Author: tuckova

Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O'Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

art and artists and my overuse of the word “interesting”

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Apparently they're making a movie about David Foster Wallace. I don't understand. I remember… was it Salinger who complained about how people knew more about Percy Bysshe Shelley than they did about his poetry? Well… here's the thing: Two vast and trunkless legs of zzzz that sexy monster Byron, though, amiright? Sometimes art is interesting, sometimes artists are more interesting. I would think that ideally your art is more interesting than you are, since that's what will survive (to the extent that anything survives, see also: Ozymandius). Although you get some artists and the reason their art survives is because their lives were interesting. But with Wallace, is his life really that interesting? I mean, I'm sorry, is he more interesting than his art? Because I don't think he was; in fact I think he worked pretty hard to not be, to put this voice into his essays that was both extraordinarily personal and self deflecting at the same time. It makes me sad to see people so increasingly fascinated with him as a person when I feel like they probably haven't read anything he wrote beyond This Is Water. 

Ironically in a conversation with Squire two days ago, regarding a comment someone had made about keeping good music under wraps, so as to protect it from "teenage fangirls"; I wrote "Great art is not cheapened by having stupid people like it… [If you're looking at art at the same time as a group of unappreciative schoolkids], the art itself isn't diminished, just your experience of it in that moment. And maybe in that school group there is one kid who is changed, who becomes a slightly better person. Do you keep the art out of the museum because somebody ignorant might see it? Or do you put it in the museum for that one kid? Because I would argue that art is PRECISELY FOR that one kid, you know? and the more people art reaches, the more likely that it can transform people."

So I'm here all "these people don't DESERVE to watch a film about him" and on the other hand, who am I to say, if some How I Met Your Mother fan who had never heard of Wallace comes to at least TRY Infinite Jest or A Supposedly Fun Thing, then that's good, right? His work will not be tarnished by a movie. And at least the movie is based on an interview with actual him instead of cobbled kiss-and-tell interviews with people who knew him. So I don't know. I'm uncomfortable. But I'm not going to dismiss the idea out of hand. I always felt like I knew him; I did not. That was part of his gift, that voice that felt like he was standing right beside you, telling you what he saw so that you could see it, too. I'm not unhappy if other people feel that way. The world is lonely enough; when we hear the voices of great artists, however we come to hear those voices, it becomes less so. I hope.

I hope the revolution will be televised.

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If you want to know how I got to have a perfect seventeen year old, I will whisper in your ear that television has been an important part of my child-rearing technique. Among other things, watching television with English subtitles taught him to be a great speller. But maybe more importantly: talking to Squire about difficult stuff was never easy when we tried to do it head on, and so I had to think of ways to approach things sideways. If we lived in the States, we'd have gone for long car rides where we talked about teen angst and teen pregnancy while staring intently at the road, but we're stuck with excellent public transportation and he walks to school so we have to stare intently at the screen instead. 

Partly we watch stuff because it's super entertaining. Battlestar Gallactica, Deadwood, every episode of Star Trek ever, the West Wing, Firefly. We seem particularly interested in the epic formation-of-society types of shows, we like a good battle in outer space, and we are partial to snappy dialogue. 

Some of the best shows we watched were American high school dramas — specifically I would say Friday Night Lights, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Veronica Mars were helpful. If you don't know how to talk to your kids about bullying, social stratification, economic issues, vampires, sexism, racism,,, well, this triptych has you covered. We learned about people who love sports, witty repartee and trust, romance and heartbreak, the varieties of parent/child relationships. It was easy to talk about heavy issues after we'd seen it happen to other people — wow, so that was a hard time for Matt… what do you think he could have done differently? Would you have trusted Spike after what he did? Should Veronica tell her father the truth or should she try to protect him? And through talking about these things we were able to practice talking to each other about most serious issues before they even became issues.

On Friday the Veronica Mars movie came out, and we sat on the couch in our old standard formation, popcorn bowl propped between us, and watched every character we loved light the screen. It has been ten years since the show was on, five years since we watched it, and it felt like it had only been days. Weevil! Mac! We got to talk about how some people change, but not a whole lot, just enough to give you hope that we are capable of change. How nice the respect and love that Veronica and her dad have for each other is. And of course some conversation (because we are way meta) about how entertainment gets funded and the future of media etc. It was great. 

