OSCAR WAO

Yes! I have been waiting for this book since December 2000, when a story called "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" appeared in the New Yorker. I liked the previous Junot Diaz stories I'd read, but this blew Drown out of the water, bursting with bravado and heart and breaking all kinds of rules. I was in my first semester at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where many of my classmates liked to formulate you-can'ts about all kinds of narrative strategies--you can't switch tense! you can't shift point of view! you can't leave this track unresolved! ("Can you ask them if they've ever read fiction?" my girlfriend in New York commented), so the pleasure of reading this raucous, tumbling, cussing, unwieldy, POV-shuffling thing, featuring one particular sentence that took up a full column and a half without stopping, thrilled me. I made copies of it and for the past seven years it's been the literary equivalent of that one song you always put on mix tapes. Friends, students, colleagues, woo-ees: they all get it from me.

This part comes about halfway in:

The first time I met Oscar was at Rutgers. We were roommates our sophomore year, cramped up in Demarest, the university's official homo dorm, because Oscar wanted to be a writer and because I'd pulled the last number in the housing lottery. You never met more opposite niggers in your life. He was a dork, totally into Dungeons & Dragons and comic books; he had like a billion science-fiction paperbacks, all in his closet; and me, I was into girls, weight lifting, and Danocrine. .... Those were the Boricua Posse days, and I never got home before six in the morning, so mostly what I saw of Oscar was a big, dormant hump crashed out under a sheet. When we were in the dorm together, he was either working on his novel or talking on the phone to his sister, who I'd seen a few times at Douglass. (I'd tried to put a couple of words on her because she was no joke in the body department, but she cold-crumbed me.) Those first months, me and my boys ragged on Oscar a lot--I mean, he was a nerd, wasn't he?--and right before Halloween I told him he looked like that fat homo Oscar Wilde, which was bad news for him, because then all of us started calling him Oscar Wao. The sad part? After a couple of weeks, he started answering to it.

Besides me fucking with him, we never had no problems; he never got mad at me when I said shit, just sat there with a hurt stupid smile on his face. Made a brother feel kinda bad, and after the others left, I would say, You know I was just kidding, right? By second semester, I even started to like the kid a little. Wasn't it Turgenev who said, Whom you laugh at you forgive and come near to loving?

The mix of slang and literary reference and Spanglish and comic books (Marvel and Daniel Clowes) sucked me in, but what I loved most about the story was the raw vulnerability beneath all the bluster and fast talk: people dying to, and for, love. But that was it. Nothing else from Diaz, at all. All I had was this photocopy from the New Yorker. Finally this June, another Junot Diaz story appeared: "Wildwood." And instantly I recognized Lola the sister, and lo, there was Oscar himself, and, joy, an author bio snippet that mentioned a whole book. Here it is! (Michiko Kakutani loves it.)

Thursday! I'm on it!
This is, like, my Harry Potter.
Also, Diaz comes to Powell's on September 25.

BRUISECAM, days one and two

Blinded by smoke machine and a row of bright floor lights, I stepped off a stage. I could have sworn there was floor there.

DAY ONE. It tingled for like three hours. I was all, Whatever, I don't need to ice it, and kept on working. Then suddenly, deep bone ache with every step.

It swelled to the size of a small mango. I mean, you could see the bulge in my jeans. I should have taken a profile shot.

DAY TWO

Here we see a more expressive palette emerging.

The trailer moment

Joss Whedon interview on The Onion. Love it. So long. This is sometimes the bane, but in this case the blessing, of the internet: no word count limit.

AVC: What do you mean when you say you write trailers before you write projects?

JW: I'll have an idea, and then I'll start to think about what's behind that, and what would be the big emotional moment, what would be the catch, what would be the thing I'd love to see. ....

The most obvious example, and I've used it before, is Buffy in the alley. I really thought about it: [Trailer narration voice.] "It's a bad town to be in, especially at night." There's the girl in the alley. "Especially if you're alone." And then the monster attacks her and she kills it. "And especially if you're a vampire." It was that turnaround, which I hadn't seen, and which has obviously been seen a million times now, but this was 20 years ago. I wrote that, and it's in the actual movie. They didn't use it for the trailer, and the scene isn't shot exactly how I imagined it. But when I'm thinking of a trailer moment, I'm not just thinking of how I can grab people. That's my whole philosophy. My entire career is in that trailer moment: The emotional highs of the movie, and the thing you haven't seen, and the thing you're longing for. They should all be connected.

That's just one of those things where I read it and I instantly want to go write.

Svag!

