From the NYT's Cityroom blog

From my window, I could see about a dozen cops in riot gear on the patio below. Off to their left, a few men stood in the cold without jackets, smoking and looking smugly in the direction of the main attraction: Occupy Wall Street protesters. I thought of the day in March 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq. I’d rode around Los Angeles with an activist art collective and wheatpasted  “It’s a Globe, Not an Empire,” signs on bus stops and mailboxes.  I thought of marching down Hollywood Boulevard in protest of the war, and of going door to door to encourage people to register to vote and vote democrat, vote for John Kerry. (I only lasted one day on the job.) I thought about why I became a teacher, and then a journalist. And then I thought about how I ended up here, on the 15th floor of the World Financial Center, looking down on the protesters.

The presence of OWS protesters was of little surprise. In recent weeks, they’d protested nearby in front of Goldman Sachs in conjunction with West coast ports owned by the financial services behemoth. I’d gone down to Zuccotti Park numerous times after work, just a stone’s throw from my office, to see for myself what the mainstream media had a hard time conveying. Each time, I sheepishly loitered on the edge of the park, half talking to people, half trying to avoid being noticed. I worried I looked boring. Corporate. Obviously not in solidarity with the movement. But in fact I was. Would they heckle me, knowing I came straight from work at an office nearby? I felt like a traitor, but to whom?

A few weeks after Occupy Wall Street protesters got evicted from their makeshift home in Zuccotti Park, they infiltrated  the indoor garden at the World Financial Center, a vast atrium populated by tourists and fake palm trees in addition to WFC employees passing from office to coffee shops and back. On the east side of the atrium, floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto Ground Zero, the 9/11 Memorial and the rapidly rising Freedom Tower, the Hudson River and the state of New Jersey to the west. The WFC is owned by Brookfield Properties, the same company that owns Zuccotti Park, and the same company that requested the swift removal of the protesters.

Though I’d been following the movement, I was unaware that OWS had reason to show up at my door that morning. In fact, I didn’t even realize anything had gone down until after it was already in progress. Apparently, the protesters had entered the building en mass, dancing and chanting around the atrium before being ushered outside by police. By the time I looked out my window, the protest was dying down. Police were lined up against the windows in identical poses, elbows nearly touching, like paper dolls in riot gear. Protesters were huddled in small groups, quiet but intense. An occasional chant or cheer would flare up and then simmer down. I thought for minute, and then I hurriedly left the office and went downstairs.

I’m in no way unique when I say it took me awhile to figure out what I wanted to with my life. But I knew very well what I didn’t want: to sit in front of a desk in a labyrinth-like office building working for a big corporation. I knew I didn’t want to feel disposable. I knew I wanted to use words in some powerful way. I wanted – and I say this with both earnestness and irony – to feel like I was making a difference. I say this only to clarify my intentions, but then again, we all know what they say about good intentions.

I liked going to Zuccotti not because I was for or against anything in particular. In fact, the more I learned about finance and big banks in my job, the more I became convinced that most protesters – most people – didn’t really have a clue what went down in 2008. If they did they’d be furious. I went because there was an energy, and something real was happening, even if nothing tangible could be laid out in clear succinct bullets or demands. I knew that that kind of energy was where life and art happened, not at my desk.

As I walked downstairs, I worried vaguely about losing my job. More than that, I worried about my own sense of judgment. Sure, I’m not the 1 percent. Maybe I didn’t benefit from a broken banking system, but was I just as responsible for maintain the status quo by working for firm that was at fault? I wasn’t revolutionary. I wasn’t willing to take a stand. But here was my chance! I was walking out of my own office! Here I went to take a stand! But if I did – I mean, if the beetle-cops rounded me up — what would happen to my job? Who would pay my rent? On many levels, perhaps I couldn’t afford to protest. Or perhaps I just wasn’t badass enough. I knew that they weren’t really protesting me, per se, but I also couldn’t deny my complicity in helping to perpetuate big banks. But a big bank was hiring, and I needed a job. But what if everyone protested corporate structure? I kept seesawing back and forth.

