Monday, 28 June 2010

You won't believe what just happened.

But as I'm a sporting man, instead of telling you, I'll make this a contest: the first person to correctly guess what just happened to me will be gifted a $25 gift certificate from Amazon.com. 

I'll give you one hint: I'm alright this time, if you don't count my renewed rage against an unjust universe and the deep bruise on my right thigh.  

Now, if you'll excuse me, I deserve a drink.

Jun 28, 2010 7:50:16 PM

22 Comments

Endy

Passed a kidney stone so hard it ricocheted?

Posted by: Endy | Thursday, 01 July 2010 at 09:26 PM

tina

How weird. I was going to guess "hit by a car," not knowing that it had happened before. So, you know, wow. Hope you're better.

Posted by: tina | Saturday, 03 July 2010 at 12:19 PM

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The Great Caravaggio Hunt My love of Caravaggio should be no secret—I did have the entire history of painting to choose from and went with that—but apparently I've never shared the story of Scott's Great Caravaggio Hunt. It starts like this: Scott and his wife were staying with friends of hers outside of Rome. Scott's Italian was laughably poor, but because he had been in Italian-speaking parts for a while, it approached passable-for-a-tourist. Still, when venturing about in Rome, he allowed his wife—who speaks it, among many other languages, fluently—to do all the talking. On the day he and had wife had dedicated to seeing the Caravaggios, their last in Rome, his wife took ill. "Now I'll never get to see the Caravaggios!" he moaned. "Pish-posh," she replied. "Go on your own." "On my own?" "You have the map. There's no reason for you to stay cooped up in this apartment with me on our last day in Rome," she replied. She was correct. He did have a map of Rome on which he'd marked all the Italian museums and churches that contained Caravaggios. He wouldn't even have to use any Italian because everything he needed was on the map. So he packed up his backpack and had their friend drive him to the train. "Remember, the 4:30 p.m. train from Rome is that last one that stops here," their friend told him as he exited the car. He waved and did the math: it was 9:00 a.m. now. Forty minutes on the train gets him there at 9:40. Half an hour to walk to the first museum; twenty from there to the second, and so on. "I should be fine," he told himself as he boarded the train. "After all, I have the map." He did not have the map. The map was on his bed, where it had been placed to make certain it would be remembered. "No matter," he told himself. "I was going to start with 'The Deposition of the Christ,' which is at the Vatican, and surely I can find the Vatican." He could not find the Vatican. After nearly an hour of wandering around with his newly purchased map, he decided to brave mockery and ask someone where the Vatican was. The very first person he asked—a tiny, gentle-looking older lady—pointed at his head. "No sono the Vatican," he replied. She gestured him to the side and pointed again, so that despite her tiny stature, he would realize that she meant, not his head, but the giant building behind him, which was the Vatican. Which he and his wife had already been through. Which meant that the Caravaggio there must have been in one of the many corridors and wings then being renovated. "Nerds!" he said to himself. He knew the next place he wanted to visit was the Church Santa Luigi dei Francesci, as it not only housed his favorite painting, but he thought he remembered how to get there. He did not. When he did eventually...
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Quick qestion for fans of anime and manga: Is there any particular cultural or historical reason why the anime and manga all seem to have an epic nonsensical climax followed by a grossly sentimental denouement? Hayao Miyazaki directed both Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke, so I thought it might simply be a personal tic—epic nonsensical disaster followed by a natural renewal—but it even extends to works merely influenced by anime and manga. For example, I just finished watching the series Avatar: The Last Airbender (because Scott McCloud told me to) and there it is again: an epic nonsensical climax followed by a grossly sentimental denouement—this time the resolution of the love stories and a natural renewal—which leads me to believe that what I took to be tics are actually a rhetorically relevant structural element of these works. My working thesis is that it has something to do with the scouring of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—which were epic and nonsensical events followed by personal, natural and societal renewals—but before I head down the rabbit hole of secondary literature, it would be keen to know whether there isn't some more straightforward cultural or historical explanation.

Scott Eric Kaufman

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