January 2007 Archives

My good reader, you embark now on a tale epic in nature, filled with tragedy and loss, grief and anger, fiscal nonsense and monetary ruin. It is many a man who has been brought to his knees by the saga of the one dollar Metrocard!

In New York City there lived a man. A man who, like many New Yorkers, rode the subway. A man much like me. But not me. Because this story is fictional. Let's call the man something soothing and generic, a strong, definitive name yet still ambiguous, a name that holds potential. But not too much potential. A name that defies the individual and instead captures the ideal that is the Everyman. Let us call him Man A. No. That's too much potential. Let's call him Man B. Yes, Man B.

Man B, as previously mentioned, rode the New York City subway. He used his pay-per-use Metrocard and each ride cost him two dollars. When he ran out of money on his Metrocard he would buy a new one for twenty dollars, getting the four dollar bonus. That's two rides free!

Then one day he needed to go to JFK Airport. Man B took the very convenient and comfortable MTA Airtrain. This cost him five dollars, also paid on his Metrocard. Due to various travel reasons that are irrelevant to this epic story he returned to New York via Newark Airport, taking the also convenient NJ Transit into Penn Station, for which he paid via credit card.

This meant that later in the week, after a few more subway rides, he was left with ONE DOLLAR ON HIS METROCARD! ONE DOLLAR!

For some time Man B clung to this Metrocard, refilling it and refilling it, always ending up with one dollar remaining. He couldn't throw away the Metrocard because he'd be throwing away one dollar, but he also couldn't figure out how to use that one dollar.

Finally, out of desperation, instead of refilling his Metrocard with twenty dollars, he pressed the "other amount" button and entered nineteen dollars. This would give him a total of twenty dollars. Of course this meant he was forfeiting the bonus four dollars simply to save one dollar. Perhaps not the wisest financial move but he didn't think about that until it was too late.

BUT, the Metrocard vending machine was too smart for him. While he did not get the four dollar bonus, he did still get a twenty percent bonus provided to all amounts purchased over ten dollars. This meant an extra three dollars and eighty cents, leaving him with a Metrocard containing twenty three dollars and eighty cents. Now he would be left with one dollar and eighty cents. WORSE THAN ONE DOLLAR!

Perhaps he could keep refilling his Metrocard in this way until he was left with an amount of money divisible by two. But no, because the twenty percent bonus meant that he'd always cycle back to one remaining extra dollar. Man B isn't going to go into the details right now, but trust me, Man B worked it all out on an Excel spreadsheet to double check and he's pretty sure about it. Man B can't quite explain why it comes out this way but he's fairly certain it has something to do with math.

Man B, thanks to the help of his Excel spreadsheet, discovered that the best he could possibly do would be to end up with an extraneous twenty cents on his Metrocard. Either that or take another one-way trip to the JFK Airport which he didn't expect to happen any time soon. Or he could put nine dollars on his Metrocard, avoiding the twenty percent bonus, but that would mean trading two dollars for one dollar, and now that he recognized this negative outcome he felt kind of foolish about doing it. Or, alternatively, he could take a round trip into New Jersey on the Path train, which charges a dollar fifty per ride and also accepts Metrocards. But why would he want to go to New Jersey?

The End

I've been debating getting an iPod (and I use the term "iPod" as a brand eponym for any mp3 player). One of my major purchase rationalizations is that such a modern music-playing device will motivate me to work out more frequently. I hear there is also such a thing called "podcasts" where in which a human will "cast" via said "pod," in ideal cases this casting will be done by a human who interests me enough to jog and listen simultaneously.

This morning I attempted to prove this rationalization by borrowing my roommate's "nano" (so-called because it draws power from microscopic, dancing nanobots, hence the fact that its name is not capitalized) when I went on my tri-weekly (oh, let's be honest: monthly) treadmill jog. For the first half of my workout the iPod seemed to be working; I ran with an intensity not seen before in this basement gym. Music served as a primal encouragement, like echoing drums before the hunt!

Then halfway through my run my left leg began to cramp up and my will to jog slackened. The miraculous nano appliance began to fail me. It is important (in fact, crucial to this post) to note that this weakening resolve coincided with the departure of the attractive woman who had been heretofore occupying the treadmill next to mine. Is it possible my exercise determination originated not from the music but from my instinctual desire to look manly next to a female of the species?

Yes.

Fortunately, at the precise moment of my waning spirits, the intelligent nano-based music player served up The Clash for my listening approval. Approved! I found the strength of character to jog another five minutes, or at least until my laundry cycle completed.

Morals:
1) Instead of getting an iPod I should pay a woman to watch me jog.
2) The Clash should always be spread abundantly throughout my playlists.
3) I should stretch more before running.

I always delay saying I've "completed" reading a book of short stories because I rarely read all the short stories in a collection. No matter how much you like an author it's difficult to read every single story, especially when there are sixty of them. Anyway, I've read at least 40 of these stories, and since that's enough to fill up a different Barthelme book, I'm going to go and log it now.

Barthelme is, of course, great. I've read The Dead Father multiple times and I've been flipping through his books of short stories for ages. I get a little tired of the stories which consist of nothing but disconnected dialogue, and while they can be very rewarding I started to skip them after reading 10 or so.

