^{Who am I kidding? I’ll be doing my reading at the laundromat. (Image: carolita johnson)}

The article of the week for me was Jonah Lehrer’s (not online, unfortunately) “Eureka Hunt.” It re-awakened memories of a puzzle that had been given to me years ago as I fled Paris to Madrid, broke. Stuck in Madrid, separated from the strange mathemetician who had given me the puzzle (and with whom I’d suddenly, naturally, fallen in love with just before leaving), I diverted all my spare neurotic energy (of which I had plenty to spare) to its solution. To be exact, he didn’t give me the puzzle (he never gave me a thing, the sweet poor slob), but rather gave me instructions for the making of the puzzle, which, in my spare time between discovering the beauty and oddity of the world and bewailing the impetuousness that had led me to leave Paris, I duly constructed. It turns out this puzzle is known as the “yoke puzzle,” and is as old as the hills.

Well, you’d think that having constructed the puzzle myself, I’d have been in a superb position to solve it, too. But no. I could not figure it out. The object was to move one bead from it’s position on one side of the puzzle, to the other side, next to the other bead, on the same string. I wracked my poor brain over the puzzle (and it was a poor brain at the time, having been addled by five years of modelling, which turned it to mush, basically) for weeks, then months… The puzzle became the metaphor for the state of my love life. Finally, the mysterious mathemetician who had given me the puzzle advised me (in the course of a surreptitious telephone call made on someone else’s dime, or peseta) to “drink a few glasses of wine and try it again.”

I did as instructed, and lo and behold, I had my eureka moment!

And therein, I’m sure, lies many a tale of alcoholism and genius. (Not on my part, unfortunately! I remained on the wagon, and not quite a genius, alas!)

(image: carolita johnson)

Regarding Silent Minds, by Jerome Groopman, if I’m ever in a coma or vegetative state (and I don’t mean New Jersey, which is the Garden State, silly!), please, no matter what you think, just pull my plug. I’ve had a great life, and am not greedy about staying alive at all costs. That said, till science can really tell whether I’m truly not consciously listening to whatever you say, kindly be gracious about it. Just in case.

(image: carolita johnson)

You know what? I didn’t think I was going to like Jane Kramer’s article on Elizabeth Lecompte, “Experimental Journey” (not online) but I did! My favorite lines are right at the very end, where they tumble down head over heels to the bottom of the column:

You know what I want? I want a dog. A dog who’s out hunting all day, and he comes home, pant, pant, and I know he loves me. How do you define pleasure? Sometimes I just want to stare at the sky, to sit in a beautiful space and stare at the sky through trees. Am I just lazy? I’m guilty even feeling that way. Well, not so much guilty but anxious. And now – all the work I’m doing–I’m not even anxious, because I know I could walk away. I see my friend Alex Katz, painting, painting–probably he’ll die painting. “Oh, move over here,’ I say. ‘Tell me your secret.’

I read it after managing to tear my eyes off that photo of Rudolf Nureyev, adorning Joan Acocella’s, “Wild thing,” reviewing Julie Kavanagh’s new bio. I saw Rudolf perform several times when I was a child. I remember taking the 7 from Flushing, Main Street with my mother into Manhattan to go see him. I was too young to be drooling over him, but looking at him made me understand what all the drooling would one day be about. I don’t care if his biographer didn’t like him. What’s to like? Some people are made to be adored, not liked.

“Married love,” by Tessa Hadley confirmed my expectations of the homeliness to come of the comical, idealistic marriage between Lottie and the old guy. But all my cynicism was erased with the last line (not a spoiler, don’t worry):

(...) Lottie followed the ordinary kitchen music–the crescendo of the kettle, the chatter of crockery, the punctuation of cupboard doors, the chiming of the spoon in the cup–as if she might hear in it something that was meant for her.

And snip, snip! Definitely read The Shadow Act (not online), Hilton Als on Kara Walker. Here’s a slide show.

