alexandra alger

Je Suis Charlie, Toujours

I’ve been reading up on how the PEN gala in New York went down last Tuesday, and am pleased that it seemed to have gone smoothly, with a standing ovation for the surviving members of Charlie Hebdo.

And three of my heroes—the writers and graphic-novelists Neil Gaiman, Alison Bechdel and Art Spiegelman—agreed to host the tables relinquished by writers protesting PEN’s decision to honor CH.

Splendid writers—Francine Prose, Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi, and many others—who came to a strangely wrongheaded view that CH is racist.

I applaud what Michael Moynihan wrote in the Daily Beast on May 5:

“Should you trust the judgments of newly minted French satire experts, most of whom don’t speak French and have never held a copy of the newspaper? Or should you trust Dominique Sopo, the Togolese-French president of SOS-Racisme, France’s most celebrated anti-racism organization, who made the obvious point that Charlie Hebdo was the ‘most anti-racist newspaper’ in the country? Those accusing his murdered friends of supporting the very things they so passionately opposed, Sopo said, were either motivated by ‘stupidity or intellectual dishonesty…Every week in Charlie Hebdo—every week—half of it was against racism, against anti-Semitism, against anti-Muslim hatred.’”

Vegas!

Nope. I didn’t see the Down Unders.

Or Tyson. He’s sure looking good (he’s 44 now! How did that happen?).

I also didn’t gamble.

Before you think I’m utterly lame, listen to what I did do, on a girls’ weekend with three college friends:

—Got tattoos: an arm band and a dragon tramp stamp. Okay, not real: decals. But it’s the idea that counts.

—Saw David Copperfield. Yes, he’s still alive and performing two shows a day–and three times on Saturdays–at the MGM Grand. He can be dazzling–he made a vintage Cadillac appear out of nowhere! And a massive mechanical T-rex!–and so cheesy you can’t believe it. One of his acts involved a tiny blue “Martian” that needed the audience to help him get back to his home planet. A six-year-old might’ve liked this act, maybe, but Copperfield’s audience has more sixty year olds than six year olds (not to mention lots of tourists with a tenuous grasp of English; they must’ve been wishing DC would just get back to making things disappear).

—Checked out the Venetian’s fake canal, with warbling gondoliers, its fake cerulean sky overhead, and people eating in an “outside” Italian tratteria; the Luxor’s soaring pyramid and fabulous Sphinx (see selfie below); and the Bellagio, which was not so impressive. Maybe that’s because we didn’t get to see the Picasso paintings for which Bellagio is renowned. Oddly, they’re hung in a restaurant, which wasn’t open during the day (weird, surely?).

What was glorious–and eventually exhausting–about Vegas were the voluminous crowds. Where is everyone? They’re in Vegas! There were moments when I thought that the broadest diversity of humanity anywhere in the world had to be right there with us on this five-mile strip. All kinds of people, young and old, from all walks of life. Even toddlers. Yes, we saw families with toddlers, strolling through the slot machines–the air stinking of cigarettes and booze–as if they were in a beautiful park somewhere. And untold numbers of young women on bachelorette weekends in stilettos and skin-tight barely crouching covering outfits. Every bride-to-be had an identifying sash or hat. One group was wearing T-shirts that said, “Look like Jackie, act like Audrey, party like Gatsby.” Only the last reference makes any sense in the context of Vegas.

I’d been meaning to try a slot machine, at least. I could not figure out how to work the damn things! There’s a slot for a credit card, I guess, but no way to know how much money you’re putting in, and then what in earth to do to play the game. But all these old people are playing away, losing their money–how hard can it be? Finally, I got my chance. At the airport, where the lame slot machines go (there was about dogs, for instance). I asked the young woman what the deal was. She showed me a dollar machine and said, “It really isn’t that hard. It’s just a question of how much money you want to spend. The more you spend, the better your odds are.” She must’ve thought I was the dumbest person on the face of the earth to ask that question.

I slipped a dollar into a dollar machine called Triple Diamond. The machine coughed and spat my dollar out. I tried again. Same thing happened. Well, then. I slipped my dollar back into my wallet.

Clearly, I wasn’t meant to gamble in Vegas. Not this time, anyway.

