I am in a Cone of Obliscence.

misc

This weekend, after many postponements and a whole lot of inadvisable back-burnering, I finally sent all 370-odd pages of the LP Sweden guide to Australia, where it belongs. Just got an email confirming that the maps have arrived, too. Hooray! I'd leap into the air and shout, if only my leg muscles hadn't completely atrophied beneath this laptop.

Anyway - so that's done, at least until the edits come back. I can now get back to worrying about grad school, with accompanying bursts of panic about the murky gloom that awaits me immediately afterward. Am currently revising an essay about how my very immature lifestyle choices are in fact somehow artistically or creatively or socially productive. My main argument is that the people who made all the smart moves - buying a house, investing in stocks, planning for the future - are suddenly going, "Holy crap! Recession!," so maybe those of us who were too busy stealing good dialogue from the barflies at the Sandy Hut to invest in anything bigger than a lottery ticket will turn out to be winners after all. Haha. We shall see how that one goes over.

Meanwhile, I've been reading a lot.



These are some of my required books for this semester (others are waiting optimistically on the bedside table). A few are from last semester, and there are six books in the stack that have nothing to do with school. Any guesses?

Speaking of reading...I nearly fainted in the bookstore the other day. Keep in mind that I faint at the drop of a hat. Still. For my class on polemics I had to buy a copy of Against Love, by Laura Kipnis. This mission sent me deep into the bowels of The Strand, which normally I'd find the pinnacle of happy Friday-night activity. However. Against Love, it turns out, is filed under "Relationships." It's not an inconspicuous row of shelves hidden discreetly in a corner, either. No. There's a Huge Sign, with big black letters: RELATIONSHIPS. Implication: Bad At; Hopeless In.

I couldn't find the book right away. So there I am, frumpy little dame in her 30s all alone on a Friday night in Manhattan, staring in desperate panic at the shelves of The Most Embarrassing Section Ever to Appear in Any Bookstore. I felt woozy. Suddenly the whole room seemed to be full of vaguely attractive men, all of them staring at me, like, Jesus, there's a one-way ticket to Sadtown. The world went fuzzy at the edges, and I had to duck over into Self-Help for a minute, take a few deep breaths and calm down. "Relationships." The horror.

In other news, I went to a free screening of the Swedish vampire movie, "Let the Right One In." It was excellent - bleak, weird, icy, hilarious in that typically Swedish way that's always also uncomfortable. I hadn't thought of the Swedish sense of humor being a perfect match for a horror film before, but it totally is. Anyway, go check it out. Good times.

Vikings always match

Many people believe economics and gender politics were to blame for the extraordinarily low birth rate in Sweden during the late '70s. But sometimes I wonder if there might have been other reasons:

http://pics.yemii.com/swedish-dance-bands.html

Props to Margo for the link. Keep scrolling down...it just gets better and better.

Update!

Greetings, neglected legions. Busy times in Beckyland! Some disjointed updates for you:

On a recent mission to watch the Indianapolis Moto GP race, I tromped out to this Williamsburg bar that usually shows the races on a big screen on Mondays. (Better late than never.) Well, as often happens, one thing led to another, and before long I was invited to Florida (or Long Island) with a blinged-out local retiree who said he was scared of motorcycles but that if he ever got one, it would be 100 percent chrome. He looked like an older version of James Caan - white polo shirt, gold chain, pinkie rings, thick and tidy wads of cash. He told me about the '57 Chevy he used to drive up and down the street we were on (Driggs); the car had seven layers of black paint on it. "Bulletproof," he said. His friend had a red one, same deal but nine layers.

He asked me if I wanted boys or girls; at his age, he said, he was probably past that point anyway, "but I would be willing to try with you." At some point during the evening I told him how old I was. "I usually go for younger women," he said. "You don't mind if I look around, do you?"

They called the race, due to hurricane, but not before Rossi had made his way to the front. "That's your guy, right?" said James Caan. "You sure got some power."

On Saturday night I went out for drinks with my pal and colleague Leif Pettersen (go read his blog, Killing Batteries), who turns out to be allergic to me. He was a good sport, though, and helped me avoid doing any real work until almost four in the morning.

