“Life’s a Gas”

I don’t have much to say today, really. I had a really nice chat with Jessica, who I hadn’t talked to in a long time, so that was good. I saw a bit of Jeff, we talked about the paper we seem to be writing together, hung out with some other folklore and ethno people, watched Hamlet 2, which, despite its total unrelenting awkwardness kind of won my affection. I couldn’t tell you why, exactly.

The best news of the week is that zombies invaded Austin, TX. It must be true, it said it on a road sign.

“Art School Girlfriend”

As reports flood news channels about Obama’s first weeks in office, I’ve been thinking a bit about his commitment to the arts.

Miles Mogulescu over at the Huffington Post has an article about the arts funding in the stimulus package, which, I quite concur, is highly preferable to tax cuts. I’ve never claimed to have deep political insight, but my sense of Republican fiscal strategy goes something like this . . .

The Republican is on the right, in case you can’t tell.

So, yeah.  Funding for the arts seems pretty relevant at the moment, when you consider that self publishing is at an all-time high and the Washington Post is no longer publishing its book reviews as a separate section.

It would just be nice to have a government that didn’t view the arts as a sissy waste of time. I’m hopeful, though. If Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem, Praise Song for the Day, is any indication, I think we’ll be OK.

Interestingly, Alexander’s publishers, Graywolf Press, are printing 100,000 copies of the poem, which is the largest run of a book they’ve ever done. Talk about economic stimulus.

“And Dream of Sheep”

It was a snow day today. The college was closed, and the professor I was supposed to model for this morning called because she wasn’t going to dig her car out of the, oh, roughly nine inches of snow we’ve got lying around. Not that I blame her. I wasn’t looking forward to walking over to her studio in the four inches of snow we had when I went to sleep last night. The problem with snow days, though, is that they give you a false sense of ease. The prospect of a free day makes you think you’ve got all the time in the world, but, in reality, after the day-long break, you’ve got to get back to your regularly scheduled business, except it’s harder than even because you fell into the snow day oasis of relaxation.

I did bake some truly decadent cookies today, though, chocolate with chocolate chips and coconut. I’ve basically decided never to bake with white sugar again. Brown sugar makes everything taste so much better. I also went over to Jeff and Melhouse’s for dinner. Jeff made spaghetti and I baked them an apple pie, which wasn’t as good as the cookies, but was still fairly tasty.

Some miscellany, now, and then I need to sleep.

It’s a good thing I started drinking coffee a few years ago, because apparently drinking 3 to 5 cups of coffee a day helps prevent dementia. Sadly, I’m not drinking enough coffee for it to really make a difference, but there’s always time to start.

Actually, that’s all I’m gonna do for today, ’cause I’m running out of steam, here. I value my sleep more, at this point, than providing entertainingly odd anecdotes. I’ll just save up my entertainingly odd anecdotes for another day. If only I’d drunk 3 to 5 cups of coffee today, maybe I’d still be going strong.

“Take a Chance on Me”

So I did modeling this morning, went to the health center during my lunch hour to finally get drugs for my lingering malady, did more modeling this afternoon, and then dragged my sorry self down to Soma to meet up with Jeremy, which made all that other nonsense worth it. I got to read a story of his, which was an unspeakably lovely experience, not only because I enjoyed the story but because it feels like it’s been a million years since I looked at someone’s writing in that capacity. I never thought I’d say I missed writing marginal comments, but I do. Of course, it wasn’t editing my classmates’ stories that got me down so much as it was having to read stories I didn’t like. Maybe that’s where workshops fall apart. The idea of a small group of fellow readers and editors is an excellent one, but I think it probably has to be composed of people whose work you actually enjoy and respect in order to actually function productively. In any case, Jeremy and I have some writerly projects in the works, which pleases me to no end.

Now, because I’m too worn out from living today to talk about it any more, a couple of additions to my fantasy reading list:

The Pluto Files, a book about “everyone’s favorite ex-planet.” I kind of imagine Pluto as a has-been actress, sitting in its dressing room with a table full of dusty wigs, plaques and out-dated awards lining the shelves, smoking a cigarette, saying, “When I was young, kid, things were different.” In a certain respect, it doesn’t really matter what the book’s actually about, or if it’s good or bad (especially because I will probably never read it). Pluto’s just awesome. That’s all.

On the other hand, the most recent issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is an item that I’m actually somewhat likely to procure for myself and read. How can I not when it features a story about “post-apocalyptic bake sales”? I think if there were a comic book in which I was the heroine, it would be a post-apocalyptic New York where I ran around solving problems with radioactive baked goods. Though it’s actually the other story to i09 review mentions, Eugene Mirabelli’s “Catalog,” that interests me the most. That pretty much sounds like my dream story. I must know more.

