What Is It About Annie?

We all have a lot of questions about what happened to Annie Le, the Yale graduate student who went missing a few days before her wedding and whose body was found stuffed in the ceiling of a Yale laboratory. Now that her killer has been apprehended and will be brought to trial, one question that lingers for media pundits is, why did her story garner so much press? What was it about her story that called for it to be splashed across The New York Times, Google News and Bloomberg, not to mention all the tabloids? One can only conjecture. Was it that she was a Yalie? On Thursday, 9/17, Slate columnist, Jack Shafer, noted:

"If you plan to be murdered and expect decent press coverage, please have the good sense to be a Harvard or Yale student or professor. America's top dailies and the cable networks will rush to the scene of the crime and sniff the vicinity for clues to your demise. They'll scrape your personal history and publish enough information to serve as a foundation for a made-for-TV movie about you."

Apparently the media elite comes from either Harvard or Yale, so almost any news emanating from these places is considered newsworthy. Furthermore, a violent crime at a place as seemingly powerful and invulnerable as Yale, the institution associated with George and George W., Bill, Hilary and the last 3 Supreme Court justices, is a sensation.

Was it that she was a bride-to-be? Annie went missing only days before her wedding, and her body was discovered on the day that she was to be married. As if to highlight the tragedy of a young woman snuffed out at the height of her promise, many stories focused on Annie’s upcoming nuptials. We know that Annie embroidered her own veil and gushed about marrying her “best friend” in her Facebook pages. The New York Times even went so far as to interview Ms. Kiley, Annie’s hairdresser, who was quoted in the paper as saying: “I was going to be part of a beautiful day, which is the most important day of a girl’s life other than the day she gives birth.” Has anybody heard this much attention being paid to a guy getting married before?

Was it because she was, pick one, young, female, pretty, Asian? Pretty young faces, as we know, sell newspapers. And what a novelty it was to see an Asian face on a tabloid cover. Asian immigrants are generally taught to work hard and fly under the radar. When Raymond Clark III emerged as Annie’s killer, it was as if two sides of the socio-economic and racial spectrum that makes up America’s workplace was laid bare.

We may never know the motives behind Raymond Clark’s killing of Annie Le, but it makes sensational news.

All of it is Autobiographical

Rafael Yglesias’s new novel, The Happy Marriage, is wholly autobiographical, a fact which may interest some readers, including those of our own pages. Ygliesias, a novelist and screenwriter who lost his wife, Margaret, to bladder cancer after nearly 30 years together, tells the story of a novelist and screenwriter, Enrique, who, after a long, happy marriage, loses his wife, Margaret, to bladder cancer. The novel alternates in chapters between the couple when they first meet and at key points in the marriage, and their final three weeks together as Margaret makes the decision to take herself off intravenous feeding and bid farewell to family, friends and of course, Enrique/Rafael. I was engrossed and delighted with the book. Reading it, though, I couldn’t help wonder if what I knew about the author (as fully disclosed in the book flap and about the author) informed my reading, and if so, to what extent. Did I find the characters compelling because I automatically assumed the writer’s authority over them? Did I make allowances for contradictions and inconsistencies in characters because they sprang from true people? What did the known link between the writer and his material do for me as a reader? Did it lend a certain versimilitude? Why is versimilitude even necessary for me in a novel? Is truth indeed stranger than fiction?

When asked in a recent NPR Fresh Air interview why he didn’t simply write a memoir a la Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Ygliesias immediately clarifies that it wasn’t because he wanted to provide any “cover” for himself. Indeed, the protagonist Enrique as written is at times selfish, impotent, and unfaithful. However, Yglesias continues, he wanted to tell the story of a marriage and keep the reader very present in this marriage. Thus, he chose to use fictional devices of dialogue—conversations as he remembered them from 30 years ago—and compression.

I like this thin line between novel and memoir. Lately, I find a resistance, perhaps even an aversion, toward fiction. Is it ego? I feel that my own life and head is so busy that I resent extending my attention and sympathy to invented characters, only real ones, or at least, ones based upon real ones. However you label fiction or nonfiction, it all comes down to story. I read James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces because it was a memoir. When all hell broke loose, I couldn’t understand the uproar. He told a damned good tale, so what difference did it make if it was all true or not?  We all know that stories contain many Rashomon effects. We all know stories are subject to embellishment. Frey would have saved himself a lot of trouble if, like Inglesias, he’d only called his book an autobiographical novel.