Of Chocolate Eggs and Boiled Eggs

For our family, as for many unobservant Christians we know, Easter is all about hunting for colored eggs and inhaling vast quantities of egg- or bunny-shaped candy. Eggs and bunnies are symbols of spring and fertility from ancient times, various internet sources tell me—and of course, have nothing to do with the resurrection of Christ. (In a 2012 article, The Huff Post says Easter eggs were made out of chocolate starting in the 19th century.) And neither does the serving of ham at Easter lunch, which harkens back to a time when pork was an abundant source of meat in early spring.

I love an occasion to gorge on jelly beans and chocolate eggs. I certainly do. But now that the kids are older, and we’re not having Easter-egg hunts anymore, and I’m buying jelly beans and chocolate eggs mainly for MOI—whose aging body really could do without them—I’m starting to feel envious of my Jewish friends. Passover is a holiday with rituals that are meaningful for the observant and non-observant alike. Years ago, a work friend invited me to a women’s Seder she hosted at her place. It was a revelation to have a meal imbued with such meaning. I now have to admit I don’t remember much. But wait—a memory of hard-boiled eggs is coming back. Jews don’t color the eggs and display them, they actually eat them! The eating of a hard-boiled egg (dipped in salt water and consumed at the beginning of the holiday meal) represents a traditional offering brought to the Holy Temple in ancient times, and is also a symbol of mourning over the loss of the destruction of the temple—or two temples, depending on which website you consult. (I’ve resorted to the internet because my most learned Jewish friends, my best source of information on Jewish traditions, are in Tel Aviv. If anyone reading this can correct me, please do!)

Our Easter will be a family event, a small one. I’m having my mother over for lunch. We’re having fish. I’m going to bake a few whole sea breams. I’ve never done it before, cooked a whole fish. I figure I can’t really mess up—as far as my mother is concerned, there’s no such thing as fish that’s been overcooked. We will not be celebrating the resurrection of Christ, but we will welcome spring—which really might at last have arrived—and all the possibilities of change and growth that spring promises.

What a Plunge!

Serendipitous events: I went to a Q&A with author Michael Cunningham (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) not long before my daughter began reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, not long before I found a copy of Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours (1998)—an homage to Virginia Woolf—at the lodge where I am now staying in Jackson, Wyoming.

So it seemed like fate: I was meant to reread The Hours.

This was a novel that everyone read and raved about, as I recall—it was The Goldfinch of 1998-99. But all I really remembered was that Virginia Woolf was a character. I’d forgotten why she was a character; I’d forgotten everything, in fact. Until I started reading, and I began to remember. One of the main characters is Cunningham’s version of Clarissa Dalloway, who, in the first chapter, is going off to buy flowers for a party. Later Woolf herself sits down to write the famous first line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she’d get the flowers herself.”

It’s one of few first lines I have never forgotten in all the years since reading Mrs. Dalloway in high school. It’s so simple, and at the same time so distinctive and yes, unforgettable.

In a very funny article Cunningham wrote in the New York Times in 2003 after The Hours was turned into a movie (remember Nicole Kidman with the fake honker, playing Woolf? And then winning the Oscar?), he describes talks about Mrs. Dalloway this way: “Woolf’s novel takes place in one day, during which Clarissa Dalloway, a 52-year-old London society hostess, shops, sees the man she might have married but did not, takes a nap, and gives a rather dull party. However, because it is an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary person as rendered by a genius, by the book’s end we understand that Mrs. Dalloway not only stands with the heroes of world literature but, by extension, that every one of us might stand so, if only a brilliant writer would look at us with sufficient depth and penetration.”

Cunningham makes me think I should be going back to his source of inspiration, but I’m happy to have The Hours in front of me. When his Clarissa centers herself in the moment, in her life, it seems like just right thing to be reading, as the spring we’re all longing for teeters on the edge of being.

“Outside the narrow kitchen window the city sails and rumbles. Lovers argue; cashiers ring up; young men and women shop for new clothes as the woman standing under the Washington Square Arch sings iiiii and you snip the end off a rose and put it in a vase full of hot water. You try to hold the moment, just here, in the kitchen with the flowers. You try to inhabit it, to love it, because it is yours….”