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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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The Demon Who Tries to Solve for x
I probably haven't said enough about x. My favorite x story is from the time when he lived in L.A. and was probably making more money in a month than I've made in any given year of my life. Max and I went one summer to visit him in his tiny apartment in Venice Beach. Here is a list of his furniture: a rented sofa (which folded needlessly out into a bed as x only ever slept on the floor), a rented bookshelf. Here is a list of the contents of x's refrigerator: a bottle of Perrier. Here is a list of the dishes and cutlery he owned: a glass, a spoon, a fork, a knife, a bowl. (Needless to say, we ate out while we were there.) A few months later, I got a call from x during which he disclosed excitedly, "I just bought a pan!" x also has this I guess you�d have to call it thing about grammar. Knowing that I am an English major who has studied grammar, from time to time he hits me with a grammar question. Now, I�ll admit, being a grammar devotee, that there is no one who likes to beat a dead horse like a grammarian likes to beat a dead horse. I like to beat dead horses. I beat them with whips and chains and subjunctives no less. But x? That boy could cure even a grammarian of a three-dead-horse-a-day beating habit. Take, for example, the day he showed up to coffee with a copy of The New Yorker. �I have something to show you,� he said. �Is this grammatically correct?� He held out the magazine. He had highlighted, in purple, a sentence in which the writer ran two introductory clauses together and followed the second�but not the first�clause with a comma. It was grammatically correct. (I mean, it�s The New Yorker, for chrissakes. If anything they�re grammar vigilantes, but they�re certainly not grammar scofflaws.) I told him so, and he asked if I thought that following the grammatical rule made the sentence nonsensical. I said yes, it did increase the nonsensical quality of the sentence, but, I added, this was not the question that he had asked me to decide. x then decided that it might be fun to discuss (for several hours�or for what seemed like several hours anyway) what exactly, in his opinion, the grammatical rule should be. And if you think it�s hard to argue about actual grammar, try arguing about imaginary, x-based grammar. Anything and nothing goes. It�s like playing handball with drapes. For hours. Also? Here is a recent exhange of emails between us about the Aisho-san (a subject that was, of course, peripheral to the matter that was actually under discussion). x wrote: I know you have sushi to eat and trips to the sushi restaurant to plan, but I need to disrupt your sushi planning to ask a series of questions. I replied: Gah. Do you think I have time for this, what with sushi tactics being planned even as we speak?! If it wasn't for my team of sushi experts (Sophistica, actually, and The Demon Who Always Does The Right Thing), I wouldn't even be able to take a breather. Although in fact I do owe you one considering that it was your Wal-fish "knowledge" monologue that truly broke the ice, so I will take time out to say� x returned with: I think you should think of your sushi strategy like a game of Go: The individual moves are not important, but all the moves together determines who wins or looses the game. I wrote back: am taking your recent advice in re go sushi under advisement stop will also try showing interest in the future though this sounds like something a wily japanese is likely to be deeply suspicious of stop don't you think go sushi sounds like the name of a japanese all-girl punk band stop
Do we love x? Yes. Yes, we do. He�s a keeper. Here is x, in Starbucks, with the spe-x-ialty: a grande no-foam latte. (He usually gets a venti, but some sort of clerical error occurred here, I think.)
x, 26 January 2004
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