I wish I had a more dramatic protest story, one that includes pepper spray, asshole bankers and profound revelations. I’ve come to realize that the movement, at least for me, was (is) more about the dissolution of American mythology than asking for particulars. If you work hard, try hard, and believe even harder, the success, money and two-car garage will follow. It may sound naive, true. But it’s also the narrative that drives people to our shores from all over the world. It’s the stuff that American dreams are made of, and the loss of the the ability to dream is far more heartbreaking than the loss of a job.

I suppose that’s why the movement never gained traction with people for whom this myth has never proved a reality.  It was never true, not really, but now it’s true for even fewer.

When I got outside I surveyed the protesters dressed in normal urban uniforms: jeans, hoodies, messenger bags, Chuck Taylors. I found myself wanting to talk to them: I’m a casualty of Wall Street, too. I wanted to do something meaningful that fulfilled me, but now I’m just doing something to get by. I really wanted them to know that there were probably others like me, legions who had to compromise on their job for the sake of their career. Of course, none of that was verbalized. I spoke with one woman, an aspiring teacher, who had formerly worked in HR and grown tired of writing layoff letters to hundreds of people who needed their jobs to feed their families. She was wearing jeans and makeup, and looked neither radical or in the dirty hippie vein. I guess the point was simply to show up, and that I did.

After I went back up to my office, intermittently watched the scene from above. Eventually I saw an A NYPD van pull up. I saw the crowd disperse and a few protesters being led away in handcuffs. Then I went back to my desk.

I’ve been practicing yoga on and off for about eight years now, and I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. I don’t think the amount of time I’ve practiced makes me qualified to write this. In fact, I don’t know that I’m qualified at all. I do, however, know that yoga makes me feel good, open and alive in a way that most things don’t. It is for this reason alone that dwell on the subject.

I stumbled upon yoga quite accidentally in a bare bones studio hidden above the Radio Shack in Santa Monica near my apartment. It wasn’t until I noticed lines slinking around the block and sinewy, lithe and sweaty creatures emerging from a door that could’ve led anywhere that I took notice of the place. Where were they going? And how did they get those bodies?

I tried the class and soon I realized I’d stumbled upon what some consider to be the ground zero of the modern American yoga fad: power yoga with the revered yogi Brian Kest. I’d wake up early on Sundays to religiously attend his epic two-hour classes. Brian would say things like “All we’re doing is touching ourselves in the most loving way possible” and “find that sweet spot between too much and not enough,” and then come around the room and run a finger down a sweaty neck, sometimes mine. It was electrifying – perhaps even a revelation.

I felt unlocked, and surprisingly un-self-conscious of my appearance – unlike at LA Fitness among wandering eyeballs. After all the twisting, binding, bending and reaching, there comes release, and this, the laying on the mat with my limbs splayed and my mind finally still, was the part of yoga I craved.

Dramatic? Perhaps. But consider this: Yoga marks the beginning of a profound shift in the way I viewed my body. It was a shift away from an obsession with food and weight, from working out to be skinny, skinnier and skinniest to moving my body to be strong in both in mind and spirit. (When one realizes they may never, no matter how thin, be happy with ones thighs, one needs something else to aim for.) Yoga, combined with my runs along the beach in Santa Monica, was all I needed. I’d never felt so healthy in my life. I was hooked.

And then I moved. Back to Chicago, to winter, and lots more carbs. Bikram yoga became my personal steam room and sauna. Sure, the intense heat made me feel lightheaded at times and the stench of sweat could be overpowering, but there was a concrete satisfaction in knowing I could generate enough heat to soak my clothes through.Then I moved again, this time to Istanbul, where I did sun salutations to the Bosphorus, and then eventually back to Chicago, where I found another studio yet again.

I’ve stopped for long periods at a time and quickly slipped right back into it. But after reading that article on Sunday, when I went to class and got into my inversion, my mind – which I’d tried so hard to quiet – went into overdrive. Was I putting too much pressure on my neck? Was I distributing my weight correctly? I couldn’t  focus on tweaking my body in a way that would allow me to sink deep into the pose. Depth of posture suddenly equaled fear and pain and harm.  What was going on here?

