ON ETIQUETTE; or, GOODBYE PDX! (ONCE MORE WITH FEELING)

really? the canadian dollar is stronger than ours? we'll definitely be filling the trunk at duty free before crossing the border, and the wine gums we bring back with us will be worth their weight in coffee beans -- word is that stumptown goes for twenty dollars a pound in new york.

my travel companion phoned this morning to say that she didn't think she'd have time to find me and give me the cash she wanted exchanged. (it's important to have a security detail that lives off the grid.) she asked if i'd just change a bit more than i'd planned to take for myself so that she could buy it from me later. "you just want two-hundred worth, then?" aren't words that should be spoken loudly over my work line. the conversation was harmless, sure, but it's silly to attract unnecessary attention. no one knows we're running those wine gums.

meet us at the drop off, vancouver.

THE NEW TRANSAMERICA: STILL FIGHTING FOR A BETTER WORLD

words without borders recently posted a new dispatch in a series "on reviewing translations," this one by translator, editor and reviewer tess lewis. in addition allying herself with the large minority of people who understand that, "Taking The New York Times Book Review to task for its neglect of translations is a regular (and vital) sport in the literary blogosphere," lewis also indicts careless reviewers of translations for their disservice to the craft of translating (and of reviewing) and proposes a standard for future reviews:

Important translations are so rarely reviewed at the length they deserve, that each missed opportunity for an authoritative piece is a double shame. Every translation is inevitably flawed, yet its weaknesses, like its strengths, can be illuminating as long as the reviewers are held to high enough standards. As a start, I propose one simple, inviolable rule: if you’re going to pass judgment on a translation, whether in one word or several paragraphs, whether laudatory or condemning, whether or not you know the original language, you should provide evidence to support that judgment.

although we read most of the books we've treated at this blog in their original languages, nearly all of our writing on books for other outlets (it exists!) has been on translations. we're not sure whether any of those translations have been of the "important" class mentioned in lewis' admonition -- and wonder what justifies her own judgment there. still, because of our fear of justified reprisal by authorities like lewis, we don't usually pass judgment on the quality of translations from a languages we don't know, but in some instances, one or another characteristics of a translation's language is marked (or grating) enough to warrant discussion. we wonder if this paragraph, excerpted from one of our columns at bookslut, would garner lewis' approval.

The Scale of Maps is heavy on metaphor. Gopegui employs it not just as a technique of language (e.g., "In a hotel room, on an unfamiliar table, I will draw the maps and give the final orders to an exiled band of guerillas in rebellion that is none other than myself") but also as a larger structural device that draws the borders of her central theme, what you might call a quantum mechanico-geographic repositioning of reality and imagination (e.g., "I'm a small man, but I have the feeling that you picture me within an even smaller scale, which makes me appear quite large. Couldn't you shift scales? Couldn't you enlarge your scale until, in your memory, I was the point that designates a town on a tiny map...?" or, "only when a woman is with me can I say that she exists, either as a wave or a particle. Thus all love is adulterous and all adulterous love is Schrödinger's cat, neither dead nor alive as long as we don't possess the woman"). Perhaps that's why Mark Schafer's translation seemed so plodding for the first half of the book. Was the figurative language so generally obtuse in Spanish? Was Schafer's just clumsy prose, or was The Scale of Maps a book that simply demanded to be experienced (and permitted) outside of "natural" language? Or, perhaps it wasn't the translator that found his stride as he worked through the book but the reader. Culling the first several dozen pages for a phrase about a mandarin that struck me as particularly awkward, I find the writing much easier going than on my first time through.

is self-deprecation sufficient evidence to support a judgment? maybe not. but just for good measure: words without borders had also recently posted a link to the list of finalists for the 2011 best translated book award (ay ay ay) at "three percent." we haven't read a single one.

GOODBYE PDX, LINGERING MEMORIES

the "salon daily" email that was still lingering in the inbox of my tertiary email account advertised an article on the ten most segregated urban areas in america, and i finally opted not to delete it and click through, sure that portland would have made the top ten -- and because i'm still waffling on the usefulness of purchasing one of those new digital subscriptions to nytimes.com. (new york, incidentally, is the second most segregated urban area in the country.)

portland, however, was nowhere on the list. granted, i wasn't at all put off by that result -- it was encouraging, really -- but i was very certainly surprised. portland has a not so illustrious history of racial discrimination and housing segregation, as well as a contemporary reputation as one of america's whitest cities. in fact, it's possible that portland is still so white that the maps that accompanied the salon.com article wouldn't have shown much contrast from one section of the metropolitan area to another, simply because no section isn't majority white -- and nearly all of them to an extreme degree.

lucky for lazy statisticians like me (i briefly visited censusscope.org, but couldn't find any easy to read city maps or ranking for cities outside of the top ten), the "oregon housing blog" recently ran a post on metro area residential segregation data in the northwest. according to that post, although white-hispanic/hispanic-white segregation in portland stayed roughly the same from 2000 to 2010 (dissimilarity dropped from 34.3 to 34.2), white-black/black-white segregation fell significantly over the same period (from a dissimilarity of 47.4 to 40.9).* maybe we're not so hypocritically intolerant as we thought. or if not, at least we're getting better. it's always difficult to gauge the relative awfulness of our immediate situation with what's going on outside of our progressive bubble. it's probably also true that, if it's not our generally overwhelming whiteness, our relative in-dissimilarity as compared to other educated, progressive-leaning metropolitan areas like chicago, new york and philadelphia is a reflection of our relative lack of money. the disparities of racial underclassing would seem to be less apparent where the really wealthy are fewer. (while similarly white, seattle is, probably by force of that argument, more segregated than portland.)

nonetheless, we're on an undeniable upswing of development and urban beautification. oregon was well ahead of the curve on cleaning up its meth house problem by requiring prescriptions for drugs containing pseudoephedrine. mississippi followed us last year. bills that would enact similar requirements were recently defeated in arkansas, kansas, kentucky and west virginia, but others have so far withstood attacks from the pharmaceutical industry in several other states (i'd read that article in the times already, so i don't think that clicking back to it today will count against my monthly nonsubscriber limit). portland, or: first in meth no longer! follow us, nation, unto the more mildly segregated future of sustainable urban development!

longtime residents love to lament how the city has changed over the last decade, but maybe there was something to the whole hipster thing after all.

