In one interview, he said "When people ask me, 'Who is your public?' I say honestly, without skipping a beat, 'Ross.' The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work."
--from his wikipedia page

from my class notes:

Felix believed that e go through life in couples--one individual life is fragmented. Untitled (Orpheus Twice) is two mirrors side by side--if you stand between them by yourself, you're bisected. Only a couple is complete. 

Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1987-90. Two clocks in perfect sync--but they fall out of sync, they lose time, and one will stop first. His partner, Ross, was dying of AIDS.

Untitled (Ross), 1991. This exhibition is hard candy that's been poured against a corner. He called this a "portrait of Ross": the candy weighed exactly what Ross weighed. You, the viewer, were supposed to take an eat a piece of the candy. Every morning, the museum owner would replenish the candy to the correct weight.

For the celebration of the "Day Without Art", to look at the impact AIDS had on the art world, galleries were supposed to put black veils over all their paintings. Felix rented billboards and showed this photo of an empty, unmade bed. No text, no context, was given.

Untitled (Blood), 1992. Made of hand-strung red and white glass beads: turns people into ghostly figures on the other side, represents a liminal space between life and death, sickness and health, separated by the composition of blood. Felix strung the beads for this curtain, along with Untitled (Chemo) of 1991 and Untitled (Golden) of 1994, while sitting at the hospital with Ross.

Felix died January 9, 1996, of AIDS.

Lately I've been noticing, among college-educated, liberal-arts-degree males, more and more sexism. These are men I am friends with, men I respect, men I cook dinner for and invite to my parties. They are men I sit in class next to, volunteer with, participate in clubs with.

They are men who would be offended if I ever mentioned this idea to them, who think they are champions of women's rights, who--because they 'respect' the ideas of a few women--think they give women equal treatment.

They are not men who 'disregard' women. They are men who do not think of women. If they want someone to talk to, they will run through a list of all their male friends and acquaintances. If they find something they want to tell people, the ones that come into their heads will be exclusively men. If they see women they are courteous, nice, and can engage in an intellectual conversation with her, usually with no problem. But no matter how stimulating this conversation is, these men will never think 'yes, I should talk to this person again sometime!' They do not think of women as 'people'--they think of them as women, as girls, and that is their primary classification. They don't disregard women. They just don't regard women in the first place.

These are the men who, last night at the coffee shop, told me that because I had read 300 pages of Nabokov's Ada in three days, I was reading too fast, and couldn't possibly understand it all. These are the men who, after I've been showing up at the Bike Help Desk every week all semester, finally say something to me like "hey Nicole, you know stuff about bikes, right?" These are men who always call my boyfriend to hang out and talk about books and, even though I'm the one who tells him to invite them over for dinner to hang out with us, never bother to get my number. These are the men who will cook for your parties but never clean their own dishes. They just don't think about it.

I could name names. I could list, off the top of my head, ten men I personally know well who fit this description. Some of them have gotten better over time, some have gotten worse. Some of these men are the kind who sleep with women at parties and then get upset when their friends do the same. These are men like Wes Anderson's self-obsessed men, like John Cusack in High Fidelity, like the Brothers Bloom, like every Zach Braff character, like Robert Heinlein books, like James Bond, like comic book superheroes, like all the other examples we can think of. We all know men like this. We have dated men like this, or our friends have dated men like this; men who are sexist because it is an extension of not thinking of other people.

Is this what causes sexism? racism? People who assume that other people are like them, and when they're too far removed, they simply ignore all those too far outside their category of sameness.

I don't know. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about sexism or racism; I don't see that I can do a lot about it. I'm not an activist, I don't think about what social change I could be making or that needs to be made. I tend to accept the way things are and work on a small scale to make things work for me within my own life--isn't that what we all do? Isn't that why this problem exists? Maybe I am part of the problem.

I let men sit down next to me at coffee shops when I'm reading alone, I feel like I must listen to them when they want to idolize me as their dream girl because I'm reading their dream book. Is this sexism? This is just how gender dynamics work in my life. Those same men watching me read their favorite books will need to explain to me their interpretation, and want to read me their poetry, and they don't want me to critique the use of "us" versus "I" and the annoying didactic tone in their poetry--they want me to quietly admire and appreciate Poetic Genius. They want to give me their number. The power I have is not power to say: "Hey, please leave me alone, reading a book in a coffee shop does not mean I'm out fishing for men" because that's rude. The power I have is to tear up that phone number later. The ways in which politeness and personal space intertwine, the ways in which a woman is regarded and is expected to act in public.

