arrBlogEntry[182] = new Array('2006.01.10', 'Never seen this before: in the Hema (like a Kmart, I guess), a white guy, in his twenties, a little bit Manson-like, long hair, strung out, long goatee but not kept up very well, wearing a black hoodie, hood up in the store, with text on the back of the sweatshirt that said, in both English and Arabic, Hamas. And what was he doing in the Hema? Buying underwear.', '','', '');
arrBlogEntry[183] = new Array('2007.01.11', 'Last minute emergency reading! I will be reading at The Sugar Factory tonight as part of The Open Stanza, wordsinhere monthly curated reading series. 8pm, 5Euro. Bring your friends, and come hear a great show (with poets, writers, live music, and a DJ!) and new work from me!', '','', '');
arrBlogEntry[184] = new Array('2007.01.23', 'so i was at lunch at the local sandwich shop, run by a Spanish woman, and i\'m thinking, it doesn\'t seem like her at all to have a 18-inch figure of Darth Vader on the counter, and then i look at it more closely, only to realize that it\'s a bottle of olive oil shaped like the Black Madonna.', '','', '');
arrBlogEntry[185] = new Array('2007.01.24', 'Les Triplettes de Belleville is a wonderful movie. Rent it.', '','', '');
arrBlogEntry[186] = new Array('2007.01.25', 'I keep wanting to write something slow and ruminative, personal, in this space, but so many things make it problematic - the bi-continentality of identity perhaps. And the need to write sound-bite-achtig. I don\'t know, I just feel hope, and optimism. I have just finished rereading the novel of a colleague, and it fills me with excitement. Maybe it\'s that I see so many wonderful people near me engaged in the creative process. I dream of fish tacos from roach coaches, and there\'s no way that that can be bad.', '','', '');
arrBlogEntry[187] = new Array('2007.01.26', 'Did I happen to wish everyone a happy new year? I think I forgot. We had fondue, protected the cats from the fireworks, did calligraphy, made t-shirts. Hey, y\'all, let it be joyful, this one.', '','', '');
arrBlogEntry[188] = new Array('2007.01.26', 'In Amsterdam, we\'re wrapping up Issue V of Versal, and again, the reading process tests both my reading skills and my tolerances. It is scary and wonderful to come up against hybrid forms, 3,000 word short stories that run with the grain, as well as interlocking 69 word stories, epistolary, prose poem. It can\'t help but open me up to what is possible, to everything that can be taken in.
At the same time, the reading process tests my kindness. The ways (and don\'t all writers do this in one form or another?) people try to catch my attention, mentioning me in their cover letter (tho I\'ve never met them), giving catchy synopses, profuse thanks for personal rejections. It\'s all so ingratiating, and yet so necessary; people are very smart to imagine the stack of paper on an editor\'s desk, smart to understand that we all want a meritocracy, but nevertheless, so many tiny factors undermine its implementation: the day of the week, the weather, how far behind an editor might be, what kind of work the editor writes, the other pieces they have read that day, not to mention the work that they have already seen, the people we meet at conferences, the amazing way that even a typo or the lack of pagination impacts a reading of work. None of us want it that way, and yet we recognize that it exists. And most important: the courage, to have the courage to encourage everyone, even the most beginning, the most inappropriately arrogant writer, to keep going, to keep searching, to keep using fiction as a vehicle to be open to the world.
As for me? I\'d rather see an ambitious failure than a lifeless, well-crafted story. But I\'d prefer an ambitious, well-crafted story. And if someone catches me straying from that line, well, run a red pen through it.
