Lucky Man

Right now we're watching the Julia Child episode about mousse au chocolat...WHILE chocolate souffle is in the oven. This is why I am a lucky man. Mary should have her birthday every week.

Incidentally, I do a mean Julia Child impersonation.

A vast host of cupcakes

Today Anna and I are having some of our friends and colleagues over for champagne and cupcakes to celebrate our engagement. And it's turned into a lot of friends and colleagues. This is what happens when you let me wander freely with Event Information in my head. I tend to share it with every stranger, pet and lamp-post I meet.

Happily, the weather has finally cleared up around here, and so far all systems are go for an idyllic afternoon in Escondido Village. It's going to be really interesting to tie together all of our social networks. I'm not sure how much people will mingle, but I'm hoping they will. It's always refreshing to break out of the bubble and meet someone doing something a little different.

The preparations for this day deserve their own entry, and a solid gold trophy for Anna and Mary, who spent yesterday baking six (6! VI!!!) dozen cupcakes. I sat on the couch and complained about how I didn't want to do any reading. Then, in a burst of energy, I asked Anna to ask our friends if we could borrow their cooler. So, as you can see we've shared the burden of labor quite equitably.

So. Cupcakes: check. Champagne: check. Friends and colleagues: CHECK.

I think we're good to go.

(Stop on by if you're free this afternoon.)

Deep in the heart of Texas

Last weekend my parents came to visit, this weekend I fly to Austin. A certain couple is tying the knot, and I'm really looking forward to seeing them. Lots of nefarious characters from former lives will be there, and it should be a great time.

All this goes to say that, once again, blogging will not be on top of the priority heap in the immediate future. But I shall strive.

There are more where I came from

Lest you think I'm the only Finn with strange events in Asia on my permanent record, my cousin Dan is a budding rock star over in the Middle Kingdom. I will forever be indebted to the man who visited me in the hospital when I was 18 and gave me Blood on the Tracks.

Even a quick perusal of the band's site will show you that he's still rockin' the fun side of the family genes. Good luck with the Supernaturals, Dan!

Venetian Holiday

Well, actually he's working, but the elusive Mr. Russel has resurfaced in the city of fog and pigeons. Trace his adventures through photographs here.

Wow, it's really been a long time since I went to Venice. It looks exactly the same, except for the modern furniture in the living room interior photos, which bears no resemblance to the tiny, swamp-like hotel beds we stayed in when we were there.

Proustian soup

Mmmm....soup.

Last week Anna made one helluva soup:

Coconut milk blended with corn, hot red peppers, chicken, zuchinni, and a nice loaf of ciabatta to eat it with. Awesome.

The coconut milk brought back memories of my Asian childhood. The word coconut has always conjured up images of Goa to me. I remember visiting those placid beaches as a small boy, wandering naked by the shore, and sipping coconut milk right out of the husk.

What is it about food that's so evocative?

I could spend years without thinking of those fleeting memories, but stirring corn into the coconut milk unlocked the old vision like a key. My parents like to tell the story that I surprised them and their friends with a lobster feast. Apparently I engaged a fisherman to go catch lobster for dinner for all of us, entirely on my own. I wonder if I was wearing clothes while I negotiated that transaction? I certainly remember being a bossy little kid.

But I wonder now if this soup will always be part of the same fabric of memory? Some days I feel like everything is just a portal to the distant past. I'll be talking to someone and struggling, deeply, to pull away from some worn groove of thought long enough to patch together what they're saying. Then, on other days, I have no idea who I am or where I've come from. Sometimes food tastes most exquisite at those moments, when I can imagine every bite as a breath-taking new experience. When I do feel cut off from the past, a good meal grounds me like nothing else, placing me unmistakably in the great input-output pathways of the world.

When food does stir memory, the same sense of placement takes root, but it's entirely internal. I become reattached to that past self, the self-assured blond mini-savage roaming the Goan shore.

Like I said, damn good soup.

Turk Romani

In honor of Father's Day and literary pursuits, here is Dad's magnum opus, translated into Turkish. When it comes to scholarship on the birth of the modern Turkish novel, the early bird does, indeed, get the worm. Rock on, Babam.

