This was the scene tonight at the Bronx zoo, where about three dozen people were stranded on the Skyfari.  Just weeks ago, Ellen, Meredith, and I were swinging around the zoo in one of these cable cars during that insane heat wave thinking, “wouldn’t it suck if…”

According to the New York Times article, the people were stranded for almost five hours.  They got hungry, and then cold, and, ultimately, they became bored.  And beneath them were oblivious gazelles and a polar bear, who, based on our viewing experience, was probably near suicidal in the heat, hugging his decorative rock.  But how could they have gotten bored?  The baboons that pace underneath that sky ride–those are the ones that are really bored.  Hanging about 100 feet over so many continent samplers,  I would have been placing bets on who still remembers how to hunt for when we dropped. 

Part of a series of periodic book reviews

 People rarely mean what they say, but accepting this as an absolute might land you in a world similar to that of Leo Leibenstein in Rivka Galchen’s debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances, where sometimes people don’t necessarily even mean who they are.  Psychiatrist Leo Leibenstein wakes from a migraine nap to a woman coming into his home who looks and talks exactly like his beautiful young Argentine wife but isn’t her, prompting Leo to set off on a search for his real wife, operating on wild theories born out of a seemingly harmless white lie told to one of his patients, Harvey, who believes he can control the weather.

The world (sometimes it seems there should be a better word for it) here, is confused with the worlds we make up out of our lies—those we tell ourselves, those we tell others, and those we mix up with our dreams.  For Leo, it all seems to flood in on the same plane, deviating from “a consensus view of reality,” but perhaps much closer to an example of the kinds of realities we each live every day.In order to keep Harvey from disappearing to random places in attempts to control weather patterns, Rema and Leo devise an act in which, during Harvey’s sessions, Rema would call Leo acting as one Dr. Tzvi Gal-chen of the Royal Academy of Meteoroloy with orders for Harvey to direct the weather more locally.  It works for awhile, but then Harvey goes missing and shortly after Leo is convinced Rema is missing with a doppelganger in her place. Leo is convinced that only the real Tzvi Gal-chen, who coincidentally is based out of Rema’s home town, Buenos Aires, will be able to help.  But, in a rather Kafkaesque twist, Harvey gets in touch with the real Tzvi himself who, independent of Leo, is going along with the ruse.

in It would seem that Leo is suffering from something like Capgras syndrome—which a person can no longer emotionally identify an individual in his life.  But it can, at the same time look like a falling out of love, or a change—say, an atmospheric one—in the nature or progress of such a love. Rema is never too far from Leo at any point in the novel. Often she is even in the same room, but he cannot see her. A simple switch turned off in the brain without his knowing; a misplaced high pressure system, maybe.  His madness is both horrifying in its improbability and as familiar as the immediate pain of a lost love—at once right in front of you and permanently disappeared.

This novel’s power lies in its sheer ability to knock you sideways into the trenches of your own confusions and misidentifications.  It’s a novel that will keep you home from work, blood pressure lowered—not so much for the story, powerful as it is—but for the thought of what you have left to learn about yourself, which might seem like so much. It is because of an occasional book like this that I continue to read fiction.

Awhile back, I mentioned an excellent craft talk that Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth and On Beauty, gave up at Columbia.  Now The Believer has published it in their June issue.  Read the full text here. 

Thanks to Beth for the tip! 

The first time I realized it was probably not the greatest idea to skip this meal was when, one Saturday years ago, having woken up and rushed out the door to attend a New Yorker festival event, I came to on the stage after the panel discussion with David Remnick looking on anxiously and Christiane Amanpour flicking water on my face and telling me I probably had a brain tumor and needed to see a neurologist asap because it looked like I’d had a seizure.

I think I told her I had fainted only because I hadn’t had any coffee yet.  After a morning and afternoon in the ER wherein nothing was found wrong with me, the medical professionals kicked me out and I went home feeling weird.  The problem appeared to be only that I hadn’t had breakfast.  I probably hadn’t eaten breakfast since 1999.  Who knew that such a commonly skipped meal could lead to one of my more embarrassing moments.   So I resolved to eat breakfast.  That lasted for about a week and then I went back to my old ways.  I either didn’t wake up with enough time to eat before class and then work, or I woke up at a time in the afternoon when it was downright depressing to cook up some eggs when most people were thinking about dinner.  I still don’t eat breakfast, but I mean to every morning (I also mean to run 5 miles) but my inbox and the Times are too distracting.  Still, I maintain that breakfast eating is a good idea.  So does New York magazine with their breakfast crusade . 

 The magazine’s wrist-slapping continues with their guide to caffeine addiction, which I couldn’t read without guiltily downing a cup or two.  Did you know that 30 minutes after drinking coffee its found its way into every cell in your body?  No wonder I feel excellent despite not eating breakfast! Also, studies show that with each cup of coffee up to seven cups, your risk of succumbing to suicide significantly declines.  But if you get to eight cups, your risk increases dramatically.  So, careful kids.  Do it right and you’re invincible, if not…stay away from the bridges.   The article supposedly goes on to discuss how just one cup of coffee can be bad for you, but there’s something shiny out my window so I

So, I know I’ve been MIA for a couple weeks–moving to Brooklyn, finishing up school, sleeping for days at a time.  And now I’m running off into the wilds of Philadelphia to see a couple hundred men about a couple thousand horses and will be gone once again.  But there’s just one thing I want to say before I take the leaving train outta this town:

There has never been a more meaningful cause.  The good samaritans of tightsarenotpants.com  have put together a manifesto and a handy press kit.  Use your printer; paper the city.  The time is now.

