Behind Every Man

I was poking around the Time website, looking for a picture to include in a blog post on a different subject, when I learned that Jeanne-Claude, Christo's partner in life and art, passed away yesterday.

I first saw the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude on "Sunday Morning", which chronicled them and their Umbrellas installation. When people talk about these Umbrellas, or about the Reichstag, or the New York Gates, they talk about Christo. But he had another half.

I'm not going to get all feminist on you. If, by reading this blog post, one more person will know Jean-Claude's name, I will be exceedingly happy.

An artist-friend was recently lamenting to me how art is not purposeful. But it is. The sublime is necessary. I am reminded of a comment made in one of my fiction workshops at Maryland, shortly after 9/11. My workshop mate said of fiction, and art, "In some ways, it doesn't seem to matter very much right now. In another way, it's the only thing that matters."

Thanks, Jeanne-Claude, for things that matter.

Good and Rooted

Many years ago, when I spent a summer in South Dakota working at Wall Drug, I worked with an older, eccentric woman named Violet. Violet lived in a cabin in Badlands National Park. I'd never heard of this before (I was 20; I grew up in the OC) and it seemed so exotic. Travel writer Tim Cahill lives in a national park, too.

From the Wall Street Journal:

"Tim Cahill has traveled to 100 countries, riding on horseback across the steppes of Mongolia, hiking through remote villages in southeastern Turkey in search of the supposedly extinct Caspian Tiger, driving a truck from the tip of Patagonia to Alaska and going swimming in an ice hole on the North Pole.

The veteran travel writer chronicles these adventures from a 500-square-foot cabin hidden in a thickly forested river canyon in southwest Montana. The cabin sits in this national forest on the edge of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, about an hour's drive down gravel roads from the "big town" of Livingston, where Mr. Cahill has a house."

Read the rest

Thanks to my mom for forwarding on this article.

A Story That Insists on Telling Itself Again

Paul Lisicky read tonight at USD. From "The Boy and His Mother are Stuck!", this:

"Just yesterday, when we were all a little calmer and safer, my younger brother put his palms on the oven of her and murmured duck, duck, I want a duck as if words alone could make the thing inside her grow feathers."

Lately, many people around me--and when I say "around me," I include myself--are wishing for things to be other than they are. None of us wish our bellies--or any of the bellies around us--to contain a bird instead of a fetus. No, our angst centers around jobs/careers/what we do each day/what we call ourselves/what others call us. In other words, identity. Which is a theme Lisicky dealt with several times this evening.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the duck that is held hostage in Richard Russo's Straight Man, where the protagonist, a long-suffering English professor at a financially struggling college, cries, "A duck a day, until I get my budget."

How did ducks come to represent such futile yearning? Hopefully there's a PhD--who self-identifies as an modern American lit expert--secreted away in some dank office, toiling on this very topic.

On a November Evening

Dear The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf:

I am writing to you with a suggestion that you change the name of your Apple Roobios tea to Wood. Because, really, this is what it tastes like. I'm not exactly sure what type of tree bark it is-- Sequoia or Pine or whatever (I'm just the idea gal, I don't have all the particulars). Apple is, of course, the obvious choice, but is obvious what you really want in an overpriced drink? I trust that your ad people can come up with something. Gap once had a perfume called "Grass," and it sold quite well. Marketing is everything.

Warm regards,

Michelle Panik

http://www.straycarrierpigeon.com

Dime Stories

Last night, I found myself wandering around a place I spent five years at, and wondering where the hell I was.

I'd gone to UCSD for Dime Stories' November Showcase, to hear, among others, my friend Nancy read her award-winning story. Which was great. What the pluck?--I don't know why she was nervous.

I'd parked in the Gilman Parking Structure, which was built after I'd graduated, but I'd become accustomed to it when I'd returned as an employee. I stopped working there in June of 2007, and since then the campus has exploded with buildings. One of which is a new student center that makes UCSD a real college and give it a real central place for students to hang out. Which is a good thing. As along as you can navigate all the other bright and shiny and windowy buildings.

Brooding about Broods

Dear TLC:

I am a fan of American Chopper. Watching the Teutul family is a melange of action, engineering, graphic design, comedy, drama, and family. Bravo. No, not Bravo. Bravo.

As we are in the middle of November Sweeps, I feel compelled to write to you about your other shows, which all seem to be about about freakishly large families. (Freaky, freakier, and still more freakiness.) They are taking over your network. I understand that shows are in the works for several months before going on the air. Perhaps you lined up all these crazy families before the Jon and Kate lost the love. TV executives live and learn. So in the spirit of living and learning, I humbly suggest you find something else to exploit.

The only monstrous family I want to see on TV is one made of up of adopted or fostered children. If at all possible, it'd be great to follow the lives of a family who takes in the children of an immediate family member, after their tragic death in a car accident.

Thank you for reading.

Warm regards,

Michelle Panik

http://www.straycarrierpigeon.com/

"Goldengrove" by Francine Prose

I love this:

Margaret's death had shaken us, like three dice in a cup, and spilled us out with new faces in unrecognizable combinations. We forgot how we used to live in our house, how we'd passed the time when we lived there. We could have been sea creatures stranded on the beach, puzzling over an empty shell that reminded us of the ocean.

-Goldengrove

Francine Prose