In a moment Ross and I are going to watch some of Richard Feynman’s series of lectures on Quantum Electrodynamics, because we are Lifelong Learners! And we want to Learn! About the weirdnesses of physics!

But a couple of things first:

1) A belated link to Jenn’s fantabulous second year show (Click “Preview” for a little — very little — video in which you can catch glimpses of the visually stunning costumery she singlehandedly masterminded).

2) It is the Ross’s birthday tomorrow, and he is turning the big two-three (yes, he’s a baby). Please leave a comment to say hi and happy birthday to him (even if you don’t know him) — he had some news last week that bummed him out, and although he’s handling it beautifully as always, he could certainly use a little celebratory cheer.

See you on the smarter side!

So, I promised a few words on Napoleon Dynamite, and here they are.

I wonder if you have ever been on one of those amusement park rides where you sit in a harness (scroll down to where it says “Free Fall”) attached to the side of a tall tower, strapped in like an institutionalized madman, and are lifted one, two, perhaps three hundred feet into the air. When you reach the top of the tower there is a suspenseful pause where you gaze out over the field of Ferris-wheels and roller coasters like a queen surveying her kingdom, before gravity is allowed to do its thing and you are thrust like an egg to the ground, shooting downwards with thrilling speed.

The free fall is swift and over very quickly. The slow rising part of the ride, the part where you are being carried upward on the way to being flung down again, takes up most of the actual ride time. And to be sure this rising is enjoyable in itself. Your view of the park expands in ever widening circles, people diminish to toy-soldier scale, a mild and pleasurable vertigo bubbles in your belly as you mount. But of course the whole point of the journey, the reason for your rising in the first place, lives in those last few exhilarating and all too fleeting seconds when you are diving downwards like a bullet.

After all that, I have to confess that I have never been on one of these rides (although I would love to, because I find the experience of being flung about fast and furious like a rag doll in flight very enjoyable. I like feeling dizzy, light-headed, fleet. It’s why I like roller coasters, gyroscopes, swinging very high and fast, and spinning about on roller-chairs until I’m very nearly ill.)

I bring it up because watching Napoleon Dynamite is something akin to being on a free-fall ride like that. The eponymous movie follows a gangly, orange-fro’d anti-hero with an overbite, a penchant for outrageous self-aggrandizing lies, and a kind of dazzlingly self-centered eccentricity that is at once awkward, endearing, and irritating. Most of the actual time you spend watching the movie, collecting and savoring its small moments of intense weirdness, you are in that first half of the ride, inching ever higher up the side of the tower. Every time Napoleon licks his thick lips and blurts “GOSH,” or “YESSSSSS,” or “Flippin’ SWEET!”, every time he bats furiously at the tether-ball in the schoolyard, every entirely un-ironic unicorn that appears on a t-shirt or notebook cover, that’s you ascending another few feet up into the air, in preparation for the eventual plummet.

Napoleon Dynamite is breathtakingly random and weird (so determinedly quirky, in fact, that I was a bit taken aback to find, from time to time, my mouth literally hanging open in pleasantly stunned disbelief). It contains – to name the least of its oddities – a pet llama, a time machine, and a contest in which Napoleon and his best friend Pedro win medals for their expert knowledge of cows.

But there really isn’t much of a plot holding the film together, because despite appearances, it’s not actually about the triumph of dorkdom over coolness. Yeah, Napoleon gets beat up and teased, but under Jared Hess’s direction Jon Heder plays his character as oblivious – or perhaps impervious – to the emotional damage you’d think he would experience. The film is actually quite tiring to watch sometimes because the acting is achingly deadpan (perhaps to counterbalance the strangeness of the dialogue and events in the film, everyone’s delivery is understated to the point of being poker-faced).

And then, about 80 minutes into the movie, there is a transcendent sequence lasting perhaps three minutes which by itself justifies and illuminates the entire rest of the film. It makes everything leading up to that moment worthwhile, the way the drop validates the ascent in the amusement park ride. When you get there, your strange and sometimes exhausting journey is rewarded, because you now have the immense and hilarious pleasure of watching Napoleon doing something (I won’t tell you what) that somehow manages to be supremely dorky and completely fabulous at the same time – and you are in free fall. Or at least, I was.

This wasn’t a profound film, or a particularly compassionate one — but man, those three minutes were fun.

P.S. If you see this, you should know that there is an epilogue after the credits that is “flippin’ SWEET!”

I love this idea.

Jo and I saw Napoleon Dynamite tonight… more on that tomorrow maybe.

Tired. Had an interesting session with Helen today. Glimpsed the circularity in so much of my thinking. She is kind of a blessing.