Some of my favorites are: "The Balloon," "The Dolt," "The Captured Woman," "I Bought a Little City," "Cotez and Montezuma," "The King of Jazz," and, of course, "The Zombies." Oh, man, it's so good.

Note: I linked to the 2003 edition of the book, I actually read the 1993 edition. That's because the 2003 edition has an introduction written by David Gates, who is my thesis advisor. Maybe I should buy that one instead. :)

A few years ago I was clawing my way up the corporate ladder, I took medication to quell the roiling flames of daily indigestion, I lay my head upon my desk - actually placing my forehead on the smooth, cool wooden surface - as I pondered the fate of a team amidst corporate scandals and government lawsuits.

Now I scramble to make rent, I sit all day in coffee shops without buying anything and worry someone will kick me out, I squeeze my fists so tight that my fingernails leave permanent indentations upon my fleshy palms... all to produce one or two paragraphs a day, maybe only a sentence, that tomorrow I will rewrite or reject, churning towards an irrelevant final work that no one will ever see.

Two revelations:
1) I do not know what's good for me.
2) I am, despite my best efforts, the embodiment of cliché.

But no one knows what's good for me. And, like the Theater of the Absurd, the necessary existence of a formal structure provides all the space one needs to break life into its basest, truest self.

I am always excited about the prospect of a new Martin Amis book to read. I've read everything he's written (some things twice) and eagerly await more.

House of Meetings is a story told by the a survivor of the Russian gulag, alternating between a present day journey back to the site and a retelling of his experiences in and out of the slave camp. It's about a love triangle between the narrator, his brother Lev, and the beautiful Jewish woman Zoya. However, at it's core really about the love and hate between the two brothers, it's about how the narrator, despite his almost impossible jealousy, saved his brother rather then let him die in the camps, it's about how he did terrible and unforgivable things but is perhaps redeemed by the fact that he was a good big brother. Being the little brother of a great big brother I am a sucker for stories about good big brothers.

While I didn't like this book nearly as much as I loved The Information, Money, Success, London Fields, or The Rachel Papers, I still enjoyed it. Plus I read it in three days, which is always a good sign.

I'm going to quote from the book here, but it's a quote towards the end, so if you don't want to read a quote from the end of the book you shouldn't read this quote:

"You towered like a god -- you straddled the ocean, you filled the sky. And I still feel that. Having you for a brother was like having a hundred brothers."

A friend of mine lent/gave me a paperback copy of Gombrowicz's Cosmos and Pornografia and now that classes are over I finally got around to reading at least the first novel of the two. There's not much story to it, it's more of a dense, philosophical mania. The protagonist is caught up in his own head and cannot help picking up every thing he sees into a larger and larger stew of connections. He lists and relists the items that have come to his attention (mouths, sparrows, sticks, arrows, pins, etc.) and that listing gets longer and longer as the novel progresses and there are more things to connect and reconnect. It's quite fascinating though not necessarily a brisk read.

There's a fascinating review on amazon.com that points out the failings in the particular translation. The reviewer provides his/her own direct translation of the first paragraph and I have to say it's much more dramatic and poetic than the one in the book. I'm interested in reading some more by Gombrowicz but I'm going to look for a better translation first.

Since I'm probably going to write my critical thesis on Borges I just reread his amazing short story collection, Ficciones. It is incredible. I've read just about all his fiction because I've gone through the big blue book of all his fiction, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. (I read it about a month before I started this book track blog.) Various people have told me that the Hurley translation isn't as good as some previous translations (despite the fact that Hurley collaborated with Borges) so this time around I read the original translations, though to be honest I couldn't tell much of a difference. Perhaps if I read them side by side.

Anyway, Borges is amazing. My favorite is still "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." Funny story about that: I first read this in a creative writing workshop (taught by David Levinson, who, among multiple other things, I will always thank for introducing me to Borges) and on the day we discussed the story most of the class said they couldn't find any books by Pierre Menard in the library. They did not realize that the Borges piece was fictional and so went looking for books by a guy named Pierre Menard.

Many of my favorite Borges stories are the ones told in essay style about invented authors. Reading his stories now I realize that every single one is actually about writing itself and about how context influences all fiction. Of course, I'm writing my critical thesis on context vs content in Borge's fiction, so the context of my reading these stories is influencing the content of what I'm reading... But that's the whole point! Or is it? I don't know.

I have some important news that I have so far not mentioned on this blog: I am being published! A short story of mine will appear in the forthcoming anthology, The Apocalypse Reader. Following that link will take you to the Amazon.com pre-order page. (Well, it's "pre-order" at the time of this posting, though it will eventually become the "order" page and, I suppose, finally the "out-of-print" page.) My name doesn't appear on the cover, though I have no problem being reduced to "and many others" when it means I'm appearing in a collection with Rick Moody and Neil Gaiman and Shelley Jackson.

I won't give away what my story is about, though I don't mind saying it is about the apocalypse. Actually, if you have read much of this blog you should probably be able to guess exactly what possible apocalyptic event has captured my interest.

Also, in the coming months I should have another short story appearing in the literary journal Red China Magazine, so keep an eye out. I'll let you all know when it appears.