Nancy Rommelmann

Joy [Part 1]

We began receiving the NYT Weekender this week, thus avoiding my driving to the two Ristretto locations and cherry-picking the sections I want before anyone snags them. Most of the paper wound up on the sofa, where I can read it at my leisure throughout the week. This morning at 6:30, over a cup of Nicaragua coffee my husband roasted yesterday, it was the Sports section, an article about John Updike's essay on the great Ted Williams. It was nice enough to read about how Updike came to be at Williams' last game, and the reverence and playfulness and seriousness with which he wrote his first and last piece on baseball, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu", which appeared in The New Yorker in 1960, but what I really took from it was a renewed sense of joy, via this quote (emphasis mine):

[T]he essay is never precious or self-consciously literary, the way a lot of subsequent Fenway prose became, penned by earnest, heavy-breathing scribes clustered in Updike’s shadow. Roger Angell, who began writing about baseball for The New Yorker two years after Updike, and whose career has had an astonishing longevity — he’s the Ripken or Gehrig to Updike’s blazing youthful phenom — has said that “Hub Fans” most of all supplied him with a tone: colloquial, attentive, unashamed of feeling or of striving for an elegant turn of phrase. It seems obvious now, but Updike was one of the first to show that you don’t have to write down about sports or empurple them, either. 

I have a library ladder in my office, just to the right of where I sit at my desk. Currently occupying its second rung is "The Thinker's Thesaurus," which Ilearned existed when I saw it on the bookshelf in which Christopher Hitchens was posed at his desk. The only thesaurus I have ever owned is a generic copy of Roget's, printed on pulp paper and bought from a street vendor in New York in the early 1980s for five dollars. At its worst, a thesaurus is a faux form of productive procrastination; at its best, it gets you out of the word-rut you plopped yourself in and helps you think. Or so I thought. The Thinker's Thesaurus turns out to be series of illustrative and author Peter Meltzer-subjective journeys, via other authors' quotes. The funniest comment I read about the book is that the quotes show consistentanti-Bill Clintonism (note: "pepperpot" is not listed as a qualifier for "portly," though there is "stomachy," which I adore). The book has provided me with much pleasure, and last week, made me remember that I love to write.

It's been a little easy to forget this. Only those still lying abed with their pillows over their heads do not acknowledge that the venues in which to run 6,000-essays about baseball grow slender and slenderer still. Fear not, I am not here to complain, only to admit that perhaps the experience of seeing five of my seven favorite editors dismissed in the past year; of writing solid pieces for one-sixth the money, felt like a punch in the eye. Feels pretty much healed today.

To come: Joy [Part 2], wherein I wonder whether anxious wives start making homemade eggrolls

Bethany Storro Burns Own Face with Acid, and It is Not a Mystery Why

Two weeks ago, Bethany Storro claimed a black woman walked up to her in a parking lot and threw acid in her face. It was front page news in Vancouver, WA (where the alleged attack took place) and Portland, and evidently sent shock-waves as far as the Oprah Winfrey show, which was scheduled to feature Storro today. Instead, Storro is again on the front pages, admitting she did it to herself.

This does not come as a surprise. A colleague at Willamette Week emailed me last week to say, local writer Marcus Griffith had been questioning Storro's account; that female fabulists seemed to be an arena I spenda good deal of time in; what did I think? I called him from New York to say, absolutely I can believe Storro did this to herself, and would be like to see the three-inch thick folder of clippings I keep, called, "Obese White Women Liars"? It is a phenom, probably a book, probably one that should be talked about on Oprah. This, though people initially prefer to jump into bed with "the victim," to have a sort of pillow party with prayers and tears and support, as can be seen in the comments here, as can the pasting Griffith comes in for, being called a "Dirty Lowlife Scumbag" for questioning Storro's story. News flash, folks: this is what journalists do, or are supposed to do.

It seems that all I do these days is write about liars, false prophets and sociopaths, and the people who believe these people's stories despite remarkable evidence to the contrary. [An interesting discussion about this continued, here.] The more I write about fantasists and charlatans, the less mysterious their reasoning becomes.

This morning, the Vancouver police are apparently still baffled that a woman would make this up. That the force spent many hours and dollars on a goose chase. They do not yet say, they are angry. They say, instead, of Storro, "It's obvious to everybody here that she's got a fragile mental state." They have also just announced, they might bring charges against her. And I think they should.