That's all. Possibly the best parenting tip I've got, though: television. True story.  

Abiding the Great White Dude

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Roger Angell's article in a February New Yorker about getting old (he's 93) started off pretty well and I was really enjoying it. I do not personally want to live that long, I think. I am sharp as a tack and do not wish to have people saying that about me when it is no longer true. People don't keep me around for my good looks, so I am not terribly worried about losing them, but nor am I particularly loved for my slow and easy charm (as I do not have much). Once I've lost my quick wits, I'm of no use to myself or anybody else, and I can't imagine I'll hold on to those into my nineties. Still, there is Angell, keeping it together pretty well, maintaining at least a sharp wit (though whether he is quick I can't say; the article may have taken ages). So in sum: he's getting old and his body is falling apart; this is pretty much what I would expect from getting old and I'm not excited about it but it's not unpredictable. People die around you left and right if you live long enough, and he finds this survivable (I am not sure. I take old people dying pretty well. I deeply resent it when people die young. So I am not sure if I start outliving people in great gulps how I will be.). He's learning different ways of communicating, and I found this part of the article fascinating — how your thoughts get shorter and you adapt the things you think about to fit that. Short poems and short witticisms, both easily memorized and easily dredged when appropriate. So he's got me, I'm thinking, my mind is with him, and then: THE PENIS. Oh my god, dudes, can you really not write five pages without sticking your penis in there? I just wonder. Fascinating thing you may not have realized about aging dudes: they still like getting it on and talking about it. Which would be ugh I guess a little boring but fine except he does insist on going on about it with that exhausting icky coyness that he's managed to keep off the rest of the article entirely. Sex! It's not just for young people! Nudge nudge! And his wife was totally okay with him doing it with other ladies if she died first! Ladies, Roger is single and primed for action! 

I'll be over here trying to keep my smartypants mouth shut over whether he lies about his age and height on OKCupid. Well, never mind: I can assure you that he does, because the Great White Dude can get old and liverspotty and wise and know all of Auden off by heart, but he's still looking for a nice young woman to cook for him and arrange a porter for the baggage he will insist he does not have. Barf.  

she said it to know.

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I went to a contact tango workshop last month, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

It was an interesting class — I'd never been to a contact workshop before, nor learned tango, so it was a lot of new all at once. Plus I only knew one person (though some people seemed to have met before in other classes). I'm fairly introverted, and though I've worked hard at speaking extrovert, it's not my native language and I can freeze and stumble over simple things, so meeting large groups of strangers all at once is sometimes scary. On top of that, the teacher spoke English, and many but not all of the other students did as well, but there were times when I needed to understand Czech in order to communicate, and so there was some gear-shifting in my head over that as well. I want you to understand how off balance I was just in general, the canvas on which this picture is painted.
 
Saturday morning we all started with warm ups and it was clear that we weren't going to go as far as the teacher wanted. I'd seen videos of other classes he'd taught where people appeared to toss their partners, who flew away into the air like birds and fell back to entwine with each other, arms and legs wrapped like vines. Even the most physical Czechs I know kiss the air beside you more often than they kiss you, and my California bear hugs are tolerated more often than they are welcomed, such that I have learned to temper my affections until I am not sure I even know how to express them. I could not see myself locking arms with a stranger, wrapping my leg around anybody's thigh, any of the things that I could feel this poor Argentinian instructor yearning for us to aim towards. And even if I had, I would have been alone, or at best in a small minority. So we were set with games where we accidentally might run into each other, in this class where within eight hours we were scheduled to be doing some pretty toss-your-partner style tango. 
 
By noon we were as close as we were going to get, the lesson adjusted to our actual levels, working on the basics of communication, practicing eye contact, holding fingers and rocking. And then we started changing partners and changing again, trying these new skills with new people.
 
In this style of tango, who leads is a negotiation rather than a gendered default, and "lead" is more like "propose", which I liked as a concept but it made more work in practice. Each partnership thus started with two top questions: which of us is going to be proposing what we do? and what kinds of things will you be proposing? Under this question was the base note of what language we would use to negotiate — was this person a confident English speaker, in which case English made sense, or a nervous English speaker whose ego would be hurt if I switched to Czech, or a poor English speaker who was hoping I would start with Czech, or a non-English speaker who was possibly having some issues with the fact that the teacher didn't speak Czech and not everything was being translated. And the heart note running through each partnership – are you a confident dancer or a shy one? Do you prefer a lead/follow style or a dance-together style? Do you want someone to challenge you or keep you in your comfort zone? Do you want to talk while you dance, and if so about the dancing itself or other things, or do you need silence to concentrate? In short, what are your communication needs and which of them can I actually meet? And meanwhile think of hands and feet, arms and legs, eyes on eyes and not on the floor, don't look at anybody else and don't bump into them either.  
 
