Conversation with a Cabbie in Dubai

I am pondering a trip to Dubai and came across this amusing post on the Washington Post’s Vagablog, a blog about travel:

Cabbie: Where are you from?
Us: Washington, D.C. in the United States.
C: You know George Bush?
U: (polite laughter) No, we’ve never met him.
C: You know Osama Bin Laden?
U: (slight discomfort) No…. We’ve never met him either.
C: Do you want to meet him?
U: (wondering where he’s going with this) Um… no. (sincerely hoping that we’re not on our way to see him right now)
C: I want to meet him very much.
U: Uhhh… Really? Why?
C: So that I could turn him in to the United States and gets lots and lots of American dollars. (hysterical guffaws)
U: (relieved smiles) Oh, okay.
C: No, I couldn’t do that. They would kill all my family. (another explosion of hilarity)
U: (polite but uncomfortable laughter)

Sometimes The Bible Has Cool Quotes

“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”  –Philippians 2:12

I only heard it in a recent movie, one which, like Pulse/Kairo, freaked me out so much I’m sleeping with the lights on again. It’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose. I wish I hadn’t watched it. Devil/demon movies don’t usually scare me, I’m usually disappointed to find out that Satan is the culprit. “Oh it’s just the devil,” I say to myself, and get bored. But not this one. It’s another mindfuck.

Meanwhile I was not so freaked out by The Descent–it’s what I’d call a “safe” horror film, in that it takes place in a very specific locale that I’m quite sure I’ll never visit (undiscovered caves in the backwaters of North Carolina) and that there’s nothing supernatural going on, just monsters and gore. And an all-female cast of ass-kicking spelunkers who fight to the death with these weird beasts. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Attention Austin, Texas

Do I have any readers there who might have a couch I can crash on for SXSW in March? Do I have any readers there at all?

The Bell Jar

For recent travels I acquired some books on tape to pass the time, as reading and/or watching movies on a bus/plane/car makes me nauseous. The library has a very limited selection of audiobooks, rarely anything new or exciting, so I had to choose among the classics. I was a lady traveling with E.M. Forster and Jane Austen for awhile, and quite enjoyed the company of the other lady characters. But on my most recent trip I fell upon Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which somehow I’ve never read despite its fame. I don’t really even know her poetry much. So I figured now was as good a time as any to get acquainted.

But this lady traveler was unfortunately terribly disappointed. It sucks. It is unbelievably dated–a great book should be timeless, and this one isn’t. It is unbelievably cliched, though it’s possible that many of the cliches I know are derived from this book rather than repeated within it, I’m not sure. It is also unbelievably racist! From the very start, she describes herself, lacking a summer tan, as “yellow as a Chinaman.” And her well-tanned friend, “like a Negress.” And a Peruvian man, “like an Indian.” Cliche, lazy, AND racist, all at once.

And finally, overall, it just isn’t written very well. It’s almost all exposition, there is no work to be done by the reader. And much of it is simply mundane description, mundane metaphor. Something was “soft as pillows.” Wow, now that’s an imagination for ya. This is a poet?

The narrator’s attitudes and the author’s oblivousness remind me a lot of what I dislike about Sofia Coppola.