A Woman Without a Nose Is Not Beautiful

My nose is nipped cold. I am huddled under a gigunda blanket in the tiny office in my father’s semi-rural house. My right hand is not happy with its near-numb level of chill. But it wants to write, so I let it.

It finds itself shocked at a sudden nagging idea today, that maybe it and the rest of me will leave New York soon, for a while at least. I can’t help but feel drawn back to New England, to houses with porches and grass and spindly winter trees and a quiet place to work. For a chance at something new again, for a time in life that will be something fresher, and quieter, freer and tighter to the chest at once.

There are houses here from the 1830s. There are cupolas and long, old panes of glass in long, wood window frames and old red bricks and Revolutionary War graves. There are people who believe in saying hello as they pass each other on the street, and those who choose to hole up inside away from everyone else. A cup of coffee in the fall here seems so tasty.

And now there is my family’s mysteriously barking old-bag Labrador, who I just half carried up the stairs so she won’t be alone. I feel childishly lost in the romance of cold nights and flannel shirts and Labradors and getting sleepier by the click of the second.

Last night I read Jim Holt’s string theory article “Unstrung” in the New Yorker. “Beauty is truth; truth beauty,” he recalls. (Rock on, Keats.)

But, he wonders, “is there any reason to think it is true?” Holt asks. “Truth, after all, is a relationship between a theory and the world, whereas beauty is a relationship between a theory and the mind.” Subject, object, loveject, sublet.

He goes on to discuss the relation between beauty and simplicity (shine on, Euclid and Pythagoras), and then quotes a Stanford physicist, Leonard Susskind, who roundly chucks all that out the window: “A good, honest look at the real world does not suggest a pattern of mathematical minimality.”

Oh, but would that it did.

The whole article is an interesting look into whither string theory vs. particle physics, but I really think I just wanted to springboard...

Let’s just bring it all downtown, ancienne-style. Shout out to the Greeks: beauty is terror, they really did say. Should we all just agree to be scared?

I Was the Latin Speed-Declension Champ of 6th Grade

Last night, a friend told me I am "in transition." I now realize I feel transitive, which is possibly more accurate.

tran·si·tive (trăn'sĭ-tĭv, -zĭ-) pronunciation
adj.

1. (Abbr. trans. or tr. or t.) Grammar. Expressing an action carried from the subject to the object; requiring a direct object to complete meaning. Used of a verb or verb construction.
2. Characterized by or involving transition.
3. Logic & Mathematics. Of or relating to a relationship between three elements such that if the relationship holds between the first and second elements and between the second and third elements, it necessarily holds between the first and third elements. Examples of transitive relationships are equality for numbers and divisibility for integers.

No, I take that back. I would like to feel transitive and not in transition. At least then there is a direction to point my discontent. You know, an object to blame.

Do you know it is not that hard to teach yourself to read Greek? When I studied Latin (for seven years, yes, my frightened children, seven), I had the opportunity to study Greek if I wished, as well. I did not. I have always regretted that. But in a back-of-the-mind regretting way, not in a conscious enough way to pursue actually studying it. Then I read "The Professor and the Madman" last week, about the OED editor and a crazy contributor, and realized I can actually sorta read Greek. The beginning of each chapter has an OED word definition. Greek roots are written in Greek. And, shockingly, I learned that Greek letters are nearly like their Latin relatives. That and the fact that I still recognize things like "theta" from high school math. (Which is a shocker, considering I spent most of high school calculus drinking coffee and eating egg-and-cheese sandwiches at the local deli. My teacher, Mr. Econ [real name], used to ask us to get him some coffee, pronounced "cawfee," too.) It's kind of a geeky head trip to try to read Greek, and then to write about trying to read Greek, but I'm pleased to know that things I thought were long-lost desires are still possible, and possibly more transparent than my brain had decided.

Everything, occasionally, is within reach. Transitively.

Lost and Found

Here is the man begging, the same man for so many years. He has an alcoholic’s face, too many years of too much drinking. His hair is white and he has a slight shuffle and a hooked cane in one hand and a plastic cup one-third full with change in the other.

He looks like one of the last World War II veterans, only that would make him too old. He looks like an old-school New York drunk as seen by Joseph Mitchell, only I’ve never actually seen him appear drunk. The ruddy color of his tired skin gives him away. Today I see him and I realize that this is his life, this is what he does. He walks the trains and asks for money, please, and the days turn into months and then years and here he still is. Will he die one day and will a newspaper article appear about all the New Yorkers who saw him all those years but never really knew who he was?

There is a newborn on her mother’s breast next to me. The baby’s lips are parted in a full open heart, and her bark-brown eyes study me. I remember the words of an ex who wrote me recently with the news that he has a 22-month-old baby girl: “I have never loved someone in quite the way I love her as my child.” This mother next to me, her lips graze the baby’s forehead as she whispers sweet things to her. Mother gives baby kisses between words, and I realize I wish we all knew such love.

