NOVEL ATTEMPTS by ashraya gupta

Went to: Cape Cod, Providence, Upstate New York, Long Island, more Upstate New York.

Saw: katie reedy, ferries, traffic, cranberry bog, rachel lindsay, sand, bay, the last caper, ice cream cones, cirrus clouds, storm rolling in, ocean, salt water taffy, sunset, fullest of full moons, red brick, warm bakery, eric cardona, green moss, steel lavender lake, gibbous moon, nellie bean d’amico, gabel d’amico, eda d’amico, delicious frittata, half penny pub, chelsea hoffman, dave perry, justine ambrose, tom murray, malcolm charles, nick wuest, frank at friendly’s, some pirates, zach gomes, colin norman, van delivering newspapers to 7-11, rabbit, bad traffic, worse traffic, adirondacks, lake george, miniature golf courses, greasy restaurants, antique boats, small swimming pool, empty motel room, chocolate chip pancakes, home.

Read: Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Self-Help by Lorrie Moore, American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

Tags:   Summer · The Last HurrahNo Comments.

Willie Hutch, “I Choose You”, 1973, from The Mack.

Recognize that? Yeah.

The whole soundtrack is good.

Also, I recently happened upon the craziest version of Stevie Wonder’s “I Love Every Little Thing About You”:

Syreeta (Rita Wright), was married to Stevie Wonder and composed a lot of his early hits with him (i.e. “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)” and “If You Really Love Me”). They got divorced pretty soon, but kept working together—Wonder produced her first album, Syreeta (1972, MoWest), which opens with this track. Wonder’s version came out later that year, on Music of My Mind. Anyway, the syncopation on this first version is awesome, as is the wacky bass.

Tags:   Funk · Hip-hop · Learned · Motown · Outkast · Sampling · Soul · Stevie Wonder · Syreeta · The Mack · UGK · Willie Hutch1 Comment

Today, I found this.

It’s the myspace blog of someone I do not know, but contains a series of posts that are, well, mine. From my best-left-forgotten livejournal.

Initially, I thought she was mocking me (deservedly, I cringe a little reading these), but then I got to the poem I wrote when Udbhav broke his wrist. She changes the first line to “My cousin broke his hand the other day.”

Wack!

Dear Nanosaur, who are you and why are you stealing my Structure & Style I writing exercises? Sam Lipsyte would not approve.

Tags:   Bizarre · Identity Theft · Internet · Plagiarism1 Comment

Most of these are quotes from other people. It seems I spent a lot of that summer just writing down whatever I overheard—on the ferry, the train, even amongst my friends. Some are notes for articles for the Fire Island News. A few attempts at fiction. And some regular journal entries.

“Come back, Communists! All is forgiven!”

“I know those doctors, they write letters all day.”

“I had to go to Long Island for nothing!”

“They drill two holes - with a drill, huh?”

“That ain’t no movie, it happened for real - he thought his boss was messing with his girl, so he made her watch as he cut him up. You know what he did for a living? Guy was a butcher. Yo, he gave my man prime cut.”

“We’re passing a boat called ‘Zee Whiz’”

“Top deck of the ferry to Ocean Beach. The girl across from me is reading a book called The Bitch Posse. She’s got a septum piercing.”

“Are we Plover 2 or Plover 3?” “I think we’re Plover 3.” “Did they say Plover 3?”

“Doesn’t it look like God has his high beams on?”

“Yesterday, I met a man named Miguel. He asked me if I spoke Spanish and wanted to know the time. I said ‘No’ and ‘4:15′. He told me he had a daughter about my age, ‘in Mexico,’ he said. His hands were the same color as mine, but his eyes were light grey and he was wearing a tightly woven straw hat. We were underground, waiting for a train.”

“For the next week, she kept picking at the zits, popping them as she told us about the mountains, how it could be cold and foggy on one side and stifling hot on the other. Redwoods, vineyards, Thursday markets with twenty types of mushrooms—she dug her nails sharply into one pimple and said she loved fresh produce.”