Outside a bar my roommate told me that if a woman is alone, at night, and sees a man walking down the sidewalk towards her, she should cross the street to avoid him. She said that a man should not be offended by this, and that the woman is not trying to give offense and is not acting in a frightened way. She said that this act is empowering, that it is a necessary act of self-protection, and that the man and woman should both understand this, and be able to greet each other from across the street. She said that politeness takes a backseat to self protection, every time.

In that same conversation I told my roommate that, since I'm graduating, I was thinking of writing an email to my ex-boyfriend, the terrible one, the alcoholic, suicidal, depressed, controlling, manipulative one, to say something like "I hope you're well." Just to leave college with a clean slate, no grudges. Earlier that day I had had lunch with my ex-boyfriend's new ex-girlfriend. She's wonderful, a very nice lady, who I would like to be friends with if we ever get the chance. They had just broken up, and she was moving out of their shared apartment to get away from him. Listening to her describe their fights, complain about the way he came into her room, drunk, and yelled at her for an hour, told her they were over. She said, "fine." He begged her to take him back. Ad nauseam, ad nauseam.

That day I opened a fortune cookie that said

Let hate turn to friendship because of your existence.

They were wrong. Being polite, making amends, being friendly, being "the better person" does not mean subjecting yourself to re-opening communications with a person who hurt you, who is depressed and manipulative and taking his anger out on you, who is not seeking help, who will not get better. Protection, not politeness. "The better person" doesn't put themselves at danger to help another. You don't have to take abuse, and keep taking abuse, in order to help someone else, and you should never do so. I am not saying men should not abuse women. People should not abuse each other.

How do you recognize the self in the other? Is that the foundation of sexism or the end of sexism? Is selfishness the cause of all these problems? I don't know. I am mad at those people, at those boys who sit in all-male circles reading poetry to each other at parties I attend, at the offhand comments they make about "a man's job", at the girls I see at parties who complain about "the drunk sluts at the Boot," at those men I sat next to at a coffee shop last night who laughed at four girls on the corner in minidresses and heels taking a picture together, at one boy I am very good friends with who talks about how stupid and entitled his girlfriend is when she's not around. It's not okay. It's just how it is.

1. Breathing or consciousness: the ultimate Catch-22 of nasal congestion medication
   
2. Nicole Bakes for Boys: cherry Pie for B, smores pie for Engram's birthday
   
3. Engram: "I didn't remember how Sudafed works so I took four before my Portugese class. My professor asked me to conjugate a verb and I just laughed at him"
   
4. My art history professor's reaction, upon showing us this Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of anal fisting and having us all go "ugh!" was, "What? You all do it"
   
5. I forgot the werewolf's name from Twilight (it's Jacob. I was calling him 'Joseph'.) This is only lolsy because I've read the books and seen the movies more than once
   
6. Parting remarks between myself and Engram: " ANAL FISTING!"
   
7. googling "is detergent a portmanteau of deter and agent" gives no relevant results
   
8. describing Primer as "a get-rich-quick scheme gone terribly wrong"
   
9. halfway through making sweet tea, I realize there is no granulated sugar, and only a 2lb bag of confectioners' sugar. This does not prevent me from making tea
   
10. I picked up a book of poems from work and am reading them one at a time. I think someone has brain cancer or is in southeast Asia, or maybe both
    
11. Being An Adult means Cleaning Things Sometimes
    

but not necessarily writing that 12 page paper you have due soon.

I know I've read three?! books now and not posted about any of them (Earthly Powers, Dhalgren, Fifty Shades of Grey) and now I'm talking about David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Because I'm reading it now and it's ehhh well it's DFW. DFW is a big deal. It's just how it is. That being said I don't have to like him, and in many ways I don't. I appreciate his essays. His fiction also becomes much like reading an essay, in that he's made an art of the self-referential writer-confiding-in-the-reader-about-writing as he goes. Everything is excess, is information, is giving too much and describing more and giving you options and showing you what he's doing. A desparate, self-conscious, writing for approval. His fiction is quite good, actually, and sometimes (oftentimes) I wish it were left to work its magic effect on the reader without his over-analyzing it for us. The best example of this is Adult World (pg 161). Fiction can have these very simple, very descriptive moments like:

She sometimes had bad dreams in which they were driving someplace together and every single other vehicle on the road was an ambulance.

This is what fiction does well: gives you details that are not, in and of themselves, telling the reader what to think, but provide an insight to the character's experience. We have fear, we have the symbol of the car, we have a mode of transportation, the sensation of speed and distance passing by quickly that compresses time, and the distance from the master bedroom to Adult World all laid out as a journey fraught with injury and danger, like the marriage itself.