*i'm not exactly sure what calculations are made to determine dissimilarities or in what units we should imagine the numbers, but the lower the number, the less segregated. by comparison, new york's overall dissimilarity was listed at salon.com as being at 78.04.

GOODBYE PDX, CONTINUED

it's us this time, but only temporarily -- and only possibly for keeps. a portland delegation will be traveling to vancouver, british columbia this weekend for the convening of a planning commission on the future of the republic of cascadia. several of the canadian commissars are shortly to be incapacitated by an important property sale, and our meeting, originally slated for the summer, needed to be quickly rescheduled for before may. in addition, none of cameron's, daedalus or st. john's booksellers have come through on a used copy of mercè rodoreda's death in spring (nor did a certain friend follow through on passing along his library copy), and our only option now for finding the book on a shelf seems to be to look outside the stops on our regular bookstore tour. (powells.com now lists a new copy available at w burnside, but knowing it's going to be there ruins the thrill of coming across it after just showing up at the store -- and that's what we've been at for these past two weeks.) in any case, the commission has business at solder and sons, and that's not too far from the used book mecca at w pender and richard sts, which is itself only a block from finch's. the edibles there are almost as appealing as the staff. maybe we'll even venture into the bangtown hair salon. the staff might even be waiting for rides back home from portland. from looking at them through the street front windows last time, we'd guess they've all been on a wait list for some serious work at atlas tattoo on albina. and that's not far from the apartment. if you're willing to squeeze, kids, we can fit three more.

GOODBYE PDX

this city couldn't be what it is without a constant drip of new blood (it's the essence of a creative city), but, accordingly, the city also has to accept that sometimes existing positions need to be swapped out: thriving in the culture trade means being willing to trade your own for the betterment of culture, which in turn means accepting an occasional exodus to new york, los angeles and san francisco -- and to who knows where for the kids that decide to go nomadic. those of us who stay are immediately bitter but ultimately contented, smug in the knowledge that the new friends of our old ones still think that the grass is greener here.

staying or going, every one of us can at least take solace in the feting of each going away, and last night it so happened that an important going away was feted, which meant, in the not so talked about beginning (not so many people knew), a deeply begrudging jostling for real estate, but after that the excitement and intoxication of a sale, a series of shows and a party. black licorice made her debut. before that, paintings of horses. during all of it, kombucha cocktails and quietly guarded bottles of (individually ported) beer. portland, or: love is a place.

but then (and how to not make this sappy?), the cover band. wait, though, there was a purple and gold "optimists" jersey that came downstairs to headquarters in the fourth wave of goods. and then (but very possibly during), the cover band. whether from the lingering spirit of past performances or the end of the vodka in the kitchen, the attic smelled faintly of, well, it's the northwest. better: it's portland. the all lady cover band came on (it was kind of an all lady party, but they happen to be our favorites), and they were note for note on every fleetwood mac song they did. m(organ).c(olleen). dance it out. but "heart of gold"? and really? "fast car"? i only went downstairs to avail myself of the light in the bathroom, but the crying in the hallway during that number was unmistakable.

you are this city, lady. goodbye, portland.

ON RELATIONSHIPS; or, FULL OF THE JOYS OF SPRING

it's possible that it's only because of the onset of spring and the accordant spike in the population's collective libido. there are the natural requirements of the season. it's more likely, however, that it's just that time in the relationship when it's necessary to put in the extra energy required to sustain the magic or just to call it quits in the interest of saving time and sanity -- not to mention alimony and broken crystal. i realized yesterday that it's been over ten months with the blog, almost a year -- which is pushing the shelf life of any honestly passionate relationship -- and that the situation had gotten noticeably stale, albeit gradually and imperceptibly until i happened to look back and take stock of the whole. (a shopper in vancouver -- or, who knows, maybe someone planning a visit -- found his way to the vancity shopping live blog from last summer.)

isn't that how it goes? eleven months later and you hardly know how you got here. this isn't not what you want. definitely not. how could it be? you didn't have much of an idea of what you wanted when you got involved in the first place. it was so fun and exciting, and that was enough for then. and your friends liked him. and through him you made new ones. what more could you want? except maybe to have it with someone else, or to discover yourself again in the relief of being alone. just thoughts. not that what we have is bad, but something has to be done about that staleness.

by what i may come to regret as a serious and lamentable momentary lapse in judgment (or maybe i've actually done some growing), i've decided that i want to make it work. the going won't be as easy as it was as the summer honeymoon transitioned to international adventures and then the holidays, but resigning myself to a different kind of progress is, from what information i can gather from my observations, the essence of a "working" relationship. we'll definitely have to address the issue of monogamy and infidelities. so far, i've only flirted with the idea of another blog, but, to be honest, it seems simpler and more fulfilling to have our desires met where they'll be received most enthusiastically. we have different needs. just because certain of mine are being satisfied elsewhere doesn't mean we're any less important to each other. like i said, i've only flirted, but it's not a bit ironic that the other blog is called "sex and compromise" (thanks, michael).

