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intertribalI.
The M60 goes from Morningside Heights to LaGuardia Airport, and I took it this evening to meet Lindsey. It's a much more relaxing and thoughtful experience to ride the bus without having to worry about people tripping over your luggage or making your flight on time. A nice long bus ride, through Harlem, over the TriBoro bridge, through a little part of Queens. And the stores are still open, so you can see them - the last time I took this trip it was five in the morning, and Harlem was still mostly asleep. It's amazing how many stores advertise "human hair" in Harlem. Riding the bus with me between the hours of seven and eight were a prim coiffed girl who I suspected was going to Harlem to meet her boyfriend or sugar daddy, a man who looked like Bob Marley, laughing and making large gestures that whoever he was talking to on his cellphone couldn't see, an austere Asian guy who looked like he might be a classical musician who took the bus for about three blocks, an entire family and their sleeping baby who took the bus to cross the bridge, and a throng of girls my age carrying stuffed garbage bags going to the same terminal as me, United.
Looking out the window, I was briefly alarmed by what looked like baby clothes moving by themselves - they were really being pulled off their rack by a hook and pole - and listened to my new playlist, Walk the Line, occasionally "dreaming in digital" but finding myself more often thinking about my own life. AC. Next semester. The future. Airports I would go to in the future, and why, and where I would call home then. I also happened to see a beggar in a wheelchair peddling down the middle of a street, parallel to the parked cars waiting at a stop light, stopping at their windows. Begging at the windows, his eyes milky and bulging from his head. I've never seen beggars moving car-to-car in the United States before. It reminded me of Jakarta, where the beggars don't have wheelchairs - if they don't have legs, they fashion crutches from branches and hop from car to car. Some of them cradle babies. Some of them sell newspapers, but most don't have such goods. The only economy they participate in is the economy of charity. I was shocked to see car-to-car begging in New York. But on the other hand, my mother knew someone who once described New York City as America's third world.
II.
Since I got there a whole hour early, I went through the airport - most of the shops, like Brookstone, and the Body Shop, closed - in search of something to occupy me. I pondered coffee for a while, then decided I didn't really want to stay up till 4 again, and went to the Borders, where I meandered toward the fiction section and wondered where my name would go if I were a published author. I scanned the names until I found my proper alphabetical place... in between Jimmy Buffett's A Salty Piece of Land, described as "an entertaining Caribbean romp", and John Burdett's Bangkok 8, described as "a thriller as exotic as it is enthralling". Both are old white men writing about exotic locales, sometimes from the point of the view of the exotic itself. While I didn't know what to make of Jimmy Buffett's seemingly conflict-less little paradise book, I should have been able to relate to Bangkok 8. It was crime fiction, set in Bangkok, full of Thai idiosyncrasies, both linguistic and cultural, and practically reeks of seedy underworld that the West has made Bangkok famous for. But there was just something about the romance between the Thai cop, half-G.I. and half-bar girl, and the "beautiful FBI Agent" from America that put me off. I think from reading the last chapter that they end up together, but I can't be sure. I have a sort of similar set-up in Here There Be Monsters, between Detective Siu Liang, one of the last honest God-fearing cops in Haikou City, and Nike, the smartmouth female journalist. Of course, it doesn't work, because it never could, and Nike goes home to America with Rod at the end of the book.
So I wandered then to the Science Fiction section, bypassing Romance completely, and looked for where my name would be there. Stuck in between Robert Buetner's Orphanage, a military sf about teenaged orphans with nothing to lose having to go conduct a counterstrike against the attacking aliens of Ganymede, and Rachel Caine's Windfall, an urban fantasy about a woman who's a Warden and has a djinn boyfriend, and has to prevent supernatural civil war, and all taking place in our modern world, or something. I love how even in sf/f women still have to write something resembling chick lit. Taking a step back, I wondered about the state of science fiction in general. There's the manly military stuff, featuring ugly green aliens and Aryan soldiers facing off amid the stars, and there's the female witches in bondage, demons-and-vampires stuff, featuring, mainly, rippable bodices. Even Anne Rice is getting into it with her latest book, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. Then of course there's the standard stuff: warriors lunging, swords in air, poised on snarling predators; beneath the cover, ye olde English, unpronounceable names, and a lack of description or introspection abound. R. A. Salvatore, who I know is at least moderately acclaimed, was found guilty in my eye of horrific name construction in his Promise of the Witch-King (a title I don't use, though I admit its resonance, because I feel it belongs to Tolkien): Entreri and Jarlaxle. God help me... where do I belong? Am I marketable at all?
On the other hand, I do find a book, while perusing the Bestsellers in Paperback shelf, that intrigued me much and that I would have bought if it wasn't $17. It's not fiction. It's called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and is written by Jared Diamond, who also wrote the supposedly brilliant Guns, Germs, and Steel. It explores "how humankind's use and abuse of the environment reveal the truth behind the world's great collapses". Reminds me of the path I decide humans and Earth will take in the next 500 years, culminating in the events of Ilium Agonistes. Now that one, I'd read.