And then you have this piece of fiction in (I) augmented in (II) with:

1c. Flat narr description of J.'s sudden pallor & inability to hold decaf steady as J. undergoes sddn blndng realization that husband is a Secret Compulsive Masturbator & that insomnia/yen is cover for secret trips to Adult World to purchase/view/masturbate self raw to XXX films & images & that suspicions of hsbnd's ambivalence about 'sexlife together' have in fact been prescient intuitions & that hsbnd has been clearly suffering from inner defecits/psychic pain of which J.'s own self-conscious anxieties have kept her from having any real idea [point of view (1c) all objective, exterior desc only].

Okay, I get it. It's metafiction, and this is what metafiction does. It's no longer about doing good writing, because there is plenty of good writing out there. It's writing about the act of writing good writing. How do you write a scene well? How do you structure a story so the audience sees it the way you want? How does POV, epiphany, character desc, etc, fit into this? If you go by the definition of "good writing doesn't draw attention to itself" you're missing the point. DFW lives [or not? RIP] to draw attention to the act of writing. Maybe he really is [was, RIP] a crazily insecure guy who needs to put those insecurities about writing into writing, and since he was also very smart and did it in a new, novel way, hit that sweet spot in metafiction popular culture where people became interested in this expounding-on-writing-as-you-write phenomenon.

And he's a very god writer. He is. There's no arguing with it. He has the most distinctive voice of any writer popular in the last few years; if you're reading DFW you know it. You spend time looking up words you don't know. You consider the relationship between reader and writer, and between writer and subject, in ways other books don't make you think about. It's important to read DFW.

That being said, oh god, this book. I woke up really content that I had three hours to sit inside listening to rain drip from the eaves, drink Earl Grey, and read from the couch, only pausing to listen to thunder. And I put the book down disgusted, insecure, upset, and feeling claustrophobic. If you read books to escape, to get out of your life, don't, dear god don't read DFW. Unless you want to become insecure, self-obsessed, repressed, and feel worse about humanity. He writes about horrible people--and admittedly the title is Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, maybe other books are better, but from what I've read of them, I get a sinking feeling not--and he writes about them compassionately. He describes shame so it is understandable, so you see it encroaching, describes depression and how easily it slips up on you, describes the selfish, mean, petty emotions of hideous people. I have to admit when I got the interview about rape I became uncomfortable, and when I got to "To know that another human being, these guys, can look at you lying there and in the totally deepest way understand you as a thing...as just a hole to shove a Jack Daniel's bottle in so far it blows out your kidneys--"
I stopped reading.

There are things you can and can't read and this is personal for everyone. I want to read and enjoy DFW, I really do. I think he has important things to say, says them in an interesting way, and has started an entire trend of writing (footnotes, oh god, footnotes) in modern fiction that is worth studying and perhaps even emulating (thought not to the extent it's been emulated). But if I have to read these books at the expense of my own sanity and mental health, I'm not sure it's worth it.

 because I can't bear to close them. But tonight! tonight I am!

• How to Format a Table of Contents in MS Word 2007 (for my thesis, which I eventually gave up on. Thesis defense: tomorrow at 2pm)
• honkshoo honkshoo honkshoo. This is on this list okay sure but I'm never closing this tab, because, ever. 
• there is little excuse for why I want to play this song on the ukulele except it's cute and got stuck in my head
• I do keep listening to the new Regina Spektor "All the Rowboats" new mastered version of this song over and over, to be fair
• Michael Fassbender. no comment
• this thing I have to do by tomorrow ugh okay guess I will now 
• this amazing ring I finally just gave in and ordered. So maybe in 15 business days I'll have a tiny bunny hugging my finger all the time. YES I WILL. 
• the cookies I'm making right now. for aforementioned thesis defense tomorrow at 2pm. 

thank you, that will be all.