What Our Things Say About Us

Like many conceptual art installations, the Chinese artist Song Dong’s exhibition on the mezzanine floor of the Museum of Modern Art (through Sept 7) has to be experienced in order to be appreciated. Entitled “Waste not”, the exhibit offers literally the entire contents of the artist’s Beijing hutong (courtyard) house, everything that the artist’s mother, driven by the watchword of her generation in China, wu qi jing yong -- “waste nothing which might have some use” – used, recycled and hoarded over the years. Meticulously gathered, categorized and displayed in MOMA’s pristine space, are (just to name a few) stacks of wood scraps, row upon row of rolled fabric scraps, used plastic soda bottles, almost-empty toothpaste tubes, paper bags, soap scraps, Styrofoam packing material, bits of string and yarn, and plastic bags carefully folded into triangular dumplings. Song Dong was born in 1966, just at the outbreak of China’s Cultural Revolution; his mother, Zhao Xiang Yuan, in 1938, during the tumultuous years when China was at war with Japan and changed hands from the Nationalist to the Communist government. Holding onto everything you could was a type of amulet against political uncertainty and shortages of goods. In the text accompanying the exhibit, Zhao Xiang Yuan tells about obtaining soap through ration coupons during China’s bleak years, and drying her soap after each use because wet soap melted away faster than dry. Placed in historical context, it’s easy to see how even an empty soda bottle can have myriad uses, or be traded for something else useful.

We New Englanders are certainly familiar with the concept of waste not want not, traditionally wearing clothes until holes show through, driving cars till their final sputter. I’ve always imagined Eli Whitney as a hoarder and tinkerer – how else could he come up with the idea of interchangeable parts? For me, walking through the exhibition felt eerily familiar, as if I was in my own parents’ basement or some of their friends’ homes. I was reminded of my college roommate who told me that when her Maine grandmother died, they found a box in the attic labeled “Bits of String Too Small to Use.” In the pre-Costco oil crisis seventies, goods were expensive, and we never knew what a winter would bring.

How the Kindle Can Save Your Life

A few months ago, my ex-mother-in-law gave me her old Kindle when she upgraded to the new model. The first book I downloaded on it was last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, The Short, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. I finished the book on a roundtrip Metro-North ride to Grand Central.

Now, the strangest thing happened, or rather, didn't happen while I was reading this book. No one noticed what I was reading. Nobody asked me what I thought of the book, whether I liked it, whether I didn't. This was incredibly disorienting, reading in public and creating no reaction. An entire part of my brain that I hadn't even known about shut down -- the part that is self-conscious about what I’m reading, and what people think about what I’m reading.

Call me intellectually vain, a snob. But I'm one of those people who makes snap judgments about you based upon what you read. Sit next to me on an airplane proudly sporting a copy of the latest John Grisham or Nora Roberts, and I will give you wide berth. Clutch a Jhumpa Lahiri or a Malcolm Gladwell, and settle in.

When my ex-mother-in-law gave me the Kindle, she extolled its virtues. She suffers from cancer and needs books that weigh very little. So the Kindle is perfect for her; she could reread Gone With the Wind on it if she wanted to.

Yes, the Kindle is light. Yes, the Kindle is portable. But this is what I consider the most wondrous aspect of it: You can read in public and no knows what you are reading.

- The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Judaism - Master Your Metabolism: The 3 Diet Secrets to Naturally Balancing Your Hormones for a Hot and Healthy Body - The Secret - Getting Things Done

This is a partial list of the books I now have downloaded in my Kindle.

At home, my bookcases are crammed with the classics from Austen to Zola; in non-fiction I love Didion and Derrida (okay, just Didion), but I’ve always had a healthy respect for self-help and how-to books. They have guided me through many a personal crisis. I used to buy these books sheepishly at the bookstore, have to set aside time alone and at home to read them, then hide them in the back layer of my bookcase.

Now, I just read them in broad daylight whenever I want to, whenever the need arises.

At last, reading as it should be: A personal choice. Absolutely private.

Farrah, Farrah on the Wall

Farrah Fawcett is dead. Let those of us who were young in the seventies observe a moment of silence. And noting this journal’s preoccupation with hair (vide Oppenheimer posting, “We Partied Like It’s 2009,” May 18, 2009) and my own hair being of “urban legend” (ibid), I could not let this occasion pass without paying personal tribute to the “Farrah-do.” Growing up in Hamden during the seventies, I sported the Farrah-do, first at Sleeping Giant Junior High (now a condominium complex) and then at Hamden High School. I’m convinced that it was this hairstyle that saved me from social suicide, helped bridge the internal “town versus gown” issues I had as a Yale faculty brat at my school, and finally, paved the way for my college years at Harvard.

