I was walking down the Upper East Side as evening came on. I turned the corner and saw a familiar face: quirky haircut, aquiline nose. We walked toward each other, and I noticed his slightly-too-large ears. Our eyes locked for about two seconds—“a look of glass,” just too long for it to be a random glance on the street—and then (to keep borrowing from John Ashbery) I walked on shaken: was I the perceived? Did he notice me, this time, as I am, or was it postponed again?

I had never met him, nor he me. I had heard his name in vague contexts: he was the friend of a brother of a guy I’d barely known back home. And he was what, five years older than me? How would I have introduced myself to him? We were just from the same part of the Midwest! Still, I had looked him up on Facebook when I'd moved to the city, whereupon I learned that we didn’t have any mutual friends. So I stopped wondering about him. And then I saw him on the street.

I walked on shaken: was there anything I could have said, really, at 5:20 in the afternoon in the middle of a crowded intersection? That moment could have only happened in the twenty-first century. This is the age of the Internet, and we’re all voyeurs, for better or for worse. I keep thinking about how Facebook’s Mini-Feed legitimizes this: I can just mention something I shouldn’t have known, and claim I saw it on my Mini-Feed. But I had no way that I could say I knew him; there was no Mini-Feed keeping us apprised of each other.

I’m more interested in this moment than in the novel I’m working on. It's more honest. Which is why, after the Canadian author Sheila Heti had gotten tired of imagining characters and stories when her actual friends were more vivid and interesting, she had decided to write How Should a Person Be? The book is a pastiche of conversations, emails, philosophical thoughts, and other mishmash centering on her friends. It’s strangely appealing. Her book is a model of the twenty-first century first-person narrative: not a neatly closed-off story, nor a megalomaniac epic that attempts to swallow the world whole, but a clear and direct record of the world as it is, as it goes on, without the artificial struggle for narrative structure.

Making sense of this encounter is my way of finding a new kind of closure. My friends were puzzled that I never went up to him and asked him if he was from the Midwest, too. I wasn’t so bothered, just surprised. I’ll probably see him again somewhere, at a party or a bar where it makes sense to say hello. And if I never see him again, well, I suppose I never actually knew him.

Image credit: journeyphotographic.com

I’m quitting my job today. I’m quitting because of an inappropriate text message my manager sent to me on Valentine’s Day. This is not the first time my manager has conducted himself in an inappropriate manner. This is not even the first time I have left a restaurant job because of a manager conducting him or herself inappropriately.

On Valentine's Day, Gothamist posted a report on gender inequity in the service industry. Reading through it was not a comfort to me. It has been my experience that working at a restaurant entails taking a lot of shit. It is highly conducive to, and rife with, sexual harassment. There is close contact, touching, lewd gestures. Much of this is entirely welcome and fun and a way to release stress. Some of this is unwelcome but innocuous enough to put up with. And then there are the moments when a line is crossed, when taking shit is no longer an option.

The day before Valentine’s Day, Roxane Gay posted a great piece in the Rumpus directed toward women who had tweeted their willingness to be beaten by Chris Brown. The day before that, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta made several highly offensive remarks on the air, regarding the increase in sexual assaults on women in the military. Also on Sunday was the arrest of Marston Hefner for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, PlayboyPlaymate of the Year Claire Sinclair. This has not been a good week.

I worked at a Denny’s when I was in high school. One day one of our bussers pressed his palm against the grill and held it there. He told me later that he did this "porque no me quiero," or, because I didn’t want him. I was seventeen. I was reminded of this incident while reading about a 19th-century Taiwanese custom: suitors would present potential partners with severed heads.

Part of me wants a severed head. There is a part of me that wants to seek out male protection in the form of violent retribution and physical intimidation. I understand that in no way should I have to be the one to quit my job because of someone else’s behavior. But I am choosing to leave.

It is perhaps this decision to leave instead of fighting that is prompting me to write this post. I get to be in control of how I personally deal with this situation, and I find it too stupid for me to make a stink about. I’m drawing the line. That’s what I can do. However, there are too many people taking too much shit. Too many people are taking too much shit every day. What I’ve read this week makes me feel as though there might be a whole lot of people who don’t know where the line is. Please be advised.

Image: blogcatalog.com

Inspired by the five hundred fairytales recently discovered in Germany (reported here in the Guardian), I thought it might be fun to take a modern-day tale and twist it, just a smidge, to reflect their style. Erika Eichenseer, the researcher responsible for unearthing the lost German tales, calls them “unadorned” and says “there is no romanticizing.” Fairytales without adornment? Plainspoken fables? I think I know what that sounds like. 