Yoga, unlike cupcakes or football, is seemingly the perfect fruit. I’d venture to bet that there are many high-stung and highly anxious individuals (I’m raising my hand here) who turn to yoga precisely because we are certifiably un-Zen. I’d also venture that many of these folks are highly conscious about how the smallest nuances can change the impact of a pose. Yoga is a practice of subtly  and strength. It is also a practice of paradox, of being totally controlled and letting go completely. Pushing too hard or too little simply doesn’t work.

When I moved to Brooklyn, the fact that there exists a yoga studio next to my apartment building was a major selling point. I’ve always known that the possibility of injury exists – just like I’m worried each morning that I’ll slip as I sleepwalk my way into the shower or get hit while crossing the street.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that Broad’s cautionary tale was so explosive. Maybe now I’ll proceed with even more caution than I already did. Maybe I’ll worry even less about pushing my body to the limits and really try to hone in on that sweet spot between too much and not enough.  But I would hate for my practice – one of the few things in my life that provides a temporary sense of respite and release – to be dampened by fear.

In 2011, my reading wheelhouse seemed to be death. (Shocker!) I was stuck on work that explored the tension between order and chaos. I found myself enthralled by stories that tapped into either a thrilling life lived on the edge or a life of stability that made perfect sense, in a picket fence sort of way, but verged on suffocating. I mention this because while one can argue about objective quality in art, for the sake of this post I’d like to define “best” not by quality of language or craft, (though many of the pieces mentioned possess top quality style) but by my reading experience. I often judge whether or not a book captures me by how strongly I feel like writing after I’ve read it, and that has just as much to do with my sense of ennui as it does with the quality of the text.

The truth is, for all my yoga-practicing, list-making, straight and narrow behavior, I prefer to live at life’s extremes (perhaps that explains all the douchey guys I date?)  I’m no tastemaker, so take this all with a grain of kosher salt.

BOOKS:

1. Pulphead: Essays
John Jeremiah Sullivan
At first glance, it appears that Sullivan has been blessed with every writer’s wet dream: a bizarre, tumultuous, experience-rich life. Then it becomes clear that Sullivan is a writer’s writer; he can make the ordinary seem extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary. In essays on everything from Jesus freaks to reality television, he finds hidden meanings that get lost in the fissures of everyday life.

2. Blue Nights
Joan Didion
I hesitate to include Didion’s masterpiece because I‘ve written about it before, and because it received such critical acclaim. All I’ll say is that for many, this has been a really shitty year. This book made me wonder what, really, I was trying to hold onto, and why the heck I just can’t let go.

3. Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches
Roberto Bolaño
Okay, full disclosure: I didn’t read the whole thing! I know enough to know that Bolaño writes like no one is listening: his writing has the freedom, playfulness and expansiveness of me singing alone into my hairbrush microphone. He is that rare breed of writer who can riff on almost anything in a seemingly scattered manner, and then, just as you’re about to give up on looking fora a point, kazzam! He whips out a gem of wisdom, and you’re back on the Bolano train.

4. Lost in America
Colby Buzzell
This book epitomizes what’s happening to my generation, in my America, in this moment, better than any fluffy NY Mag trends piece ever could. I can’t really understand why it hasn’t received more publicity. Anyway, Buzzell drives from the East coast to West looking for work. Along the way he encounters people who embody the struggles of our nation with more complexity and depth than anyone interviewed in Zuccotti Park. (Sorry friends.)

5. Griftopia: Bubble machines, Vampire Squids and the Long Con That is Breaking America
Matt Taibbi
I started reading this while Wall Street was being occupied right outside my window. I can now say I know what a credit default swap and why the housing boom went bust. But more importantly, I sort of get why we’re still screwed. Yes, it will make you angrier than you probably already are.

LONGFORM

6. The Long Run – Kindle Single
Mishka Shubaly
Lots of people like to write about how fucked up they once were and how they’ve changed. Shubaly is different. He’s honest enough to admit that recovery doesn’t mean life is any less messy, and that a change in behavior doesn’t mean your demons disappear.This is the story of  a man who goes from being addicted to drugs and alcohol for nearly two decades to being addicted to putting one foot in front of the other. By that I mean he does ultra runs, which sort of sound like voluntary Bataan death marches. They go for scores of miles and make your toenails fall off.

