I’m not allowed to reproduce this wonderfully imaginative excerpt for Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Super Sad True Love Story. I’m going to assume by the title he’s been hanging around Jonathan Safran Foer lately.
(Here’s a teaser, though: pistachio ice cream and early Velvet Underground!)
I’ve been reading about the early years of blogging and find the evolution of it fascinating. I’ve never been a techie, so I completely missed out on the 1990s and the advent of blogging. In fact, as recently as 2005, I thought it must be the stupidest thing one could possibly do with one’s time (still a constant worry of mine.) Humble pie.
So I thought I’d try an experiment; after all, that’s how blogging began: by experimenting. I’m going to write a post in the voice of my younger self; in effect, I’m going to try and put myself in the shoes of Justin, who was only two states north of me in a different university when he began his Links in January of ’94. For the record, I was living in an off-campus apartment in Richmond, VA with a friend. I was enrolled in the VCU Art School. And I was miserable as hell.
January 27, 1994*
I stayed up all night listening to the VU’s Murder Mystery with headphones, jotting down the lyrics as best as I could. I kept having to turn one headphone down to hear Lou, and the other one to hear Doug and Mo. It’s the best song ever recorded, after Sister Ray. I should get some sleep.
Missed class today. Too groggy from my all nighter. I wish J would call me. What happened?
I can’t wait to get the fuck out of this shithole. This fucking ghosttown is piled up with corpses vampires. I HATE THE SOUTH. Take me to New York, baby. That’s where I wanna be.
Shitkickers. That’s what B was telling be about his high school. He was like the only kid in his entire town who knew who Fugazi was. He says they all drank beer and listened to Bocephus. Chased him around with a shotgun for kicks. Now he’s the beer drinker. WTF? Oh, Virginia.
Yesterday I bought a copy of Coltrane’s My Favorite Things on cd. Lester mentions it in his book. Sounds like Tom Verlaine, or vice-versa. I wish Lester were here now.
No one around here knows who the goddam Stooges are! If it was recorded before 1992 they’re not interested. But now they’re stealing my ideas, tuning down their guitars and jamming like Thurston Moore. Last year they hated Sonic Youth. Now they imitate them.
I think if I moved to NYC there’d be a ton of people with my same interests.
Ripped a t-shirt so I’d look like Richard Hell. My design teacher just stared at me like, “Whut?” Bitch. I’ll burn her classroom down.
And I did just that.
*I didn’t really write much in 1994, so this is a rather ad hoc attempt at nailing my major obsessions with hindsight. Anyway, it was a trip down memory lane.
Franco Frattini, Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, keeps piping up about the “right” to display the crucifix in Italian public schools. He’s bristling over the Strasbourg Court’s hearings; soon they will have to make a decision over whether or not the crucifix can be legally affixed to the wall in public classrooms in Italy.
There are almost no politicians in Italy willing to stand up to the Church on this one (surprise, surprise). Left or right, it makes amost no difference. In fact, it was the State that appealed to Strasbourg after the court had decided that crucifixes were unlawful. The State doing the bidding of the Church. All in the name of brainwashing its own children from the time they are old enough to get an education.
Italians have broadly failed – and their representatives most miserably of all – to understand the principles of secularism. They want that label on their constitution, but are frightened to follow it up in practice. The pope gets angry and stamps his foot and frowns. And they, in parliament, are his subjects.
I know a surprising number of people who think homeopathy actually works. Every time I begin asking, “But do you know how it works?” I realize we aren’t speaking about homeopathy but about herbal remedies. Actual ingredients, that is. Homeopathy, properly understood, is a perfect lack of active ingredients. There’s nothing in it but a fancy sounding name and a placebo with a bowtie.
Some of you will grumble, but you haven’t tried homeopathy! I have, and I can tell you it works. And that’s enough for me. And I will grumble back, the plural of anecdote is not data.
Allow me to pass the mic to Ben Goldacre, who writes the Bad Science column at the Guardian (in one of that newspaper’s more noble journalistic endeavors). His writing is as clear as sunlight poking through the London fog.
Homeopathic remedies are made by taking an ingredient, such as arsenic, and diluting it down so far that there is not a single molecule left in the dose that you get. The ingredients are selected on the basis of like cures like, so that a substance that causes sweating at normal doses, for example, would be used to treat sweating.
Many people confuse homeopathy with herbalism and do not realise just how far homeopathic remedies are diluted. The typical dilution is called “30C”: this means that the original substance has been diluted by 1 drop in 100, 30 times. On the Society of Homeopaths site, in their “What is homeopathy?” section, they say that “30C contains less than 1 part per million of the original substance.”