', '','', '');
arrBlogEntry[189] = new Array('2007.02.06', 'Pico Iyer\'s article in Newsweek discusses how Alice Munro, in her latest book, succeeds in doing everything you shouldn\'t do when writing fiction. What might have amused me more: a) it was in Newsweek, and b) the article was surrounded by a two page Viagra ad...(Is the Movie Sold Out? Make sure you\'ve got options.)', '','', '');
arrBlogEntry[190] = new Array('2007.02.07', 'It is finally snowing in Holland. About time.', '','', '');
arrBlogEntry[191] = new Array('2007.02.07', 'I\'m thinking of teaching Beloved for the novel workshop this term. But when I go to the library and see the bookcover with its woman-in-black-silhouette and its NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING DANNY GLOVER AND OPRAH WINFREY, then I start having second thoughts...for a second. And then I think, if anything deserves to be a movie, it\'s Beloved, which was voted the best US book of the last 25 years.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[192] = new Array('2007.02.08', '
Vegetarians cheat. Or, they overlook. Prime suspects: tortilla lard, fish sauce, beef broth in French onion soup. But since I turned vegetarian when I was 19, and not including the vegaquarian activities of the last two years, I have only deliberately cheated three times. First, when I was 20, eating rattlesnake nuggets at a Hooters rip-off restaurant in Arizona; then, eating old cod to appease our octogenarian host in the Czech Republic; and now, captured here on digicam, eating breaded frog leg. it was good.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[193] = new Array('2007.02.08', 'Super congratulations to my sister Beth and her now fiance Chris for their engagement!!!! We love you!','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[194] = new Array('2007.02.09', 'Just for fun and grossness: an article on surgery for poor Mozart the iguana...','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[195] = new Array('2007.02.11', 'Many of you know about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born political figure who just moved from Holland to the US. This New York Times Article charts her life in the US...','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[196] = new Array('2007.02.12', 'what i learned from being sick the weekend before last: brown bears wait at the tops of rapids and wait for the salmon swimming upstream to leap into their open mouths - there are a bunch of new technology roller coasters in los angeles - even bill gates doesn\'t know how to sell vista - the music in the original charlie\'s angels series is really flash (and that\'s not an analog to: i read playboy for the articles) - checking your email repeatedly is the new checking the refrigerator repeatedly in case you didn\'t see the chocolate pudding in the back.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[197] = new Array('2007.02.15', 'walking through amstelpark in the rain, in a park without bikes, means quiet, the dampening effect, and the ability to realize that geese have bulbous faces. also: in dutch, miniature golf is translated as midgetgolf. go figure.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[198] = new Array('2007.02.20', 'not to say i don\'t love it, but how many times is National Geographic going to show the one with the mega-herd (they call it that, really tens of thousands) of wildebeest who, at a single point no more than 10 feet wide, have to cross the river where the crocodiles are waiting? and how, once a crocodile finally drags a wildebeest under the current, the remaining wildebeest still on the near shore panic, then starts a larger-scale panic of the remaining mega-herd, who retreat into the jaws of waiting lions? it is such amazing drama, i fear overexposure.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[199] = new Array('2007.02.20', 'Fascinating book review on The History of Monopoly (the board game). Who knew that it was originally supposed to teach people about the perils of capitalism?','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[200] = new Array('2007.02.22', 'Laura commissioned our dear and brilliant and talented friend Nicolas Delamotte Legrand to paint a picture of, nominally, us. A few weeks ago, we went to visit him in Brussels and pick up the painting. I have to say it completely blew me away. Here\'s the happy quartet...
','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[201] = new Array('2007.02.23', '
And on the Brussels node, especially for closeted Perec fans out there, here\'s a poster for an exhibition on world religion - displaying a Rubik\'s Kube. The name of the exhibit is Dieux: Modes D\'Emploi, which is like Gods: A User Manual.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[202] = new Array('2007.02.25', 'and then i\'m reminded that there is one thing more popular on National Geographic than the crocodile/wildebeest encounter, and that\'s the Orinoco river anaconda (4 meters long) killing and swallowing whole the capibara (100 lbs).','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[203] = new Array('2007.02.26', '
','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[204] = new Array('2007.03.03', 'I was Skyping my sis, and I realized, when talking to her about writing, that one goal of mine is to simply introduce people to how much great, but largely unknown writing existed in the world. So many brilliant and moving books that don\'t really sell, that never make the A-list of major publishers. So I\'m going to start trying to make these public. You can always see what I\'m reading by hovering over (or, for a complete list, clicking on) the \"What\'s Robert Reading?\" link - I won\'t put something up that I wouldn\'t recommend. I\'ll also start sending more web sites...