7. The Wave – The New Yorker
Francisco Goldman
Based on facts alone, this may sound like a run-of-the-mill tale of tragedy, heartbreak and loss. It is the story of how Goldman loses his beautiful and vibrant wife in a freak swimming accident off the coast in Mexico.  But the thing about this piece is the way it simmers for so long you almost forget its going burn. This story of loss isn’t a quick shattering, like a mirror breaking. The slow, suspended narrative details the wretched days and moments between the time you known someone you love is going to die and the instant they are gone.

8. I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD - GOOD magazine
Mac McClelland
Forget about the provocative title for a moment, and consider this: In a psych book, I read about a guy who used to stand in the middle of a busy street in the middle of the night. He’d wait for a car to come zipping along, perhaps with a drunk driver behind the wheel.  Then, the moment before he was about to get flattened, he’d jump out of harm’s way. We do things like this in order to deal with trauma, to try and change the past. Same circumstances, different outcome. People don’t often write this honestly about the brutality inherent in love and healing, and I don’t mean the physical.

9. A Murder Foretold-The New Yorker
David Grann
This twisty story of conspiracy and murder offers a glimpse into political corruption in Guatemala has seeped deep into the psyche of a people. When you read, pay attention. This is one of those intricately reported, layered masterpieces that reads like fiction. I could not put this one done.

The article dubbed the crew of masters degree holding, culture loving, literary-leaning academics who started the site “New York’s literary cubs.” I’ve hesitated to write about the precocious group simply because to be critical of the success and ambition of up-and-coming book nerds a few years my junior makes me sound like a bitter old yenta. “When I was in college, we didn’t even have Facebook or Twitter!”

Though The New Inquiry’s integration of high and low culture isn’t particularly cutting edge, it does bridge the gap, albeit tenuously, between the (self-indulgent) cultural criticism of academia and the variety found in The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Review of Books. There are no clearly defined rungs on the ladder to writing for such places, and with nepotism and luck playing a large role in such prestigious writing posts, simply paying your dues and keeping your nose to the grindstone doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere. The New Inquiry has managed to stake its claim in the void, and for that I give it, and those who started it, kudos.

So it is not young adults with Ivy League degrees versed in Derrida who feel shut out of the literary establishment because they can’t get paying jobs in publishing that I find suspect. Certainly, it’s a massive, paradigm-shifting letdown to take all the “right” steps and realize that you’ve spent the first 20-odd years of your life climbing a ladder to nowhere. What I am critical of is an article that places these cubs outside of the establishment, when in fact they fall squarely inside of it.

The very idea that making the “right” moves gets you to the right place reveals an underlying sense of entitlement and privilege. It reveals the belief that doing A,B and C makes one deserving of success – a success that should happen swiftly and with ease. I say this only becuase, to an extent, I count myself among them.

Yes, it takes ambition, motivation and disciple to create a magazine of probing inquriy, but let us not forget that on some level, it also takes a little swagger. Labelling what is status quo radical has always been a way to maintain it, and the mainstream has long made idols of supposed counter-cultural heroes who often tend to be more bourgeois than their images may suggest.

The Decemberist’s ‘Calamity Song,’ in reference to Infinite Jest.

I couldn’t make it to any of this weekend’s Brooklyn Book Festival readings due to an unfortunate combination of work, chronic neck pain and an epic shopping trip to Fairway. Why do you constantly subject yourself to situations where you try to “make connections,” when the game should be called “sitting alone and pretending to be enthralled with your iphone ?” I wanted to see the author Colson Whitehead DJ, but since the turnout was quite poor, he was just standing around chatting. I tried talking to him, but I quickly realized I had very little to say. Then I went home and watched the end of the Emmys while eating ice cream, like a normal person. And this concludes another episode of Alizah Feels Awkward

]]> http://www.alizahsalario.com/2011/09/good-effort/feed/ 0 http://www.alizahsalario.com/2011/09/an-exorcism-of-sorts/ http://www.alizahsalario.com/2011/09/an-exorcism-of-sorts/#comments Wed, 14 Sep 2011 02:07:24 +0000 admin http://www.alizahsalario.com/?p=1195 I fear I’ve reached my saturation point with fiction. When the inner workings of novels start to become transparent, is it time to stop reading – or just time to start thinking about them differently? I think, in fact, it’s simply time to start why books do what they do. Here’s a old essay I wrote on the topic — and Elif Batuman’s The Possessed –that suddenly seems relevant.