I don't know. It was beautiful and lovely, so much thinking and feeling, and a little sad for me. I wanted to be a better dancer, a more intuitive dancer, but I could not offer intuition, just my frantically churning brain and a real desire to do well, to be the best partner to each person. At the end of the day I was so tired that I couldn't dance, couldn't even imagine how to communicate with my own body, much less someone else's, and so I sat and watched the others dance, some confidently and well, some confidently and poorly, some in other combinations. And I kept thinking about how every relationship is like this: friendships, partnerships, even strangers on a tram, this constant flow of unspoken negotiation and decision – how wonderful and exhausting the business of being human in the world.   

Storyboard Art

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The article in the New Yorker this month about Storyboard P will not leave my brain. I keep thinking about how we learn (though doing, through repetition, through the desire to achieve some goal, etc), about creativity, about success. 

 
I'm trying to learn to play the ukulele. I stink, frankly; I can't hear the differences in the notes, which makes it difficult, and I'm easily frustrated by any learning process that is difficult. Most things I've wanted to learn, I've suffered through the learning to get through the goal of knowing. And if the goal is not easily reached, I give up. See also: Japanese. Usually, the only time you can get me to learn something I don't need to know is by sneaking it on me. Like I learned basic manners because my parents valued them, but I learned details because Judith Martin is a great writer. Ukulele is maybe the only thing I've actively tried to learn simply because it seemed like a neat idea, and it's hard. Storyboard P getting an idea for how a movement might look, and drilling himself on it for ages, and just for the joy of it, is so out of my reckoning that I can't imagine it.  
 
In the article, there's a bit where he talks about a series of gestures to convey feeling beautiful, smearing cream on his skin, and then having that gesture morph into peeling his skin off. My friends, I have turned a phrase from time to time, but I have never come up with an image that powerful (and now I cannot erase it from my mind). I have a friend who makes art and when she explains it I think — I understand the idea, I just don't understand how it came from her head into this expression, although it makes sense. I get the origin and the destination but I cannot comprehend the journey. And isn't the journey the point? When I've tried to make visual art, it's so LITERAL that it's almost absurd. I can't get away from the words of the idea, and I'm never particularly creative beyond metaphor. I don't know how the mind gets there; is it naturally so or does it take a certain kind of training? 
 
And success… I don't know how artists manage this. I've been talking to some people lately who make some or all of their living from art, and some people who assiduously avoid accepting any money for their art, lest it become commercial. Not that success is only measured in terms of money. But here is this guy, and probably this New Yorker article is going to be a factor in his success, his fame, whatever. What does this say about media, about the nature of success, about all of those things. Do I care? Not personally. But it is still important to think about.
 
And I was thinking that it is interesting that an article about art (not the art itself) is what got me thinking about it, and how this is how I often approach art: thinking, not feeling. Which is not wrong, but is part of what the article stirred up, here in gray January. How are you doing? 
 

take this longing

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This is the language they speak in the open spaces between them, the spaces formed by their outstretched arms, the language of emptiness and wishes, the things they want, the same things spoken into the same vast vacancy every time, because the wants are never satisfied. I want to see you, touch you, dance with you, variations on the theme, over and over, the Greek chorus of longing veering dangerously close to lamentation.

And the language they speak when they face away from that aching void? They are casual, code names, dismissive humor. I mean seriously, she says, I'm more picky who I watch movies with, and it is true, and the knowledge that what she says now is truer than what she says into her own empty arms helps her feel less hollow, filled with the stone she has rolled in front of her heart. 

Envying the Crows by Ronald Baatz

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A cold winter day spent 
reading, collecting tinder. 
But, my god, the loneliness 
of the hours was overwhelming. 
With age it becomes more and 
more apparent that I need to be 
among people. I have to stop living 
like a monk. Although, it is true, 
monks do live with other monks. 
They pray, take their meals together, 
and perhaps life at the monastery 
is not such a burden. I would never 
have to eat alone in such a place. 
Earlier, I stood eating a can of sardines 
and a piece of unbuttered bread. 
I envied the crows. From the 
kitchen window I had seen them pecking 
at the leftover rice I had thrown out. 
The crows, that had arrived in a group 
and that had left in a group. 
Same as the sardines. 