“Around the Bend”

So remember how yesterday I said I wanted to try to start remembering my dreams? Well, I Googled it last night, and literally the first page that came up was How to Remember Your Dreams, which gives the advice:

Possibly, all you will need to do to increase your dream recall is to remind yourself as you are falling asleep that you wish to awaken fully from your dreams and remember them.

I guess those crazy dream experts know their stuff, because I tried it, and I woke up out of not one, but two dreams last night.  I never knew my subconscious was so responsive.  It’s like I told that secret side of myself to jump and it said, “How high?”

The dreams themselves were bizarre and somewhat disturbing. One involved a romp through a psychedelic nature preserve-slash-modernist house, followed by an attempt to try out to be the Mighty Boosh‘s new sidekick, which involved me in my famous red bathrobe trying to charm Julian Barratt (unsuccessfully, I might add), who then transformed into Roger Sterling from Man Men, who judged the subsequent audition of my friend Jesse (played by Jane from Mad Men and also for a brief period of time by Jeremy), who showed up in a giant cloak covered in dolls. While that one was pretty awesome, the second was rather more frightening, and was essentially a sort of supernatural detective scenario, in which dream-me’s boyfriend had made a pact with an evil shadow creature that made him more successful but was also slowly turning him evil, and which he was using to help him solve whatever mystery we were involved in, but which ultimately caused the possession and death of my boyfriend’s father, who was played by Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks. The shadow monster, which was basically a patch of total darkness that lived in the boyfriend’s closet, was really terrifying, and my horror of it stayed with me even after I woke up.

I had the sense immediately after I woke up that the shadow monster has something to with my feelings about being here in the Folklore Department at IU. What I mean is, I feel like getting this degree is good for me (is making me stronger in some way), but it’s also draining me of my energy (though I wouldn’t say it’s turning me evil). Folklore is not really what I want to be doing, ultimately, and in a certain respect I feel like I’ve made a contract with a wrong (though not evil) power, in that I’ve contracted (literally, in terms of my lease) to stay here for two years. What’s especially interesting to me about this is that I knew this so instinctively, like even as I was waking it up and writing the dream down, half-awake and still kind of freaked out. Often I have to sit back and think about a dream, or discuss it, before the meaning becomes clear, but in this case, the meaning was totally inherent in the nature of the monster.

Also, I’m kind of shocked I dreamed about so many TV characters — not that I should be surprised, since I’ve basically been watching TV for a week straight. But I am kind of jealous, because my dad always has dreams about celebrities, but they’re nice dreams, like where some famous tennis player tells him they really like his music or something like that. He doesn’t have dreams where British comedians reject his advances and then turn into fictional advertising executives from the 1960s. Or maybe he does, and he just doesn’t choose to share those with me.

On a less disturbing but equally surreal note, here’s some miscellany:

The New York Times has an article about dirty-sounding names of British villages. I guess even the Times has to pad out its content every once in a while.

Also in the category of things I don’t really need to know, but am glad I do: an 111-year-old lizard recently fathered some children in New Zealand. To be perfectly correct, it’s not actually a lizard, but a reptile called a tuatara that is similar to a lizard but markedly different, having diverged evolutionarily some 225 million years ago. But let’s be serious, here, a mere 225 million years seems like splitting hairs to me.

Lastly, street artist Shepard Fairey’s portrait of Obama has been installed in the National Portrait Gallery. This comes on a rising wave of recognition for street artists, since mostly their work hasn’t made it into the museums, with the exception of that time Banksy dressed up like Inspector Clouseau and taped his artwork to the walls. Most people know Shepard Fairey from for the OBEY portrait of Andre the Giant that is stenciled all over the place. Interesting fact: OBEY artwork is also featured in several placed in Veronica Mars, including that poster with the Masonic pyramid in Keith Mars’ office. That always made me happy.

“Speak for Me”

You know, it’s odd. After running a few errands earlier today, I nestled myself under the covers to watch movies and do reading. My mother called at a certain point in the evening and asked me if it was snowing here in Bloomington. I replied that it had snowed a bit earlier, but to little effect. Just now I looked out the window and noticed that everything is thoroughly white outside. Where have I been? It’s like I disappeared from the world entirely for several hours.

I have that feeling a lot, actually, mostly due to the fact that I disappear into my head so much. I get immersed in schoolwork, in writing, in days-long television marathons. Things happen while I’m off somewhere else, and when I come up for air I’m sometimes a little baffled by the changes that have happened. I was lying under the table, modeling, when I heard about the crash-landing in the Hudson River, days after it happened. It had been all over the news of course, but I wasn’t paying attention to the news. Where was I? Somewhere else, reading a book or watching Twin Peaks or something. It’s irresponsible, really, and I try to rectify. I listen to NPR when I can, BBC News is my homepage. It’s not that I have an aversion to the news, like some people do. It’s just that my mind wanders, I get immersed in whatever I’m doing, and sometimes it’s a while before I surface.