Amanda and I hit the IKEA Grand Opening on our way out to a dog romp--we didn't bother waiting in line, etc., just barged in on the opening ceremony. You missed: TV crews, Swedish national anthem, old man in knickers creakily cranking up Swedish and American flags, ladies in Swedish national costume handing out canary-yellow swag, Tom Potter droning, finally ABBA blasting "Dancing Queen" as the manic hordes burst forth and flooded (shuffled) through the doors, waving their inflatable IKEA thunder-sticks.



Picture the throngs below streaming out of the left side of the frame and all the way around the back of the building, where hundreds more patient consumers waited in the paved and barren shadows, far out of earshot and sight of the "entertainment."

The front-of-line people started camping out on Monday for the Wednesday morning opening. For this, they were rewarded with I WAS ONE OF THE FIRST 100 AT PORTLAND IKEA T-shirts. (Which you can see tied around/tucked into? the waist of the middle lady.)


Amanda and I targeted the Swedish dames like fighter pilots, swooping in on as much tacky swag as possible in fifteen minutes. (The dogs were waiting in the car.)



I am unexpectedly excited to now own a "cellphone chair," a yellow nerfy thing upon which my battered mobile is currently resting.

The future is waiting

Backstage at the Rock'n'Roll Camp for Girls showcase last night.

ROBERT, 1975-2007

My friend Robert died last night. He was found in his apartment in Oslo by a bandmate. It is in the Norwegian newspapers.


(That's Robert, on the left. Then Frode, then this other singer Ane Brun, then Sivert.)

I met him in 1997, during one of a handful of amazing summers where I'd go to Norway for a whole month. He and his bandmates had moved from their tiny town way above the Arctic Circle to Oslo, to make it as a band. They were called Abbey's Adoption, one of the worst band names I've ever heard. (Also: imagine it spoken with a Norwegian accent.) Frode explained (sheepishly) that, unable to agree on a name, they had opened up the English dictionary to A and picked out two of the first words they found. Fortunately, they dropped it after like two shows and became Madrugada.

Miraculously, they actually did make it and became one of the biggest bands in Norway.

I originally wrote way more in a huge long post here but it made me feel weird, writing all these things about it. I haven't seen Robert in a few years. But he was a sweet, kind person, and I knew him at a really good time in my life, and his. And I'm terribly, deeply sad that he "left," as they say in Norwegian. His summer was booked with shows and he was in the middle of recording Madrugada's fifth album. He was only 31, two and a half weeks older than me. Isn't in medias res where you're supposed to start, not end?

Hva tenkte du, kjære venn? Du var ikke ferdig her.

WE ARE GONNA BREAK IT DOWN FOR YOU

The rock camp session one showcase was one of our best yet.
The Today Show was there to film it! Segment airing sometime in the next couple weeks!
Here are photos.

UPDATE: Here's the Today Show segment. I am in it for two seconds. Disclaimer: I had no idea they were going to be at camp when I arrived the first morning of the session. I definitely had not showered.

MUST SEE

I've been intrigued by Elizabeth Huey's paintings ever since some random MySpace browsing led me to her website. I love the combo of architecture and woods and catastrophe and human iconography--kind of reminds me of my friend Aaron Spangler's incredible rural-apocalypse-themed wood carvings, back when they were colorful (now he paints them all black.)

And now she has a show in Portland, up through July 28 at Quality Pictures. I am dying to see it.

This is how it looks:





Here is her website, and here is the Mercury review.

This is what happens when you let people name their own roads

A couple of years ago, Minnesota decided it was time to name all the roads up north that previously were just "second left after the Vacationaire sign" or "three miles past Two Inlets, when the road makes a big S-curve, look for the sign that says Minimum Maintenance Road" (Amy and Aaron's) or "HC 05" (my parents'.) So they did this thing where they let the residents of each road name it themselves. In Hubbard County it was alphabetical--you got assigned a letter, everyone submitted ideas that started with that letter, and then the top three went to a vote. Thus did HC05 become Far Portage Drive, and the sequence was born of Flaming Pine Road followed by Flamingo Drive (?).

Driving through Beltrami County tonight, in the woods north of Cass Lake, Tove and I saw these roads. Not alphabetical, but clearly resident-determined, these are their real official names.



Honest to god.

"Woman, the New Social Problem"

My far-flung friend Gail O'Hara linked to this piece by Meghan Falvey called "Woman, the New Social Program" on her Chickfactor site. It starts out plenty satisfying, tearing up some of the most prominent and irritating new arguments about what women are supposed to do with their lives (see: Maureen Dowd, Caitlin Flanagan), but then it really takes off when she connects the issue not only to gender but to class, and to all people, not only women. Love and work are unstable; love and care become commodified.

In our private lives, the transformation is just as profound. Our default serial monogamy, our noncommitment and obsession with self-refashioning—these resemble nothing so much as casualized employment. Economic and romantic life converge, in a register of profound insecurity defined by constant movement—in and out of capital markets, jobs, relationships.

Here's the rest.