues the neo-Nazis into the woods of Wunstorf, Germany.

He's pissed that they tried to kill him, and fine, fair enough, but the whole wheelchair through the stream and mud and logs and up the rocky trail so steep that he has to drag it behind him while he presumably crawls with his arms was starting to make me go, "Really, Tom Clancy? Really?"

I wanted to believe it - I didn't want to TAKE HIS POWER AWAY - but I was gritting my teeth. Oh yeah, and a girl who the neo-Nazis had also tried to kill earlier dropped out of a tree WHERE SHE'D FALLEN ASLEEP and landed on the wheelchair agent's would-be assassin.

And THEN? She said in breathless chunks, "It's not...the first time...I've fallen for a guy." Oh God, make it stop.

How very witty for a 20-year-old college student who was innocently interning on a movie set when she got caught in Nazi crossfire and almost blown up in the wardrobe trailer. I would think she'd be shitting her pants just a little bit more than that. I wanted them all to be blown away, just get it over with.

I don't know how long it took for me to give up, I just know that at 7:30 AM I woke up, the sun streaming into my room, and I felt both completely sick from lack of sleep and totally wide awake. I hate starting days like that. I blame Tom Clancy.

Steve Martini

Sunny was reading a crime novel when she and I were in Austin.

The book was large with a hardback yellow cover and looked like it'd weigh about 25 pounds. When I actually picked it up, it almost flew out of my hands; It was as heavy as a butterfly. A big butterfly.

"How many people were killed while we were in there?" I asked Sunny as we left Austin Java after spending a few hours, her reading and me writing.

"Do you mean how many people were RUBBED OUT?" she replied.

The novel was old-timey noir, full of men in trench coats and porkpie hats smoking cigars and drinking whiskey straight up, grifters and double-crossers and detectives. The women were dames and broads and dishes in fire engine red lipstick and cuban stockings, telling the guys to scram.

I loved making fun of crime novel but Sunny defended herself, "IT'S A REAL PAGE TURNER."

I get it, I told her, I went through the Tom Clancy novels in my parents' attic in high school. I loved spies and assassins and adventure. Oh, and snipers. I dug snipers.

I just haven't gotten into it in awhile. I've been reading more nonfiction.

One of the books I brought with me to Berlin was on a favored subject of mine: brain mechanics and consciousness and their implications for human nature AKA Cognitive Science. This subject, in the wrong hands, can be a real snoozer but given the right author (Antonio Damasio, Steven Pinker, Rita Carter), it's fascinating.

A page turner, even.

Sadly, book I brought with me is not. I think the author tried to make his subject accessible to the non-scientist by keeping his essays short but they were abrupt and incomplete. Worse, he tried to make his messages seem cool by using lots of slang and contractions. But you can't stick a flower in a pile of dog crap and convince people it smells good. Sorry.

I tried to read this book a few times but it wasn't going to work. I decided to go in the other direction.

"I need a bedtime book," I decided, "Something fluffy."

I put the offending book in my backpack and took off on one of my walks, thinking I'd figure out what to do with it on the way. This particular walk started in the north of Mitte, a touristy area in the center of Berlin.

The coffeeshop I chose to do my walking notes in was attached to a hostel, a hostel with a book exchange. OH, HELLO.

I put my book on the shelf and checked out the other titles, landing finally on The Arraignment by Steve Martini.

I may owe an apology to Sunny.

I devoured this book. I mean, I was laughing at my favorite terrible lines -

"Metz was dynamite on a stick with a short fuse up his ass"

and

"Hey, fuckin' Tolt, he's your friend. I don't care they cut his ears, hose his balls off, hang 'em on a charm bracelet. But this man upstairs, this Pablo Eyebarra, far as you and I are concerned, he be the fuckin' Wizard of Oz"

- but I was riveted and happily let Steve Martini lull me to sleep with his suspense-filled legal thriller.

UNTIL. Right at the end, he went too far. I closed the book this morning and quit with three pages to go because I could not handle a couple of rich, white-collar San Diego lawyers grappling on top of a Mayan pyramid in the Yucatan Peninsula. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

National bestselling author Steve Martini, come the f**k on. Gah!

Next up: Snipers. Lots of 'em.

In a Lonely Place

Skimming the shelves of the British Film Institute bookstore, I saw a familiar book: In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes. The 1950 movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame is probably more well known than the book but I wouldn't have known either had I not worked for the Feminist Press.