As for my other adventures this week, let's just say losing two of my four ponytail hair-tie thingies was the least depressing but most representative consequence. The world is small and mean, and the city is so big. It's all left me in a weirdly unsettled, trancelike state, the perfect mood for reading Joan Didion, which is lucky because The White Album was one of the week's reading assignments. The pace of school is picking up, and I'm a shockingly slow reader. (I savor.) My list of boyfriends has expanded to include George Orwell and Edmund Wilson, for anyone still keeping track.

For Friday's class I get to write 50 to 200 words about why I'm special and the rules don't apply to me. I sort of think it goes without saying, but whatever.

Found this today at the very end of Harper's magazine; I like what the semicolon does to it:

"In space, the earth's shrieking could be heard; Mars's soil, said chemists, will support asparagus."

Scenery for the Curious

Here's the view from my temporary hut in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY, USA, where I'll be staying until this last semester of school winds up in December.


Here's the living room/book cave -- and right behind that fan in the window, there's a GIGANTIC spider hanging out on the other side of the screen (but for how long???).


And here's a pic (bad, but I like it anyway) from a couple of weekends back, when Brenda came to visit and we went to the farmers market that happens every Saturday right outside my door.

tourist time

This week, while waiting for my living situation to sort itself out, I played New York City tourist. Fun game! My first night here I just walked around the neighborhood, people-watching. The sunset killed, but I had no camera. Next day I went to the Whitney to see the exhibit on R Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the buckyball (among other things) and all-around cool cat. The display included tons of his drawings and plans, all of which have hilarious annotations scrawled all over them. He was a funny guy. Here's a sketch comparing his "4D" house to the "tailor-made archaic contraption" most folks live in:

He also invented a three-wheeled car (the Dymaxion car) that could parallel-park in two square inches, held eleven people and got around 35 miles to the gallon while hitting speeds of up to 120mph. And this was in 1933.

Recently my grandpa sent me photos of the army hut he and Granny lived in when my dad was a tiny munchkin. It was basically a particleboard cube, so small they could barely all fit inside at once, but housing was scarce at the time and they took what they could get. Meanwhile, Bucky was marketing self-contained home kits that cost hardly anything, went up in a day, and could be transported anywhere cheaply. Orders poured in, but the things never got made. What gives? And what about his floating cloud cities? or the gigantic pyramid community outside of Manhattan, or the geodesic dome over Manhattan?

None of the really cool stuff ever gets invented. We are lame.

Anyway. I also went to Film Forum one day and spent the whole afternoon watching French crime films: Un Flic and The Sicilian Clan, both starring my boyfriend Alain Delon. Pretty great.

Yesterday I hung out at MOMA, which I'm starting to love almost as much as Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The big exhibit now is Kirchner and the Berlin streets - I love his angular prostitutes, all sleek and vivid. I bet they'd be fun to hang out with. They look cool:


Also spent some time in what I call the Freaky Germans room, with Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and George Grosz - the Grosz they had up is SO super yucky, it's a portrait of an old man and the skin on his head is too thin and shiny, you can see veins and blech, it's just gross. Great, but gross. Like the old hacking dude in Prizzi's Honor - extreme nightmares. I love Otto Dix but he's scary; his self-portrait at MOMA is plastic-zombie creepy. Photos of him in real life make him look pretty rad, but the painted version gives you chills, man. Christian Bale in saranwrap.

Mostly though I just walked around and looked at the city. It's huge! I walked past the UN by accident, so now I know where to find a police officer if I should ever need one. Jeez. Later on the doorman at a fancy apartment building tried to get me to buy his Honda Interceptor (red), but it looked awfully shiny and new. I doubt I could afford it, much less ride such a thing. (I miss my little Hawk, though. She is chilling in Zach's garage. And the racebike is chilling in pieces in Jack's garage...more on that later, no doubt.)

I'm dragging my rucksack to the apartment today - the place is in Fort Greene, actually bordering Fort Greene Park. It comes with a nameless fish I'm allowed to kill if things go badly. Updates and photos once I get settled in.

I am in a cone of uncertainty.

pdxoxoxo

It's 8am on a sunny Sunday morning and a crazy still-drunk dude is walking down the street screaming the lyrics to "Broken-Hearted Savior" outside my window. Oh, Portland. This is the packing-up-and-cleaning-out weekend - I fly back to NYC early Tuesday morning. At which point I'll have to dig around in my storage unit and hope I left my analytical brain in there somewhere. Hasn't been that long since school got out, but it feels like years. Years! I'm actually kind of excited to swap my hectic summer social butterflying for a fall & winter of Extreme Reading. I just hope I still know how to do it. And that I can shake off the guidebookian habit of writing everything in 30-word blurbs, with a lot of extra u's and l's.