My erstwhile writing teacher, Linda Proud, had an interesting entry in her blog recently about dreams, and the absence thereof. She’d been feeling creatively, emotionally suffocated for a while, and when she started treatment for what seemed to be an unrelated problem, she began to dream again and suddenly felt energized again. This made me very happy for her, but a little sad for myself. I don’t dream much these days. I’ve always attributed it to disrupted REM cycles — I’ve heard that if you wake at the wrong time, you forget your dreams, and that waking up to an alarm often causes this kind of disruption. But maybe there’s some other reason I’m not dreaming. I miss it, even though the few dreams I’ve had have often been unsettling and weird.

It rings true to me that the dream life is related in some abstract way to the energy one needs to work creatively. I can’t say I’ve ever noticed a direct correlation like the one Linda talks about in this entry, but I tend to think writing is analogous to dreaming in a certain respect. Both activities involve processing real-life material in new and hopefully surprising ways, and in both cases, you have to submit yourself to the capricious alogic of the medium. There’s work involved in writing that isn’t really involved in dreaming, but I think the nascent states of writing are definitely a kind of conscious dreaming, wandering strange landscapes of your own creation, exploring the surprising terrain of your imagination. The later stages, the work that goes into shoring up a story, is really more like dream analysis, where you take the pieces your imagination has throw at you and put them into a workable order.

In any case, I think I’ll try to work at remembering my dreams. I know you’re supposed to keep a notebook by the bed and write down the dreams before you get up in the morning, and that, the more you write, the more you’re supposed to remember. That’s actually worked for me in the past, though I never kept with it for long. I wonder what techniques there are for remembering anything in the first place. I have to have something to write down in order to get started. But I’m going to try, because I do miss dreaming. It’s like there’s a whole secret side of myself I don’t have access to right now. I’d like to know what I’m thinking.

Review: “Mad Men,” Matthew Weiner

I’m feeling better than I was yesterday, though, as I told Jeremy earlier today, I’m at my best when I’m horizontal. The benefit, however, of spending two days in bed is that I’ve had the opportunity to finish Mad Men, and I’m ever so pleased that I did. I’ve been trying to watch this show pretty much since it came on the air two years ago, but various circumstances (primarily my lack of cable TV) has prevented me from doing so. After all the news about the series Golden Globe and Emmy wins this year, I finally broke down and bought it on DVD.

This series is incredible. It’s like nothing I’ve ever really seen. On paper, it doesn’t sound all that unique — a TV series about 1960’s advertising executives and their interpersonal relationships — but in actual fact it’s much more than that. It’s about America, in a very particular way, about the way excess and great sadness intermingle in our society, a relationship that seems perfectly expressed in advertising, that bright business of selling products you don’t believe in to people who don’t really need them but want them desperately.

Everything about this show is wonderfully executed. The performances are subtle and full of barely-restrained energy, the characters remarkably multi-faceted (especially for an ensemble show like this), the dialog sharp and incredible subtle, and the costumes — Lord have mercy, the costumes. The costumes are a vintage clothing fanatic’s dream. Actually, everything about this show seems to have stepped directly out of 1961. Obviously, I wasn’t around in the ’60s, but every single aspect of the show seems to be completely period-correct, and I’m not just talking about the clothes or the cars or those incredible, shellacked hair-dos. I mean the way that the men are jaw-droppingly sexist and highly sensitive at the same time, the way people drink and smoke so much that you can practically smell it in the air, the way the television screens goes down to a pinpoint when the characters turn them off. The use of historical events, like the Nixon-Kennedy election and the Cuban Missile Crisis, are very well-done, too. Not only are these events used to create a sense of the time, but they move the plot and characterization forward, too. In terms of creating a full, complete fictional universe, I can’t imagine anything better. You might think it wouldn’t be so hard — after all, 1960 wasn’t that long ago — but it was a completely different world. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a different country.” Mad Men might as well be a show about spacemen selling moon rocks to Martians. But as with any good science fiction story, Mad Men is ultimately a story about people, that just happens to be about life in some distant, fantastical place.

But as incredible as the costumes and the sets are, what really floors me about the show, I think, is the writing. The most wonderful part is the silence, the unanswered questions, the unfulfilled requests. These people say more with a pause in a conversation than some shows say in a whole hour of television. It’s in these moments of silence that we see what life is really like for these characters, the level of repressed emotion that characterizes their every interaction. It’s what’s left unsaid and unresolved that makes this show as strong as it is. And unlike many shows, so far Mad Men has been unflinching in leaving its loose ends untied. Even problems that are resolved don’t leave you with a feeling of relief. There’s no room for that in the life these people are living, this incredibly glamorous but ultimately hollow American Dream.