“I was not a boater. My family was not boaters. I like history and my wife dared me.”

“My jawbone’s giving up on me.”

“Once, he was almost charming.”

Also, unrelated, women’s gymnastics qualifications were yesterday. Awesome!

Tags:   Fire Island · LIRR · Remembered · San Francisco · Summer1 Comment

Anna: I was like, “I’ll play with Mike and Rob cause…Hey, why not? But I’m not going to DO music.”
Me: Yeah. You guys are like the guy I shouldn’t date but can’t help sleeping with.
Anna: You ARE dating us.

The Kitchen Cabinet tours Europe!

Tags:   Conversation · Music · Remembered · The Kitchen Cabinet1 Comment

Going home means I always wind up rereading some book I loved when I was younger. I remember picking up The Mill on the Floss the summer we moved to Long Island. I was about to enter 7th grade, knew nobody in town, except for the 6 year-old boy who lived with his grandparents next door.

We went to the beach a lot that summer. The house was always dusted with sand. With little to do, and the sudden freedom of a bedroom somewhat removed from the rest of the house, I stole cigarettes from my parents and chain-smoked them late at night. They made me dizzy, languorous. I would listen to the breeze from the bay as it swept through the trees.

It was a humid summer, long. I remember my floorboards became uneven from the moisture in the air. Or maybe it was something to do with the plumbing.

I read all 535 pages of the book in three days, completely absorbed, rarely moving from the couch. I swallowed up the tumultuous novel, its pain, its heroine. Maggie Tulliver suffered from very familiar childhood anxieties and guilts. Early in the novel, she cuts her own hair, with the help of her brother, Tom. Her reasons were different from mine, but I recognized “the satisfaction of making a pair of shears meet through a duly resisting mass of hair.” I loved Maggie’s weaknesses, her determination to be good, her conviction that she wasn’t.

Anyway, I still do:

“Oh, it is difficult - life is very difficult! It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; but then, such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us - the ties that have made others dependent on us - and would cut them in two…Many things are difficult and dark to me, but I see one thing quite clearly: that I must not, cannot, seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural, but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned. Don’t urge me; help me, help me, because I love you.”

I tried for years to read more George Eliot, but couldn’t seem to give any of her other books the same attention I gave The Mill on the Floss. I finally read Middlemarch last winter. While it shares (perhaps even exceeds) the complex portrayal of betrayal and renunciation of Eliot’s earlier novel, I think Maggie’s childhood portrait still speaks more to me.

Maybe it’s because Middlemarch deals more with marriage, or perhaps it’s the religious and political tones of the novel. The Mill on the Floss seems somehow more intimate, more familiar. It is the story of a family, of a girl and her brother. A century and a half later, it is still just that.

Tags:   Books · George Eliot · Literature · Long Island · Remembered · Siblings · The Mill on the Floss2 Comments

“If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children,” the judge ruled.

Tags: 1 Comment

The Cabinettes Live at the Silent Barn

Tags:   Created · Music · Silent Barn · The Cabinettes · The Kitchen CabinetNo Comments.

• Haribo is not Japanese
• Yes, Vampire Weekend and Wes Anderson use the same font
• Charles Darwin may or may not have done drugs, but his great-great-grandson did

EDIT:

michael: ash’s new blog post = rob stenson facts of the weekend

Admittedly, all this information was gleaned during the Cabinettes’ grand excursion to Sayville, N.Y., mostly by Rob navigating the internet. Also, Rob named his iPod “The HMS Beagle”. Mike didn’t bring his iPod, but drew a really great picture of a wizened old man riding a mechanical dragon creature.

Tags:   Charles Darwin · Futura · Haribo · Learned · Typefaces · Vampire Weekend · Wes Anderson · WikipediaNo Comments.

Tags:   Comedy · Learned · Sarah Haskins · Target Women · Yogurt2 Comments