Take a moment and be thankful with me, would you, for people who live to document the spooky things the sky does—this one from a spot called Bø—and to measure the legs of lizard refugees, and even to feel the odd emotion, because as always, "the authorities despise us," (really, they do) it's getting colder day by day, and the spring offers little solace.
I had the odd luck to arrive in Oakland on October 19, 1991. I had planned to stay for a week or so at the home of a close family friend. She lived in the hills, in an almost painfully gorgeous house with a view of the bay. Mainly I remember the view and the bookshelves in her living room. The ceilings were high, and the shelves stretched from the floor to the ceiling, covering one wall. In any case, the next morning the fires came. I don’t want to dwell on the events of that day, except to state the obvious, that I survived. I made it out on foot with my two best friends and our host. She and I went back a week or two later, as soon as the city began allowing residents into the area that had burned. If I remember right, she was hoping that one particularly treasured piece of jewelry might have survived — we had fled in a hurry, empty-handed. But nothing was left. All the trees were gone, and nearly all the houses. What had been green and bright with flowers was gray and black for miles, the enormity of the bay and the sky all the more blue for the contrast. We found the wasted chassis of her car ten yards from the spot where we had been forced to abandon it. I still have a teardrop-shaped puddle of chrome that melted off the bumper. Except for the chimney, the house was entirely gone. No roof, no walls, not a rafter survived. The second floor had collapsed onto the first, ash intermingling with ash. Only the refrigerator, which stood at a funny angle but remained more or less intact, allowed us to figure out where the kitchen had been. I laughed — when I was a child, in the days before electronic storage, my mother used to stash her unpublished manuscripts in the freezer. Even if the house burned, she had reasoned, the books would survive. I opened the freezer door and, to my delight, found a few neat bundles wrapped in aluminum foil. I peeled back a corner. The contents, whatever they had once been, were reduced to pure black ash. A few yards to the left, I saw a miraculous sight. I’m getting to the point here. In the mass of otherwise indistinguishable cinders that had once been that high-ceilinged living room, I found the bookshelves. Or at least the books. They had tumbled from the shelves and lay on the ground, yards of them, their bindings closed, pages facing up. I remember great, rolling mounds of them, all the same color now, the same whitish grey. Everything else — big, stable, solid things: staircases, couches, pots and pans — had been incinerated and disappeared, but the individual pages of individual books had retained their contours. As I stood there, marveling, I couldn’t help myself. I reached down to touch them, to feel the ridges of the pages against the pads of my fingers. They collapsed at my touch. They didn’t crumble. There wasn’t enough to them to crumble. They collapsed into the most perfect powdery ash. You’ll laugh at me, but I mean it when I say that the surprise I felt — my breath still catches—the impossible fineness of that ash, the keen sense of the irrecoverable, made that one of the most beautiful moments of my life. Maybe sublime would be a better word. In any case, I tell this story with a banal and semi-petty motivation. Which is that I finally figured out exactly what it is that I dislike about Jonathan Franzen. Not personally — I hear he’s a decent fellow. It’s what he says and writes, and what he says about what he writes, and the implications of what he says and writes and says about what he writes, that bothers me. Maybe you’ve already read this. Poor thing, he seems so fragile. He seems to really believe that literature is “permanent and unalterable.” Don’t tell him!
No, the bee was not three and a half feet long. It was a normal, bee-sized bee and was sitting depressed and damaged, perhaps drunk, (despairing?) on my windshield, which, transparent, forms a key part of this photograph, perhaps the most important part. Pardon the focus: like I said, the bee was feeling off. It had a parasite in its abdomen. Pesticides made it feel as stupid and woozy as the rest of us. Like the Israelis, it had a bad case of Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. When I started my car, the wipers came on and shoveled the bee off the windshield. It got stuck on my side mirror for a block or so, then tumbled out of sight.
And while we're all enjoying ourselves, check out this review of Ether on htmlgiant. I swear I didn't write it.
"There were a lot of men running around in the Winter Palace. And sometimes it was completely empty. That meant that things were going badly for the Bolsheviks. The intellectuals were not cooperating, were selling newspapers in the streets, were chopping ice.
Were looking for work.
At one point, they were all making chocolate.
But at first, they merely fried everything fryable in cocoa butter, which was sold right from the factories. Later on, they learned how to make chocolate. They sold pastries. They opened cafés—at least, the richer ones did. All this came later, not until spring.
The main thing, however, is that it was terrible."
—Victor Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey
b.