“The insufferable gaucho,” by Roberto Bolaño has a little of everything: it’s a western (of the Pampas variety), it’s got a rather Monty Pythonesque rabbit moment, it’s got Borges wandering around in the shadows, it’s got a Marquezian dilapidation of society, a sort of devolution of humanity. Go ahead—don’t be afraid of what Stephen King says about short stories.

That was enough for me this week. Besides, someone stole my magazine before I could finish reading it.

(image: carolita johnson)

There are things, ugly desires, dark, simmering rages, festering hatreds, repulsive beliefs, and just plain embarrasing mediocrities jostling alongside all the good and boring things one values within even the most docile of parents. Sometimes they come out in a humiliating (for you, but perhaps beautiful for the involved parties) affair with someone younger than your sister/brother or daughter/son, sometimes they come out in a public toilet (Hertzberg on Craig), and sometimes they come out in the form of “Mr. Bones”, which I read mostly on my cell phone going downtown and then back uptown to finally find my copy of TNY in my letterbox. Paul Theroux’s Mr. Bones is part Minotaur, part Mr. Magoo.

Aptly, Crawford’s cartoon is my pick of the week: Is this your first time…?

Larry Doyle’s “Portrait in Evil,” makes evil, and Karl Rove, funny again.

But “Crybabies,” by Jerome Groopman made me shake my own hand in congratulations for not having any babies, thereby neatly preventing the evil which is the colicky baby. There is nothing you can do about a screaming, colicky baby. NOTHING. Read my lips: NOTHING. It is nothing more than a test of your own capacity for evil. So, good luck. And the article isn’t online, either. But if you want to know what you’re missing, click here.

(Eat up!)

In France, one tends to “savor,” “breakfast,” “lunch,” “dine,” “snack,” or “nibble” (a favorite word, “grignoter“). What’s more, it’s all about doing so with someone, which could even mean you, yourself, in a self-centering moment. When I returned to New York, I was often struck by the simple “eating” that got done here. Asked if I needed to “go get some food,” I took it to mean: stuff something into my “pie-hole” to make the stomach stop its grumbling. The “Food Issue” reveals that while it really is all about “food” here, depending where we’re from, the meaning behind all this ingesting and digesting shines out of different places in our psyches.

Which reminds me: never mind that awful “shimmering” thing in Judith Thurman’s “Fast Lane” (not online, but here’s the abstract). If you ever want to experience a subtle joy, pay for your boyfriend’s colonic irrigation. Especially if he is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and you are convinced he’s full of “it.”

For me, the stars of this “Food Issue” were “Luda and Milena,” the heroines of Lara Vapnyar’s fiction piece. Wherein it is confirmed that all is fair in love and war, even when the arms race inventory includes cheese puffs and cabbage pies.

Was it the homonym that made this the perfect issue in which to feature an article about Manu Chao (pronounced, at least by anglophones, as “chow”) ? Don’t tell me you didn’t notice! Travelling Man: Manu Chao’s polyglot pop, by Sasha Frere-Jones.

“Real Food,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie features this compliment that I will be actively seeking to use at every opportunity:

“Auntie, this is soup that you washed your hands well before cooking.”

I worry about Adam Gopnik putting hits on chickens in “New York Local: Eating the fruits of the five boroughs.” I was hoping he’d render an account of how, before the awed eyes of his children, he actually wrings the neck of a chicken he raised himself. (No, not really! But putting a price on the head of a New York chicken does raise questions of just how far one can go in one’s mission to eat local…)

Gary Shteyngart nearly made me cry at the end of Sixty-nine cents, but personally, I’d have taken the beet salad: I used to wish I were dead every time my parents announced we were going to MacDonald’s.

David Remnick sobers us up with a digestive expresso in the form of “The Lobby,” on the bitter subject of the “Isreal Lobby.”