i also recognize that part of making it work is moving past old hangups. having been together long enough to look back and see that things aren't as easy as they we're in the beginning means having enough to look back on to know what didn't work, which then means forgiving, and asking for forgiveness, too. this can't just be about me. and wouldn't you know? salon.com's laura miller recently wrote an encouraging article/book review on "a cure for writer's block." she has some good things to say, and she's not herself a bad writer, either. my beef, now all but forgotten, was just the peacocking of a self-conscious new love. i'm sorry ms. miller, the world to me then was a different place. we're much less hyperlinked here now, and hopefully a little more thoughtful.

plus, she gives me an easy out (as helpful suggestion), both for today and for through the inevitable foibles of this relationship in progress: "some of the most famously 'blocked' writers, such as samuel taylor coleridge, wrote reams of stuff -- just not the stuff they thought they ought to be writing. it's amazing what you can get done when you believe you're shirking some other, more important enterprise." indeed. "that's what every blocked writer really needs: something more significant they should be doing instead, an earth-shaking, life-changing project you're stealing time from to work on this little [blog project]. or the great [blog project] you ought to be drafting while you knock off your memoir just for fun." you see? it's just that this thing we're doing has become so important to me. "sex and compromise" would actually bring us closer. no?

it can be confusing...but, then again, it's probably probably just the libido spike. pretty petty euphemisms are the joy of spring. i, however, am in it for the long haul -- with the stipulation that i might back out, remorseless, at any time. it's no use pretending otherwise, all of this is exactly why we fell in love. now if portland could just do us something about the constant rain.

HOW TO LOOK REALLY, EXCEPTIONALLY, IMPOSSIBLY GOOD IN PANTS

there's a part of it that comes naturally, naturally, but there's at least as much that needs to be learned -- in our cases, anyway. some people, of course, are different, but those are the instructors and timeless muses. before we looked so good in pants, there was a short-lived performance art group known affectionately (although not particularly known) as the metaphysical pet project, and its memory be damned if elizabeth taylor wasn't the godhead of its guiding pantheon. we've been through it all since then, mother courage. thanks for your help.

"the problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues." -elizabeth taylor

SAINTS YOU MAY NOT KNOW

it was definitely for the best that i was disuaded last thursday, the seventeenth of march, from writing on patrick mccabe's second to most recent novel, the holy city. i hadn't looked at the the article with which i'd planned to compare some of the book's more prominent social themes since reading it a month ago and didn't remember the title. had i had it on me last thursday, i surely would have stayed my own hand: regardless of what you might think of the church and the feast of st. patrick, directly addressing "the irish affliction" (as the article is called) on that day would be in unarguably poor taste. (likely hard pressed to find a date that didn't closely correspond with a prominent catholic feast, the new york times magazine ran it on the eve of valentine's day.)

fortunately, the intercession of the weekend hardly makes this review any less timely, because it wasn't in the first place -- but neither, for that matter, was the magazine article. the scandals that continue to plague the irish catholic church are hardly breaking news. rather, this post should be just casually regarded as the second installment in what might or might not become a loose series of articles on older books by former booker shortlist authors (begun with my writing, earlier this year, on my experience reading wide open by nicola barker).

the holy city was first published in the united states in december of 2008. it's first american edition was a paperback, which was probably the result of a lukewarm critical reception and that the original british edition's sales were correspondingly poor. i'd been a big fan of mccabe's since breakfast on pluto, but after my underwhelming experience with winterwood in 2007, i wasn't ready to pounce on what sounded to be just more of the same a year later.

and patrick mccabe has written quite a bit of the same. i've regularly described him as a more literary chuck palahniuk, principally because both authors make wide and deft use of punchy vernaculars in voicing their frequently delusional (and sometimes psychotic) characters, many of whom are men with mommy issues straight out of freudian analysis -- though they're not necessarily straight. (pussy braden and brandy alexander are both brilliantly written and wonderfully memorable.) however, mccabe's writing is, in general, less traditionally structured and punctuated than palahniuk's, which often lends an ethereal poesy to the fantastic flights of his characters' recollections and imaginations.

so perhaps by more "literary" i mean just more psychological, or maybe even just more european: i can't completely deny that i might just have been seduced by the exoticism of the gaelic lilt with which mccabe executes his narratives. still, for all their menial labor and common public houses, the culture of -- and attention to culture in -- mccabe's novels seems higher. in the holy city, for example, the protagonist has a near obsession with a portrait of the artist as a young man, and his style in telling his own story owes an evident debt to joyce ( although, while that's certainly an argument for mccabe's literariness, it's not, i suppose, a defense of my european bias).

in any case, i make the comparison with palahniuk mostly to argue that both authors have a similar appeal as a result of having mastered their respective offbeat voices. ironically, those voices, initially responsible for the excitement surrounding each author's cachet, have become equally redundant through their development over the course of the authors' careers. both of them have been rehashing the essentials of the same books for most of the past decade. which isn't to deny the talent of either one (nor to confirm it). if you're a fan, by all means keep reading. as for me, however, i don't plan on spending any more time with palahniuk. after reading reviews of the holy city, i'd resigned myself to being bored with mccabe as well. then out of nowhere: i longed for the sound of that voice and the feeling of its cadence. i really didn't care what it was about.

and the holy citywas more of the same. christopher mccool (just call him "pops") is the bastard son of the wife of henry thornton, a stiff upper lipped member of the protestant gentry, and stan carberry, a catholic, who lived down from the manor. chris grows up at a cottage he calls the nook under the guardianship of dympna mccool, another catholic, and is visited only infrequently -- and in secret -- by his mother, lady thornton, and one of her wealthy protestant friends. he spends his early adulthood as a fixture of the town's nightlife in the swinging sixties, during which time he figured himself to be largely reponsible for infusing cullymore with the swagger of carnaby street. the details are told in retrospect: chris the narrator is sixty-seven and living at an assisted living facility. he's been institutionalized at least once, and from his talking about his seeing his doctors there appear in his room in miniature to berate him, it's not too far a leap to assume that vesna, the deceitful croat with whom he now shares his life at the "happy club," is probably a doll.