Little Red Riding Prostitute

There was once a slut going to college in this wacky town that allowed women to go to college, even though sluts like her only wanted to have a lot of sex. This slut wanted sex so badly, she even wanted the American people to pay for it. Anyhow, one day, her fairy godfather suggested she put an aspirin in between her knees so she wouldn’t have to drag everyone else down with her embarrassing and immoral medical malarkey.  

A monster appeared to her and she got all scared and pricked her finger, which happens a lot, I guess. After pricking her finger she fell into a deep sleep and had a dream. In the dream her fairy godfather ate snickerdoodles and watched television while elves bathed together—sinfully. The slut didn’t really know what this dream meant, but she went ahead and followed her fairy godfather’s advice about the aspirin because her fairy godfather influenced lawmakers. After like, two hours she got a wicked cramp and had to go walk it off. Then she got pregnant. Nobody’s paying for that damn bleeding finger, either. Bitch better not need stitches.

Oh dear. Is it time for an apology? Have my advertisers pulled all their spots from my program? The whole point of fairytales are that they in some way instruct people on how to live; or, to paraphrase Eichenseer, the stories are focused on what it means to become an adult. Fairytales provide more than just fantasy. I think a few of our politicians and pundits would be well-served to read some.

Image:trashionista.com

I remember when the High Line opened in 2009: amid the reports of overcrowding, I heard people gushing about the greenery, the views and, of course, the famously non-reflective windows of the Standard Hotel. Everybody in New York thought it was the new Central Park.

But now it’s late winter, and everybody’s long since moved on to other novelties (fake snow in Union Square, anybody? How about an indoor park?). The weather’s been unnaturally nice in the city, so I decided to go for a walk on the High Line. To do that, of course, I had to take the subway. Only in New York: going underground to go aboveground.

There were the usual groups of tourists, and occasional couples wandering up and down the pathways. But the plants were pretty sparse, and as I looked up at the Standard, I had to shield my eyes. So I was surprised to feel more relaxed, at a remove from the city, even though I could see skyscrapers in the distance.

Why was anybody here, really? What do parks have to offer in the winter? Are New Yorkers so starved for nature that they have to make pilgrimages to these carefully tended gardens to get their green fix?

If this is a problem New Yorkers face, they’re not alone. My friend Daniel works in Paris, and decided to make a day trip in July out to Giverny, about an hour away (less if you go 150 km/hr, of course). He dragged along three more people in his rental car, and they couldn’t stop remarking on how relaxed they felt after a trip to Monet’s gardens. It was a way of escaping, yes, but the greenery itself had a way of settling their souls after so much time in the steel and glass and concrete of the city.

I came back from the High Line and pulled out my copy of Wordsworth’s poems. It fell open, as it usually did during my Romantic Poetry class in college, to Tintern Abbey. As the rhythms rolled over me, my eyes caught on the stunningly contemporary lines:

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart . . .

By the end of the poem, Wordsworth has found himself revitalized by the mere memory of nature. A romantic sentiment, certainly, but one that makes some sense of the High Line’s popularity in winter. If Eliot is right to declare that “humankind cannot bear very much reality,” then the High Line is a way of escaping that reality, for a moment, in order to recall feelings far more real.

image credit: nycgovparks.org

While I’m not so good at being aware of what’s going on in popular culture, somehow I'm still stubborn and adamant in my judgment of popular culture. This becomes horribly evident every year when it comes time for the Academy Awards and I haven’t seen any of the films nominated for anything, yet I insist on filling out the NYTimes Oscar Ballot along with my family and friends.

The only 2012 nominee I saw was Drive (here's me raving about its soundtrack a few months ago), which was only nominated in the category of sound editing. It did not win. My sister-in-law informed me that Glenn Close was in this film Albert Nobbs about a woman dressing as a man in the 1920s, and I proceeded to pick that film as my winner for every category for which it was nominated.

My brother found my ignorance amusing enough to actually record some of it. In his words, "Watching the 'scars with my sister is the most hilarious thing in the world. She is almost criminally ignorant of movies and popular culture in general." What follows is his edited transcript.

"The Descendants, that stupid movie about the beach?"

"The Artist...it’s fucking silent, it’s not gonna win. Well, at least it’s prestigious."

"The Help... Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz are married?"

On The Iron Lady: "What's that, a movie about the First Lady?"

[Insert unrelated heated exchange between the Blatchley siblings:]

Kayla: "Why does everyone love Sandra Bullock? I mean, why is she even on TV?"

Response: "Well, she won the Academy Award last year."

Kayla: "What?!?! That stupid bitch won an academy award? For WHAT?"