Segreti

I am amazed suddenly by the number of secrets I know about people. Friends, friends' lovers. It's a bit unnerving. I suppose I understand the need to confide, and I understand that I am naturally, perhaps, someone people confide in, but some of these secrets involve things like the gay husband of a friend who does not know--supernova kinds of things that have come across the desk in my head indirectly. You know, a memo got passed from one person to the next to the next until, oops, it got to someone who cares. And then she cares until she hurts.

How much do we ever not know about each other?

How much should we ever really know, anyway?

I feel remarkably enlivened today and yesterday, as if there are birds flying behind my eyeballs.

Does That Come with a Side of Falafel?

Anyone want to venture a guess as to what "Sauteed Loofah w. Glutton" might be on my Chinese takeout menu?

Anyone dare me to actually call the Chinese place and ask them what this dish is? Or shall I just order it, sight unseen?

Come on, peeps. Let's live a little.

Listen

A man tells a woman stories in a bar. About smuggling adventures involving precious materials and small Central Asian passageways. The woman imagines sand in the smuggler's hair and the sound of a heartbeat in the smuggler's ears from fear, sometimes. The body-shaking rush that went along with such clandestine feats. The man presents to the woman stories about the smuggler that make her feel as though life can be instantly fresh, interesting always. Drums sound in the background of the bar and people swirl around. A red cast illuminates the space; it is seductive.

Power is implicit in the storyteller. Less so in the story.

Say It

Silty is a beautiful word.

It Is September 12th, Again

The lights are on again. A friend and I had our own tribute tonight: We called it the "Tribute in Chinese" (i.e. our best attempt at a terrible Onion headline)—we ate Chinese food and drank Brooklyn Lager on my roof, stared at the lights, commented on the way they hit the clouds, shared stories of reporting at ground zero, remembered the heat that built that day (it's cooler this year, with a few more clouds in the sky, although not many more), wondered if we saw souls rising, as so many people say they do in those lights. Text messages flying to and from my phone about the shafts: "Can you see them?" "I can." "I see people trapped in them."

We sat on my bedroom floor and sorted through a sooty pile I haven't touched in years—newspapers and magazines from that black time: "War" read the full-page hed in the Post. New York Times: "Stunned Rescuers Comb Attacks Sites, But Thousands Are Presumed Dead; F.B.I. Tracking Hijackers' Movements" (banner hed, Sept. 13). New York Times: "Bush Tells the Military to 'Get Ready'; Broader Spy Powers Gaining Support" (banner hed, Sept. 16). New York Times: "Agonized, New York Bends, But It Doesn't Break" (inside Week in Review, Sept. 16).

Clyde Haberman's lead in that last story, second graf:

"'New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along,' E.B. White wrote, and it does so 'without inflicting the event on its inhabitants.'
"'So that every event is, in a sense, optional,' he said, 'and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.'
"Not this time."

There was no one crying on the subway tonight that I saw but me. It was, though, a quiet crying, a quiet cry of remembrance. I remembered my college friend and my fireman friend, how young they were, how young we were, remembered all the people I never met but have come to know through their friends and relatives over the years. I try not to remember their terrible deaths, but after you spend years working on projects that reconstruct exactly how certain people died, you have to will it out of your head. I do that neatly. Sometimes. Finally.

A friend who knows from these things as well or better than anyone wrote this to me tonight:

"I spent time thinking about the last five years too. Exhausting, unbelievable by pre-9/11 standards, and still happening."

And now it is September 12th again.

Evening

The clouds are rolling in, furious in the graying night sky. I spent Sept. 10, 2001, at the Odeon on West Broadway, seven blocks from the World Trade Center, which, if you can't picture it, was close enough to make the buildings loom as large as a fluorescent-lit chimera, only with a warm and fuzzy tint, like a crazy mythical creature that reminds you again, and forever, you'd think, that yes, you are definitely in Hades, and isn't it warm and cozy here?

My journalist friend and I exited the restaurant at just about midnight. Red wine tickled our bodies. We stopped on the sidewalk and looked up, as if magnetized.

"It's just so beautiful," I said.

"I know," she said.

And then we went our separate ways, and went to sleep.

The Politzero

At 5 p.m. NY1 showed George and Laura Bush walking the ramp at ground zero to lay a wreath upon a pool of water. I wouldn't have known how angry this scene could make me if I hadn't just found myself sneering at the screen, altogether rapt in pain and contempt.

This man, who has made our lives so much more frightening, potentially full of so much more danger than already was probable, bowed his head in the place where so many died, attempting to resemble a man who cared.

I imagined that when he held Laura's hand and closed his eyes, he prayed some methodical prayer to God. Others in my office said they are sure the only thing going through his head was "zhhhhhhzhzhzhhhhh"—the buzz of static.

Then Bush climbed into a black car to take him one block to St. Paul's (zip, zoom, leave the pit, because you were never truly in it to begin with). Pataki and Giuliani followed along behind him. Bloomberg, however, had to cross around to the other side of a car, and we all happily imagined him climbing in to sit facing backwards, in a kiddie seat.