On Monday, typing travel reimbursement memos, my hip still throbbed, though the bruise didn't appear until Wednesday, ugly purple, bigger than my fist. With the dictation headphones in and my hair still matted with blood I felt silly and Fight Club, like typing haikus on company time and abusing my copier privileges.

on Sunday the weather was nice so I wore red, white, and blue.
At the Holi festival behind the cafeteria revellers splashed pink dye all over me, so I had to go hoe and change.
In the sun it was seventy five so I wore a sundresses with white flowers embroidered across the chest, and we biked to the Bayou St. John. Going down the hill on Jeff Davis in the sunshine I let the freewheel spin and raised my arms in the sun, watched the trees against the blue sky and felt that one moment of perfection you only get going downhill on a bike on a sunny day.
At the bayou, even in the sun, the breeze coming off the water made goosebumps raise on our arms, and we huddled around the pot where crawfish were boiled alive, warming ourselves on the steam. When we gave up and went home I stepped in the shower, getting my hair wet but not washing it, feeling the steam around my own skin. I've never left a party only to shower and return but we did return, in jeans and sweatshirts. It was dark on the bayou and we clustered around the table greedily fumbling with carapaces and tails that we couldn't see. The boys became giddy, setting off bottle rockets, agitating the dogs.
I got into a boat with my boyfriend when the water was still. Our oars made silk-fabric ripples in the water and we rowed under the footbridge, ducking low, hearing it creak over our heads. The bridge, strung in Christmas lights, mirrored perfectly in the water. "I'm going to remember this for a long time," he said. I want to. I watched the cars go by on Esplanade from a boat, dipped my fingers into the water. It was warm.

on Thursday I didn't go to see the Two Gentlemen of Verona like I said I would. I age meager pasta provided with the best intentions in a student lounge at the Tulane School of Medicine, talked to a friend about my job, his former job. They showed us the robot dummies where the medical students practiced delivering robot babies, putting in a central line, injecting intravenously. Everyone said they loved the school.
I told another student that I was writing a thesis on time travel and he looked at me, awed, and said "You're a keeper."
I drove home listening to Johnny Flynn along Claiborne, so close to the Superdome you could see the individual lights around the edge as they change color.

on Friday I went to Thesis Fridays alone, mixed jasmine and peppermint tea, made sure the protaganist knew she was her own mother. Time travel problems.
I left at eleven thirty to attend a lecture on the role of neonatal testosterone in prepubertal impulsivity. I wore a red halter dress, my shoulders feeling very exposed, my hair down. Through the lecture I was nervous, butterflies and goosebumps.
After the lecture I went to Cafe Freret to have lunch with my ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend. We talked about theatre, television, and time travel. Going home I tried not to think certain things. I kept thinking of how nice she was, how easy it is to be taken advantage of when hyou are nice. All week before I'd been dreading the meeting, what we would say. "When I knew him, he was a depressed, alcoholic, suicidal, manipulative, mean person," I'd practiced saying, in my head. "I hope he's changed." I didn't say any of those things. We sat at the table long after we ate, our conversation punctuated by silence.
Friday afternoon I went to bike help desk, put on a new bike saddle, rode around campus in the sunshine. While Grimes played I put my brass bell on my stem, watched from the back of the stage her hood fill out in the wind. That night at the levee there were four bonfires. In the woods was a large canvas washed up by the river, covering something the same size as a man, with his head leaned forward as if in sleep. My search for firewood turned up only trash, everything turned gray by the moon. I walked near it only slowly, at first thinking it was a hobo in a sleeping bag, then—when it did not move—a body. I didn’t touch the canvas to find out.
Around the campfire I went with the only people I knew, only to find them high on acid. Smoke blew into my face, making me cough.
A hobo, drinking Artem’s mezcal, approached us. “I wanna sit by the chicks,” he said. “I ain’t tryin to look cool,” he said. “I’m 36, and a hobo, hoppin freight trains and stuff.” His other friend, also a hobo, said goddamn in an accent that reminded me of home.
Those drunken boys who tried to climb the bridges fell into the Mississippi. ”You aren’t an alcoholic until you graduate,” the girl sitting next to me said.
At the liquor store I sepnt twenty seven dollars and seventy three cents on alcohol, and drank none. I only wanted the cork to plug the ends of the handlebars on my bicycle.
In the woods I found no firewood.
Sitting around the campfire I thought of Kelsey’s front porch, about being miserable in fancy clothes, about doing what other people want, about the very isolating feeling of drinking only water and watching those around you become intoxicated.
The clouds were orange from reflected sodium streetlights and the moon was half full, half empty.
We climbed atop an abandoned yellow platform that shook with our movements, by a ladder set at a 30 degree angle, tilted away from the body.
I went to the woods alone. I did not go home. I did not pull aside that canvas to reveal whether underneath was rotting flesh or just logs.