Response: "Blindside."

Kayla: "What?! That movie about a prissy white woman who lets a black kid stay with her won an Academy Award? They don't even have sex!"

My impeccable strategy of seeing as few movies as possible landed me 4 our of a possible 24 on my NYTimes Oscar ballot. My Oscar picks are apparently not Oscar’s picks. But who is the real winner? I somehow suspect it’s me.

Image: Getty images via blog.zap2it.com

I’m always a touch skeptical when I read writing tips from famous writers. Scrolling through Open Culture’s recent selection, I wondered whom these authors—from George Orwell to William Safire—saw as their intended audience. Beginners, most likely. Students, dabblers. But what about that vast, silent majority that lies between the beginners and the pros?

“Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes," suggests Margaret Atwood. "Pens leak.” I am immune to the kind of privileged bullying going on here, and I won’t stand for Neil Gaiman’s condescending #2: “Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.” I know when I’m being teased. Most of these tips read like your mother telling you to put on a sweater.

At the same time, I find them irresistible. And sometimes it’s a comfort just to see famous authors revealing the dull daily tasks that allow their work to proceed. Sometimes I need to be told to put on a sweater.

Here, then, are some suggestions for those of us who have surpassed the intermediate phase and are now approaching the very real, very dark side of the writer's life.

1. Become a better drinker. If you’re unable to write while drunk, get drunk on the nights reserved for not writing. Devise a hangover method that works consistently. Never edit under the influence.

2. Maintain a cordial relationship with your parents, as they provide useful storage for all the books and manuscripts you refuse to relinquish. You will also, at some point, need to live in their basement.

3. Do not get married. Never have kids. If you have to sleep with someone, do it in a public restroom or over at their place so you can leave easily and get back to work. Never have someone sleep over at your apartment unless you have a separate study with a door that locks. Also, your parents can hear you.

4. Survive by routine. Eat and wear the same things every day. You’re not going to look good; you’re not intended to.

5. Embarrass yourself publicly, as often as possible, in order to build up solid reserves of shame and insolence in your heart. And to convince yourself you don’t live a life of monotony and work, which you do.

Image: vulcanicnews.com

Every year, I read James Joyce’s “The Dead” on the first night of snowfall. I’m not Christian, so the sense of Christmas tradition never resonated for me, but the swirling motifs of snow and wind echo with each winter, the black-ink letterforms intertwined with the white and falling flakes I see outside my windows as I read.

Last year, I came across John Huston’s film version of The Dead. I’d heard about it years before in the Wall Street Journal, which claimed that the film achieves the near-impossible: it “shows what [film] can do to enhance the enjoyment of a great literary work.” Since so much in Joyce's writing hinges on his perfect construction of sentences and phrases, I wanted to see how film would increase my appreciation.

For the larger part of the story, Joyce’s prose hews closely to realism, and it was a simple pleasure to watch the characters enact the same words and motions on the screen, from pouring drinks to dancing with each other. As I watched at home, my brother the classical pianist-turned-keyboardist overheard Mary Jane’s piano performance, “full of runs and difficult passages,” and remarked that whoever was playing was unusually good. The whole thing seemed to be a perfectly executed and emotionally fulfilling period drama, carefully steeped in political discussions and subtle allusions to Irish cities and struggles.

The true genius of Joyce’s story, however, is in his gradual shift from realism to carefully tempered stream of consciousness, as the protagonist Gabriel realizes that he may have never loved his wife—or, for that matter, anyone else—nearly as much as his wife and a young, now-dead man namedMichael Furey once loved each other many years before:

So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life ... He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.

Constantly I hear reports from the front lines of newspapers and blogs that the novel is ailing, is dying, is dead. But moments like this convince me otherwise, when I am able to so fully enter another person’s consciousness that, unlike with theater or film or any other form of art, I am able to forget myself and imagine another world.

I wanted to write about how I could (mis)read James Joyce’s “The Dead” through John Huston’s The Dead. But when the short story’s eye moves gently and surely from Gabriel’s actions to his thoughts to his pure emotions, it’s a joy to read. As I came to the end, hearing those same wordsflattened to a voice-over monologue, even when set against the natural beauty of Ireland in snow, stripped the epiphany of its power to completely immerse and change the reader. Whereas the movie indeed enhanced my enjoyment of the story on the whole, the last five minutes pulled me back to the words on the page, not on the screen. The movie is a masterpiece in its execution, but the novella by virtue of its form surpassed its cinematic imitation.

I was a passive viewer, but I decided to become an active reader again. I turned back to the book in my hand, and admired the way my sensations interlaced with Gabriel's own: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Image: imdb.com