During my days as the marketing associate for the publisher, one of my tasks was to sell this book. It was part of the new Femmes Fatales series and I was supposed to pitch it at conferences and to schools and bookstores. The pulp series debuted shortly before my time at the Press came to a staggering halt and by then I knew I was no saleslady.

If I'm not REALLY excited about something, I can't fake it. And even when I am really excited, I still kind of think it's up to everyone to decide for themselves what they like and don't like, what they need. Mine is not the Salesperson of the Year attitude. 

"Oh, you don't care? That's cool, wanna talk about something else?"

I liked coordinating events and readings and wanted to talk to people without sales figures getting between us. At the British Film Institute I was happy to see In a Lonely Place on the shelf and thought the possible implications were swell, that the Feminist Press is doing well and hasn't backslid into dry academia and at the very least the pulps, by far the most titillating titles on the list, have made it across the Atlantic.

But I was beyond relieved to have nothing to do with it anymore. I started working with books out of lust for letters and ideas. Had I carved out an editorial space for myself in publishing, maybe that energy wouldn't have been gobbled up by trying to sell other people's ideas and wondering what font they used on that cover. I tried to salvage time while working in publishing to linger over what books said inside but I was burnt. Forget about what I had to say inside.

So I plucked In a Lonely Place off the shelf and flipped it around in my hand, then put it back and kept wandering around London's South Bank, grinning. Because with my touring work now, I do sometimes actually find the space to relish letters and all the ideas that they spell out.

Henry Miller Library

Henry Miller Library, Big Sur

Hell is other people at breakfast

This morning my mom was talking on the phone to her sister Kathy. I was sitting nearby at the computer and minding my own business when I heard Kathy ask how long I was going to be home.

"I don't know," My mom said. "I'm afraid to ask."

Then she laughed quickly to indicate that she was either a) Making a joke or b) Telling the truth a tiny bit too much.

I stared sullenly at the computer screen for awhile and then said two words without taking my eyes from the screen:

"ONE MONTH."

When my mom finished talking to Kathy, she went back to what she was doing and all was quiet until a few minutes later when she called out from the dining room, "Jess? Would it be fair to say that you're not a morning person?"

"Yes," I said.

In a flash, I remembered an article by Jonathan Rauch that was published in The Atlantic Monthly in March 2003 called "Caring for Your Introvert: The habits and needs of a little-understood group" which, when I read it, made me practically wave my fists around and cry out Yes! Yes! Yes! before throwing a couple of air punches.

That article was such a turn-on that I wanted to hunt down Mr. Rauch and plant a wet one on him and then, with a wink, gently push him in the other direction so that we could each go spend some quality alone time without either of us taking it personally.

With the introvert article suddenly in mind, I amended my curt reply to my mother.

"Actually, I really like mornings. I like getting up early. I just don't like to be bothered."

"O-kay," she said.

And I recalled spitting out the same argument to a dear fellow bus-mate, Tim, just last week. I was the first to wake on the bus, still en route to the venue. When Tim entered the front lounge, we shared a glance, a good morning, and I returned to the absorptive state regularly induced by my early morning companions coffee and iBook.

This didn't deter chattypants from talking to me and expecting me to engage. When Tim noticed that my responses were minimal, he commented on my lack of enthusiasm.

I responded to him with a question.

"Have you ever heard the quote, 'Hell is other people at breakfast'?"

"No," said Tim.

Here I either smiled - or looked stonily - at Tim. I honestly can't remember.

I HOPE I smiled, because as Jonathan Rauch points out, extroverts simply do not understand introverts and it's nice to not be rude about simple misunderstandings. Though, when they persist, GOD HELP ME, GOD GRANT ME THE PATIENCE, etc.

Anyway, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is the person who said that about people, breakfast, and hell and I have my suspicions about whether Sartre - existentialist, literary critic, revolutionary, and author of works entitled Nausea and L'idiot - was a real barrel of laughs.

But it really doesn't matter because, like my buddy Jonathan Rauch explains, being an introvert doesn't mean one doesn't like people or isn't fun or is shy. It just means that we find other people tiring. We just need some time alone to muster up all that god-blessed festivity and hilarity the rest of you all are expecting.

"Fuck you, Rene Descartes, I need to sleep"

Two weeks ago I signed up for a philosophy class.

On the first day of class a lot of the students said they took The Mind and its Place in Nature to get out of a history requirement. I said was there because I wanted to be and that was enough to make two students ask me after class what my story is.

My story is that I want to understand why things are the way they are. I want to know why we think about ourselves the way we do. I want to know how this relates to the ways we govern and educate and behave. I want to know more about our assumptions and our judgments and want to look closely at human nature.