“I fake it so real, I am beyond fake.” When Courtney Love sings “Doll Parts,” she may not realize she’s summing up the contemporary novel.

The novel is in decline, and some literary critics and authors even believe that the genre is in danger of extinction. In 2009, Philip Roth predicted that the novel would become a “cultic” niche interest within the next three decades; he posited that most modern readers lack the concentration and focus to consume a work of fiction in its entirety. The same month, N + 1 co-founding editor Marco Roth lamented over the rise of the “neuro-novel,” fiction such as Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time that focuses so intently on the workings of the brain, it leaves the traditional territory of literature – the mind, heart, and soul – barren and undiscovered. Roth considers the neuro-novel’s growth as yet “another sign of the novel’s diminishing purview.”

Both Roths tap into theories that James Woods first touched upon in “Hysterical Realism” in 2000, where he maligned the “big, ambitious novel” (i.e. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth) for privileging grandiose themes over the reality of characters’ lives. In a later New Yorker article, Woods asserted that the novelistic conventions of hysterical realism – “the preference for the concrete over the abstract (“She was twenty-nine, but still went home every evening to her mom’s ground-floor apartment in Queens, which doubled by day as a yoga studio”)” – “congeal” so they have become the conventions of the novel, while other standards of fiction writing have lost their cachet. The craft of writing suffers, but more importantly, so does the art of storytelling.

The bottom line is that writers haven’t just whittled away at the literary techniques that give fiction its authenticity and realness, they’ve mitigated literary sensibilities. But if readers have lost the ability to distinguish between the real and the fabricated, does it matter much anyway? The ostensible argument is that the dulling of literary senses is due to the invention of the Internet, the atomization of information and the increase of mash-ups in popular culture. But the novels’ decline started well before the world wide web.

In the classic reading guide How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler compared the “artificial props” of television and radio (and now, of course, he’d likely include the Internet) to drug addiction: “We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we when cease to grow, we begin to die.”

The blurring between the lines producer/consumer and audience/entertainer began to materialize well before the advent of the Internet. David Shields challenged the very concept of the novel as a distinct genre in his new book, Reality Hunger: “There’s inevitably something terribly contrived about the standard novel; you can always feel the wheels grinding and going on,” he wrote. Shields can’t get through Franzen’s The Corrections (one of those big, ambitious novels) not because it’s “bad” or “good” but due to something much deeper about the way he reacts to text: “…something has happened to my imagination, which can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of a novelistic form,” he wrote.

On one hand, both writers and readers need and want stories. On the other, stories fail to penetrate because of the paradigm shift in the way readers decode information – the growing inability to “read creatively” – and situate a text in its entirely within their lives. So what are writers and readers to do? One writer took a chance: rather than place a text within her life, Elif Batuman placed her life within various texts. She intertwined her life with the lives she reads about, and succeeded not in writing a big, ambitious novel, but in living one.

The central question Batuman poses in The Possessed – how to bring our lives closer to the stories we cherish – is really a literary means of unraveling a 21st century problematic: how to bring our lives – fragmented, isolated, and vapid as they may be – closer to authenticity and wholeness. Batuman remains true to contemporary forms of disseminating information: she aggregates various texts by quoting from many sources, she comments on commentary, and even borrows the title of her book from Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel The Possessed, which was later translated into Demons. Yet her book is not a pastiche cobbled together from other sources. The idea clearly germinated from her identity and experiences, and Russian novels are used as roadmaps to navigate her own story, not comprise the story itself.  The book is both a product of the Internet age, and a backlash against it.