(And in a game of Know Thy Mayor:
"He's wishing he could take a Lexis instead," one reporter said.
"Nah," I reasoned. "He's going to take the subway.")

Splendid Is the Night

So I'm a New York girl in a New York world, and you can only imagine there will be occasional "Sex and the City" moments—a girl throws on her heels, lipstick in the purse—your ex will be there, so will his new wife, there will be the others you haven't seen for years and the unexpected pleasure of a new man you've never met before—and you swing your shiny hair and sexy ass right on into the bar with an "I don't give a shit" vibe, because, really, the night belongs to you.

And then you can imagine how uproariously funny all that sounds in my ringy-dingy head as I type it. I love being a New York girl, if only because the irony is never far from the tip of my you-can't-imagine-what-really-goes-on-in-anyone's-head head, or my please-make-it-interesting mind. [See below to pick apart my self-contradictions like layers of pretty mica.]

Now let's slip back into the underground lair where it's occasionally sparkly but mostly mottled, cause I know you like it there, too.

Iotae

Three items from McSweeney's latest issue of "The Believer," of which I am not a usual reader, but happened to read recently:

1. "Killing a rodent is just another way to kill yourself when you're up against the wall. It’s easier to bite a human than to love one."

From "The Rodent Is Myself," by Andrew Friedman

2. "Animals are sexual talismans and aphrodisiacs. I'm no pervert. But I realize that animals appeal to our sensate selves with their tactile features and wild demeanors. A purring cat is sexier to me than a man doused in cheap cologne, but I don't want to have sex with either of them."*

From "Free Your Beast: Reviving the Animal Tale," by Trinie Dalton

3. "As I struggle to eradicate irony from my Modernist lifestyle, I find my major motivations is a desire to enjoy irony-free sex, as a way of rejecting any realistic notions of body image or sexual conduct I've absorbed through the media."

Ibid.

Am I the only one who cannot grasp this concept of irony-filled sex? Not that I cannot grasp that it happens, but that someone should have developed their sexual self in such rhythmic tandem with outside images, in such a hopelessly hyper-conscious way? Or that a person should be so self-aware, or neurotic to have started attempting to excise their self-awareness or neurosis, which is tangled up in media imagery, from their sex life? Or do you now laugh, ha, McBickle, you are in denial—we are all tangled up in media imagery when it comes to our sex lives? Or, you say, are you so deluded you are willing to entertain the idea that you are unique in this way, and truly keep the two separate?

When it comes to my delusions, be comforted, this seems the least harmful.

(Isn't there some kind of law in place that punishes those who attempt to use the phrase "irony-free" in McSweeney's? Shall we contact our congressional members and ask them to get to work on a bill immediately, if not?)

And now, on NPR, a teaser for a high-schooler who "listens back to recordings she made the day after 9/11." Makes me remember I have those tapes as well. And that I forgot. And that somewhere in my house is a paper mask I wore that day. And that probably never want to find it, or consider for longer than the length of time it takes me to type this sentence why I chose to keep it.

_____________

*Note to Men: Do not wear Vaseline Intensive Care moisturizer on your face, even if you have a sunburn, unless you want to smell like my grandmother.

In illustration:

VICM + Face = My Grandmother = Not Sexy

Women on Top

So our newsroom was tuned in for Katie Couric's CBS Evening News debut tonight. I'm not sure how she performed, exactly, but I will say that we performed exactly as expected:

"Whoa! What happened to her face!"

"She looks nervous."

"Why does she look so different?"

And we wonder why women never rise to such positions.

And then we wonder why we must perpetuate our own stereotypes when we do get there. (Although we could just as easily wonder why that is a bad thing. Oh, the tangled web...)

I leapt out of my chair and attempted to claw the screen at the end of her broadcast when she said she had not yet come up with an appropriate sign-off, ran a reel of a bunch of male newscasters giving theirs, and then asked the public's help to come up with hers.

Log on, kids! It's a a touchy-feely world with a woman at the helm! We will decide by consensus how I'll say goodnight to you!

And you'll love it!

And Blam

The summer heat is over (wethinks) but the heat of the city is ever-raging. I won’t bore you with verbal fights I overheard on the subway, the clack-clack of red patent-leather heels at the end of mile-long legs on the concrete, the weight of laundry in my arms, as if it is the world and I am Atlas (or a tremendous drama queen, either/or).

The e-mails of long-lost loves and the people who come and go. The work to be done and the work now accomplished. The collective presence of 8 million people and counting in a small space, relatively. I feel an odd sense of presence tonight, as if the earth is moving at exactly the right speed, and I am moving, for once, at the same speed as it.

Done now.

Blam

A car has just crashed woefully out of control. I could hear it swerving and finding its targets no matter what its driver did. Then the “Oh my god” of people nearby. Sometimes, we cannot control anything.

At least, here come the sirens.

Oh, god. Now there is the breaking of glass. As if to get inside.