A lot from a single hairdo, I know. But what a ‘do. Tousled, cascading layers. A sexy, casual, windswept, just-got-out-of-bed look. Farrah smiled down at us from that poster with that mane. And every girl worth her salt had to have that ‘do. For me, a Chinese girl with hair and parents as straight as a grove of bamboo stalks, achieving that look was no easy feat.

First, I first had to convince my mother -- who ascribed to the general zero-sum notion that any attention I paid to my looks took away from my attention to my studies -- to let me have a perm. She only relented on Rave, a home perm that gave soft loose curls. Then, we found an inexpensive hair cutter in to give me the actual layered haircut, which I had to style to perfection each day. With my own allowance, I bought a hairdryer, a curling iron and a set of hot rollers. After trial, error and much practice, I learned the hot rollers worked best on me. So, every day before leaving at 7:20 a.m. to catch the school bus, I plugged in hot rollers and did my hair: three medium-sized rollers for the fluffy top and two wings, and three large rollers for the back. If I had time, I added the flip with a small-barrelled curling iron.

The only other Asian girl in my class, Elly Tanaka, also a Yale faculty brat, kept her hair straight. She liked to flip it around a bit. Shiny and black, it looked okay, but having the Farrah-do was a universal ice-breaker, an automatic “I’m-okay-you’re-okay-because-we-share-a-hairstyle” with the non-faculty brat set at my school. Janet Gallo, the most popular girl in our junior high, also sported the Farrah-do, which she achieved each morning by using a blow-dryer and round hairbrush (we discussed this one day).

There was no mirror for Asian women yet in the public media. No Gong Li, no Sandra Oh, no Ziyi Zhang. The only person I saw who looked remotely like me on television was Mrs. Livingston from “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.” So, for me to emulate Farrah Fawcett was just as far-fetched as any other role model.

At first my parents fought me, preferring that I try to get in a half hour of piano practice before the school bus. But eventually, they gave up, and instead began to take notice of my dedication and perseverance with my hair-do. I knew they finally understood who I was when my mother asked me the summer after senior year, why don’t you learn haircutting so that you can earn pocket money at Harvard?

This is how I ended up studying at the Gal-Mar Academy of Hairdressing, Nails and Beauty in North Haven alongside aspiring hair technicians and beauticians. I’ll always remember the morning, Miss Julie, who owned the place with her sister, Miss Gail, had us gather around a willing student guinea pig, to teach us the Farrah Fawcett cut, or as it’s known in the trade, the long-layered feathered shag. We learned how important it was to section the hair carefully, to keep the hair hold perfectly elevated and to shift the cutting line. Then to cross-check each side of the head against a spot in the center to make sure all the lengths were even. Finally, to use the point-cutting technique to feather the hair ends and give it a softer look. Voila, Farrah.

I walked out of Gal-Mar with a certificate for haircutting only – no color, no perm – but I set up shop out of my dorm-room bathroom a couple afternoons a week, and ran a pretty lucrative business of haircuts at $7 a piece, often $10 with tip. Guys from the rugby team would come, and some daring girls for their version of the Farrah-cut. Other people stopped by and stayed a bit, and often the whole occasion became quite social.

Today, one of Charlie’s Angels is Lucy Liu, a Chinese girl who wears her long black hair straight down her back proudly. I have two daughters with beautiful straight hair in its natural state. That is how I wear mine too, now. But I will always have a soft spot for my Farrah-do of youth.

New Haven in the 21st Century...?

Driving through the flooded streets of Long Wharf this wet week, then ditching the car to hike up my skirt and trudge barefooted through filthy knee-high water in front of Union Station – all to catch a Metro-North commuter train to Manhattan -- I flashed on a day when life would seem less at odds with nature. Usually, I’m not a green utopist, but a visually stunning and provocatively written new book, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (Abrams) is turning me on to the ecological origins and conceivable futures of cities. I’m so taken with this book that I’ve bought several copies as gifts (perfect for Father’s Day) and am planning to present it to my daughter’s grade school to adapt into the curriculum – that’s how important I think the ideas are.

Here’s the premise: even a city as developed as Manhattan began as a natural landscape of forests, trees, rivers and streams. In 1609, when explorer Henry Hudson first came upon Mannahatta -- the “island of many hills” to the Lenape tribe – it teemed with flora and fauna among fifty-five ecosystems that “reused and retained water, soil, and energy, in cycles established over millions of years.” Back then, Mannahatta supported a human population of three hundred to twelve hundred. Today, Manhattan is home to millions of people on a planet of billions. Yet, as author Eric Sanderson argues, it’s a “conceit” to think any city and its inhabitants -- no matter its technological and economic development – “can escape the shackles that bind [us] to our earthly selves, including our dependence on the earth’s bounty and the confines of our native place.”