chris also probably flirted with pederasty at one very formative time in his life, and he's definitely a racist. the swirling connections of all of his hangups and delusions intersect at his insecurity over being abandoned by his mother, which he does his best to disguise by insisting on his understanding of the natural differences between protestants, ambitious and even tempered, and catholics, recklessly passionate and superstitious, even as he struggles to rationalize his protestant aspirations and catholic urges. the holy city isn't simple (the title itself is a reference to a hymn that mccabe uses as a metaphor for chris' yearning for salvation through a sanctified love), but neither is it really unique among mccabe's other books. chris mccool reads too similarly to most of mccabe's other protagonists to really distinguish himself (specifically those of mccabe's best books, the butcher boy, breakfast on pluto and emerald germs of ireland). the tightly limited perspective that gradually reveals its own lapses of judgment and self-deceptions amidst the echo of period or pastoral song lyrics in the sanctuary of a constructed past pattern can only be repeated so many times before becoming utterly predictable, if not downright boring.

like i said, though, it had been a while, and i was happy listening to chris rave. and maybe it was because it had been so long since i'd engaged someone like him that i took some of what he said to heart. or maybe it was because of that article. "the irish affliction," by russell shorto is essentially just new reportage on the struggle of the irish people to work out their issues with a deeply entrenched catholic church that is increasingly mired in the emergence of more and more information about its sexual scandals. however, it also underscores the issue by tracing how over the last century, politicians and clergymen, despite the efforts of some of the irish intelligentsia, "wrapped irish patriotism together with catholicism, agrarian traditions and the gaelic language...[and] thus the 20th century image of "irishness" came into being: rural, charming, locked in an eternal, tragicomic struggle with the church."

the image of irishness in the novels of patrick mccabe is very much the same -- although in those books its strictures tend to make someone crazy or get someone. in particular, the holy city seems to represent that same irishness as it is being confronted by ireland's secularization. in his article, shorto describes the struggle of an increasingly wealthy and modern country to shrug the yolk of its traditional historical church-state relationship. as much as many irish people might view the church as destructively antimodern, others, "find the idea of abandoning catholicism to be as counterintuitive as giving up their racial or sexual identity [sic]."

while the ever present foil of protestantism has other political and historical implications in his case, chris mccool is still in much the same position in the holy city as the one described in the shorto article. "if you want 'the good times', there is no better period in which to be alive. nobody will bother you -- you can more or less do whatever you like...no one will care," he remarks from the happy club. "you can rest assured there will be no intervention. it makes the assertions of sixties freedom look so childish." in the nineties, money had come to cullymore, too. now that he has his macintosh computer, chris looks laughingly back on the days before the white room: "what i came, more than anything, to conclude was that, in fact, what had been taking place with that seventeen-year-old boy was that i had been projecting my own needs and desires on to him." (methinks that shorto should have added "darkly hilarious" to his description of irishness.) "and was using both him and the textures and colours and beliefs of catholicism to try and find a place, i suppose, a home for my own particular 'excitable passions'."

that realization comes to chris about halfway through his story, and it isn't his last. recantations abound in the holy city. vesna is a catholic, too, and in addition to having to deal with that mess, that boy continues haunting chris through the end of the book. but he's just a deluded old man, and had it not been for that article, i probably would have stopped reading before his own story made a complete fool of him. mccabe never lets chris say one way or the other what he's finally decided about his identity, but that indecision makes an important point. it's a good thing that mccabe has a knack for manifesting the rural charm of the struggle. the gothic humor helps, too: that was a good deal to write on a book i didn't really like.

COMING TO A LIVING ROOM NEAR YOU; or, JUST THE FACTS

the art and artifice of the culture critic aren't always appreciated for their scopic influence and import. if anything, the critic is most widely embraced for the ease with which he can be pilloried for espousing an opinion. established or otherwise, authority is authority -- which also denies the critic the satisfaction of playing the martyr.

so it's incredibly validating when hard work and honest observations are rewarded with public recognition of their merit. they might not have been the most popular films at this year's international film festival, but this critic's picks were nonetheless assiduously considered. thankfully, someone was reading.

"the housemaid" from south korea, our number five pick, is currently showing at living room theaters at sw 10th ave and stark st, a prelude to the opening of "heartbeats" by xavier dolan, our festival favorite, on april first. that's just the facts, no martyrdom no sainthood. claiming either would just be an embarrassment, knowing now that theater management is going to see this.

it's almost certain now that both films will get dvd releases (there are probably places -- places of course beyond the strictly critical purview -- where it's possible to find out things like that), but the theater has done its good deed. maybe that deserves a reward. you'll feel like you were at home anyway, because living room only screens digital projections. "heartbeats" will probably suffer for that, but it's worth the while to see dolan's pretty face on the big screen. get up and go.