On that note, a curious web site, The Literature Map, where you enter an author\'s name and you see a graphical map of other authors that have things in common with the author you entered. I have no idea how they do it, but it\'s cool.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[205] = new Array('2007.03.04', 'Something new: Amsterdam composer and friend and recorder player Ned McGowan has asked me to write text for a new composition that will be performed by his group Hexnut this month at the super-cool Mata Festival, a New York festival sponsored by Philip Glass for emerging composers. So it\'s very exciting, and exciting to engage in a process with musicians, who work very differently than writers. I\'ll keep you posted, but if you\'re in NYork, check it out!!!','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[206] = new Array('2007.03.05', 'Wikipedia\'s list of Indian Novelists','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[207] = new Array('2007.03.07', 'Jean Baudrillard has died in Paris yesterday. I always think of him when I\'m in Las Vegas.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[208] = new Array('2007.03.11', 'Again the National Geographic obsession/fetish: okay, so there\'s this guy in Japan, comes from a small fishing village, loves fish, i mean loves to eat fish, and he moves to Osaka, which isn\'t a coastal town, and he\'s devastated - i mean, the fish isn\'t as fresh. so he goes on this absolute crusade, what he comes up with is this. of course the fish are traumatized, as many studies have shown, by their final transport from the sea. their muscles produce fear chemicals, they\'re less sweet. so the answer? he has started a company that uses acupuncture, or a version of it, to put the fish to sleep before they are transported. then, at their destination, they are killed humanely, without waking them, and shazam! the tastiest fish you could ever eat.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[209] = new Array('2007.03.12', 'i\'m rereading Beloved for the thousandth time, and it each times it\'s more amazing. Read the first 3 pages and see how much incredible, dense stuff is in there...','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[210] = new Array('2007.03.13', 'It\'s funny when you see on tv those humiliating quizzes, the ones where you someone asks some random passerby some thing you think is incredibly obvious, like to show on the map which is Australia and which is Austria, but it\'s embarrassing, as a species, when it happens in live time, next to you on the train to Utrecht, when the 22 year old American girl says to her friend, \'I mean, does the sun really always set in the west? Like I know that in the south the toilets flush the wrong way, so what about the sun?\'','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[211] = new Array('2007.03.17', 'I thought it was just a stupid B- movie, but there really are supervolcanoes, and Yellowstone really is one. Okay, so it won\'t probably erupt for another 200,000 years (by which time we\'ll undoubtedly have the technology to, say, transport the entire supervolcano to another galaxy), but still...','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[212] = new Array('2007.03.27', 'For many years, I boycotted Sofia Coppola\'s The Virgin Suicides for no other reason than she was a Coppola, she had been given opportunities that other deserving people would never get, and so forth. Cranky me, watery sense of justice. But this weekend, I finally saw it, and I am happy to say that she uses her gifts for good and not for evil. It is a really good movie, as was Lost in Translation, and she has a really great eye/tone. I will continue to crankify about sundry forms of nepotism, and it still irks me that the credits read \'Written and Directed by Sofia Coppola\', and, much later, \'Based on the book by Jeffrey Eugenides\', rather than giving Sofia a simple screenplay credit, but I have to apologize: dear Sofia, wherever you are, you\'re doing really good work.
PS. Apparently there\'s a Dutch word, kift, which indicates a jealousy for someone who is succeeding. So to the person who learned me this word: it might be true for Sofia, but not, as you intimated, for Dan Brown.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[213] = new Array('2007.04.07', 'A sad thing I missed: Amsterdam Zombie Walk...
','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[214] = new Array('2007.04.08', 'do not open up your electric shaver over the toilet until you have checked and double-checked that the blades are securely attached or else the blades will fall into the toilet and you will have to use a spatula to get them out','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[215] = new Array('2007.04.10', 'wonderful photo of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a black eye after being punches by Mario Vargas Llosa. A South American literary rivalry to match the supposed fist fight between Hemingway and Faulkner while they both worked in Hollywood...
NB: the NYT article is now pay-only: you can read the full article at The Times Online, but alas, no picture...','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[216] = new Array('2007.04.21', 'Went last night to the Bimhuis to see Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. This is an Oakland band that are old Barrington (those who know don\'t tell, those who tell don\'t know) housemates of mine and colleagues of Laura. I have to say, bias aside, that they put on an absolutely mesmerizing show. Hard to describe - loud guitar, funky instrumentation, highly theatrical, academically trained, with enough rhythm and presence to convert the classical musicians sitting next to me, despite the fact that they never hear anything nearly that loud and obnoxious. Transformative stuff, amazing, go check them out...','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[217] = new Array('2007.04.30', 'For those of you who haven\'t been in A\'dam during Queen\'s Day (Koninginnedag), you are missing something special (and, by the end, drunken). My favorite is to go to Vondelpark and watch the hundreds of children who have a sort of open-air recital of whatever lessons they\'re taking. This year, accompanied by D. Ronen and J. Farrington, we saw child breakdancers, belly dancers, accordion players (playing Amelie!), violinists, pre-teen heavy metal trios doing Metallica covers (or Smoke on the River!), kids bashing out their drum kits, with lots and lots of smiling, proud, sunburnt-pink-nosed parents holding the change hat for passers-by. My friend Yoris wound up selling a crate of The Wiz commemorative mugs, and we paid a euro to try to hook goldfish out of a plastic wading pond...','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[218] = new Array('2007.05.01', 'It cracks me up how easy it is to be rat-racy until you get out of town, and you see how much of a fool you have been. L- and I went to Zuid-Limburg last weekend, in what is sort of the Four Corners of the Lowlands, the border of Holland, Germany, and Belgium. It was so good. There were little chickadees and hills (Hills!!!) and moo-boo-cows (in Holland cows go Boo) and strange and sad mausoleum with space for 60 coffins, only 3 filled in. Sauna and did I say cute baby ducks???