*

Now it's Tuesday morning. 5:23am, Portland airport. Hope I remembered everything. Spent yesterday evening sitting on the deck of Zach's new apartment, which has a view over the entire kingdom of Portland and all its adorable landmarks: everything from the Made in Oregon sign to the tram. (The tram is so exciting! Portland as paperback book cover! It doesn't look real.) I french kissed the entire city, and my motorcycle, then napped on my couch for a few hours, and here we are. May post a PDX Summer Fun Roundup later on.

I am in a cone of silence.

So long, pal

My old rodeo horse died. He was eighteen million years old! So it's not sad. But still.

I'm looking for a good picture of him. In the meantime, here are some pics I took awhile back of a giant horse eyeball:




And here's where he spent his retirement:

I am SO BORING!

Hang in there, legions of fans -- update coming soon.

xo

typing is hard

In case anyone's wondering why I haven't been globbing much lately...here's some LP math for your morning's entertainment. Current project allows Your Author five and a half normal weeks of writing time to produce about 71,100 words. By "normal weeks" they mean they're calculating this as if you get weekends off (ha!). This means producing about 2,500 words of sparkling prose a day. Many of those words are phone numbers and things like "open noon-3pm on alternating Tuesdays from June-August but only Sundays and every other Thursday the rest of the year" -- not too taxing creatively, sure, but tedious to arrange. Especially when you're getting the info from a reindeer-mauled notebook or a used cocktail napkin and you have handwriting like mine.

The other part that makes the math a bit weird is that, really, you don't write most of the book from scratch. It's an update of what's already there, so some of the text is going to stay as it is, if it's fine that way. The basic early history of Sweden, for example, hasn't changed much since the previous edition. (Bad example, though, as LP has a "new style" for its history chapters, meaning significant rewrite.) Anyway, what we're really counting here is not so much words written as words prepared. Or something like that.

Anyway. Yesterday I wrapped up a big chapter, which allowed me to do an accurate where-I-stand word count. Uh-oh! The scoop: I've been home and writing for 15 work days, by which I mean Monday through Friday, days when regular people work when they have real jobs in offices. One of those days was a holiday (July 4th!), so let's call it 14 work days. In 14 workdays at 2500 words per day, I should've finished 35,000 guidebook words. That's a lot! So how many do I really have done? Get ready:

25,783.

Ouch!

What this means, of course, is that (1) I'm freaking out a little, and (2) in the margins between today and tomorrow I need to crank out 10,000-odd words. Plus today's 2500! Whoo!

I'm already tired just looking at that!

OK. I'm off to inject some coffee and look around for an easy chapter that's already perfect...

sweden recap

As promised...a brief wrap-up of Sweden, form of list:

• Days in country: 38
  
• Kilometers driven: 7818
• Same distance in miles, according to an online converter: 4846.695299451205
• It sounds cooler in miles!
• Kilometers of trails hiked: probably about 100
• Kilometers of city sidewalks explored: 4846.695299451205 (not counting when I was lost)
  
• Peed in the woods: many times
• Non-adorable cottages seen: two (plus one that was just so-so)
  
• Elk spotted: one
• Reindeer: hundreds
• Australians: only one!
  
• Pairs of shoes annihilated: one and a half (I've been limping)
  
• Hotdogs eaten: one
• Herring for breakfast: five times!

What? Where am I???

The last little bit of my trip was spent in Harnosand with the whole family, as described earlier. Sample photo:

GB and Mini-GB. Dang, that chick is small!

Best quotation of the trip, taken from a report about reindeer, their history and uses:
"The intestines made nice toys for the kids."

When I flew back to Portland, the boys picked me up at the airport in a minivan. It was supposed to be a van full of cute boys, but by accident they had instead filled it with cute girls. Oh well. There was also beer, and just enough room for my luggage, so I was pleased. We cruised around for awhile, attempted to look at the sparkly lights of Portland from Mt Tabor Park, were denied by Johnny Law, retreated to Beulahland, had one beer each and all went to bed. (Not together.)