on Saturday night I went to an Everything is Terrible movie with Bailey, called Doggie Woggiez! Poochie Woochiez! I ordered and drank a Goya Ginger beer that burned my nose and throat. Three men dressed as dogs did exaggerated comedy. The movie was an hour and a half of found footage of dogs, each clip less than twenty seconds. I didn't understand the humor. I fell asleep to dog jobs and woke to ghost dogs, unaware of how much time had passed.
Leaving the threater two of the dog-men said "Goodbye!" to us for a good two minutes as we walked back to the car.
Saturday afternoon, at Plan B, we fixed a bent crankset, discoveerd a bent frame, bent it back using a vice. A man with a cigarette in his mouth said: "This is way hillbilly," holding the frame while we clamped down the vice. That night Braden put together his new bike before we left.
At midnight, the brand new Sunday, I went to Snake and Jake's with Bailey. "Are you happy? How is your relationship?" she asked me. I am.
We walked the three blocks home at 2am, after ditching the bar because a man with a coffeepot kept talking to use. Five blocks away, at Pine and Maple, two students were mugged at gunpoint, shoved to the ground and hit. We didn't know. We drove to the store for cigarettes, came home in ignorance. I took Nyquil to stop the coughing at three and fell asleep in my underwear.

on Sunday night Braden was excited about his new bike. "He was biking like an asshole," I told Bailey later, holding a gauze pad to my head in the front seat, shaking. His new bike is faster than mine and he, giddy with fireworks, crawfish, and beer, wanted to bike fast, take sharp corners, beat cars at stoplights, not wait for me. I caught up to him on Jeff Davis as he was fumbling with a light, not paying attention to me. While reaching around for the light he swerved in front of me, knocking my bike towards some cars. I backpedaled, used to a fixed gear, unable to find the brake, and landed with my left hip and the left side of my head on the road. "Are you okay? Are you okay?" he kept asking, over and over. "My head," I was screaming, clutching it. "My head, my head--"
Two med students in the car behind us stopped and ran over to help. I kept thinking how important it was to be lucid, to not cry, to be sane. "Where do you go to school?" I asked and upon learning it was LSU joked: "Oh, I work there. Let's just meet in the cafeteria next time," with blood still running into my hair. I sat down on the curb to avoid throwing up. Braden put his jacket against my head to try to stop the bleeding.
Jake and Sarah's house was only two blocks away so they drove to come get us. In their kitchen Sarah washed my head with the sprayer on the sink, running warm water over my scalp. "Do you want me to stop being nice to you?" she asked. "I know if I'm hurt an people are nice to me I just start crying." In the kitchen, after everyone had left, I just started crying, holding a brown towel to my face.
At home my rooommates fussed over me and washed my hair, Chelsea pouring hot water over the right side of my scalp, Bailey applying peroxide, neosporin, and bandages to the skinned patch on my left elbow and palm.
In bed, shaking, I piled blankets around myself, sobbing intermittently. My eyes remained undialated, my head pain local. I remain unconcussed.

on Monday I woke with blood matted on my hair, on the right side, and afraid to touch my scalp I washed the ends, the water running brown against the white porcelain sink, and then drove to work. My boss noticed my limp. "But you were wearing your helmet and gloves," he said. "Yes," I said, my left hand bandaged, blood still dry against my scalp. My helmet was in a gift-wrapped box on the bookshelf, waiting for my Wednesday birthday.
At home I put on a dress I'd never worn before, from my wife, in liquor-gray-brown satin that had a large bow over my chest and fell to my ankles. I biked to work that afternoon very slowly, unable to put a helmet on over the knot on my left side. 
At work we prepared for a reading by Jonathan Franzen. I walked around the quad in the sunshine in sandals and that long dress, holding yard signs to direct people to the event, walking slowly. At the reception I told the two people sitting next to me, Zach and Evian, about the accident, but didn't mention it to my boss. No one noticed the matted blood in my hair.
The reading was funny, and Franzen signed my book "To Nicole: Happy Birthday."

on Tuesday it was Braden's birthday. We ate biscuits cut out in the shape of men for breakfast, spread them with raspberry jam. That night I bought bread and made sandwiches on twelve-grain bread with raspberry jam and nutella. We tried to bar crawl but tuesday night defeated our compatriots. At Parasol's, eating the orange slice out of my old fashioned, sitting next to me, he repeated: "No one came to my birthday party." Outside the bar, sitting on the sidewalk, we fixed a flat tire and our friend met us. At the next bar they were doing Pub Trivia, the Princess category, and I knew all the answers. I ordered To Die For Fries, with bechemel sauce and green onions, and it felt like eating french fried pasta. At Cassidy's house, at midnight on the new Wednesday, March the 7th, he gave me a Tree of Life tarot reading for my birthday while Braden slept on the couch. My significator was the Page of Cups, and the first card he laid down, the top of my spiritual triangle, was the Star. My intellectual triangle was entirely inverted, everything holding me back. Inverted in my emotional triangle was the World. I thought over and over of Pynchon, of Blicero:

His future card, the card of what will come, is The World.

on Wednesday it was my birthday. I ate Life cereal with strawberries and half a grapefruit, went to work late, skipped work all afternoon to go to the zoo with Braden and Carrie. Wearing my purple dress, I smiled at the flamingoes, the elphants, the tigers, the lions, the orangutans. It was sunny, and I wore my favorite shoes.
In the sunshine, watching the animals, everything was wonderful.

 this weekend, in light of my forthcoming endocrinology test (quick! ask me about the anterior pituitary!), I read Solaris, the infamously trippy, psychological-but-yet-still-hard-scifi novel by Stanislaw Lem. And then I watched the movie (the 2003 George Clooney, as the person who loaned me the book said she liked it better). 

And. There were parts of this book that I really appreciated--and one of them was how CREEPY it was. It's paranoid, and it makes the reader paranoid. You are Kris Kelvin, you're following his every thought throughout this whole ordeal. When he arrives on a space station to find the person who invited him there dead, and one of his colleagues uncommunicative and paranoid, the other locked in his lab, you start to get creeped out. You are just as confused as he is when the planet scans his brain and recreates an immortal simulacra of his dead wife. The fact that Snow and Sartorius are both unavailable--both physically, conversationally, and emotionally--for the entire novel makes it a very isolating one. You, the reader, are Kelvin as he has to try to figure out how to deal with his 'visitor' on his own. There are brief moments that are frightening in their details: the conversation Kelvin has with Snow, only to realize at the end that Snow is holding the hand of someone or something that is hiding in a cabinet the entire time. Creepy also is the fact that their 'visitors' cannot leave them--watching Rheya, not knowing why she did it, rip apart a space station door because she can't see Kelvin is a moment of real power in the narrative. It encases and includes the claustrophobia, the sense of confinement. 

I think I mention these things because these were things I LOVED about the book that the movie completely ignored. 

Solaris is a few things. It is an exercise in claustrophobia, it's a commentary on the nature of space exploration, it's a lot of fake hard science, and it's also a love story. The love story, while integrally a part of it, and for that matter an interesting part--his wife's suicide, the subtle way in which she goes from something he wants to destroy to something he wants to protect--is NOT the entire story (which, if you watch the movie, you will not learn). Of course the movie was going to get it wrong, I know, hollywood loves a love story, and telling bits of the story from her point of view was interesting. But I'm not sure why they left out all the things I mentioned above--you know, the super cool, super creepy stuff that could have made this a really visually interesting and scary movie--in favor of love scenes between two actors with awkward, barely-there chemistry. When Solaris the movie tries to be creepy, it has blood on the floor. There was just so much more to work with in their source material. What you end up with is a love story, randomly set on a space station, with some unnamed and unquestioned force bringing back his suicidal wife. And sure, you get some pre-Inception Inceptioney questions about 'how close is a memory of a person to the person's actual life' (duh, not very), but that's really not what Solaris was about. 

The premise of Solaris the book is that space travel (science fiction space travel, anyway) is about finding a reflection of man. Man goes into the stars looking for something like himself. Whether it be language, bipedalism, warm-bloodedness, M-class planets, single star orbits, a nervous system, a system of communication--whatever life we encounter out there must be like us, right? All the life we know is like us. We have a lot of attributes. Of course something in space will be like us. The 'hard scifi' part of Solaris--and a good third to half the novel is spent explaining this phenomena--is the fact that Solaris is a planet with an unstable orbit around a dual star system. The thing holding the planet in check is a giant, probably-sentient 'ocean' that can do anything.  It's not made of cells. It may be made of atoms or maybe neutrinos (I'm not sure how good Lem is on physics, considering this was a 1961 novel, but he tries real hard). It may be intelligent--it doesn't react the same way to stimuli when stimuli are given, anyway. This laundry-list of the ocean's attributes takes up a vast number of pages in this very short novel, turning it into (if you subtract the characters and just give Kelvin's reading and inner monologue) a scientific review of the Phenomenon of Solaris. It does get tedious. But reading the book you are never to doubt that what this book is really about is the ocean. 