And for dessert? Make your own Orange and Almond cake! Only seven simple ingredients (two of which are almonds and oranges), and online only: Claudia Roden’s recipes.

Favorite food-related cartoon (besides mine): Crawford’s “You can stop the pain, Marcel…,” based, he tells me, on a true story.

(image: carolita johnson)

In “The Human Bomb” Adam Gopnik observes what many French people take unashamed comfort in:

The French police are not known for their gentle touch with psychos.

And the comparison of Nicolas Sarkozy to Brigitte Bardot is particularly insightful and apt, love-handles (poignées d’amour?) notwithstanding. Gopnik’s little twist of transfering the “Human Bomb” epithet from the actual Human Bomb to Sarkozy is also very French, rhetorically speaking. Très bien!

Luckily I read Gopnik’s piece before reading Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “Nawabdin Electrician,” because that one piece of fiction was enough to sustain me for the whole week. If I’ve been waiting for another fiction piece to fall in love with, it was worth the wait. The suspense at the end, where we wonder if mercy will turn this piece into something else altogether, is acute. Is mercy a good thing of itself? Or is it a luxury? Does it really make one morally superior? Questions are raised.

(image: carolita johnson)

Paul Simms’s “My Near-Death Experience” is so so true. Live every moment like it’s your last. Or watch your life pass before your eyes someday and be bored to death.

I don’t understand “Mayberry Man.” Because as well-written as the piece was, halfway through it I realized that everything I was reading therein classified as TMI. I mean, the only reason I can possibly imagine needing all this information about Rudy Giuliani is if there actually is a good chance he’ll be our next president. Is this what Peter J. Boyer is trying to tell us? If this is so, then please excuse me while I prepare for my assisted suicide.

Fiction this week was the opposite of last week’s heavily estrogen-spritzed, lusty lady piece, with a surprisingly heavy intravenous dose of bitter, hairy-chested testosterone, in T. Cooper’s “Swimming.” There’s a cockroach in it, too, up a kid’s nose. Total boy stuff.

“Parallel Play” (not online), by Tim Page, about living with Asperger’s Syndrome awoke some old memories as well as some old bugaboos. My dad was diagnosed as an “Aspie” recently. Before that, he was often diagnosed as a jerk. Most people don’t get people with Asperger’s. The thing about “Aspies,” which I remembered as I read Page’s piece, is that even when they talk about how hard it is for them, they do seem to take pride in it. Maybe a bit too much pride for comfort. I’m not usually one to deny anyone a bit of self-satisfaction. Why? Because I’m often guilty of that sin myself, and sometimes wonder if it’s a tic I’ve inherited from my Aspie father. Which naturally leads to questions of free will, and all sorts of other worries.

While I worry, here’s the abstract of the piece, but you’ll have to get the paper version for the full article.

Is it my imagination, or was this issue very manly? (Note: I have no problem with manly. Me like manly. Manly good. Me just asking!)

(image: carolita johnson)

Nancy Franklin’s “Women’s Work,” begins her review of Lifetime’s new season of female-oriented shows with an observation that confirms what I thought I might possibly have been imagining: Lifetime is all about reinforcing the fears that discourage women from being as free as they think they are. The killer always turns out to be the boyfriend or husband, and the boyfriend/husband turns out to be the killer or swindler. Women, barricade yourselves, put on your virtual burkas. Men are Bluebeard, or the big, bad wolf in every story. The message is: can’t live with them (because you might be killed or bamboozled big time), can’t live without them (as Maureen Dowd may well know). Now I know why I never liked Lifetime. Is the idea is to use fear to unite women, the easier to suppress them? That would be so old-fashioned that it would nearly be quaint. No, more likely the easier to sell to them. Beware of this kind of “television for women.” It doesn’t have women’s best interests at heart.