The return of Mr. Phil

It took me a while to decipher the email address he left in a recent comment, but somehow I detected his signature madness at veldt.lobitlandscapes.org. Mr. Phil is a brilliant, dangerous, and rambunctiously crazed old friend. He does things with computers. There is not a box in this world he does not think outside of.

His website details many new projects I will not pretend to understand for you now, but they're bound to be crowd-pleasers. For example, he's made a customizable protest screensaver. "minimobs march across the screen while you're away, to causes of your choice. crowd sizes, colors, and politics are all customizeable."

I haven't followed up with Mr. Phil for quite a while, and it's almost scary to think about all the things his evil genius has no doubt accomplished in that time. Cool.

My first two hours in LA

So in all the hullabaloo following my return from California, I never even got to describe my visit to LA. I stayed with our friend Eric, who has recently abandoned the East Coast for a glamorous life of script-reading and professional phone-jockeying...which is pretty much what he did over here too. The difference between Eric and your average phone jockey is, of course, that Eric is really friggin smart. No doubt he will soon be following in his brother's footsteps...and inviting his family to view the FILMING of a TELEVISION PILOT!
Yes, that's right, your lucky correspondent was in the right place at the right time (after Eric orchestrated about fifty coordinating phone calls and some fortifying cheeseburgers). That place and time was 10 pm at a certain LA museum where Eric's brother was creatively producing (or directing, or guiding in a scriptural manner...whatever, he had one of those chairs, ok?) a new TV pilot starring a bunch of famous people I don't know. It also stars Peter Dinklage (who played that amazing role in The Station Agent (but Eric and his family have warned me never to remind a star of previous roles in conversation)) and Brent Spiner (whom you should DEFINITELY not compliment for his role as Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation). Tragically, I missed both the nightie scene and an aerial canine abduction, but I did learn how that TV sausage is made. Basically, they film the same scenes fifteen times in a row while a balletic army of people in cut-off jeans maneuver large pieces of the Magic-producing machinery around tiny rooms. Fabulous stuff.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that thanks to Eric and his wonderful family, I was enjoying the insider's insider LA scene two hours after strolling off the plane. It was great to meet his folks and see the town, and they even forgave me for not recognizing some guy from American Idol who was having lunch next to us. Thank you, Eric, Marc, and family, for a wonderful visit!

The only way to get bourbon in Anna

"When we're graduate students, we won't be able to afford bourbon or hot chocolate. We're going to be drinking hot water with a little melted crayon in it."
--Anna, reminiscing about the decadent joy of City Bakery's bourbon hot chocolate

Original solutions to writers' problems

Anna on Friday:
"The newsletter has not, to my disappointment, written itself despite the fact that I left the blank word documents alone in their folder for many days. I must have forgotten some key ingredient, like perhaps some Marvin Gaye music."

Making Hay

Paul Muldoon, my senior thesis adviser and a brilliant, impish man, has taken his boyish smile to its natural cultural conclusion: a rock band. Google has lead me to a nascent band website, and there may even be songs for downloading. Rackett, as the group goes, also features Nigel Smith, another distinguished Princeton faculty member, and some friends of friends. You can see them in action here. As the Daily Princetonian reports:

While Muldoon's lyrics differ from his poetry, Muldoon's literary background certainly surfaces in his songs. "In one of our songs," Smith said, "the first line includes a reference to King Lear, and I'm not quite sure what it's doing there, probably because we were talking about King Lear when the lyrics were being written . . . [Paul's] songs often work by fusing two landscapes, which creates an energy in their collision. Something that brings the speaker's world together with something from a world outside is a powerful facet of creativity in literature that both Paul and I recognize."
Muldoon himself found songwriting to be a very different process from composing poetry. "It's much harder to write songs," Muldoon said, "as songs have a consistent structure that one must stick to." But he contends that the lyrics, as good as they are, can't stand on their own: "Songs are not just poems set to music. Poems have their own music, but lyrics need music to bring them into being."

Who knew

From the mysterious internal Finn archives, a blast from the collegiate past: Andrew Walsh has a blog. I knew Andrew mostly from--God, was it our last semester in school? We took one of the last classes taught by Professor Robert Fagles together.
I'm pleased to see young Walsh is still following the crazed Hibernian gusts that drove his wit (and flashing eyes and floating hair) in college.
Congratulations to Mr. Walsh for emerging from the blasted sands of my memory and proceeding unscathed into the daunting, undiscovered country of adulthood.