And what is the ocean? Kelvin, by the end, is ready to theorize that it's a very young god; a sly way by Lem of criticizing humans for deifying anything they can't understand. The fundamental, and most interesting part of Solaris, is the question of the other. Other than human. There are still a vast, unaccounted-for number of things that humanity does not (cannot?) understand. And our reaction to the unknown--the human tendency to become small, afraid, mean, and protective when faced with what cannot be understood--is what's being examined in Solaris, just as closely as Kelvin examines the ocean. 

 +dancing to the Talking Heads at midnight

+playing Grim Fandango all afternoon

-getting stomach cramps on a bike ride and rushing into the new Rouses in the CBD to be ill their bathroom

+it’s a really nice Rouses

+seeing ‘Tit Rex (pronounced T-rex, short for ‘Petite Rex’, a Mardi Gras joke), which is these tiny little floats the size of small wagons or large shoeboxes. the parade was one block long. instead of standing in one spot, waiting for floats to pass us by, we walked up the parade and admired each float individually

-losing circulation in my fingers and toes, standing in the cold (it’s 37 degrees yall)

-blowing a flat on my front tire on my way to the afterparty, walking my bike into the bywater

+at the afterparty (through a friend of a friend), the first thing I saw when I came into the house was a knitting book on the coffee table. further inspection revealed a bowl full of knititng needles, circulars, double-pointeds, metal, bamboo. There were two typewriters on either side of the fireplace, two guitars next to an old-fashioned desk, an antique toy keyboard on top of the mantleplace. The bookshelf contained Terry Pratchett, Ian M Banks, and lots of Palahinuk. It was arranged by color

-I never met the people who lived there

+sitting in the perfect front living room of people I had never met, alone, I took my tube out and replaced it with a new one. Everyone else was in the kitchen. Someone passing through to smoke gave me their floor pump, and sitting on an old green chair, with vintage copies of Playboy on the table next to me, warmth and circulation returned to my fingers and toes

+in the kitchen there were pieces of white cake with brown sugar frosting, thin pieces each individually wrapped in wax paper and sealed with a gold embossed sticker with a hummingbird on it

+after I fixed my tire and wandered back to the kitchen the party announced that they were dispersing to an afterpartyafterparty (as they had done the one-block ‘tit rex walk hours earlier). I sat on the couch in the kitchen and wrote a hurried thank-you note to the people who lived at that house, signed it “with gratitude, Nicole” and left it next to their nightstand. I am sorry they won’t know me. someday I’ll leave a pie at 3146 burgundy and they’ll never know who or why

+biking back from the Marigny we zigzagged through parade routes blocked off on Canal, and took St. Charles back, watched some unnamed parade (Oshun?) as it looped from Lee Circle all the way back to Napoleon. We waved at the parades and rode in the left lane. All the cars were going at our speed; no one honked, people waved.

+At Seventh street, where we had to cross St. Charles to get to my friend’s birthday party, we had to wait for a marching band to cross before we could sneak in front of a float. “You’re doing a great job! Keep it up!” I shouted at the marching band, the dancers.

+At the birthday party my friend had a bunny named Sadie, named for the Joanna Newsom song. We drank wine from mugs and ate sparkly, metallic king cake from Sucre and delicious vegetarian jambalaya 

+in the 37 degree temperature biking is the only way to keep warm. I wore my hat and goggles

+I abandoned the idea of the bonfire rumpus, my face aching from the cold. Biking home I saw a man walking down the sidewalk, carrying a partially deflated kiddy pool. “Good weather for swimming,” I said as I biked past, giving him the thumbs up. 

+the cake was good. when I got home the heat was on. 

+11:11, and all is well. 

I wish that I had known before I read this book that Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is really creepy. I wish someone had told me: "Hey, this is an entire book written in dream-logic, and it works, but it's really creepy." So there's that.

some things about this book: it is slow. Very slow. Long stretches of time pass where the narrator (Toru Okada) simply sits on his couch, or goes for walks, or sits on a park bench, or sits at cafes. There is a lot of sitting. The most significant sitting happens when--spoiler!--Okada decides to sit, for three days, at the bottom of a well. I mean, there's action, too--the random scene where the main character assaults a random passerby for reminding him of the wife who left him--but overall there's just a lot of nothing happening.