They’ve since apparently deleted these embarrassing numbers, preferring the ambiguous “highly diluted substances” and a long list of celebrity homeopathy users like Jude Law and Tina Turner. Some celebrities use cocaine, too.
This is an understatement: a 30C homeopathic preparation is a dilution of 1 in 100^30 [to the 30th power], or rather 1 in 10^60 [to the 60th power], which means a 1 followed by 60 zeroes, or – let’s be absolutely clear – a dilution of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000.
That’s an awful lot of zeroes.
To phrase that in the Society of Homeopaths’ terms, we should say: “30C contains less than one part per million million million million million million million million million million of the original substance.”
Wait. One, two, three, four…
At a homeopathic dilution of 100C, which they sell routinely, and which homeopaths claim is even more powerful than 30C, the treating substance is diluted by more than the total number of atoms in the universe. Homeopathy was invented before we knew what atoms were, or how many there are, or how big they are. It has not changed its belief system in light of this information.
Did you get that last point? It doesn’t matter what science discovers about reality, the homeopaths prefer their crackpot dogma instead. This makes homeopathy irrational, akin to voodoo, astrology and flat-earth creationism.
If you “believe” in homeopathy – a locution which should set the alarm bells ringing in your head – you might be upset with me for having made such a brash comparison. Voodoo? I don’t stick little pins into dolls, thank you very much! Astrology? Yeah, like I think the position of Venus in the sixth house and Mars in the ascendant makes me snappy! Go get a haircut, bozo. And I will cite Oliver Wendell Holmes (with homage to Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst):
“Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.”
So try kicking homeopathy around a bit and see if it, too, is round and full at the end of the day.
A woman named Zinnia Jones, who bills herself as the “Queen of Atheism” on her YouTube channel, has given Ron Rosenbaum all the answers he never wanted to his infamous agnostic coming-out. It’s kind of a long video, but she pretty much slices and dices Rosenbaum’s arguments-from-ignorance better than anyone except PZ Meyers. And she’s like twenty years old.
This has been floating around the internet for about a month now, but I only just sat down and watched it straight through . Oh, and don’t worry, I figured out she’s a he. He does a mean Mel Gibson, too.
By my admittedly amateurish reckoning, this blog has from three to five regular readers. Which ranks it in the upper echelons of the overstuffed blogosphere – right there beside The Daily Dish and Wonkette.
Every day I see dozens of things that would be worth writing about and linking to for the benefit of my readers. And, because I take those admittedly few readers seriously, every so often I actually write a post so this blog doesn’t go totally comatose. But I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that almost every time I write a new post I didn’t think to myself, “You’re wasting your time. Get a life.”
Today I picked up Scott Rosenberg’s erstwhile history of blogging, Say Everything, which actually makes this decidedly banal venture seem not only worthwhile, but interesting. Or, as Jonathan Safran Foer put it in Everything Is Illuminated: We’re writing we’re writing we’re writing…and so on all the way down the page. It’s like that meme about anyone who ever bought the first Velvet Underground album in 1967, all one thousand of them: they all went on to start their own bands.
I remember clearly thinking not very long ago that I’d never be so desperate or vain as to start my own blog. Justin Hall, whom Rosenberg and any book you’ll ever read on blogging cites as the VU of personal blogging (that’s Velvet Underground, by the way), basically posted his entire life – intimate details and all – on the web for a decade. Then he had a nervous breakdown; but so did Lou Reed. You can get a sense of Hall’s style here, in this painfully melodramatic video from 2005.
Hall and I are the same age. So is Tom Bissell, who is still debating whether or not to devote himself to the pastime. When I begin to think to myself that this blog is a waste of my time and energies as a writer, I remember why I started it in the first place: as an informal way of writing more regularly. So, in that sense, it’s a success whether I have six readers or six million.
I think it was Saul Bellow who said that we spend our time reading thinking about the next book to read. Or something like that, anyway. And so it is. I’m halfway through Alone in Berlin, which is excellent, and already I have a mental pile of books to plow through as soon as I’m finished with this. So allow me to make a few notes, with the intention of suggesting these books to you as well.
In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent – Ever wanted to read a whole chapter about Klingon-speakers?
Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg – The past, present and future of the most maddening and addictive pastime…blogging. Can blogs survive the Age of Twitter?
Virgins? What Virgins? by Ibn Warraq – I’ve been curious to read Warraq at some length without diving head first into hardcore Qur’anic exegesis. I still haven’t finished the Qur’an! So this is a collection of his shorter pieces for amateurs like me.
I’m always open to suggestions, so feel free to post them in the comments if you have any.