But here's a bet: there will be cries that we should not further persecute someone who is obviously in enough pain to disfigure herself in a bid for attention. That had -- and I might call this the Laura Albert rationale -- Storro only been given the love and support she needed, she would not have had to resort to such drastic measures, and that she did only proves, we were not there for her when she needed it.

What Went Down in New York

 
Tavie in my mom's kitchen

 
Morning of September 11

 
Anne Breza, my brother Chris's girlfriend, and Chris, just before he did a swim across the East River

 
Chris, who later said of the swim, "It was fun and easy."

 
Din walking the Brooklyn Bridge

 
John's Pizza, midnight

 
Gelato on Bleeker Street, 12:45

 
View from penthouse of Gansevoort Hotel, wrap party for "Arthur"

 
Tavie and star of "Arthur" Russell Brand. He is telling her, "You make me feel very unusual."

 
Bon voyage cheese blintzes at Teresa's

Why Not to Follow a Cult Leader - "The Rajneesh Chronicles"

I am fortunate to be writing for an editor at the Oregonian who lets me dig into ideas I find important to disseminate and/or debunk. One of my favorite (least favorite?) is anything having to do with liars who convince others to believe their lies in order to amass personal power. I sometimes think I could write a book called, "Cult Leadership for Dummies," the actions of these charlatans and sociopaths are so proscribed and tawdry and small, a sort of one-two-three in which the manipulator worms his or her way in, worms and worms and worms until the host maggoty and broken. We cannot always protect people from being foolish and weak, but we can and must alert them at every turn not to be so. The opening from today's offering, a Q & A with the author Win McCormack, in the re-release of "The Rajneesh Chronicles."

It is axiomatic that each generation gets the guru it deserves. In the 1970s, fired up by freedoms proffered by the sexual revolution and women's lib, voyeurs to the Beatles' and the Beach Boys' spiritual brushes with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, those seeking a pleasurable enlightenment looked east.

There was someone looking back, someone who, in theory, had feathered a nest just for them. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh preached an admixture of mysticism and the Human Potential Movement, and bound it with a goo of free love. "Know your sexuality," read a Rajneesh ad in Time magazine, "and one day you will stumble upon your spirituality."

The message proved irresistible to thousands of Westerners. And if, upon arriving at Rajneesh's communes, life proved less than idyllic, with encounter groups devolving into sanctioned gang rapes, and meditation giving way to 120-hour unpaid workweeks, and sterilization and abortions strongly encouraged if not demanded due to Rajneesh considering the institution of family "a symbol of all that is ugly," then perhaps these were the costs of building a better world.

Read the rest here.

Happy Anniversary

So I'm getting my hair cut yesterday when my phone rings. It's my daughter, from New York. I ask what she has planned for the weekend. She tells me and ask what I'm doing. I tell her, Din is taking me to dinner.

"Cool," she says. "Isn't your guys anniversary tomorrow?"

Silence. Thinking, what is today? What is tomorrow? What day did we get married? Then I start to laugh.

"You forgot again," Tafv says. Yes, indeed. The last time this happened, I had at least thought a week or two before that we had anniversary coming up. This year, nada, nix, not once.

I came home told Din; asked if it had crossed his mind at all.

"Nope," he said. And, "At least we're on the same page."

To which I will add, I wake up every morning glad to see him. Happy 7th, honey xx

 

Which Size Do You Prefer?

Let us overlook that any dimples have been photoshopped; also, that it appears doubtful the heads of the girl on the left and the right have ever before or since appeared on the respective bodies. I am going to keep my mouth shut for now, except to say, according to one survey, the girl on the right wins. 

 
h/t, Hillary Johnson

The Stuff of Inspiration, or, Nana Strike 2010

What is it about our mothers, and specifically my mother: Generous to a fault, bright and funny, ready to defend you to the ends of the earth, and yet possessing the ability to instantly provoke irrational anger. The fault may be with me, and if so, is one I apparently passed to my daughter, who currently lives with my mother in New York, and while they cross paths only a few hours each week, this week this proved too much, my daughter becoming furious about something, a fury she roared a bit about at work, which apparently inspired the film's art director.

"As soon as I heard you say it," he told my daughter this morning, upon presenting her with a roll of stickers with the image below, "I knew what I had to do."