The Golden Finch and the Red Oak Tree

There's a sense that if one if from New Jersey, one must completely and totally be from New Jersey. If someone asks you to describe yourself, the correct answer is not "I'm 21, I'm an English major, etc." The correct answer is "I'm from New Jersey, etc." Pretty much all New Jerseyans I know despised the state until they went to college, where we learned that everyone else hates our state, and thus we must learn to love it. We will defend our right to have someone pump our gas, tell others that only the highways smell bad, and damnit, we will love Jersey Shore, while pointing out that only two of them are actually from New Jersey. We may still hate the other half of the state (fuck you, South Jersey), but it's only because they're the ones who give our state a bad name. This love/hate relationship seems pretty standard for almost all college-aged New Jerseyan friends, at least the ones from Vassar. Learning to love New Jersey, it seems, is a rite of passage, and once we reach it, we won't shut up about it.

This way of thinking is also completely embedded in our music scene. As this NYT article puts it: “Every great song about New Jersey has always been pretty much about getting out of there,” said Mr. Stickles, a native of Glen Rock, in a telephone interview on Tuesday, the day of the album’s release on the XL label. “The Monitor,” a glorious, rambunctious, unsettling album, has a more complicated proposition. Its protagonist starts out escaping to Boston, but comes to realize that hiding is folly: his home state is embedded in him. By the end of the album, he’s headed back, doing the things he hoped he would stop, becoming the person he’s tried to avoid becoming, even though he was that person all along.

People who write about childhoods/life in New Jersey seem to have the sense that they are not just writing a narrative that happens to take place in New Jersey. They are writing about a specific type of life or childhood that can only take place in New Jersey. Is this true? Probably not. If someone had a similar family to mine, was pushed into similar activities, had a somewhat similar personality, I'm sure our lives could be roughly described the same way, even if they grew up in a South Orange-sized town in Nebraska or Wyoming. And being from New Jersey is not necessarily more meaningful than being from anywhere else. New Jersey stands for something in the outside world, but so does New York, or California, or Massachusetts. Or even Maine or Idaho.

It's difficult to separate a location from its meaning, but New Jerseyans seem to have a particularly hard time with this. I know plenty of people who enjoy Ted Leo's music who are not from New Jersey. They understand the tropes of childhood, of growing up, of everything else he writes about. He could easily be writing about their lives, but I know better. I know he's writing about the singular New Jersey experience, and while specific components of that experience can be generalized, as a whole, other people just can't understand it. (Note: this is clearly an exaggeration of how I actually feel).

Or maybe not. Maybe New Jerseyans are all just self-centered tools (because God knows we have a lot of those in our state), who try too hard to own the few things we're proud of when the rest of the country calls us the armpit of America. But I will take my Springsteen, Lauryn Hill and Ted Leo albums, watch Garden State (incidentally about my town in particular, although not a very good movie) and Kevin Smith movies, and use my New Jersey tote bag no matter how far from home I move. Because no matter where I end up, I will never really leave New Jersey, and I will always be proud of that.

I'm usually not much of a sappy person, but I find this unbearably sweet, if maybe a little cliched:

First Kisses

Philip Roth Again

Because he writes too well, and too close to home to not be heard from. The Counterlife in particular takes place mostly in my hometown, while his other books take place in and around Newark, in the era of the Newark Jews; my dad's family that I only know from his sporadic stories. Despite the obvious huge generation gap between me and Philip Roth, the anxieties about secular Judaism, about New Jersey, about what those things mean for one's identity are all, to varying extents, huge parts of my life, and I'm glad someone writes about them as well as he does. After reading American Pastoral, all I wanted to do was write, because if I could write a sentence even a quarter as good as some of the sentences in there I would be happy. I wouldn't necessarily say his books are for everyone; the religion, place, and family influence are obviously a lot of the reason why I like him. But I highly recommend his books to anyone, anyway.

"Henry remembered that after the lecture, during the question period, Nathan had been asked by a student if he wrote 'in quest of immortality.' He could hear Nathan laughing and giving the answer...'If you're from New Jersey,' Nathan had said, 'and you write thirty books and you win the Nobel Prize, and you live to be white-haired and ninety-five, it's highly unlikely but not impossible that after your death they'll decide to name a rest stop for you on the Jersey Turnpike. And so, long as you're gone, you may indeed be remembered, but mostly by small children, in the backs of cars, when they lean forward and tell their parents, 'Stop, please, stop at Zuckerman - I have to make a pee.' For a New Jersey novelist that's as much immortality as it's realistic to hope for.'"

"Let it be this way then, the lost way. Life is the adventure of losing your way - and it's about time I found out!"

- Philip Roth, The Counterlife

A Productive Day

See #28 on the list on fastest solvers? Yeah, that would be me. I guess 2-5 crossword puzzles a day for the past four years or so has paid off. Too bad I can't actually solve a New York Times crossword puzzle after Tuesday...