‘Night…

Exercise Two: I AM GARCIA MARQUEZ

Write a paragraph to a page (150-350 words) of narrative with no punctuation (and no paragraphs or other breaking devices).

I did this exercise tonight but I’m not going to post it, because I littered it with names that I’d rather not place in this space and I don’t want to change them. I will, however, post these ruminations:

1) I am a complete slave to punctuation. I can barely travel an inch in any direction without feeling the need for a comma, a dash, a colon, a semi-colon, a question mark, a period — perhaps several periods… I felt like I was holding my breath, a fish flopping helplessly on concrete. I couldn’t slow anything down. I couldn’t really speed anything up. It also felt kind of artificial, because I kept thinking “Never mind, next week I’ll just come back and stick a comma in right here, and then it will be ok.

2) Why Garcia Marquez? Sarah, you’re reading him right now… I don’t remember what he does with punctuation. What’s the deal?

3) Everything I write squirms and wriggles about under my fingers until it turns into a portrait, even if it’s supposed to be a story. I like writing portraits, but I want to also be able to storytell. Next time I do an exercise I’ll be more vigilant about keeping it in the narrative mode.

This entry’s title brought to you by a game of Mad Libs Jo and I played on the Fung Wah to New York Sunday morning, when we weren’t listening to our various obsessions (Jo: Jazz and the Gorillas, Me: this book, which I have fallen utterly in love with, and which is a much more interesting creative accomplishment than the one I am about to tell you about).

An alternative title for the entry would have been “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” because that is what I mostly thought when we finally got to Central Park, after walking twenty (plus twenty plus twenty) blocks through pizza and used books. I’m very glad we went to see the Gates, because we had a delicious time, and Jo had a celebrity sighting which I will let her tell you about (we were crossing a road, and I was too slow, so by the time I turned my head the two very short famous people Jo spotted had disappeared. That’s all I’m telling you. They are both very short, and they are famous, and they are — Jo thinks — married to each other. Go guess!).

But the experience itself was sadly lacking in wonder-production. Actually, I’m quite certain that had it been a stunningly bright day, with a stiff breeze, and had we been, as in this picture, the only three people in the park, it could have been rather lovely — even a bit spiritual — possibly it would have been breathtaking. As it was, the life-jacket colored banners were pretty, but very flat, still, and almost completely overwhelmed by the teeming masses of humanity eating hot dogs underneath them. The tremendous number of people in the park turned the audience into the show, as far as I was concerned. Several times I clean forgot about the big orange things lying about everywhere, because I was so much more interested in looking at the people. Lots of families, lots of dogs, lots of babies. Lots of funny hats and fabulous coats.

That part really was amazing, and kind of wonderful — the sheer fact of so many human beings coming out on a cold February afternoon to see this… this thing, this spectacle, this crazy, expensive, eerily poetic but also weirdly mundane stunt pulled by a couple of wrinkled old coots who have figured out a way to play glorious jokes on the world.

I’m going to New York tomorrow to see The Gates, so until I update about that I will put up some pictures of the baby, because I can.

Here is Asher swooning over grandfather #1. Look at that expression of complete drunken joy. He really loves my dad.

And here he is again, mightily cute and looking very like a rescued refugee child, with grandfather #2.

I’m sure he made out like a bandit on his first Chinese New Year, this one.

Today I went to the bookstore where Sean works, to meet him and Peter for dinner. While we were waiting for Sean to close up, I perused their children’s section — an alcove in the very back of the first floor, consisting of three shelves stuffed full of people from Ramona to Walter Crane, Hans Christian Anderson to Scarry Potter. In fifteen minutes I had picked out five books:

Two Beatrix Potters, little. (Peter and Tiggy-Winkle. I had to stop at two, even though they also had old Squirrel Nutkin and Jemima.)
William Wegman’s wonderfully weird photo-version of Little Red Riding Hood (all the characters are Weimaraners).
Arthur Rackham’s illustration of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” which I will never forget reading for the first time sitting on the floor of a hallway on the second floor of Simmons, during the 2003 Symposium.
And Attilio Mussino’s Pinocchio, which I have been thinking about ever since I saw “A Tree of Palme” on Saturday and was thrilled to my toes to see on the shelf.

I’m too tired to make links, so trust me when I tell you that, each in their own way, these are five beautiful volumes. If you’ll indulge me I’ll read you some of them, when you next visit me. Yes, I mean you. Come visit me and let me show you books.

Also, I love Sean and Peter.

Also, someday in the not-too-distant future, Susan is going to be listening to lots of songs about underwear.