The M60 goes from Morningside Heights to LaGuardia Airport, and I took it this evening to meet Lindsey. It's a much more relaxing and thoughtful experience to ride the bus without having to worry about people tripping over your luggage or making your flight on time. A nice long bus ride, through Harlem, over the TriBoro bridge, through a little part of Queens. And the stores are still open, so you can see them - the last time I took this trip it was five in the morning, and Harlem was still mostly asleep. It's amazing how many stores advertise "human hair" in Harlem. Riding the bus with me between the hours of seven and eight were a prim coiffed girl who I suspected was going to Harlem to meet her boyfriend or sugar daddy, a man who looked like Bob Marley, laughing and making large gestures that whoever he was talking to on his cellphone couldn't see, an austere Asian guy who looked like he might be a classical musician who took the bus for about three blocks, an entire family and their sleeping baby who took the bus to cross the bridge, and a throng of girls my age carrying stuffed garbage bags going to the same terminal as me, United.
Looking out the window, I was briefly alarmed by what looked like baby clothes moving by themselves - they were really being pulled off their rack by a hook and pole - and listened to my new playlist, Walk the Line, occasionally "dreaming in digital" but finding myself more often thinking about my own life. AC. Next semester. The future. Airports I would go to in the future, and why, and where I would call home then. I also happened to see a beggar in a wheelchair peddling down the middle of a street, parallel to the parked cars waiting at a stop light, stopping at their windows. Begging at the windows, his eyes milky and bulging from his head. I've never seen beggars moving car-to-car in the United States before. It reminded me of Jakarta, where the beggars don't have wheelchairs - if they don't have legs, they fashion crutches from branches and hop from car to car. Some of them cradle babies. Some of them sell newspapers, but most don't have such goods. The only economy they participate in is the economy of charity. I was shocked to see car-to-car begging in New York. But on the other hand, my mother knew someone who once described New York City as America's third world.
II.
Since I got there a whole hour early, I went through the airport - most of the shops, like Brookstone, and the Body Shop, closed - in search of something to occupy me. I pondered coffee for a while, then decided I didn't really want to stay up till 4 again, and went to the Borders, where I meandered toward the fiction section and wondered where my name would go if I were a published author. I scanned the names until I found my proper alphabetical place... in between Jimmy Buffett's A Salty Piece of Land, described as "an entertaining Caribbean romp", and John Burdett's Bangkok 8, described as "a thriller as exotic as it is enthralling". Both are old white men writing about exotic locales, sometimes from the point of the view of the exotic itself. While I didn't know what to make of Jimmy Buffett's seemingly conflict-less little paradise book, I should have been able to relate to Bangkok 8. It was crime fiction, set in Bangkok, full of Thai idiosyncrasies, both linguistic and cultural, and practically reeks of seedy underworld that the West has made Bangkok famous for. But there was just something about the romance between the Thai cop, half-G.I. and half-bar girl, and the "beautiful FBI Agent" from America that put me off. I think from reading the last chapter that they end up together, but I can't be sure. I have a sort of similar set-up in Here There Be Monsters, between Detective Siu Liang, one of the last honest God-fearing cops in Haikou City, and Nike, the smartmouth female journalist. Of course, it doesn't work, because it never could, and Nike goes home to America with Rod at the end of the book.
So I wandered then to the Science Fiction section, bypassing Romance completely, and looked for where my name would be there. Stuck in between Robert Buetner's Orphanage, a military sf about teenaged orphans with nothing to lose having to go conduct a counterstrike against the attacking aliens of Ganymede, and Rachel Caine's Windfall, an urban fantasy about a woman who's a Warden and has a djinn boyfriend, and has to prevent supernatural civil war, and all taking place in our modern world, or something. I love how even in sf/f women still have to write something resembling chick lit. Taking a step back, I wondered about the state of science fiction in general. There's the manly military stuff, featuring ugly green aliens and Aryan soldiers facing off amid the stars, and there's the female witches in bondage, demons-and-vampires stuff, featuring, mainly, rippable bodices. Even Anne Rice is getting into it with her latest book, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. Then of course there's the standard stuff: warriors lunging, swords in air, poised on snarling predators; beneath the cover, ye olde English, unpronounceable names, and a lack of description or introspection abound. R. A. Salvatore, who I know is at least moderately acclaimed, was found guilty in my eye of horrific name construction in his Promise of the Witch-King (a title I don't use, though I admit its resonance, because I feel it belongs to Tolkien): Entreri and Jarlaxle. God help me... where do I belong? Am I marketable at all?
On the other hand, I do find a book, while perusing the Bestsellers in Paperback shelf, that intrigued me much and that I would have bought if it wasn't $17. It's not fiction. It's called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and is written by Jared Diamond, who also wrote the supposedly brilliant Guns, Germs, and Steel. It explores "how humankind's use and abuse of the environment reveal the truth behind the world's great collapses". Reminds me of the path I decide humans and Earth will take in the next 500 years, culminating in the events of Ilium Agonistes. Now that one, I'd read.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-12 02:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-12 03:52 am (UTC)