It’s early July and I’m sitting with Alex in a Korean restaurant in Rome’s Esquilino neighborhood. There is no air conditioning, and the place is empty except for a table in the back room occupied by what looks to be a Korean family having a special occasion meal. It is a very plain restaurant, neither clean nor dirty. Alex is a vegetarian, and I’m one tonight for the simple reason that I’m distrustful of the kitchen’s hygiene. Why are we seated there at all, one might be inclined to ask?
Alex and I both grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, and both of us have been flirting with Rome for much of our adult lives. Alex has dual American-German citizenship, and for a while taught at a university in Beyreuth, Germany. He made his way back to Rome eventually. I haven’t left since I moved here in 2003, which is beginning to feel like a long time.
I feel I speak for many Americans abroad when I add that we are hungry for what we call “ethnic food.” So hungry are we that we will sit down in a Korean joint about which we know nothing just to feel like we’re in New York for an hour or two. The fiction works, if you disregard the waiter’s choppy Italian. My eyes keep veering off during conversation to a Korean news station on the TV behind Alex.
Talk revolves around the usual topics: racism, conspiracy theories, literature (Alex is reading Roberto Bolaño) and of course food. I begin telling him about a woman named Layne Mosler who writes a blog called Taxi Gourmet. The idea is that she makes her way into various NYC taxis, asks the driver where the best place to eat is, and pays him — or her — to whisk her off to a great meal. I add that our restaurant is just the kind of place Layne would write about.
What is it about taxi drivers? Do they possess what might be called food wisdom? Mosler began Taxi Gourmet in Buenos Aires, moved to New York City, and last year embarked on a voting campaign among readers for her first European destination. Rome was on the list of possibilities, but Berlin won out and now she’s writing up her summer adventures in the German capital.
It has been suggested to me that I turn this column into a similar venture. Part of me has always wanted to be a food writer. It’s the same part of me that has always wanted to be an astronaut. It’s a vocation I find fascinating. I briefly toyed with the genre when I was in New York, penning a six-line poem — on commission — praising a midtown falafel chef named Muhammad Rahman. It ended up, fortuitously, in the New Yorker. But do I really need to eat that much? Do I really want to look like A.J. Liebling?
And that’s not even to consider funding such a project. Layne Mosler has recently become a cabbie herself, perhaps to earn spending money for her blog exploits. She has also raised money directly from her readers. They, in effect, are sending her to Berlin. Now she is working on a book based on her considerable experience.
In Joseph O’Neill’s recent novel “Netherland,” a minor character is a New York food writer whose job it is to eat in taxi driver-frequented holes in the wall. He is unimpressed. “‘Cab drivers?’ he said. ‘Have you ever heard one of these guys express an opinion that wasn’t complete bullshit?'”
For my part, I once jested in this column that I could cook as well or better than most of the restaurants I’ve eaten at in Rome. Some accused me of hubris, and I understand why. But of course I don’t normally eat at five-star restaurants. I eat at cheap to mid-priced places that should offer better fare than they often do. That was my gripe, and it still is.
Back to Alex and me and our Korean dinner. There isn’t much on the menu for vegetarians. The waiter appears perplexed when I ask for help. He points me to a bean curd soup, which looks benign enough. I hear my wife’s voice in my head, “Don’t order the anaconda!” We had a bad experience in a Chinese restaurant in Portugal on our honeymoon, and she subsequently struck all Far Eastern cuisine from the shrinking list of non-Italian foods she will consider eating. Bean curd it is.
We pick at the kimchi, the marinated cucumbers and shrimp omelet. Alex scarfs his Korean pizza. I raise up my spoon to find a mysterious clamshell in the midst of the tofu mess. It is still burning hot. We pour more Tsingtao into our glasses and discuss Hitler, blogging and the paranormal. When our meal is over we head for the metro, where the train doors close on us in mid-debate.
The next day I write Alex an email: “Next week I choose. Ever tried Ethiopian?”
Published in The American
Last night I caved and bought a copy of Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin (in the US it’s called Every Man Dies Alone), which has been taunting me for a while now. A little research reveals that Hans Fallada was a basket case, a drunk and a morphine addict who did time in a Nazi asylum. He had also killed a friend in a duel (which brings to mind both Pushkin and Caravaggio). He wrote this book in 1947. It’s about everyday resistance to Nazism by ordinary Germans, a theme we hear far too little about.
Now that even Roberto Bolaño’s laundry lists have been published to wild acclaim, it looks like Hans Fallada is the new forgotten master on the block. Read him before your mother has to for her book club.
Marc Di Martino 