Right, and power to the people, Happy May Day.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[219] = new Array('2007.05.02', 'INVITATION: Versal V Release Party, 10 May, 20h, at The Sugar Factory in Amsterdam. I am so proud of Versal, and Versal V is one gorgeous, beautiful literary journal. It\'s going to be a fun night with DJ, readings (I will be reading my favorite piece), and live music. I would love it if you came with all your friends and hung out and drank Mojitos! More info at wordsinhere.com','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[220] = new Array('2007.05.18', 'Meanwhile, amidst serenity, I\'m sitting there reading Joyce Carol Oates\' Rape: A Love Story, which is one raw and brutal book, unrelenting, reminding me a bit of In Cold Blood, but not quite. Here\'s the first line: After she was gang-raped, kicked and beaten and left to die on the floor of the filthy boathouse at Rocky Point Park. (you can understand why, by the end of our vacation, both L- and me putting the book cover down to prevent lovely sauna-goers from reading the title.)','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[221] = new Array('2007.05.19', 'For those of you who missed the Versal Launch Party, it was a superfab show. The opening video by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai was a knockout, reminding us skeptics (and ex-performance artists) that there is a place in the world for video-based (not live) performance poetry. It was an absolute pleasure to see Fiction Editor Kai Lashley, straight off a 48 hour trip from South America, in funny/disoriented mode, reading Alicia Nutting\'s I Will Take You Over, which forced him to narrate as a teenage girl with a tennis-ball-cut-in-half as a bra stuffer. Best of all, Versal looks great, feels great, reads great.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[222] = new Array('2007.05.20', 'What a pleasure to sit in the hammock, in the morning, in the Sunday sun, reading a Milan Kundera article in The New Yorker. And what a strange twist of life it is to plan a vacation: Mumbai-Tokyo-Jakarta - and have the actual vacation turn out to be: San Francisco-Seattle-Orcas Island-Salt Lake City. Thanks to all my dear expatriate friends and relatives for being in the wrong place at the right time...','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[223] = new Array('2007.05.22', 'A few images I\'ve collected lately...
do not disturb sign, koln
I await the bad ones','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[225] = new Array('2007.05.31', 'for those of you wondering about the origins of the last post, it was just some graffitti.
Now that I\'m moving to some place snowy, i have done some research on alternative winter transportation...','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[226] = new Array('2007.06.08', 'happiness: trying to get Luca to agree to get into pajamas and brush his teeth and go to bed, and to say, \'deal?\' and for him to nod, and then for Riva, who hasn\'t spoken during the entire complex negotiation (where I had conceded that I would read a horribly-written abridged version of the The Jungle Book), says, \'Not a deal.\'.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[227] = new Array('2007.06.09', 'at cafe jacques on the Paul-Lincke Ufer, Anton takes the bill and erases half the orders, gives it to the maitre\'d, who goes to the bar and rewrites the orders and adds one, gives it back to Anton. Everyone laughs, and the maitre\'d gives Anton a bottle of Amendoa Amarga, this really nice Portuguese lemon/almond liqueur.
Next door to Almut and Tory\'s new place is a big gallery with a Hannah Hoch exhibit, which I\'ll try to get to today...','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[228] = new Array('2007.06.10', 'It is pure coincidence that the tv series Big Love has come to Holland. Big Love is about an orthodox Mormon community, where the primary characters are a man and his three wives. I am curious to have all my prejucides broken and, undoubtedly, new ones created. One friend is waiting for the Amsterdam/Salt Lake City mutation city to arise.','','', '');
arrBlogEntry[229] = new Array('2007.06.11', 'Interesting biography of Walt Disney...','','', '');
//kenny loggins
//arrBlogEntry[213] = new Array('2007.04.08', '','','', '');
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