I remember hearing some talk a while back about the possibility that the show might not come back for another season. Now, though, it looks like the show will be back for at least two more years. I have to say, I’m glad. Mad Men is the answer to a question that you just can’t figure out. It’s not that there’s anything withheld. There’s no lingering mystery. Mad Men puts everything out in plain sight, but still, somehow, remains inscrutable. Maybe it’s because we can’t stand back and see the whole picture yet, because, no matter how far away 1960 feels, it’s closer than we think.

“Lascruces”

Well, I intended to do a lot of things today. I was going to do some writing, go to the grocery, go over to Jeremy’s to play board games, finish an oh-so-insightful post about Twilight. Instead, I went to class and pretty much spent the rest of the day in bed watching Mad Men.

I feel it bears mentioning that I am actually sick, not just lazy, as has been the case previously.

So now it’s the middle of the night and nothing’s happened except that I’m completely in love with Mad Men. But that’s a conversation for another day.

I’ll just throw this into the ring before I get into my little trundle bed and drift of to the land of nod (for real this time): It pleases me mightily that Obama has lifted a ban on abortion funding. This seems like a good sign, especially since I remember that one of his predecessor’s first acts in office was to pull funding on AIDS programs in Africa because they provided condoms instead of teaching abstinence. I may not be an active killer of babies like those crazy donut people, but it is nice to have a little break from all the wrong-headed, antiquated malarkey about women’s reproductive rights that’s been happening the last eight years..

Now it’s time for me to sleep. I hear that it’s good for you.

“Creeper”

Some of us went out to dinner after class today. We had Thai food, which included, in lieu of traditional fortune cookies, delicious little rolled cookies with a scroll of paper in the center. My fortune, however, was less delightful than its method of delivery. It was:

Whatever arrangements you make are apt to be final.

Is it just me, or is that vaguely menacing? I can’t say I’ve ever been threatened by a fortune cookie, but there’s a first time for everything.

On a lighter note, Susan sent me a link to Visuwords, a visual dictionary. It’s interesting, but also a little overwhelming. Someday I’ll have to sit down and fool around with it. It feels a little like Wikipedia, like you could get lost in it for hours, just playing sex degrees of separation.

The Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie Quest

Having a bad day?  Wake up on the wrong side of bed?  Maybe you slept through the Presidential Inauguration, like some people I know.  Fear not, I have the cure for what ails you: when all else fails, bake cookies.

I’ve had a reputation for compulsively baking cookies for a while now. It might have gotten me through Oxford, as evidenced by the mockumentary about our time there that Aaron Levesque made, The Oxonians (my award-winning performance starts around 3:18, if you’re at all curious), and it’s definitely made a big difference in my quality of life here in Bloomington. Cookies make people happy, and that can’t be a bad thing.

The kind that makes me happiest is a really good, chewy chocolate chip cookie, and I’ve been searching for the perfect recipe pretty much since I started baking cookies. I often have extremely variable results when baking cookies — they’re cake-like one day, bready the next, thin and crisp another — but one constant is that they’re never chewy enough for my tastes. Today I tried a recipe that might just do the trick.

The recipe, called simply Thick, Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies, isn’t all that different from other recipes I’ve seen. It doesn’t include some secret miracle ingredient like cornstarch or sour cream that’s supposed to make the cookies softer, it just alters the proportions of your basic ingredients, and monkeys around with the baking time a little bit.

The trick seems to be, well, now that I think about it, there are a lot of parts. This recipe uses all brown sugar, instead of the usual mix of white and brown sugars, which, according to this tipsheet from Sunset Magazine, is one of the sources of moisture. It also calls for about twice the amount of chocolate chips as your average Toll House recipe, a move I definitely approve of. But the most interesting difference is that, in this recipe, the oven is at 400 and the cookies bake only 6-8 minutes. They cool only briefly on the cookie pan before you slide them onto the rack (or in my case, the plate) to cool, because apparently they’ll keep cooking if you leave them on the pan, which leads to dried-out, crispy cookies.

I have to say, I took all of these recommendations to heart, and the result was a batch of cookies the likes of which I’ve dreamed about. They’re seriously rich, dense, chewy and chocolately — in other words, pretty much my perfect cookie. We’ll see how they taste tomorrow, and how easily I can repeat these results next time I make them, but for the moment, it seems like I’ve found a go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe. I know it’s not how everyone likes their cookies, and I can go for a little bit of variety from time to time, but I can’t really imagine wanting them any other way.