A Valentine to Darwin

Dear Darwin,

I have a crush on you. I have no experience with barnacles, fossils, or apes. I’m not a naturalist. I’m not even an atheist. My hobbies include eavesdropping, stealing, and legislating the words. I like to watch truTV and read your diaries. You didn’t write anything dirty in them so there’s no reason to be embarrassed. The red diary is my favorite. On the back you wrote, “RANGE OF SHARKS: Nothing for Any Purpose.” And that one isn’t about sharks at all. It contains epochs, volcanoes, quartz, and those big ideas of yours. I bet you wrote the shark business because you were afraid someone would put you under house arrest (like Galileo) or on the stake (like Basil the Physician). “Profoundly deep: a great fault or rather many faults,” reads one entry. I like to pretend you were defining how “deep” someone is based on how many mistakes he makes. “Try on globe” is another gem. In a few days, I will board a plane and try on Patagonia. Your old stomping ground. I hope to see the cave where you dug up the bones of the giant sloth and I hope to stay far away from those underground critters that shriek. I hope we cross paths.

I have to tell you: I’ve always been suspicious of science because it wants to explain everything. It wants to make the unknown known, the mysterious unmysterious, and now really, where’s the fun in that?

Posted on January 9, 2009 | If You See Something, Say Something / Issue 7 | Permalink

Off the Page and onto the Sidewalk

Ten p.m. in Shimokitazawa, a neighborhood of circuitous alleyways ten minutes or so west of central Tokyo by train. Think Long Island City or Williamsburg in Brooklyn, early nineties. Three separate bands busk on street corners at the bottom of a hill. Above them loom a giant McDonald’s and several closet-sized ramen shops. Three cops appear, batons in hands, nodding sternly, and the bands crumple their gear into canvas sacks and disappear. A few minutes later, one of the bands, a hyper-speed blues trio, reappears and plays two more numbers before applauding passers by. Then they fold it all up again.

Just past 10:30 Rikimaru Toho bounds down the station stairs with plastic bags in both hands and a plastic washbasin under one arm. Toho is a professional manga reader. He has been out here every Saturday night since five years ago, when he moved to the city from the seaside village of Chigasaki. On Sunday afternoons, he’s at nearby Inokashira Park, only a few stations away.

Posted on February 12, 2008 | If You See Something, Say Something / Issue 5 | Permalink

At-Talifoon

Just after the first Gulf War, I moved to Jeddah with my husband. I didn’t realize at the time that I hadn’t married Essam, I had married his mother and the women of his family. The minute I arrived, they became my world.

During the day, there were six of us: my mother-in-law, Um-Essam; her two youngest daughters, Arij and Johara; a daughter-in-law, Hasanat; and me with my infant daughter, Yasmina. They had never lived with an American before, and they regarded me like an ugly old armchair that was too big to stuff out the window. (For the virtuous, home-bound woman, the window was the only way to dump trash.)

Posted on January 22, 2008 | If You See Something, Say Something / Issue 5 | Permalink

Shark Means Knife

The story goes that as a child my mother finished a book every day. I have tried to imagine her then, but the best I do is a blurry glimpse of a girl walking among a vast and towering library of the things she's read, fingers dragging along the spines on the lower shelves.

Somehow, among all the many volumes, Slaughterhouse-Five persisted as her guidebook. In seventh grade, it became mine too. We took its signature phrase so it goes to be our own, invoking it at every tragedy major and minor. We went to it as others might the bible. It said there was no reason behind anything and we'd be better off not seeking any. We liked that.

Posted on January 22, 2008 | If You See Something, Say Something / Issue 5 | Permalink

The Revenge of the Angry Black Artist

Years ago, when I was a Disney Screenwriting Fellow (a program that evolved out of the need for Disney never again to be dead last in employing women and writers of color, probably more out of corporate embarrassment than enlightened self interest), I had the thankless task, they didn't even own the rights, of adapting Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

From where I'm from, you need to know when a game is getting run on you. Disney, though it seems pretty naive of me at the time to have been surprised, was white as toast, and I sensed from day one that all things being equal, I was in the wrong neighborhood, the wrong side of town.

Posted on January 8, 2008 | If You See Something, Say Something / Issue 5 | Permalink

Letter from Buenos Aires

Dear Big Logos,

I’m alive in tango central! I have my own apartment! Suddenly I am full of exclamation points! This place is more dashing than I ever imagined. For a city that declared its autonomy in 1994, and proceeded to suffer a catastrophic depression in 2002, things seem to be running smoothly. Slight chance of an energy crisis. The word on the street is gasoline. Instead of a White House there is a Pink House. A plaza. A cathedral. Traffic lights change from red to yellow to green. It is okay to put the pedal to the metal on a yellow. The question of what to do with dog poop on the streets is a common and controversial topic of conversation. Most of the streets are named after famous men: Alvear, Calvo, Peña, Roca. The newest neighborhood, Puerto Madera, named their streets after famous women. And many of these famous women are—guess—poets! Increiblemente. I bought an anthology of poetry out of a cardboard box marked two pesos. The poets in the anthology call themselves The Elephant School. So far, no elephants in the poems.

Posted on July 31, 2007 | If You See Something, Say Something / Issue 4 | Permalink

Gene Smith's Sink

I've been researching and collecting Smith's life ever since my wife, Laurie, gave me a camera for Christmas ten years ago. When the owner of the camera shop in Raleigh, North Carolina, asked me what I'd be taking pictures of, I told him Pittsburgh. The city has captivated me since we first visited Laurie's family there a dozen years ago, and I'd just started researching its history and landscape. Have you ever seen Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh's photographs he asked. The previous night he'd caught an American Masters documentary on Smith and it mentioned a big project he did on the city in the 1950s. I left the shop and walked around the corner to the public library to look for more information.

Smith went to Pittsburgh in 1955 for a three-week freelance assignment to make one hundred photos for a book commemorating the city's bicentennial. He'd quit his job at LIFE magazine, where his photo essays had made him legendary, because of escalating editorial struggles: He wanted to change the world with his photographs and LIFE wanted reliable staffers who met deadlines. Smith's burgeoning ambitions outstripped the Pittsburgh assignment pretty quickly, and over the next four years he made 21,000 photographs of the city. At one point he had 2,000 5x7 work prints pinned to walls and bulletin boards all over his studio. His Pittsburgh opus may have existed in that form. But it was utterly unpublishable, and when 88 of the images were published in Popular Photograph's 1959 Photography Annual, he called the results a "debacle" and a "failure."

Posted on July 27, 2007 | If You See Something, Say Something / Issue 3 | Permalink

STOP.

As of January 27, 2006, Western Union discontinued its telegram services, thus sounding the death knell for one of the first forms of more or less immediate long-distance communication. I have never received a telegram, and now will most likely never receive one in my lifetime. STOP

Is this a failure of myself or of technology? Or another completely different kind of failure, having rendered service well enough to have made itself obsolete? In this way success—a perfect usefulness—folds in on itself and becomes its eventual failure. Is it like a star that burns itself gradually away. Is that the purpose of technology, to find its purpose and to fulfill it, to, like a booster rocket, exhaust itself and dwindle back into the atmosphere we like to call the future. STOP

Posted on July 27, 2007 | If You See Something, Say Something / Issue 2 | Permalink