1. Today on “Fresh Air,” this entomologist who just wrote a book about ants was the interviewee, and he was such an awesome guest–he was perfectly deadpan and matter-of-fact and was able to evoke such intense visual images I got the physical creeps at one point, when he was describing the way marauder ants will come pouring down a trail in the jungle and catch up to and literally engulf a FROG. Ants will also pull all the moving parts off a thing, like a caterpillar or cricket, and carry the torso back to their compound and let it lie around there still alive a few days, trying to flail its amputated parts. The (non-Terry Gross) interviewer made a creeped-out noise that was definitely not feigned and this added somehow perfectly to the creepiness. It was much more nerve-wrenching to hear and be forced to imagine this myself than if this had been a television documentary and there had been footage to watch. I wonder if this is why I subconsciously avoided NPR for so many years–too much stimulation.
2. I somehow let myself watch free-range television last night for two hours: a new VH-1 reality series called You’re Cut Off! in which the premise is that a bunch of improbably wealthy women have their financial support “cut off!” by the people who have been facilitating the women’s fascinatingly dysfunctional means of coping with what must be really unpleasant inner lives. I’m not being sarcastic here–if you had filmed all of these interviews and then presented them without background music, and with some old narrator doing tinny voiceovers sounding like Alex Trebek at the bottom of a well, as part of like an old 16-millimeter psychology teaching film called “Recognizing Narcissistic Personality Disorder,” they wouldn’t be out of place and would be entirely un-lowbrow in intent and effect. There were plenty of elements of the women’s responses to new surprising indignities that were so clearly unstaged–none of these women would be capable of doing such subtle acting as to make some of these responses “look real” like this on cue. To the extent some of the women were clearly trying to play to the camera, they were doing so ways so pathological as to exemplify how disturbed they really were. You listen to the dialogue clinically, i.e. just the women’s dialogue, not anything by the voiceover guy, and having it in your head just to objectively listen rather than to get sucked into the narrative villainization of the women, and the degree to which the women are in vivid compensatory denial of reality is almost as creepy as the ant guy. A couple of their dads appear in the occasionally devastating family videos at the beginning of the show in which the “princesses” (the show’s, and some of the women’s, word, not mine) get “cut off,” and you can get a glimpse of the Faulknerian family dynamics–many of those reading this will remember W&L undergraduate boys who back in the late ’80s were already going to grow up to be these dads–like the plastic surgeon who prescribes Botox injections for his own 21-ish-year-old daughter, which daughter readily admits that she doesn’t think her father would still love her if she didn’t look like she does, which is kind of like a replicant, not in a good Sean Young-y way.
3. I saw a woman’s handwriting today that looked so much like my mom’s that it almost made me cry, but in a good way. The capital “T”s are a particular shape that makes me think of a swan boat. My mom was one of those women who always would get asked by women who were getting married to address their wedding invitations, back in the day when it would have been unthinkable to hire a professional calligrapher, and to address envelopes by any mechanical means would be the ingrained-social-taboo equivalent of nonchalantly spitting one’s chewed food into the middle of one’s dinner plate mid-sentence. It was an honor to be asked to be one of the invitation-addressers, like how in the South it’s an honor for the bride’s second-tier friends to be asked to be punch- and cake-servers at the reception, when you know you’re not in the first tier of relatives and friends who comprise the bridesmaids, which, I know, if you didn’t grow up in the Deep South, just sounds like crazy redneck talk.
4. If your workplace has a high school or college kid working there for the summer, and you’ve observed that the kid is doing a remarkably good job, why don’t you go find that kid and tell him or her that? Let’s just think of this as Encouraging Good Work Habits Day, or, okay, something less Maoist-sounding might be appropriate.
*J*D*L* 