Update: I actually did Wednesday's puzzle apparently. I guess they go online a day early? The good news is that I can solve Wednesday's puzzle now (they get harder as the week goes on). The bad news is that I'm now #152 on the list of fastest solvers. But somehow I don't think I'll ever be able to solve the NY Times crossword puzzle in 3 minutes...

This weather makes me want to take naps outside, listen to indie pop, and take sun-drenched pictures of people I care about. I've definitely been doing the second one, but I doubt I will get around to the other two soon, especially because it's supposed to rain next week. But at least the fact that the library isn't open today let me take a break from the computer screen and sit outside, even if it was just to do more work.

Break is winding down, and although I'm happy to have almost all my friends back at Vassar, I'm not so happy about everyone else coming back. I've liked the deserted paths, the deserted library, the deserted THs. The quiet and small groups have been exactly what I needed, and I feel like the beauty of Vassar right now will only be marred by the activities of the entire campus.

But it feels like spring is here to stay, and despite all the scary and/or not-so-good things spring will bring, I'm starting to think things will change for the better. And if there's anything I need right now, it's a little bit of change, and a lot of sunshine.

Down the rabbit hole

When I first heard Tim Burton was making Alice in Wonderland in 3-D, my thoughts were along the same lines as when I heard he was remaking Willy Wonka: 1. He'll ruin it! It will be too Tim Burton-ish and weird! and 2. I guess if anyone's going to remake it, it should be him. and specifically for this: Why does everything need to be in 3-D?! Turns out I was mostly wrong about 1 and 3.

If anything, this movie should really be called a sequel to Alice in Wonderland, although I don't know what the actual title of the movie should be in that case. The characters are all there, and some scenes (i.e. the tea party) are the same, but Alice is about 18 years old, this is her second visit to Wonderland (or Underland, as it's called in the movie, which is stupid and unnecessary), and the situations themselves are almost entirely new. In this version, Alice returns to Wonderland, and is supposed to slay the Jabberwocky, which will allow the White Queen to take over from the evil Red Queen. Of course, no one is sure she's the "right Alice."

But let's start with the queens. Yes, Helena Bonham Carter looks unnecessarily weird, but I think she actually did a fantastic job. Despite being a composite of the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland and the Red Queen from Through the Looking Glass, but hey, it's a sequel. A truly evil queen wouldn't have worked in this movie, so the humor and insanity that Carter puts into it made her into a much better character. Sure she was over-the-top, but that's kind of how she needed to be. The White Queen on the other hand: eh. I know Anne Hathaway can act, so I'm more inclined to blame the character than her, especially when it was a small part, but she had no personality, and her affectations came off as annoying, rather than a necessary part of her character.

Also, nerdy side note: Maybe this is mostly because I'm taking a class on Elizabeth I, but the Red Queen is absolutely Queen Mary and the White Queen is definitely (but less directly) Elizabeth. I mean, they even call the Red Queen the Bloody Queen! And the White Queen being somewhat trapped in her castle while her followers plan a rebellion she may or may not be involved in? Definitely the Wyatt Rebellion rewritten to be successful. I'm also 99% sure there was a picture of Henry VIII (Mary and Elizabeth's father) in the Red Queen's castle.

Anyway, if there's one thing that was too Burtonesque, it was Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. Of course I hate to say anything bad about Johnny Depp, but I think he had a little too much fun with this role. His part was much, much bigger than in the books, and to some extent the character development added depth to the plot, but it was mostly unnecessary, and I think it would have worked better if Depp toned it down a bit. You don't need to be a serious actor? Alright, we get it. You also don't need to change your accent every five minutes.

I have to say Tim Burton was right when he said he's never seen a version of Alice in Wonderland that captures the true essence (not that I've seen many versions, although I have a strong recollection of one with Whoopi Goldberg and some people on roller skates), but I'm not entirely sure he does either. He said he wanted to make a "warrior" version of Alice, which I don't think is the essence, but she was a lot more vulnerable than I thought. I think the movie succeeded because there was plenty of basic things (i.e. characters) for people who don't know the books well, and lots of little things for people who do know them well, but Burton also managed to create something entirely new. Framing the story with Alice having to kill the Jabberwocky may seem kind of silly, but I really liked it, and not just because that poem is one of two that I know by heart. It gave the movie purpose, and direction, and allowed Alice to really shine. Even the 3-D was done reasonably well, and wasn't nearly as gimmicky as I would expect from Tim Burton. All in all, it wasn't the best movie I've ever seen, but I liked it far more than I thought I would, and would definitely recommend it.

Daily self-esteem

This is why I'm hot

Correct punctuation in text messages? Obscene amounts of trivia? Lack of dancing skills? Competitiveness? Omg, I am so hot right now. And if you're reading this, you probably have at least some of this qualities too. Congratulations, you're hot!