2014

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Read 12 books by non-English writers (in English, but anyway)

Watch 12 Czech movies + 12 Woody Allen movies

Learn 12 songs

Cook 12 new things

Yeah, it's not Woody Guthrie's resolutions, but it will do. 

 

“but monkeys are so ugly they’re cute”

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Jan 1995This picture was taken in January 1995, my first winter here. I was 26. I recently spoke to two friends that age, one visiting the Czech Republic for HER first winter, and the other working abroad for the first time.

Since I kept a diary back then, I was able to visit that younger Anne, to see how much of what I remember now was what I thought was important at the time and to ponder how much of who I was then informed who I am now. 

And mostly I'm the same. I wrote sentences like "I think sometimes people practice being unhappy to remind themselves they are still alive." I had a weakness for gimmick novels. I had a dream about a writer whose fingers turned to fountain pen nibs and she ripped apart a person she was trying to hug. 

But I was so fixated on how unattractive I was. For example, I wrote about the boy who took this picture, and how much it meant that he let his skin touch mine here, because it meant he wasn't afraid my ugliness would infect him. 

Now I look and I think — I was not ugly. How did I think I was ugly? Was it being female, was it the people I socialized with, was it how any insecurity I felt manifested, was it the hair (it's always the hair)? I wish that I had a time machine to go back and tell that girl she was okay. I would have told her she was fine, that there were so many other things worth having all those feelings about. I would have told her that her eyes were incredible and that she should learn to use them to see things more clearly, that her skin was lovely and doing a great job of holding her guts in so she could quit spilling them to dingbats who didn't deserve it, that her hair was perfectly fine and to hell with anybody who told her differently. I would have told her that her beautiful heart was the only thing that mattered but also that she had amazing bones. 

Of course I turned out okay; I'm 95% less likely to stay inside because I am too afraid of frightening people in the street with the horror of my face. So since I like who I am I probably wouldn't use the time machine to go back in time to change anything.* But I have decided to try to tell people a little more often how beautiful they are on the outside. Just in case they don't know.  

*Also if you have a time machine you go back and invest in Apple or something USEFUL, duh. TM MIG.

unutterably alone

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I went to a play in London earlier this month partly because I decided that I wanted to be the kind of person who could say "I went to a play in London earlier this month" and there was a really easy way to make that happen. Anyway: play in London. And this is on top of a music festival in Vienna the previous month (partly because pretty much the same reason). Plus going to an unprecedented number of live shows here in town. And what I have felt at all of these shows is really, really lonely. 

I've been thinking about it because on the one hand it makes no sense. I was with friends at both shows; both shows were crowded with people, it was not unfriendly, in fact in some ways I felt more unified with the audience than I often do (that is, I felt like we were enjoying the same show, for the same general reasons, which I don't always feel). And yet I just felt so lonely. I felt like I wanted to stop everything, turn to someone next to me, someone I liked, and say, "Hey, did you just see that?" and know before I even opened my mouth that they did, that they saw what I saw, and that their opinion would help inform mine. I don't mean they'd have to agree with me, but that we would have our experiences clarified and enhanced by each other's. 

But the trick here would be the moment of stopping everything. Because I hate to look away from a moment that is happening to observe it, whether that means taking a picture of it or turning to talk about it or even just smile — it feels like the moment gets changed irrevocably by the need to observe it, and the more I enjoy the moment, the less I want to turn from it… I want to be in the moment. And that means that I have to be alone in it, and so what I felt, what I've been feeling, from surrendering to being alone in intense moments (not turning away to look at my friend, not taking pictures, etc), is really lonely. And I've been thinking about how much of life is like that, the decision between living the moment and sharing the moment, and how hard it can be to do both, and how even if you do a really really good job of documenting what happened, you cannot really have someone in your experience, I mean no matter what you are alone, even if you could stop the moment you would still be alone. I would still be, I mean. I don't think it means that attempts at connection should not be made; in contrast, I think it's the most important thing to attempt. But it means I'm realizing it's even harder than I thought.