A Brie Grows in Brooklyn

It’s difficult for Tannenbaum to describe how much he enjoys his job. He tries words such as “unbelievable” and “amazing,” then offers more superlatives, but they all seem insufficient to him. His fulfillment is such that the job is also a source of anxiety, which can be forestalled only by greater and greater exertions. “I’m relentless,” he told me. “I’m going to show up every day, almost to an irrational extent. I want to work. Insecurity drives me. I don’t want to go back to Needham. I don’t want to be the man in the frozen-foods section of a grocery store, the guy who, ten seconds after I pass by with my peas, people whisper, “That guy used to be the G.M of the Jets.”

—Mike Tannenbaum, the General Manager of the Jets, as quoted in an article, “Quarterback Shuffle,” by Nicholas Dawidoff

(I just spent the energy typing the quote to a fellow writer, so I thought I’d recycle it here.)

The whole article is great—a little Tebow, a little humor, a little Mark Sanchez, a lot of tears (at least for me). I weirdly love sports articles in the New Yorker, because the people who write them—Ben McGrath in particular—are fantastic at weaving stories. Read it here. 

“Twenty-five years later, I wrote ‘The Fire Balloons,’ a story in which a number of priests fly off to Mars looking for creatures of good will. It is my tribute to those summers when my grandfather was alive. One of those priests was like my grandpa, whom I put on Mars to see the lovely balloons again, but this time they were Martians, all fired and bright, adrift above a dead sea.”

—Ray Bradbury in a final essay, fittingly called “Take Me Home,” which is laden with nostalgia, and unerringly beautiful.

I read “The Proxy Marriage,” a short story by Maile Meloy, in the New Yorker yesterday, and at the end, it really moved me.

It’s different than most stories that run in the magazine. Simple. Hopeful. A modern day fairy tale without any grime.

Read it if you have the chance.

I know I’m like weeks behind, but I just read the article in the New Yorker on Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Kerala, where $20 billion worth of treasure was just discovered. And that’s in the single vault that has been opened. There’s another one of equal size that has yet to be uncovered.

It’s all pretty crazy, Indiana Jones type shit. Jake Halpern, the reporter on the piece, wrote a great story. But more than anything, I think he did a good job highlighting why I think that religion in India, almost more than anywhere else is the world, is used as a method of control to keep people uneducated, poor, and faithful to a feudal way of living. That probably wasn’t his intention. But that’s what I felt traveling through the country, and I thought it was interesting that my observations came through in the piece.

“A street-food vendor named Suresh spoke with me at his home, a humble concrete dwelling that he had decorated with a small statue of Buddha and pictures of his heroes: Jesus, Mother Teresa, Vishnu, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. He said that he did not trust the government to handle the temple’s wealth. I asked him if he had more faith in the royal family. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘They were not like the government officials, who are corrupt. They were foresighted and saved this wealth for the generations to come, like parents who are saving for their children.’”

Of course, one member of the royal family in Tivandrum—where the temple is located—lives in a 106-room palace, and another collects rare vintage automobiles. All evidence points to the fact that they’ve been stealing from the vaults for years. But why dispute those appointed by gods to rule over humble people?

I’m still thinking a lot about who loves India, and who doesn’t, and why it made me so angry. I haven’t figured it out. But I will say that I was at a dinner the other night, and I sat next to a man—unfortunately for him, a stereotypical 2005 sort of investment banker—who thought that I was insane for not loving it. He said that he would go back every year. But then again, he also said that it was ok for him to embrace his female employees without their permission, and that girls who want equal rights can’t reasonably expect that men hold open doors for them. He also loved essentializing poverty.

The article is a good one, and you can read it here.  I stole the picture above, taken by Chiara Goia, from an accompanying slideshow on the New Yorker website.

I went to go visit Rat-A-Kat at Fanelli’s today, where she works with Bob Bozic, the bartender and intellectual recently immortalized in a New Yorker profile by Nick Paumgarten.

As a friend of Rat-A-Kat, and an all around sassy kind of girl, I was teased immediately by Bob, the shit-shooter.

“Who are you going to India with?” he asked me after I had told him (and the rest of the bar) about my job, my education, my parents, my family, my interests, and my plans for the next twenty years.

“My boyfriend,” I said.

He guffawed at my naivete. “What are you, 12-years-old?”

(In retrospect, I’m not really sure what that means, but it was funny anyway.)

Then he went on about that for approximately an hour, even going so far as to ask when I think Caleb will die. 

I have to say though, it felt good to be noticed, however disparagingly, by a true blue New Yorker celebrity. 

“Wiens began to speak. ‘Because of the medication that they gave me, I don’t know if I can do this without making a mess.’ His speech was slow, and he halted every few words. ‘Every one of you—I guess I can’t,’ he said, and then paused, collected himself, and began again. ‘I will never, in my life, be able to express the undying gratitude, and love, for you guys to usher me into an entire new life, and “Thank you” just doesn’t count.’ Wiens paused again, and the sound of medical equipment, a mass of noises forming a single hiss, filled the silence. ‘It’s my life—’ His voice began to waver. His head, scarred and featureless, except for the cartoon of a face that had been drawn on it, seemed terrifically vulnerable. The doctors were going to remove the inexpressive container of flesh that Janis had created to house Wien’s personhood; and yet the room was filled with his emotion, his trust, his gratitude, his anxiety. He was barely audible. His head was still. He whispered, ‘I will see you all on the other side, right?’”

I was terrifically moved by this article in the New Yorker about Dallas Wiens, a Texan man who lost all of his face—literally, nothing was left except for his skull—in an electrical accident. After surviving with only a layer of skin to cover his featureless head for 2 and a 1/2 years, he was given a full face transplant by a team of doctors. Smell, taste, feeling, sensation, and even hair were granted to him anew, from the body of an unanimous donor. Today, the only sense he is still missing is sight. It’s an incredibly moving story, and an incredibly philosophically challenging one. The article is long, but worth plowing through.

I read it alone last night, in an empty painting studio, underneath a band practicing strings of guitar melodies that shook the ceiling above my head. While they stomped their feet to keep time, I lost myself in it. I think you might too.