ONE NATION UNDER CLOD

from the vantage of a completely free friday, the responsibilities of the end of the weekend seemed immediately deferable without sacrificing the merit of the work deferred, even having resigned thursday to other pursuits, recognizing the easy possibility of still getting things done ahead of time the next day. so, i practiced dance, albeit having turned down that same afternoon an opportunity to perform, and cleaned the drivetrain of my bicycle, both things a long time deferred themselves and so justified, but with the ashamed knowledge of executing both tasks principally to prolong fulfilling others. the drivetrain was particularly expedient to that purpose, being that polishing each tooth of my chainring and rear cog took increasingly more effort for the more time i was willing to devote to each part. without soaking my chain and having to re-grease it after resetting it, the other components were bound to get blackened by my first subsequent ride, but that didn't mean that the bike would ride any less well for the cleaning, only that the cleaning might have taken less time to realize the same result. it is, however, nice to see the silver shine again, if only for a moment.

and then saturday. it was completely out of my control that the weather was too nice not to go for a long and leisurely ride. my drivetrain was performing like it hadn't been in weeks after all, and i was all but obliged to ride up to the top of mt. tabor, if not just to test the result of my labor then to see the city in the light of a sunshine that, in this town, might not otherwise show itself -- if at all -- until late july. and then, of course, from there it would have been a travesty not to appreciate the smell of the daphne before it faded, as well as the special charm of the cherry blossoms before they came into full bloom, which forced me on a wide tour of the east side of the city. there really weren't two ways about it.

it's not that i didn't want to have things done. i did. in fact, i was looking forward to what i had to do. prolonging the fruition of desire is just a great way to enjoy the fruition in the meantime. procrastination is an ugly word for efficient time management. i can't help it if someone wanted to buy me a drink. it would have been awful to decline, knowing that i had the time, until now, to make good on my obligations.

fulfilled, somehow, i've dropped the stitch; but the light in this bathroom is perfect. i think i'll keep the beard. hold. place.

DON'T THINK OF AN IRISHMAN!

my betters seem to be of a mind on the gaucheness of posting pieces on irish authors on st. patrick's day, so it's turned out for the best that i don't have my copy of the holy city with me -- or even the article on the current straits of the irish catholic church that i had planned to contrast with my take on the novel. but i've nothing in particular to throw up instead. powell's still doesn't have a copy of death in spring on the shelves at w burnside. why even post at all? pat pig needed a shout out, that's why. cheers to all the emerald germs of ireland! but i'll be damned if i'm going to drink green beer.

ON CULTURAL ESCAPE VELOCITIES; or, THE LAHARS ARE COMING

yesterday, a conversation about the earthquakes in japan and what great loss and damage the country continues to sustain despite its wealth, ingenuity and preparedness turned from the topic of that most recent disaster to the preparedness of portland and portlanders for an earthquake here. there's an earthquake coming. that's for sure. the argument over when and what to fear has always been one of sooner versus later. geologically, we're due. but with all the seismic havoc that's been wreaked on the world in the last few years, it's easier to think that the big one might arrive before we've left. no one questions that every house in the west hills will slide into forest park and over the 405, regardless of whether the quake we get is of the magnitude of that first one that shook japan. unfortunately, now that the game might be up, more serious inspection (and honest introspection -- the kind that deals in realities) reveals that most of the architecture and infrastructure here probably wouldn't withstand anything close to a number nine.

portland might need a shaking up of late (ha!), but no one wants to die crushed under piles of repurposed rubble. (and we probably wouldn't have the economic means in the aftermath to re-repurpose everything into homes for all of the people currently sharing portland's oldest buildings.) it's scary. and no, we don't have the money for earthquake insurance, especially now that the premiums have probably gone way up.

apparently, however, i should be more afraid of a volcanic eruption at mt. hood, at least according to a friend who told me that certain cliffs near the mountain were cooled lava flows from some serious magma action at yellowstone a million years ago or something. granted, we're also due for a volcano, but i argued that even if mt. hood were to explode explode, it wouldn't spew any lava the sixty miles to the city, and the lava wouldn't flow so quickly that we wouldn't have time enough for some sort of evacuation. right?

frightened, i took a few moments out of this morning to look up mt. hood's eruptive history. if the mountain is going to pop, it's going to rumble first. the united states geological survey monitors seismic activity under mt. hood in order to predict volcanic behavior. if there's going to be an eruption, it will be preceded by a swarm of earthquakes coincident with the rise of magma to the site of its release. earthquakes and volcanos. now that's a disaster. but, it doesn't sound like any lava from an eruption at mt. hood would make it anywhere close to portland and the pile of sticks that was once my apartment building that i somehow managed to escape before its collapse.

in fact, the science seems to show that the most destructive potential hazard of a big eruption at mt. hood would be the lahars, muddy debris flows that would flow down from the site of the eruption through any adjacent valleys -- particularly into rivers. lucky for portland, the geomancers predict that the lahars would only get as far as troutdale, charging along the sandy river until they spent themselves in battle with the columbia. and getting there would take them four hours. still, it's understandable that some portlanders might still run, just hopefully not for the hills, because if seismic activity at the mountain corresponded to anything more general and more epic, the hills would be set to fall. the river basin seems safe enough, though. the demolition of the trojan nuclear power plant was completed in 2006. just don't head too far north. seattle: if mt. rainier goes, it looks like you're screwed.

DETENTE

portland received the delegation from new york city yesterday evening. the delegation arrived here at the same time as one of ours arrived in new york as hostage in reciprocation of good faith for the meeting being held on non-neutral territory.

new york was happy for the opportunity to sample local cuisine, although talks indicated that new yorkers still intended to enforce their ascendancy on the food scene. microbrewing in new york and the surrounding area has also made strides to bring itself apace of developments in the northwest. the new york delegation remarked at a man on an oversized unicycle stopped at the corner outside the window of the meeting venue. a tall bike was recently seen in brooklyn. new york insisted that the bike and its rider be summoned home as soon as possible. discussions were begun to open regular consultations for the improvement of portland's public transportation.

as per the agreements settled at a prior meeting, new york communicated portland's official greeting to thom browne, who the new talks revealed had been stripped of his important functions and remained in the city only as a figurehead. it was agreed that all future tribute should be sent only as gestures for the maintenance of amicable relations.

shortly after talks were adjourned, portland succumbed to nervous exhaustion during a debriefing. the delegate was awarded a chivalric order for fortitude in finalizing the accords.