Batuman’s theory of the novel reflects the hunger for authenticity and integrity in her own life, and explains why she decided to study Russian literature instead of writing a novel: “the novel form is “about” the protagonist’s struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books. Looking back, this is how I understand my interest in Central Asia: there was an actual place you could visit, with a language you could learn, that linked my favorite books with one of the more arbitrary and “given” aspects of my life: being Turkish,” she wrote.

Throughout The Possessed, Batuman juxtaposes the stories of her life with those of the authors and the characters she so adores. She introduces her book by comparing her life in grad school to the journey of the central character in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, who spends seven years at a tuberculosis sanatorium though he doesn’t actually have tuberculosis: “How does someone with no real academic aspirations end up spending seven years in suburban California studying the form of the Russian novel?” she asked herself.

In essence, Batuman writes a “real” novel about her own experiences: the preposterous bureaucracy of graduate school, learning Uzbek in Samarkand, and visiting Russian ice castles, all the while examining, studying, and obsessing over the lives of Russian authors from Tolstoy to Babel. Yet Turkish-American Batuman is not concerned with how to make fiction reflect “real” lives – she’ll leave that to students in creative writing programs obsessed with craft and the false realism that Woods so harshly critiques.  Rather, through nonfiction, she explores how to make our lives more like the books we love, and by extension, how to make our lives feel more real. In turn, her readers are forced to do the same.

Batuman posits theories about the significance of her work by comparing her methods to literature and philosophy, using stories as a consistent guide for navigating her life: “In the The Night’s Move, Shklovsky proposes that the history of literature proceeds not in a straight line, but in a bent one, like the L-shaped path of a chess knight. The authors who influence one another are not always the ones you would expect….literary forms themselves grow by assimilating foreign or extraliterary material, veering off in new angles.”

It is unlikely that Batuman’s book will rescue the sinking novel or drowning authors from the tempest of change. It does, however slightly, veer off in a new angle and offer an alternative, ultimately making readers question whether appropriating fragments of understanding from others is more satisfying than grappling with understanding themselves. It begs questions of whether we can tolerate a reality that is beyond fake, and what it would mean if writers ceased striving for authenticity and truth via fiction. For Batuman, the answer is clear.

“If I could start over today, I could choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.”

]]> http://www.alizahsalario.com/2011/09/an-exorcism-of-sorts/feed/ 0 http://www.alizahsalario.com/2011/09/snooki-the-next-anderson-cooper/ http://www.alizahsalario.com/2011/09/snooki-the-next-anderson-cooper/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:13:10 +0000 admin http://www.alizahsalario.com/?p=1185 I was going to write a long-winded post about the conflation of information and entertainment and the blurred lines between news and gossip, but I think this speaks for itself.

]]> http://www.alizahsalario.com/2011/09/snooki-the-next-anderson-cooper/feed/ 0 http://www.alizahsalario.com/2011/08/full-disclosure/ http://www.alizahsalario.com/2011/08/full-disclosure/#comments Wed, 31 Aug 2011 04:18:48 +0000 admin http://www.alizahsalario.com/?p=1176 I really want the leopard print jumpsuit. No, I’m not being ironic.

Animal print: it's not just for grandmas in Boca anymore

 

]]> http://www.alizahsalario.com/2011/08/full-disclosure/feed/ 0 http://www.alizahsalario.com/2011/08/1128/ http://www.alizahsalario.com/2011/08/1128/#comments Thu, 04 Aug 2011 04:33:48 +0000 admin http://www.alizahsalario.com/?p=1128 Whenever I check my site stats on Google Analytics (which is embarrassingly often) I notice that my search engine traffic stems from one particular search: Jersey Shore. Sometimes it’s “Jersey Shore Analysis” or “Jersey Shore Critique.” I wrote one post on the subject way back when, and though I’ve written about important, highbrow junk too — Malick and Herzog, Foster Wallace and Whitman — this one little ‘Shore post continues to be my jackpot. So. I’ll write it again. Jersey Shore Analysis. The Situation. Juiceheads. GTL. Abs. Beer, pouf, pickles, Snooki. J-Woww. Snooki, Snooki, Snooki.

I hope someone out there finds this useful.

Hey. Whatever works.

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