A couple of days later, John G and Sean came in from SFO for Margo's Awesome Goth Wedding and we immediately went out for drinks. I was still jetlagged and waking up at 3am every day, which meant things started to look weird and woozy by the time the bars closed, but it was fun. (It also made me wonder how much time can pass before you have to concede that what you've been calling jetlag is really just your personality.)

JG and I went to Powell's. I love Powell's. I bought four books. Because if there's one thing I need, it's more books. One of them was Kevin Sampsell's new book, the ickily titled Creamy Bullets, and as I was carrying it around the store, there he was. I saw him see me holding his book, and I didn't know what to do - it was already autographed, and I've only met him once a long time ago, and I just sort of froze. Looked away. Awkward.

The other things I bought were Gary Lutz's Partial List of People to Bleach, which I keep hearing about (mostly from Kevin Sampsell! who published it), and a Paul Berman book (for skool), and this book called Motorman by David Ohle, whose new novel The Pisstown Chaos (which I just started) might be the weirdest thing I've ever read. Planning to review it somewhere so I'll save the details, but if you're impatient and like reading weird things, pick it up.

And that's all for now. More guidebook typing awaits!

pdx

Whoa! Sorry, glob fans, if you were starting to think I'd been trapped in Newark Airport this whole time. I wasn't, I've just been busy. I'm all nestled into my little Portland apartment, now with real art (in frames!) and grown-up furniture. Most of my stuff is in storage, and I have to say it's pretty sweet to have a crashpad so uncluttered.


Still noisy, though. See those windows? Huge loudspeakers in disguise. Broadcasts of the 28th Avenue Street Noise Show begin at 6am and go until about 3am. My favorite segment is the one called "Local Homeless Guys Frighten Drunk Hipsters for Cash," which comes on around 2, but otherwise it's quite peaceful here.

Anyway, I'll be in town until the end of August, typing away at LP's Sweden guidebook and other secret projects.

Speaking of Sweden...update and photos coming later today. Honest!

airport life

Newark Airport is full of tiny birds!

If you ask me it doesn't seem like a super nice place to raise a family. (Even a tiny bird family.) But, then again, when your alternative is to build your nest outside the airport in Newark... OK, I admit I don't know much about Jersey, but Newark I'm pretty sure is no milk-and-honey paradise for the small and winged. (Is it?)

Also, airport people eat messy fried food. Crumbs everywhere!

Plus: man, it is pouring out there. Smart birds.

Anyway, I'm headed home; full trip debriefing to come in a day or two, with jetlag and added pictures!

Attacked!

I'm in Härnösand with the fam, including Mom and Dad, Karl and Natalie, miniature niece, Mormor, Moster, and Captain Joe, the singing sailor. Lots of eating, sleeping and wine. Also chocolate. Today K & N and I took a walk up a hill to get a closer look at this huge windmill, but we failed. Reason: Sniper attack! Sweden is not at war. However, just in case, a zillion Swedish youth were hanging out up there, living in tents and wearing camouflage, hiding in the forest and firing little BB-type projectiles at each other. They had military vehicles and convincing rhetoric, but the guy we talked to said it was just "gaming." (Clearly I'll need to investigate this further.) Anyway, it was a little scary when one of their guards aimed his machine gun at our heads, but eventually his boss came over and yelled at him ("DO NOT AIM YOUR WEAPON AT CIVILIANS," in English), then raised a hunter-orange flag and led us through the war zone, past the camp, and on our way to safety in the village below. No casualties.

Karl took pix, so if he sends 'em I'll post them. (Hi, Karl!) (He's sitting ten feet away.)

Heading back to Stockholm tomorrow, then Portland on Sunday. So long, Norrland!

Abisko

Before that, though, I did some research on some of the walks listed in the old guidebook around Abisko. They were pretty good!


Further evidence will be uploaded shortly.

I peed in Finland.

Pretty much unrelated to Sweden

Two of my stories just came out, on the same day:

A profile of Firewater's Tod A

and

A review of Personal Days by Ed Park (he's funny! go see him read in Portland, Portlanders, and then tell me how it was!)

OK. Back to Arvidsjaur.
(No, I can't pronounce it properly either.)

Picture Time

OK, I've added a few pix to flickr -- you can look at them here. Hooray for rain!