"Home" at last

It is strange to be home again. The Finn family ranges across continents and languages with reckless abandon, so when we do manage to get together it feels like a cross between an Irving novel and Show and Tell day at the Junior Explorers Club. But we love each other, and that's what counts.
The strangest part is coming across forgotten troves of Finniana lurking in closets and battered boxes. Mom has a scanner/printer here (unattached, of course--all new technology is held under military quarantine until I arrive or we've moved homes again), so maybe I can scan in some memories. Or at least get her a decent coffee-maker. The current system involves holding a plastic filter thing over a mug and pouring boiling water into it.
Meanwhile, maybe I'll redesign the site. So many choices.

Back by popular demand

The Egg Pics. West Egg, East Egg. You've read the novel ("Do they seem like real people?"). Well, these are Kubla's eggs. They date from a little over a year ago, when a few intrepid souls ventured East with little wit, less wisdom, and a large cone made out of sugar. Long Island is aptly named.

Make new friends, and keep the old

Who knew? Jeff Wolf, the man with whom I've spent more consecutive years in the same grade (in the same school) than any other, is apparently alive and well. I'm glad to see that he hasn't given up his philosophical...well, ambitions seems like the wrong word, but anyway he's keenly interested, and I'm happy to see he's following his dream. How appropriate that he's following it at Berkeley, a school named after a man with a famous dream. So, high on my list of neologisms-to-do: a word for famous dreams like Finnegans Wake.
I can't believe I was half as old when Jeff and I found ourselves sitting in a common room, talking about his coming to my boarding school the following year. We were a lot younger then. I didn't listen to music. I'd never worn contacts, and my glasses looked like spare parts for a Soviet telescope. We wouldn't get email for a whole year, and when we did, it would be regulated in half-hour doses like prime time TV.

Ach, Ultimate

I've been out of college for a while now, but I still miss Ultimate Frisbee. No, no dogs are involved. Yes, my former roommate's team, Pike, is kicking ass at Nationals right now. Check their results in real time here--they upset the #1 seed in their first game. And check out Pike's website too. There's a helmet. It's on fire.
And be sure to wish Bailey "All Legs No Brain" Russel good luck.

Best cousin's boyfriend EVAR

I was at a wedding last weekend, and I met the West Coast version of myself. His interests are diverse, and he's a funny guy. So, you know, just like me.
Only the West Coast version of this website is raucously alive compared to its East Coast counterpart, which is, um, let's say serene.

The inimitable Alex K

Over the weekend I finally got around to looking through some of the logs from this site, and I discovered a surprising connection. My old college roommate and general wonder boy, Alex, has linked to me on his site.
If you need someone who plays a mean wind instrument, owns a second-degree black belt in kung fu, and can explain the intricacies of the Riemann Hypothesis to even the likes of me, then Alex is your man.
And, disgustingly, he's also a really nice guy. He plays in jazz and klezmer ensembles all around New York, so go check out his upcoming gigs.

Alive!

I just want everyone to know that Anna is alive and well in Peru. I was beginning to wonder if her plane had crashed amid the snowy peaks, leaving her stranded beyond the reach of cell phone civilization, forced in a desperate bid for survival to eat her fellow passengers or, worse, left-over airplane food.
Not so, faithful reader. Anna, her family, and several microbial hangers-on are painting the Andes red. Which is good, becuase according to climatologists the mountains won't stay white for long.

A Good Excuse

This is my new favorite excuse for delaying a party...or anything, really. Ah, the East Village and the roommates who live there:

Well, as it turns out, our newest drummer, [Name withheld while he thinks about what he's done], got himself detained by the Detroit PD last night in an combination public drunkenness/nudity/jaywalking brouhaha. As a result, the rockin' party we were going to toss this weekend (June 5th) is getting pushed back (mandatory detox) to next Saturday (June 12th), same time (9 pm), same place.

sophisticated friends

Tom Dibblee, a genially nefarious guy in my dorm senior year of high school, has written an essay on the plumage and social customs of Southern California's college intelligentsia.

You'll all be thrilled to meet the star of Tom's little investigative gem, Byron Fuller. This hard-drinking-thinking scion of scholar-sybaritics has some things to say, and he has clearly said them to Mr. Dibblee.