Thursday, January 02, 2003

People have written and complained that my new web journal contains no juicy personal details!  Thanks for caring, but that's not what this journal is about.  I don't know, I think you can really tap into someone's affective stream, and learn a lot about them, by asking about what they're reading, or listening to, and that's more to the point for me.  Nonetheless, here's a more personal, recounting-of-my-day type entry for you, gentle readers. My girlfriend came back from Kansas on Monday night, in the midst of a heavy and fast-moving storm front.  So, her flight was delayed for 2.5 hours.  Midwest Express might be cheap, they might offer direct flights from Austin to Kansas City, they might give you a chocolate-chip cookie, but they seem unable to track the movement of their own planes.   The storm was exquisite, though.  I was home, cleaning house, all the windows open when the light changed and the atmosphere shifted.  The change was slight and small and I couldn't place it, exactly.  Then the wind came, and the clouds, and the lightning!  The air ionized and smelled so good, like electricity.  Midwest Express' website said her flight was in the air, but landing would be delayed untiil 5:30, so I arrived at the airport at 5:15.  The "arrivals" display in the terminal still read 5:00pm, so I began wandering about, looking for the proper luggage bay.  5:30, 5:45, 6:00, 6:15 - the light in the ABIA terminal has this odd, lambent quality; after fifteen minutes I could see clearly neither with glasses nor without, and my eyes began to ache and burn.  Everything receded to this strange middle distance, and took on an ugly and alien aspect.  At 6:15p, the information for her flight disappeared from the display.  At 6:45p, someone announced over the loudspeaker that the flight had landed.  My girlfriend showed up at 7:30p.  We drove, immediately, to the sushi bar, and loaded up on spicy tuna rolls, hamachi, unagi, all that good stuff.  Her flight was long and rough - the de-icer on the plane was malfunctioning, and they diverted all the way to Corpus Christi, then back up, to avoid the storm - so she drank a little carafe of hot sake, and felt better.  My girlfriend is a fearless flyer, and took lots of excellent pictures of the storm system as her plane circled round.  It was nice to see her - she's awfully cute and funny.  She makes me laugh really, really hard, almost every day, and you can't beat that, can you?  She had a classic, midwestern, Bing Crosby-esque Christmas.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that her family did things like ride around their small Kansas town, in the snow, in a beautiful black hardwood carriage with red velvet seats, pulled by a handsome black Clydesdale-Quarter horse mix.  They played soccer on the front lawn, and drank wine, and rode horses, and all that fun and picturesque stuff.  She told long, funny stories about her week, and I liked hearing about everything, all the little details that make up a life lived. ABIA has finally erected the long-promised, woefully ugly statue of Barbara Jordan in the terminal.  For the longest time, the little model of the statue was upstairs by the gates, under a vitrine, right in the middle of a row of wheelchairs.  I used to get terrifically embarrassed every time I walked past that line of wheelchairs, until I decided that Barbara Jordan wouldn't have given a damn, probably.  I decided, in fact, that Barbara Jordan would have laughed her ass off at this.  The larger-than-life version of the statue is quite awful - I don't really like the tendency toward representational memorials, particularly in instances where the person's in question work so clearly transcends the body.  I had two hours to muse about this, as I had failed to bring a book (not that I would have been able to read it anyway, given the poor light).  ABIA is an abject failure, architecturally.  The scale's all wrong, and the quasi-unfinished, structurally-exposed trendiness is going to look cheap and seedy in less than a decade, mark my words.  It's loud, and I will reiterate for the third time that the quality of light is unbelievably bad.  Despite all the glass, the field of view is delimited fore and aft, and you have to turn your head right and left countless times to spot your party descending the elevators from the gates - this due to a total absence of informative signage, and again, problems with scale.  Also, it's not too very damn international, is it?  Scant signage in English, much less French or Japanese or whatever.   I'll never be an architect, but I often appreciate my architect father's command, repeated countless times during my youth, to "just LOOK at your surroundings.  Just look at things."  So, I have this weird habit of trying to really look at things, buildings and the like, and trying to decide how they make me feel.  But I liked my time in the airport terminal, nonetheless, because things and stories converge there.  People roam about bored, lonely, anxious, clutching flowers or little signs with scrawled names.  Then they see that particular person, they pick them out from the hurry and crowd and their eyes get big, and they run and kiss.  Small singularities, time suspended then collapsing into that moment, those eyes, that embrace.  That was fine. The brash and brazen Now I re-read The Hours last night, in anticipation of watching the filmed version of the book a few weeks hence.  I loaned it to my girlfriend's sister a few months ago, and she kindly sent it home with said girlfriend.  So, it was sitting right there.  I picked it up, just to look through and remind myself of key passages, as I first read it several years ago.  This was a nice hardcover first edition, and I actually thought "I can't believe I loaned this first edition to someone," which gives you some insight into my possessive, and wholly unattractive, attitude towards books.  If I have ever loaned you a book, particularly a hardcover book, I like you a lot. A whole lot.  Anyway, I sat down right there and read the entire thing.  This is a very fine book, and the rewards of my quick but attentive (not because I am so mindful, but because this novel forces that kind of attention) re-reading were deep.  The section where Laura is making the cake for her husband is so lovely and seemingly-simple, and then the undercurrent of her despair at its imperfection is mirrored and expanded so perfectly in the following section, where Virginia's niece prepares the burial nest for the dead bird.  It's all right there - the author draws an incredibly flawless line between those wildly disparate worlds.  Laura is but a child, and everything about the simplest of her days bespeaks and makes intimate death.  I don't read fiction so much to confirm or exalt my feelings about life.  I've touched on this briefly in a previous entry.  The Hours is a treacherous book in this regard - it's full of feeling, feeling which it would be unbelievably easy to relate too closely to your own experience, thereby bringing some false depth of emotion to your own everyday; an emotion which is not your - your own individual, inexpressibly unique, and singular days' - own.  There's a subtle rebuke of this tendency woven into the structure of The Hours; Laura Brown is a reader, full of emotion about the things she reads, and all-too-willing to subsume her real, valid, deeply-felt emotions and experience to the lures of the fictional.  I like finely-drawn character, and I love the perfect sentence, the perfect paragraph.  But you know, there is word, and there is flesh.  There is this imperfect and beautiful day, or there is nothing.   3:17:39 PM