HOW TO GET OVER YOURSELF; or, THIS WON'T BE THE FIRST TIME

there's nothing like a natural disaster for putting self-pity into perspective. i.e. there's apparently nothing like awful fate for ironically helping you get there.

here's to late night coffee and confirming the safety of friends. and here's to doing whatever we can to help everyone less well fated in the north of japan and the other elsewheres in the wake of the tsunami.

goddamn you hyperspeeded communication technology every night except this one.

staying up reading yoko ogawa until i know that everyone is ok.

ON HOPE; or, HOW TO CHEER YOURSELF WITH THE CERTAINTY OF FAILURE

the internet was down on my weekday computer, so i was forced into other distractions and had no choice but to plan a post in my head with naught but an old newspaper for inspiration. unfortunately, the arts and leisure section of the february 27th new york times featured a profile of lorin stein, focusing in particular on his manhattan party going. i was set ill at ease by how nonchalantly good in pants mr. stein came off in his profile and with reading the week in review from two weeks ago as my only alternative (what a day not to have a book in my bag), i went for a stroll to be inspired by the sights of the social services district and hatch a plan for becoming the editor of the paris review in eight years. with that magazine on my mind, i decided to head for powell's, which i hadn't visited, i think, since its recent layoffs announcement.

maybe i was distracted by trying to decide if i should ask an employee whether powell's was going to be okay to see if i got the canned response that powell's management had prescribed for staff in the wake of the announcement, but i bypassed the periodicals in the front room and walked directly into the blue room. p...q...r...it took me a full circle of an aisle to find the one book by mercè rodoreda on the shelves. it wasn't death in spring, the book i'd hoped to find, but i decided to buy the time of the doves because, well, i'd have bought and read anything by rodoreda, to whom i was recently introduced through her collected stories. if she's not my new favorite author (we should probably get to know each other better first), she certainly has me a bit obsessed. rodoreda wrote in catalan. from the introduction to the time of the doves (the rain had started coming down in sheets since i'd been inside, so i gave myself time to read): "the world has been slow to become aware of [catalan writing's] virtues -- partly due to a lack of good translations, and partly because of the franco government's deliberate suppression." "a writer's native language is usually his or her only medium of expression. if a language dies or is killed," david rosenthal, who translated as well as introduced the book, goes on, "then the writer also dies. thus, as with many catalan authors, [rodoreda's] personal story is of a kind of death followed by a recent and partial rebirth." rosenthal's translation is copyrighted 1981. it would seem that insufficient light has been shed on his subject since then -- though, to say nothing of the novels i haven't read, rodoreda's stories at least are about love in the worst way, and sometimes is nicer to stay in the dark.

the rain hadn't let up and the internet probably wasn't back up anyway, so i took my book with me to the small press section to scan the spines of old editions of the paris review. mercè rodoreda died in 1983. i bet lorin stein would print it if i could get an interview.

HOW TO MAKE HAY FOR THAT DEAD GIFT HORSE

it's old news, simply by definition, because i found it in the travel section of the february 27th new york times, which got skimmed yesterday for the pile getting too tall. (i'm waiting until i get my harlem mansion to commit to hoarding whole hog.) then a web searched confirmed that vancouver's municipal food cart restrictions had been the talk of the street food blogs since january.

the true north might not be as free as it sings. portland, despite its strict land use statutes and urban growth boundary, lets cart pods grow wherever they pop up. lupe of la jarochita, the best mexican cart in portland (or maybe just downtown: tranny tacos on fremont and vancouver has lately been throwing some knockout punches), just opened up a second cart, la jarochita 2, on the the same block as her original. la jarochita 2 serves only vegetarian items.

in vancouver, however, the opening of new carts is limited and controlled by the city council. in 2010, the city awarded ten new openings by lottery. this year, fifteen new carts will be chosen by a board comprised of foodies and bloggers overseen by vancouver coastal health. according to the blurb in the times, licenses will be granted based on criteria that include, "nutritional content; use of local and fair-trade foods; and diversity of options." the food at la jarochita is spectacular, but the best tasting of it is probably the worst for you, and i doubt that any of its ingredients are locally sourced, even the ones that go into its vegetarian options. who knows if la jarochita 2 would pass muster with the coastal health board. is vancouver making a play to take over the vanguard of cascadian cultural cool by melding its street food scene with the locavore mania so often used to both tout and lambaste portland?

methinks it's rather just another example of that lefty bureaucracy that those socialists are always trying to push. public health care is a nice perk, but for what social sacrifice? is a lead like that really what we need at the seat of our great, free and independent new empire? it looks like it's the rose city versus the city of glass in a smirking, self-righteous battle for the hearts and minds of the citizens of cascadia. which way are you leaning seatlle? do you even have food there?

ROMANCE AND ATONE; or, THE STYLISH URGENCY OF SECOND PERSON PRESENT TENSE

it takes just enough time to listen to metric's first three albums during the drive from portland to newport, which means that the round trip to the coast will take just about as much time as driving between portland and vancouver in british columbia. you might as well have taken the trip to canada, because you'll be driving as much today as you would have if you were coming back from there. listening to those albums makes you think of canada too, because you had the sense that you understood metric as a canadian band the first time you went to vancouver. you listen to "old world underground, where are you now?" first, and there's spring in the air and they're sweeping the streets when you leave the city in the morning, just like in that one song. love is a place, portland, oregon. you should have taken the trip to vancouver, because you would have avoided the weekend here if you'd have left for canada on thursday evening like you originally planned.