So, as Ellen mentioned a few days ago, the gods of NY real estate were smiling down on our respective nesting dreams last week for the first time ever. Like most NYers, I’m used to being forced out of my apartment every year by soaring rents and having to spend the hottest days of august hoofing it around the city to look at closet-sized spaces that have holes in the floor. Having picked up a nervous habit of checking craigslist daily year ’round for the real deal, I found it last week. I went to Brooklyn with a wad of cash and a file of papers to prove my worth as a human being despite being a grad student, walked into the studio with ten other girls (one actually brought along her mommy), and was the first to yell “MINE!”

Now, for all the apartment hunting amateurs out there, you should probably look at the bathroom before yelling “mine!” but no matter. This puppy is rent stabilized, has windows–BAY WINDOWS and is on 2nd btw 5th and 6th in the ‘Slope. And it’s all mine and the rent stabilization means I can live there until the stock market crashes. As far as the bathroom goes, well, I’ve just been describing it as “delightfully bohemian.”

I don’t have pictures, but this is what it’ll look like when I’m done renovating:

And despite her use of my soup ladle on the decomposing Happy Gilmore, I’m gonna miss Ellen tons when I go hermitify myself for the oncoming thesis year.

Most people cannot imagine me from being from some place other than where I happen to be currently standing and I’ve been mistaken for someone from Vermont as many times as I’ve been mistaken for being Uruguayan. But as I’m rushing off to finish the school semester and some giant monster portrait of my real home town in the fly-over part of a fly-over state, I thought I’d share:

This was the local architectural anomaly and the pride of the town. The Orange Dome. A building made to look like an orange. When I was a kid, it was hands down the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

And this was the local celebrity. Banana George. Most heroic of all heroes, he water skiied over alligators barefoot while always holding a banana. Sometimes we’d spot him in the grocery store buying bananas. He only wore yellow.

I miss all those people who thought I was from Uruguay. They were nice.

Some advice for all those hasty young people wanting a book deal.

Zadie Smith, Zadie Smith. Among book people she’s one of our new beloved writers of the past decade–and the subject of much envy for her success at such a young age. She’s beautiful, intelligent, and has an incredible speaking voice. It’s hard not to fall in love with her on first sight and after listening to her talk–a refreshing experience for any serial literary event-goer–I would go so far to say that anyone not enamored of her probably has deep character flaws. She recently gave a lecture up at Columbia entitled “On Feeling Fraudulent.” As much as her lecture gave great realistic advice to emmerging writers it also shed quite a bit of light on herself, a somewhat reluctant public figure. I remember going to a PEN festival event two years ago and watching her walk onto stage after Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison. She reached the podium and squinted out at the audience and said, “I really shouldn’t be up here.”

I’m trying to get my hands on a transcript of the lecture she gave at Columbia for you, but they’ve probably already attached all kinds of rights to it, so I’ll just share her best piece of advice, though far less eloquently. On the subject of finishing a novel (or for those writers out there squeamish about the N-word, “a piece”), Smith said you should “step away from the vehicle.” Put it in a drawer. Do not publish it–do not even read it–until you absolutely have to. The most important reader of your work is not yourself who has written it, or an editor who has seen ten drafts of it already, but a complete stranger, and if you can keep the thing in a drawer long enough chances are that you’ll become that stranger yourself.

Of course, Smith said about this advice, which was given to her by another writer: “It’s really great advice that you should take. I intend to take it…maybe next time.”

In my many years of not watching TV, I’ve begun to realize that when you meet a new person, one of the first stock conversations you can have is about those TV shows you used to watch as a kid. Typically they’re talking about something other than Reading Rainbow, so I have ot reply to their “Remember that show…” either with a blank stare or an “Oh, sorry. I really don’t know, I’ve never really watched TV.” Typically this response makes people want to punch me in the face–it’s why I have so many friends.

I used to say stuff like, “I don’t watch TV, I read the New Yorker and listen to NPR.” But that’s sort of a lie because I don’t like radio and I read one NYer article every other month or so. Typically I spend my time mending clothes, weaving, or making bread and candles. I don’t really hate TV, it’s just that my time is so taken up with typing letters on my typewriter and ferrying them off to the post office that I just never have a chance to watch.

I found out what American Idol was a few months ago and watched my first episode of Sex in the City this past January. I’m sort of intolerable as a human being, but I’m even more intolerable now because I’ve discovered that show In Treatment, which I illegally download off the interweb. My grandmother sent me a note via carrier pigeon and told me all about it. Who would’ve thought that a show of half hour therapy sessions would be so riveting! I’ve never seen a show so well written, the characters so psychologically consistent.

So now when some new person comes along and asks if I remember Fraggle Rock or Animaniacs or The Read World I want to find out what role they feel the need to assign me. I’ll ask, “Tell me, how important is it to you that I confirm your memory of a television show from your youth? Is it important to our brief interaction that we share the same childhood memories? Is there something about that time in your life that was particularly painful?”

This compulsion may explain any black eyes you see me with in the next couple weeks. But seriously. check out the show. First five episodes online here. It’ll make you want to find your own therapist to confuse with a soulmate.

Last year, it was all about the fake Hawaiian shirt. This year the sweaty amorphous fishing hat is once more the choice topper for your local subway perv.

Now, as many of you know, Ellen and I share lots of things in common. We were (are) maniacally horse-obsessed kids, our mothers raised us on Mary Chapin Carpenter, our last names are almost the same, and we talk real slow. Now we’re roommates who’ve started dressing the same. We eat peanut butter for dinner and we leave the apartment every morning covered in roughly the same amount of pet hair.

Sometimes our lives even follow similar paths. Last week on our respective 1 train commutes, we both got pawed by hideous men wearing fishing hats. To overcome our nausea, we got drunk and colored. Observe (click to enlarge):