Scholarship and research aside, Mannahatta is a fun read. Full-page color photos of today’s Manhattan juxtaposed with photographic visualizations of 1609 Mannahatta open up, centerfold-like, throughout the book. Author Sanderson, a landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, is adept at making complex scientific issues accessible to the lay reader. Charts and maps show habitats of species, distribution of fauna, and even the location of beavers in the vicinity of today’s Times Square. City buffs can pore over bathymetry and topography maps. I laughed aloud when I learned that the bronze bull standing at Bowling Green (the New York Stock Exchange) was once a hill twenty feet high.

By 2050, the majority of people on earth will live in cities, and they will have to become greener and more hospitable if they are to continue being the vibrant cultural and business centers they are today, as well as comfortable places to live in. In the last chapter, “Manhattan 2409,” Sanderson addresses basic human needs – food, water, shelter, energy – acknowledging that changes in infrastructure will most likely come piecemeal. Waterways and greenways will slowly replace beltways and avenues. Sanderson proposes new green buildings with lizard-like second skins that can both shade and insulate, open and close depending upon the season.

As to this week’s flooding at the New Haven train station? The next time the city renovates Union Street, they might use permeable paving materials that capture rainwater below the surface. Or perhaps, we can add a “green roof” -- a thin layer of soil planted with grasses and flowers that slows water flow and cools a building -- atop the New Haven Police Station? I can always dream.

Note: This September 12, 2009, celebrates the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Henry Hudson in New York Harbor. See also, the exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City.

Artists' Books at Southern

What would William Blake have made of the Kindle, I asked myself the other morning during a private viewing of the Artists’ Book Collection at Southern Connecticut State University’s Buley Library. According to Tina Re, curator of the eighty-book collection, it was Blake who created the first artist’s books when he and his wife, Caroline, wrote, illustrated and bound books such as Songs of Innocence and Experience. Their venture beyond authorship into design, self-publishing and self-distribution remain hallmarks in the realm of artists’ books today.



“The artist’s book can be purely visual or text, one of a kind or an edition,” Re says, as we walk among tables of books as fans, venetian blinds, flags, accordians, and origami structures, to name a few. “It can take the form of the traditional codex – the book as we know it today, with binding on one side and pages in progression on the other side – or many others. Whatever the case, it’s very much about the artists having control over every aspect of the book.”

Wavy-haired and bespectacled, Re (rhymes with “Fey”) displays the quiet intensity you would expect from a Special Collections librarian. Under constant state budget constraints, she’s been amassing this collection for only three years. It serves mainly as a multi-disciplinary teaching collection for faculty and students, and is presently available to the public largely through private arrangement.

We stop at a book called Aunt Sallie’s Lament, a collaboration between poet Margaret Kaufman and Claire Van Vliet of Janus Press. The words of a Southern quilter printed on thick, colored uniquely-shaped pages that layer and interlock with each other, the book is a harmonious blend of text, image, color, structure and craft.

Next we come upon a portfolio box housing Direction of the Road by Ursula LeGuin with Foolscap Press. It's the story of an oak tree standing in the road, and is a limited edition artist’s book incorporating anamorphic art, first recorded in the west by Leonardo da Vinci in 1485 in a drawing in his Codex Atlanticus. An anamorphic woodcut of an oak tree, intentionally distorted on one axes, becomes proportionate when we view it through an included standing cylindrical mirror. The reflection of the oak tree provides a backdrop to the book itself, which is printed letterpress on white linen paper with fabric leaves pressed into the paper.

“Listen when you read,” Re says to me. And as I turn the pages, the linen paper rustles, like leaves in a breeze. It feels as if we are standing directly below the tree.

I am hooked. I fully comprehend the urge to create a book in its whole, not just as author, but as designer, illustrator, papermaker, typographer, photographer, printer, illustrator, calligrapher, and bookbinder.

Re said that she had similar responses after a recent open house of the collection. Students came up to her demanding to know more about bookmaking and printmaking, and talking about DIY, steampunk and the huge popularity of Esty.com, the site to buy and sell handmade items. It appears that this generation brought up on tactile-less text on the computer, cellphone and Kindle screen are starting to get back to the basics.

William Blake is surely resting easier in his grave.