vancouver was no longer an option, but you still wanted to get out of town, especially after the weekend started in portland. you'd wanted to leave saturday night, the night before the morning you left, and find a motel near the beach, but not having slept on friday night made you reconsider the advisability of driving two or more hours alone in the evening. you might have braved it, but playing it safe meant also saving on lodging. so you saved on lodging but put off sleep again until you could really relax. even though it's daylight, it's probably not all that safe to be driving after two nights without sleeping, but you also weren't sure it was safe to have taken xanax after that many drinks and so didn't let it let you close your eyes on saturday night. now, sunday morning, at least you have a reason to use caffeine non-recreationally. a large one on the way out of town and a refill in philomath. staying awake those two nights meant you had to distract yourself on something, and because you'd thought about going to the beach you thought about newport and about that chair. now, sunday morning, you're going to newport to see about that chair. emily haines is singing on the car stereo and the sun is out. you aren't unhappy because you've gotten out of town, but she makes you think that you should have just gone to canada.

the newport antique mall (cheap frills) is right at the intersection of highways 20 and 101, so you head there as soon as you roll into town. "grow up and blow away" is nearly finished. when you came to newport for the first time ten months ago, a woman in a booth downstairs told you that the danish mid-century chair she was selling looked like it was your taste. it was definitely your taste for $65, but it didn't fit into the backseat of your economy rental, for which your passenger was paying half so you couldn't ask her to take the bus back to town. there is no reason to expect that the chair will still be at the booth. in fact, you don't remember enough about the rest of the antiques that were in the booth ten months ago even to place it. but there is no danish chair on either level of the mall. you do two sweeps. the other patrons make you feel uncomfortable by smiling and excusing themselves whenever you cross their paths. you would have bought the chair and taken it home had it been there, but it's a relief to know for sure that it's not. you recognize some of the other chairs. you still don't want them. there's a blue sign with white lettering that you like when you see it in your periphery and think it's written in cyrillic but absolutely hate when you see that it was just written without regard for consistent capitalization. you regard the mall more carefully and regret that the chair is gone. the best distraction is just to sink the cost of the gas and leave.

the crab cakes at the newport cafe are unspectacular. the grapefruit juice has added sugar. you can only sit at the counter, because although most of the tables on the floor are unseated, they're also all reserved. it's sunday, but one thirty seems too late for the staff to be expecting churchgoers. sitting at the counter means facing the television showing nascar. you read a new book. for ten pages. it's difficult to keep the book open while keeping it away from your greasy plate.

the floor staff of the newport cafe, a young woman and an older one, recommend that you go south to florence instead of north to lincoln city. they recommend florence for riding a dune buggy and as a result paint you an unappealing picture of the town. you decide to go south anyway, because you haven't been to lincoln city, but you have been to all points north of there through astoria.

you hope that florence has somewhere interesting to sit -- inside -- and watch the ocean. it's sunny but not very warm, and the beach probably can't comfortably serve you more coffee. maybe florence is something like astoria. you imagine a proud but modest old city center and hills of victorians. waldport and then yachats give you hope. the drive from newport shows you the most beautiful section of the oregon coast you've seen and makes you wonder if you shouldn't just keep driving south into california and pick up the seaside motel plan one night late. cape prospecta and the lighthouse are very literally breathtaking, because you swerve trying to look back over your right shoulder to get better looks. but, florence turns out looking less like you imagined and more like 82nd avenue in portland, a long strip mall for the dune buggy renters, and with all of its coffee carts closed. so you head back north. you remember seeing something with potential in yachats. on the way out of florence, you see the pic-a-dandy flea market for the second time and almost can't resist stopping. but you came to the coast to be distracted by your chair, even if just to be able to consciously direct the unfolding of your story on the one who got away. and pic-a-dandy is probably closed.

the promising place in yachats is closed. you temper your frustration, which is goaded now by fatigue, by dismissing the place based on that the yachats cove isn't visible from the parking lot. the views from the cafe windows couldn't be much better. most everything in waldport is closed too. the tavern is open, and so is the laundromat. so is the knife store. the shell station has gas for twelve cents cheaper than the chevron, so you turn the car back south and ask to be filled up there. the coffee only costs seventy-nine cents. delicious. you might as well head back before dark because you're not going any further south. you opt to take highway 34 through the suislaw national forest instead of retracing the road to newport and driving back the way you came. you haven't been on the 34. it's picaresque in the late afternoon light, and quiet. only two cars pass you for sixty miles. halfway back to philomath there's a town called alsea that smells like every resident must be burning firewood. you feel guilty at being charmed by the ramshackle buildings along the stretch of highway that goes through the town. with the caffeine and the wooded mountains, the driving scene is essentially the same as it was in the morning, but the experience is different on the road back in.

you hadn't listened to any music for most of your way back from florence, but after alsea you replace whatever replaced metric with some mix. there's a song by carole king. your chair. you don't know if you like carole king better or worse now that you hear her as painfully sympathetic to an actual experience. danish mid-century chair at cheap frills antique mall: "still i'm glad for what we had and how i once loved you." you search for other music and think again that you should have gone to canada.

THIS IS CAMELPOOCH

lookinggoodinpants is away.

AGAINST DELUSIONAL HIPSTERITY -- OR NOT

unless you follow the "laughing squid" link blog or, less likely, the webcomic "toothpaste for dinner" authored by drew (just drew) from columbus, ohio, you're probably as yet unfamiliar with a new term recently coined in the nationwide scurry to classify eraly twenty-first century hipsterdom before its extinction -- and no doubt soon to be added to the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. per drew's february comic (no link, because it's as easy to get stuck there as at "laughing squid"), "delusional hipsterity" denotes the belief that wasted potential is more important than actual success. and that's also the comic in its essential entirety (just without a couple of box heads talking about being in a band that doesn't release records or play shows), in case you want to spend your semi-meaningful distractions time elsewhere. (no links, because you'd never come back.)