But during the first day of class I had some moments of "Uh-oh...."

Maybe I DO want to know this stuff but don't necessarily want to hear people TALK about it. I wrote in the margins of my notebook There is an awesome conversation happening about PINK ELEPHANTS. Do they exist just because you think they do? After class I kept smiling and thinking, "Goddamn kids. They are some argumentative motherfuckers."

The next day I read about how Rene Descartes (1596-1650) studied with Jesuits, got a law degree, and joined the army. Descartes really liked travel and wanted see the world so he threw himself into the good life and partied, presumably with this smirky look on his face.

In his 30s, he realized how uncertain he was about everything he'd been taught. He left France, went to Holland, and sat around asking scientific questions all day long, trying to empty himself of everything he thought he knew. Oh, and he wanted to prove that there's a unity to knowledge that had been lost and that there's a God and a soul that's separate from the body.

You know, the usual.

I'm totally into this. I don't care right now if I agree with Descartes; I just want to know what he thought. Descartes isn't the easiest person to wake up to and it did take me three hours one morning to read 17 pages of his book but I liked doing it. Yesterday morning, however, was different. I'd stayed up late reading the night before and had been thinking I didn't know where Descartes was going with it all but I'd figure it out in the morning.

Unfortunately my morning and night were separated by only four hours and when I woke up, I had a sick, shaky feeling in my gut. I started to read and became quickly enraged, due more to lack of sleep than anything else. This guy is making me CRAZY! I don't care if he's the father of modern philosophy! THIS IS BULLSHIT.

I got up from the couch, poured another cup of coffee and said out loud, "Fuck you, Rene Descartes." We made up yesterday when I stayed after class with some other students to talk about him. FOR FUN. Bring on the pink elephants.

Don't make me read Descartes outloud

Last night on the phone, Carl was pestering me and I tried to make him stop by threatening him, "Don't make me read you a sentence of Descartes. BECAUSE I WILL."

He challenged me.

I opened my book, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), found my sentence and said, "This one's perfect. It makes no sense at all."

In the words of Rene Descartes, "The first is that, from the fact that the human mind, when turned in on itself, does not perceive itself to be anything other than a thinking thing, it does not follow that its nature or essence consists only in its being a thinking thing, such that the word only excludes everything else that also could perhaps be said to belong to the nature of the soul."

Carl hooted, "What worries me about that is what if everyone in the seventeenth century read that and thought, 'Well, sure, that goes without saying...'"

I began to cackle uncontrollably and Carl asked, "Is this the point in our conversation where everything deteriorates?"

Delicious diligent indolence!

On February 19, 1818, John Keats wrote a letter to his friend J.H. Reynolds about the sheer pleasantness of reading, to "wander upon it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it."

How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious diligent Indolence!

These thoughts were penned between when Keats gave up his medical ambitions for poetry and got a sore throat and died from consumption AKA tuberculosis. Keats wrote a hefty number of odes in his time, pondering everything from nightingales and Grecian urns to women, wine, and snuff.

I dig the three words delicious diligent indolence because that's what I'm after. Dictionaries don't think too highly of indolence and define it as habitually lazy and disinclined to exert oneself and use sentences like LEPROSY IS AN INDOLENT INFECTIOUS DISEASE to capture the slow nature of indolence.

I daresay the dictionaries are one-sided. There are both physical and mental ways to exert oneself and the dictionaries don't take into account that DDI could just as easily define someone who spends hours reading and writing and thinking as it does someone who is slavishly devoted to eating multiple boxes of Cinnabons while watching the WB all day long.

Last year my official workday ranged from 0-18 hours and due to this extreme range I am protective of my time. Solitude rules because I develop and order my thoughts when I'm alone and thereby avert early-mid-life crises like the one that made me cry like a baby back in November. Right now I balance scholastic moments by working with other ZenGenius freelancers, talking shit, and tuning in regularly to Sex and the City and American Idol Season V.

But I get this response from some when I find myself blogging a lot, "You must have a lot of time on your hands."

Well, sometimes I do have a lot of time of my hands. Sometimes, though, I just make time by waking up too early, going to bed too late, and sequestering myself from people. Sometimes I can't make time and I feel nuts. When those 18 hour days happen, I run on morning coffee, afternoon adrenaline, and nightly gin and tonics. Then I don't have the wherewithal to reflect on Grecian urns much less the Socratic Method because I JUST WANT TO CRASH. So I'm treating what I have right now - the opportunity to concentrate - as one of my jobs. And like Keats' voyage of conception, it is delicious.