late saturday night

even when i know i should be frugal, i can’t resist buying a new book or two. i’d been feeling the urge to wander a bookstore all week, and friday night, i ended up at bookpeople – essentially the only good bookstore in austin, as far as i can tell. wandering the fiction section, i paused in front of a paperback with an arresting cover. it had caught my attention before: a woodcut-looking image of a young girl, two braids, upturned eyes, looking mildly horrified, as if straining to see the word ’stories’ plopped in the middle of her forehead. promo quotes from salman rushdie (front cover) and yann martel (back) caught my interest. the book, the girl on the fridge by etgar keret. so far, it’s fabulous: incredibly short stories, infected with a magical realism that recalls murakami and marquez. delightful.

academic books

it’s actually satisfying to read ‘academic’ books that feel useful to me. as i sit around with my fingers and toes crossed, waiting to hear from the master’s program at texas state, i’ve been occupying a good chunk of my time with two books that are helping me get back into a more scholarly mode.

the first is the craft of research by booth, colomb, and williams. i pulled this off a list of recommended research reads on the yale university library website. it’s pretty solid, explaining in simple language every step involved in the creation of a research paper – from subject matter to final product. even the early bits, which felt a little basic, were a helpful refresher. as silly as i say telling people that i’m reading it, it has given me some ideas of how to improve my academic reading and writing processes.

relatedly, but more directly focused in my field, is david ball’s backwards and forwards: a technical manual for reading plays. as simplistic as its premise is, this thin volume is a straightforward explanation of how to read plays to get at the heart of their meaning. basically, it reminds you of the basic elements of a play and very clearly explains how observing those elements critically will help you translate the words to the stage in an effective way, while still leaving lots of room open for personal interpretations of the work.

today’s notebook (6/22)

started my day with some npr live concert podcasts. the first was a boston band called passion pit. they’re getting lots of buzz right now, but i don’t enjoy them. saw them play at the middle east downstairs, in cambridge, ma, last year. i just found them to be an unpleasant mash of too many synthesizers, and a singer who wanted to rock a falsetto, but doesn’t quite have the power or nuance to make it any fun at all. just not my thing, i suppose. and i just listened to the new single – very nicely produced, but still boring.

i quickly hopped over to an allen toussaint performance, and i’m totally blown away. i see marc ribot is on guitar for this (long-time tom waits collaborator and brilliant guitarist), and they just played ’st. james’ infirmary,’ an all-time favorite of mine.

central texas drought

when i moved to austin from boston last fall, i knew i was making a big change in a lot of ways, including climate-wise. boston varies wildly, with icy winters, wet, sloppy springtime, hot, buggy summers, and autumns marked by red-gold leaves and crisp, dry air.
austin, i knew, would be much hotter. i wasn’t likely to see more than the faintest traces of snow, but it’d probably be pretty pleasant biking all winter long. summers – stretching from may to almost october – would be hot, hot, hot, starting in the 80s and climbing the thermostat to rest around 100 degrees in august. winter coats would be a thing of the past, but so would frozen nights huddled in a drafty apartment. air conditioning would become a life-saver, and evenings would be cooler, and would find me on my bicycle in austin’s quiet nighttime streets.
what i didn’t realize was that i was moving to a part of the country that had been experiencing drought conditions for the past year. in fact, austin itself has been experiencing an extreme to exceptional (the two worst drought categories) drought since the day i rolled in to town last august. it shows – june normally has an average high temperature of 91, but it’s been hitting 96-100 almost every day this month. normally, we’d get almost 4 inches of rain in June, but we’ve barely hit 6/10″ so far. The Austin American-Statesman has an interesting interactive drought map.

(incomplete notes)

rebirth

i’ve decided to change things up with this blog. i need to gather my ideas and store them somewhere more organized than my million scattered notebooks. so that’s going to happen here. sometimes it’ll be just like old times (music/film posts) but mostly not. hopefully it’ll still be interesting.

what is desecration? will the soul say goodbye?

I read a great article, The Ghosts of Doongerwadi, in Harper’s Magazine this month – a look at the dwindling Parsi community of Bombay.

My thoughts/notes: Parsis are Indian, descendants of Zoroastrians who came from Iran. Mostly they live in walled colonies in the Bombay area.
They observe dokhmenashini, a Zoroastrian ritual for disposal of the dead. Bodies are laid in dokhmas – squat, roofless, cylindrical structures where only pall bearers (khandias and nassalars) may enter.
Zoroastrian belief: burial desecrates the earth, cremation desecrates fire, leaving a body to the river or the sea desecrates water. This seems to be a religious ritual with a practical purpose – vultures pick clean the bones, which are tossed (cleaned and bleached from the sun) into a pit in the center of the dokhma. Any remaining waste flows in underground channels to charcoal-lined pits, which purify the passing fluids.
But industrialization has corrupted the ritual. A cheap medication taken by arthritis sufferers in India passes into the vultures who dine on the (often arthritic?) dead, causing kidney failure. Without enough vultures – the most voracious of several varieties of flesh-eating birds – the dead aren’t eaten quickly, so they begin to rot. And smell. The underground channels have been destroyed as development encroaches on Doongerwadi – a large Parsi funereal site in Bombay – so the passage is clogged with human remains. Further polluting the area, one would imagine.
The stink rises, so now the pallbearers must simply bury the bodies – after lip service has been paid to the old Parsi ways. So the pallbearers must lift heavy, rotten flesh.
There’s spiritual release in the practice, of course. Zoroastrians believe that the soul at the time of death is in a traumatized state. For four days, the soul awaits its judgment, and should be comforted. Candles lit near the body let the soul know where to find its familiar home, hovering over the body.

What a sad, strange thought, eh? Yet plausible, to me. It feels to me as if my feelings, my emotions, generate from the body, but are beyond mere bodily functions. If anything is going to survive after death, is it the brain (which, despite symbolism to the contrary, is where we store our thoughts)? Does the brain’s activity continue for some time? Does it exist independently of the flesh? I’m not sure, but I can imagine my body dying while my essence still burns with life. And with any intense change, isn’t one often unsure what to do? Think of your heart – the meaning inside your heart – waiting beside its longtime home, whose doors have suddenly shut for good. Like waiting on a doorstep outside your old home. A place you can’t return, but a familiar place all the same – the departure can’t be easy, even though it’s inevitable.

I have a lot more to think about this, later.