the comic was funny, but seen in more sterile isolation, drew's definition is also a keen commentary on the state of young culture over the course of the last decade or so. the same kitschy primitivism that accessorized the hipster with low tech trappings for her high tech lifestyle also informed her ethos of cultural dissemination. kids might not have gone so far as to, say, as musicians, entirely eschew recording or performance, but the diy aesthetic that still dictates cool -- if not absolute rightness of behavior -- for a certain set definitely mandates a style of production and limits performances to certain venues. maybe. because of course that same set uses the internet to advertise and to sell itself and enlists its designer friends to digitally craft appropriately styled fliers, but only for distribution at appropriate locations so as to appeal to an appropriately sympathetic crowd. which is just marketing. but it's the way it's done, you see? maybe not. circularly defined: simply having a sense of it means having experienced it, and not wanting to disclose incriminating details of that experience means not wanting to accept a moniker that has been most popularly placed on those individuals who were most reluctant to accept it. why's it still so hard? coming out was supposed to help us shrug off all that hipster nonsense and give in to liking pop music again.

at the same time, a generation's collective nostalgia for its own early experience, as evidenced in its taste for pre-digital av playback devices and the entire american apparel catalog before american apparel declared the hipster over, is also a symptom of limited social and economic mobility for a group of people raised on prosperity but come of age in an era of increasingly diminished opportunity. the hipster looked back because cultural production in the forward direction seemed futile. the monotone platitudes of teddy ruxpin were far more comforting than the cultural pastiche that the ruers had themselves helped create. (everyone had also gotten really good training in talking about postmodernism.) in that sense, delusional hipsterity is symptomatic of a neurotic fear of failure by which the perception of reduced payoffs thwarts desires for productive participation in society. in economic terms, then, (scientifically, that is) a large scale submission to delusional hipsterity (or a small scale submission by a large percentage of the talented) would effectively be impetus for a cultural deflation spiral, hence the frequent casting of the hipster as the dead end of western civilization.

then again, the same aesthetic that lets the delusion take hold is of certain artistic importance. if not directly productive itself, the pursuit of aborted perfections is at least a stimulating consideration for the general discussion of aesthetics. the cultural anthropology of the hipster may be difficult to trace across such a varied topography of scattered hard evidence, but her demonstrated and romantic will to live in recognized obscurity is an alluring reason to pick up the trail. perhaps the spread of delusional hipsterity actually represents a broadening movement of intellectual acuity and maturity. the symptoms of the delusion aren't unsimilar to the contemplation of suicide, the aesthetic passion toward/implications of which often pop up in continental conversations on art and philosophy but rarely here. to act against one's objective better interest is truly a desirous (desired?) act. the question of what culture might have become is anyway more exciting than an established history of what it was. and that questioning might very well spur us to new heights of cultural production. accordingly, the hipster might prove to have been an important step in the evolution of the history of the new information culture after the dust settles on the ruins of postmodernity.

it's also possible that she was just lazy and bankrolled. probably, actually. the shrinks will likely just count up the beer cans and nondescript wine bottles and structure their diagnostics for delusional hipsterity around the ones for alcoholism. just like homosexuality. that comic is funny 'cause it's true.

HOW TO DISTRACT YOURSELF WITH TRIVIALITY, REPRISE; or, ON GETTING BACK TO YOUR ROOTS, THE SEQUEL

with the end of the film festival (which, the end of it specifically, has already been over milked), it's time to return to the ordinary calendar, which means a resumption of normal activity as per our established dictates of looking good in pants. even the chickens, not actually maimed in that imaginary incident of last may but then reduced by half during a raid in november, resumed a kind of normalcy yesterday with the introduction of two new hens to the coop. the rat that was burrowing under the wall of the run to steal eggs -- apparently the survivors of the raid had been laying through the winter and their trauma -- has been dealt with as well -- but not violently, and of course not by me. it's forty degrees and hasn't stopped raining since late sunday afternoon, the return of the true portland winter, but the signs seem to be pointing in the new directions of spring.

the world outside of portland and the festival having been all but ignored here for the past nearly three weeks, there should be more than enough to find to discuss in the catching up, even if it's a little bothersome not to have a scheduled project and have to come up with topics independent of the easy offerings of an institution like the film center (although march's french crime series has undeniable appeal). but so much happened! and that's part of the problem: not knowing which outdated information warrants commentary. borders finally declared bankruptcy, and the internet split on whether that meant an opportunity for independent booksellers. (a pasadena indie offered $20 gift cards to the first 200 customers to turn in their borders rewards cards.) "the washington independent review of books" (headquartered in america's most literate city) finished its first month. the libyan investment authority's sizable investment share in pearson was frozen and won't be paying dividends. and something about another sarah palin book. and that john galliano mess. (but the james franco boycott meant that no one was watching the oscars to see if natalie portman showed up in dior anyway, so...)

things were going well until i somehow found my way to page99test.com. personally, i'd never test read (or heard of anyone test reading) the ninety-ninth page of a book to gauge my interest in it ("because it's arbitrary. it's rarely as worked on as the elements we usually judge a book by [sic]"). apparently, though, it's an established practice of decades. i started today. page99test.com gives you a login and then throws ninety-ninth pages at you. some of the excerpted books have been published, others not. most of the ones i read were from genre fictions, which made the critiquing (would you turn the page? tell the author why(!), how likely would you be to buy this book?) all the more shamefully compulsive -- and unfortunately not because most of those fictions were very good. using the site is like playing petty editor in tweet breaths. that's as far as i got in my retracing, so it's as far as you'll get caught up before we jump back into ordinary time, which ends again for the caltholic church after next tuesday, but i think that we can give ourselves a bit more leeway.

semi-meaningful distraction! isn't that the very lesson we're supposed to have learned from all the writing about the internet (and on it) lately? consider yourselves served. and then visit that site and smile through those cringes. it's fun! we'll catch each other up later. the rat's been handled, so we don't have to worry about the chickens.

really, though, i'm a good father.