Becca Jane Approximately
When your mother sends back your invitations
And your father to your sister he explains
That you're tired of yourself and all your creations
Won't you come and see me, Queen Jane?
Sudden Memory, Why I Could Never Live on the East Coast
A girl I once knew once had a thing with a guy who, besides being sardonically surprised that I knew who Walter Benjamin was (I am not sure why) once said to her in this teasing, irritating tone of voice “I bet I’ll get published before you.”
Like a mini Gore Vidal. Yuck. He was good looking, though, and had that “Oh I’m quiet and good looking so I must be that sensitive brilliant type, draw me out, fair maiden” thing going on.
We are slacking
Which don’t we have? I suppose people don’t hibernate but, Extensive personality reconstruction, check, see internet and astounding numbers of mood disorders. Memory-editing, check, we have lobotomies and shit, as well as ECT. You got me on the artificial placenta. Prolongation of youthful vigor (CHECK!!) Man-animal chimeras, check check checkity check. Anyone’s who’s ever had a non-human transplant is a human-animal chimera, hence the title of my autobiography The Pig-Man: A Daughter’s Tale. If, on the other hand, one hundred years pass and the Singularity is NOT here, I’m going to be furious.In 1968 G. Rattray Taylor published an essay titled The Future- If Any. The essay contains hints of apocalypse and includes the following list predicting the technical achievements of our current time.
BY THE YEAR 2000:
-Hibernation and prolonged coma
-Extensive personality reconstruction
-Memory-editing
-Perfected artificial placenta and true baby-factory
-Prolongation of youthful vigor
-Man-animal chimeras
Re: The Gwyneth Problem
I think I would enjoy Ms Gwyneth Paltrow if I wasn’t sure that she would completely hate me. Doesn’t anyone get this feeling from her? There’s nothing wrong with being a snob, but she’s just so…unrepentant about it, without having offered the world as much joy as her snobby friend Madonna. She was girlhood friends with Maya Rudolph, though, which says something about a person. I’m not sure what.
I’m loving Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP. (Those exercises have changed my life. Okay, maybe just my butt.)
This week, Dr. Frank Lipman, author of Spent: End Exhaustion and Feel Great Again, talks about ways to overcome that all-too-modern ailment, characterized by chronic fatigue, sleeping problems, morning grogginess, caffeine and sugar dependence, emotional exhaustion, etc.
As a devoted breakfast-eater, I’m always happy to hear how great it is for me. And the idea of the “electronic sundown” is a very good one — and probably the hardest habit to adopt.
a) Eat in accordance to your body’s rhythms. Since your metabolism peaks at about noon, it is better for your body to have a bigger breakfast and lunch and smaller dinner. Eat good fats and protein for breakfast because that is what your body needs for fuel during the day. Smoothies are a great way to get both of these into your diet. The typical sugar and carb-laden breakfast of a bagel, muffin, toast or sugary cereal are just about the worst things you can have, so avoid those at all costs.
b) Have an “electronic sundown.” At around 10 pm, turn off your computer, charge your cell in the other room and turn off the TV. Scan your bedroom for blinking or glowing lights – the alarm clock, the charging indicator on your cell phone, the DVD clock and timer, etc. Turn these off or cover the lights. Each little bit of light can stop your melatonin levels from rising, which you need to induce sleep and to reach the deep restorative sleep your body requires. If you can’t darken your room, wear a sleep mask. This period of darkness will help reset your natural rhythm.
c) Slow down with relaxing music. Music is one of the best ways to retrain your body to chill out. Our internal rhythms will speed up or slow down to match the stronger external rhythm around us. For instance, research has shown that when you are at a beach, your rhythms slow down or when you are in a busy city, they speed up. This is called entrainment. We are entraining all the time to our surroundings and the rhythms around us. Music is a wonderful way to help your rhythms entrain. Relaxing music slows heart and breathing rates and creates a feeling of well-being.
d) Invite ease with restorative yoga. Restorative yoga is the perfect solution to the over-stressed state we all are in. As you are supported in the poses, one gets the profound effects of yoga without having to exert any energy. Restorative yoga is one of the most physically reviving things you can do when you feel run-down, burned-out, stressed-out and spent. These poses are particularly good to chill you out at night before bed.
(Note from Gwyneth: My Favorite restorative yoga pose when I am extra burned-out is as follows: Lie on your back with your legs perpendicular against the wall so that your body is at a 90-degree angle. Have your arms out by your side with your palms facing up, close your eyes and breathe for ten minutes.)
e) Release tension with tennis balls. Buy two tennis balls, as these can be used to do self-massage, especially on your shoulders, back or feet. Releasing tight muscles will free up blocked energy and not only decrease pain, but energize you, too.
(Note: For the ultimate neck and shoulder release, you can lie on your back, knees bent and feet hip width apart. Place two tennis balls at the top of your shoulder blades, side by side, in the area where you would love to have a massage. Slowly lower your head and shoulders. Place a pillow behind your head if your neck is uncomfortable. Lift your arms to the ceiling, then move them slowly toward your knees and then toward the wall behind you. Repeat this 10 times.)
f) Add an adaptogen in the morning. Adaptogenic herbal formulas have been used by Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine for centuries. They serve as energizing tonics to help energize people who are weak or aging. These herbs increase the capacity of the body to adjust to the stresses of life. Lately, there has been much research confirming their positive effects. My favorite adaptogens are Panax ginseng, ashwagandha and rhodiola. Because they combat stress and are anti-aging, they are the perfect antidote to spent. (Note: Please consult your doctor before taking any herbs or supplements)
g) Practice ubuntu. “Ubuntu” is an African term that means what makes us human is the humanity we show each other. It’s a worldview that sees humanity as a web of family rather than a mass of individuals. When you relate in this way, you feel connected, energized and have a sense of abundance.
The Glorious Finale of John Updike Week!
“Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”
John Updike Week: Day 5, Philip Roth
Philip Roth is one of those writers whose reputation is giant, and thus whose work seems like it would be impenetrable and old-fashioned (like John Updike!) but who is a magnificant, terrifyingly good writer, capturer of the I-95 Male Specimen in Repose. From American Pastoral:
“He’d invoked in me, when I was a boy—as he did in hundreds of other boys—the strongest fantasy I had of being someone else. But to wish oneself into another’s glory, as boy or as man, is an impossibility, untenable on psychological grounds if you are not a writer, and on aesthetic grounds if you are. To embrace your hero in his destruction, however—to let your hero’s life occur within you when everything is trying to diminish him, to imagine yourself into his bad luck, to implicate yourself not in his mindless ascendancy, when he is the fixed point of your adulation, but in the bewilderment of his tragic fall—well, that’s worth thinking about.”
John Updike Week: Day 4, Meg Wolitzer
I know, WTF? Meg Wolitzer! She’s not even a guy! Whatever, she wrote a book about being the wife (and maybe more…spoilers…) to an Updike-esque literary lion called The Wife:
“By the time I was in college, I was desperate to have a big effect, to tower over people, to loom, which seemed a completely unlikely possibility in the occasional moments when I saw what I’d become: a slender, hygenic Smith girl who didn’t know much about anything, and had no idea of how to learn.”
John Updike Week: Day 3, John Irving
I have begun to doubt the…efficacy? Purpose?…of JUW, as I have not in point of fact ever read John Updike except for those churlish book reviews of his in the New Yorker. Nonetheless, “I can’t go on, I must go on.” John Irving is also named John and has an intriguing, writerly last name. The only book of his I could ever get through (A Prayer for Owen Meany has a little person in it, little people in books are so gimmicky) is A Widow for One Year, the heroine of which is a writer named Ruth Cole whose father is a bit of a cad and whose mother runs away from home:
” ‘But they’re always married women, Daddy,’ Ruth would say.
‘Yes, I guess that’s why they’re so unhappy, Ruthie.’
‘If you cared about your nudes—I mean the drawings—you would have chosen professional models,” Ruth said to him. ‘But I guess you always cared more for the women themselves than for your nudes.’
‘This is a difficult thing for a father to explain to his daughter, Ruthie. But…if nakedness—I mean the feeling of nakedness—is what a nude must convey, there is no nakedness that compares to what it feels like to be naked in front of someone for the first time.’ “
John Updike Week: Day 2, Richard Yates
Thank God for moving pictures, without which I may never have learned of Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road in particular, and this perfect depiction of the suburbs (which remains perfect, even as the dull suburbs morph into the haunting exurbs):
“The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.”
Looking through my computer b/c I don’t want to take notes on Jarhead—of all things!—there is this picture of Pres. Bush’s dog, Barney. It feels so symbolic, eh?
John Updike Week!
Recently, in light of my unemployment and subsequent loss of sanity, I have been quite project-oriented, and as I’m trying to get some writing done with my copious free time, this week shall be devoted to The Pre- and Post-Modern Updikeans, what I think of as the I-95 Literary Tradition. You will see what I mean further along in the Week of Updike.
First entry: John Cheever, the keeper of the WASP flame. In particular, the elegiac final paragraph of “Goodbye, My Brother”
Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand: how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming—Diana and Helen—and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.
Like a voice in prayer, isn’t it?