Herbert Spencer, a “Man with a plan,” would probably concur, if he were a TV-watcher, which he probably wouldn’t have been had he lived in our times. He observed that:

women manifested “a worship of power under all its forms; and hence a relative conservatism.” Enfranchised women would tend to vote for authoritarian figures, and so obstruct the natural law of progress toward an egalitarian society.

Sound relevant to our times?

Shapin’s exploration of Spencer yields so many contradictory yet sense-making details that you could easily use this piece to answer all the questions in a Keirsey Temperament Sorter. (Spencer would have been an INFJ, if I’m not mistaken). This is a purely gratuitous comment, though, and one and all are welcome to pshaw me. It’s perhaps just a passing thought. In any case, even if you don’t care how Spencer’s evolutionary theory differs from Darwin’s, you’ll realize how much more interesting Spencer was as a personality, and, moreover, be glad you never had to deal with him yourself. Especially if you’re a woman with a big nose, and in love with him.

Say what you will about my fortitude (or lack thereof), but An Error in the Code, by Richard Preston, was much too painful to read. My fingers hurt just thinking about it. I have nothing but compassion for anyone having to live with the compulsive self-destruction discussed in this article. But don’t ask me to read it. Here is an online abstract of the piece, which is not online itself.

In the Fiction, you have to love Hari Kunzru’s “Magda Mandela,” no matter how many times she tells you to “Go now. Go away. Fuck off. Go. I love you. Go.” She likes “a old man.” Oh yes, she does. The f-word makes seven appearances on one page, all very necessary to the plot.

Sasha Frere-Jones has no idea what I’d do without my inner Grinch, but if you want to lose yours, here’s how to do it: Great Danes.

And another great Christophe Niemann illo. Have a look and guess what James Surowiecki’s article is about before you read it.

(image: carolita johnson)

Emdashes proves herself to be the master of the a propos header with “Let me take you to Monkeytown!” I’ve been humming the reference song all week. Thought it was out of my system, but now it’s been reactivated.

Speaking of music, why pick on Prince? He was very nice at the Paris “Bains-Douches” (yes, I did dance next to him, but he didn’t recognize me—and yet, he didn’t act too uppity either), surprisingly petite and sexy. I’d gladly pay sixty thousand dollars to have brunch with him. If I was the kind of person that does things like that, I mean.

This week’s TNY was very informative. Everything you always wanted to know about spam, in Michael Specter’s “Damn Spam,” which I’m tempted to send out as link in a huge mass mailing, to see if the tautological effect could make the world explode.

I’d love to meet somebody who thinks Elizabeth Kolbert is a big time downer. I mean, the prospect of the end of the world as we know it need not be so depressing, right? Well, it kind of is. But maybe she’ll start putting more jokes in her pieces, to lighten things up. Did you hear the one about the entire honeybee population disappearing? You know the punch line. “Stung” (or, “everything you never knew about honeybees and never even thought to ask about which then made you feel a sense of impending hopelessness when you got the answers”) is not online, but certainly absorbing enough to make you miss your subway stop, in both directions. Which I did. UPDATE: “Stung” is now online, here.

I haven’t finished “An Unsolved Killing: The murder of an Assistant U.S. Attorney” by Jeffrey Toobin yet, but it’s boding ill. I’m not really sure, but in spite of the writing, which drew me in well enough to find myself reading it on the elliptical, I think I won’t like the end of this story. (UPDATE: I didn’t. Even more depressing and ill-auguring than the bees.)

My favorite line of “So it is in life,” a series of short fictional texts by Daniil Kharms:

I was very curious as to what sort of scholarly works these were. But that remained unknown. Marina said that he had been born with a pen in his hand, but didn’t divulge any more details of his scholarly activities. I began to suss it out and, finally, I learned that he was in the cobbler’s line of work.

I know many people like that.

And cartoon of the week goes to Crawford, of “I have people coming.”

And I’m sure the only reason this story didn’t become a GOAT item, is because it only happened last night: submarine surrenders in Brooklyn.