And what you get from it more than anything is atmosphere. You meet other characters and hear their stories, and for the most part the stories of Creta Kano, Lietunant Mamiya, Malta Kano and even May Kasahara are far more interesting than our main character. If I had such a boring main character I'd go insane and throw up and follow someone else and Murakami sticks with him, persistently, stubbornly, clinging to his every move. And sometimes (usually) his monologues go something like

She seemed to have some kind of a clear image in her mind of how I should look. It took her no time to pick out what she bought me. I would have spent more time at a stationer's, picking out a new eraser. But I had to admit that her good taste in clothes was nothing short of astounding. The color and style of every shirt and tie she chose seemingly at random were perfectly coordinated, as if she had selected them after long, careful consideration. nor were the combinations she came up the least bit ordinary. (p380)

which sounds straight like, ugh, bad fanfiction. I do not care how long it takes you to pick out an eraser at the stationer's, why would you tell me this, do I need to know it? Magical woman magically buys you expensive clothes while you sit around doing nothing? Cool. Right. I believe it. NO. I say fanfic because this...this passive main character, who while doing nothing begins to have magical things happen to them, is very fanfic. It's very wishful thinking, and it clashes entirely with my experience of reality and it grates on me, rubs me the wrong way.

In fact, the entire book is best when the main character is not present. Then the simple writing turns from banal to beautiful, as in

This submarine has come up from the bottom of the ocean to kill us all, she thought, but there's nothing strange about that, it could happen anytime. It has nothing to do with the war; it could happen to anyone anywhere. Everybody thinks it's happening because of the war. But that's not true. The war is just one of the things that could happen. (p 398)

which is magical. When the narrator gets out of the way, the book becomes a dark wooden box full of small, delicate, ornate objects. Too bad the narrator is an ugly newspaper stuffed over these objects for most of the book. All the other characters actually tell the interesting parts of their story, while our narrator either can't seem to figure his out or won't tell us what's going on. Is he running a psychic detective agency/prostitution service/spiritual healer? Is he a dream-walker? I mean, we assume that much.

The end of the book--as a warning--is really creepy (especially when you're finishing it at midnight alone in bed). I wish all the people who told me this book was charming (how? what?) would have told me that. The dream sequences, because the book is written in dream-logic, make the most sense and have the most internal consistency, and provide the most poignant atmosphere:

"This place is dangerous. You are an intruder here, and I am the only one on your side. Don't forget that."

"Who are you?" I asked.

The faceless man handed me the flashlight as if passing a baton. "I am the hollow man," he said. Faceless face toward me, he waited in the darkness for me to speak, but I could not find the right words. Eventually, without a sound, he disappeared. He was right in front of me one second, swallowed up by darkness the next. I shone the light in his direction, but only the dull white wall came out of the darkness. (p 575)

It also reads a bit like a detective story--in the way that all these mysteries are presented, you--and the narrator--both feel like soon, there will be a fact handed to you, and that fact will act as a key, and you will be able to Figure This Out. There's even a little explanatory scene at the end, insofar as we get any explanations, but they're all rather vague. I've included excerpts, but if you're afraid of spoilers, don't be, because there is no big reveal to spoil:

I sensed the darkness around me increasing in density, much as the evening tide comes to fullness without a sound. I had to hurry. I didn't have much time left. They might come looking for me here once the lights came back on. I decided to risk putting into words the thoughts that had been slowly forming in my mind.

"This is strictly a product of my own imagination, but I would guess that there was some kind of inherited tendency in the Wataya family bloodline. What kind of tendency I can't be sure, but it was some kind of tendency--something you were afraid of...And your sister, I'm sure, didn't die from food poisoning. No, it was more unusual than that." (p 578)

I'd like to say the rest of the explanation gets more specific, or that this is the explanation for a big plot point of how Toru Okada's sister-in-law died--but it isn't. Those things don't really matter to the plot, as best as I can tell. (It's hard to interpret a book written in dream logic.)

And don't get me wrong: I like dream logic. The sequences when he is dreaming, dreaming of a hotel with endless rooms, labyrinthine hallways--I love those dreams, I have those dreams, and Murakami writes them well. They're creepy and suitably vague, and only in dream logic would sentences like "there is some kind of inherited tendency in the bloodline" be a solid conclusion to draw that explains your problem. The way that time moves slowly in a dream, the way events that happen in separate places, to separate people, or even maybe in separate timelines seem to be connected--all this is beautifully put into place in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and written well. There's just too much stuff in the middle: too much picking up clothes from the cleaners, too much brooding on the couch, too much reading junk mail and opening the fridge. This is how time passes in real life. We really do spend a lot of time waiting in traffic and opening mail and licking envelopes and doing unthinking, meaningless work. But that's not what I want to do when I read a novel, and sitting through the domesticity to get to the eccentricity feels a lot like a bore.

 the end of the year and I've been reading everybody else's year-end best-of lists (in order to figure out what I wanna listen to next) so here are mine: