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p.j. harvey, "c'mon billy"
 

Monty Python's Flying Circus #5
 

Children of Dune
 

"The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust."
-Elizabeth Bowen

Went to Greenspeakers (the Toastmaster group of the Green party) on Tuesday night with Julia, who remains in town until (I think) the 16th. It's rather a treat having her around for so long; I'm so unused to being in the same city with her that I feel like I should have plans every night. She was very nervous (I'd talked her into giving a speech since she needs practice fundraising in front of people) and she was really quite good. She did a whole thing explaining her African Commission organization by starting off talking about husbands who just went missing for no good reason in Mauritania, and how the wives left behind eventually were represented by her organization. Alas, her organization costs $250K to run each year, and corporate grants essentially dictate what they want done with their money, so she needs a patron or two or ten or a hundred. Rich people, contact me so I can pass you along. She gave a great speech of about 6 minutes, and at the end of the evening we all had to vote for who did the best. It was between her, a newcomer who read her whole speech about vegetarianism from a word-for-word sheaf of notes (and was quite graphic in describing how she saw meat, including a story about being forced to carry her portion of salmon around on her lap while her family ran errands after dinner -- parents have such odd notions of "punishment") but who was entertaining; the woman whose office we were all crammed into -- the Vegetarian Society of New York, or some such thing; she talked also (obviously) about being vegetarian. Julia was talking about human rights, and figured later on that she was voted the best in the group 'cause she had more moral weight with her discussion, but I think that's cutting herself off short. Anyway, she didn't even vote for herself. Talk about humble. We'd hashed out the speech ahead of time a few nights ago at Zen Palate. She and her boyfriend Sanjay and I all went for dinner (and I learned the joys of fried wheat gluten, which sounds disgusting but is yummy, yummy, yummy ... ack, tofu and gluten, I've turned a corner I'm sure), and then he had to go to a book discussion uptown, so she and I lingered over tea and went over what she'd say. I also learned Julia is reading Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Oy. I'm still reading Dune. There is no way I'll ever be as smart as she is. Still, it's a good goal to have a friend who really is smart to aim for; I fear for the dim bulbs who aspire to be just like Joe Bob, who can crunch beer cans on his forehead, or of Bambi, who somehow functions with fingernails longer than her hand.

I annoy myself sometimes. How's that for a segue? Truth is, I think I'm spending far too much time alone, and I'm noticing when I'm with groups or even just with friends I tend to just barrel ahead and talk over them, which I hate, hate, hate, and which I always think to myself "don't do that again!" right after I've just done it. I don't think anybody hates me for it, but I hear myself doing it and I don't like it. I like to think I'm a pretty good listener, but I move real fast, and process real fast, and the slow ones out there drive me bananas. I'm working on that bad habit. At the Greenspeakers meeting I spoke up during a critique, trying to toss off a witty aside (someone had criticized the Vegetarian Speaker #2 that her eyebrows had jumped up and down a lot; I offered that she should get bigger glasses and grow her bangs, and then the whole room started talking and then I felt dumb for having intervened on the schedule. Then one of the Greenspeakers, who started the whole thing with us last year, said we should begin ending meetings with a joke, and at the end of the meeting told a joke I cannot remember. So I felt it necessary to share my joke with Julia and someone else nearby, then as I began to tell it (it's rather, uh, raunchy without using any bad words) I realized everyone was listening and tried to get out of it with "um, this is not really for mixed company, you'll never let me back in here again..." but was egged on. So I finished it, got laughs, and Julia mock-gasped, saying, "That's so crude!" But then I felt dumb again for maybe having crossed another boundary. I'm not much of a showoff, but put me in a room with a friendly audience of semi-strangers and I get rather boisterious and cross lines just to get a reaction. Sometimes it works and then I get the rep of being a wiseass. Sometimes it falls flat and .... there I am, annoying myself again. 

I run a mailing list (hey, another non sequitur) called The Ivy Vine, which is for fans of my friends' band Ivy to chat about, well, Ivy and other related topics. There's a young woman visiting from Seattle, who is on the list, and whom for ages Peter (he of the new baby) and I were concerned over the gender of. He said female, I said had to be a gay man. Hey, her name's Cameron, and she calls herself a queen. Good enough for me. Long story longer, she's in town and wants to take me to dinner (can't turn down free food) and sounds like rather a party gal. So who knows what will happen tomorrow night after work. We are stopping off to see the band in the studio, but then it's off to a new, hidden restaurant called Apt. Kind of sounds like the restaurant I wrote about for a book, which I called Sixes and Sevens (I loved the idea of being able to say "I'm at Sixes and Sevens," archaic as the phrase may be). In my book, you wouldn't know it was a restaurant unless you knew where to look. This place is like that, too -- they're reluctant to even give out the full address. So, Friday looks ... eventful. Maybe I'll get drunk and annoy even more people than me.

Added a new link. I read a portion of this essay in Harper's some time back, and immediately fell hard for Dave Eggers, much like many of my generation. His book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, continued the unique style he has (almost as uinque as Peter Cetera, and hell, they're both from Chicago, how's that for coming back to the beginning), but didn't quite blow me away as much as the essay. Basically, he was interviewed by the Harvard Advocate, writers for whom you'd think could come up with better questions than were asked, and one of them got him going on a rant. So the whole back and forth isn't crucial to read, just the "Addendum," which just makes me happy to read. I'd love to hear him read it aloud. That would be sweet. Anyway, it's virtually impossible to find on the Web, since the Advocate is undergoing renovations and even then they'd buried it under some impossible-to-link javascript. So I found it in a cache and made a file. Now I have it! Muhahaha! I rule. Thanks, Dave.