My mental circus, inside and out.

It is that time of year.  Emma has lunch with a friend who is here because he is helping his son move into the freshman dorm.  Emma met this friend--an expert on congressional filibustering-- many years ago online. . fourteen years ago maybe. . .and this is the first time they have seen each other in person.    Steve has a few hours to kill before his son and his ex-wife arrive with the car, presumably loaded with "önion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn, the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints" (If you've never read Don DeLillo''s brilliant novel, White Noise, you have missed the most wonderful description of freshman moving day every written.).  They walk around campus.   The color guard and the band are practicing in the field, the football players in full gear are heading towards the stadium.  Bad driving has increased in the city 100 fold and the Meijer's is prominently displaying cheap rugs and storage boxes.  The campus dairy store, where they have ice cream, is packed, for the day is very hot and humid after a thundery night.  Steve, a professor, is finally seeing the freshman experience from the parental side.

And, of course, Emma''s bike gets stolen right from the front of her house where she has propped it against the garage door.  One would think that after living in college towns for what 40 years (Emma was raised in one) that she would know better than to tempt someone with an unlocked bike.  She tells the police who have, as they tell her, a report of a "Mexican male with a white baseball cap" prowling the neighborhood, but how then do the neighbors know he is "'Mexican"" unless he is waving a Mexican flag or something.  So yes, for the permanent residents,  the invaders have arrived and for some that means "Mexicans"" and other folk devils.  So there goes the bike, just another material possession, and Meg, Emma's ex-husband's second wife, offers two bikes to make up for the loss.  And so all harmony and balance are restored, while Emma advises never to own a new bike in a college town.  Old rickety ones are just perfect.  Emma may have been falsely attached to the bike, but the bike was not attached to her!

Posted by: EmmaPele at August 23, 2007 19:48 | link | comments (3)

Oh wow, that provoked some comment!  Well, I have some philosophical meanderings on this topic of humans and technologies.  One of the classic debates in the philosophy of technology is the "guns dont kill people, people kill people"" problem.  And one of the most elegant solutions I've seen is Bruno Latour's theory that the person and the gun become a person-gun actant, each changed by and taking the properties of each other in a kind of new hybrid form--with violent capabilities.  And so it would be with the cellphone.  The cellphone isnt neutral--the person and the cellphone act upon each other to become a person-cellphone actant.  A good friend of mine pointed out that Flann O''Brien gave a brilliant version of a person-bicycle actant in The Third Policeman, which is something of a meditation on physics.  The question is, how does the cellphone act upon the person, and what new entity arises from the union and what are its drives and capabilities?  The cellphone is really strange, in my view.  It is like a  mobile 24-7 window into other realities that take people away from where they are and often make them forget where they are and therefore  the person-cellphone actant is  often extremely rude--rudeness is a callousness to other persons.  The person-cellphone actant is detached from place, always in a kind of virtual reality which is not beholden to others in the immediate vicinity.  I'm not talking about the casual emergeny user, but there are many, many people who are tethered to their cellphones all the time.

Posted by: EmmaPele at August 22, 2007 05:53 | link | comments (1)

Blog purges are a strange thing.  Somebody turns on the windshield wiper, and woosh, all those words gone. Entire identities vanish in an instant.  It's like people move away in the night and take the house with them, leaving a vacant lot.  

 The parties are over and Emma is glad.  She is a shy introvert disguised as a highly competent person.  It took 50 years to perfect that disguise, which would probably benefit from a cell phone.  But she can't bring herself to quite go that far yet, even though most people in her proximity are very busy texting and talking away, and there are devices making musical buzzing noises all around the house.  The first thing people always ask on a cell phone is, "Where are you?"  Well, maybe Emma doesnt want to say where she is.  The cellphone is the end of privacy and it is for people who are afraid of spending some time alone, in meditation, in the beautiful quiet of mornings. The cellphone is for people afraid of their own shadows, and yet their shadows still chase them  The cellphone is for control freaks, or fragile people who need constant reassurance,  or teenagers who don' yet know what to make of themselves. Emma sees people walking their dogs with headphones over their heads, busy talking on their cell phones instead of saying hello to their neighbors.  Emma saw a man screaming at a wall in the airport.  Emma thought he was mad until she realized that he was arguing with his wife on a cellphone.  Poor wife.  Emma bets she was thinking,  I wish I didn't have a freakin'cellphone.

Posted by: EmmaPele at August 21, 2007 19:59 | link | comments (4)

At one of those fake "Irish pubs" the other night, in Baltimore, Emma was introduced to an ancient journalist who looked like a sea tar, disheveled and wrinkly, and it was instantly apparent that he was an alcoholic because he had that alcoholic's smell: beer and cigarettes so deeply ingrained in the pores that even if he quit for five years he'd still smell like that, you know?  And Emma was thinking about smells anyway, because she had been very deeply pondering her aversion to big dog smells, whereas many people who own big dogs don't seem to smell them at all, and are perfectly willing to roll around in dog oils and be slathered in dog spit without running off like Lucy screaming "dog germs! dog germs!."  Emma once had a boyfriend who really liked his own spit and would often rub it all over himself and would not fuck her without emanating a long silver trail of spit which he would put on his cock before entering her, this is true.  His jeans were covered with snail tracks of spit, and he accused Emma of squeamishness.  But this is off topic.  So on the subject of smells, Emma began to think of some very interesting lessons, for example, the phenomenon that you often don't smell yourself or anything else that is most familiar to you.  It's like not recognizing how much of a god-awful irritable crank you are because you're behavior is so engrained that you don't see it in yourself.  On the other hand, there's an equanimity in not noticing smells at all, or just recognizing them as all of a kind, the world offering itself to you.

Posted by: EmmaPele at August 16, 2007 06:18 | link | comments (1)

Emma got a backyard barbecue grill for her birthday, thus cementing her position in the American suburban classes.  She then ate a porterhouse steak on the magnificent patio that her children have been building because they like to party.  Emma has been thinking a lot about the way she and her friends have settled into a life they would have wholeheartedly rejected thirty years ago when they were so idealistic and were rejecting the dull life of the suburbs.  These thoughts come in the aftermath of a visit to Ali, her best friend in high school, who is now a conservative Republican lawyer and Civil War reeanctor (on the losing side, and of course on the *wrong* side)..  As they walked around Harper's Ferry looking at the legacy of John Brown (which Emma liked) and the Civil War Iwhich Ali liked), Emma thought, How did this happen to a nice Jewish girl whose father was a liberal newspaper editor?  Actually, the suburbs have turned out to be extremely nice for Emma--well, not exactly the suburbs, but a shady street in a college town.  Ali lives out in the suburbs too, in the country, and, to her credit, has let the pool fall into a state of disrepair.  She practices collaborativelaw in an office in her dining room, mostly navigating  people's divorces in a friendly way, but legal practice has made her somewhat paranoid aboud crime.  When she and Emma went walking in a state park in  the CochoctinMountains, she asked Emma if Emma thought it would be safe.  Having just returned from crime-ridden Quito, Emma was so surprised by this question that she laughed.  The only scary place was Camp David, over the hill, where Bush was probably holed up bemoaning the fate of Karl Rove and machinating against Iran. Fear eats the soul, as Fassbinder observed.  Maybe it also makes you want to live safely in the past, where things never change and you can take shelter from the messy present, which might always turn out worse, in theory.

Posted by: EmmaPele at August 14, 2007 20:21 | link | comments