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Lisa Zeidner and John Allen Paulos

the breakfast table
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from: Lisa Zeidner

Spring Roll Pomodoro

Posted Wednesday, June 30, 1999, at 1:15 PM ET

Dear J,

Exactly! Tex-Mex Sushi, Garlic Bagel Chip Ice Cream: So much of our national life feels like just that kind of nonsensical hodgepodge. Even in art, what passes these days for postmodernism is often just a pointless smashing together of contrasts, a multicult mush: Modern dancers in kimonos square-dancing to Beethoven's Ninth. As we old farts endlessly gripe, part of the problem is that no one has any history anymore. So what if the girl in the movie The Piano is supposedly improvising Phillip Glass-type music, at a period when Schumann would've been downright revolutionary? It's all classical, ain't it?

Our talk so far has worn me out enough that this morning, I just wanted to look at pictures. After I got done (first thing, I confess) ogling the blurry nude in the ad for my novel, I flipped right to the photo of the Khmer Rouge torture chamber in Phnom Penh, and immediately my eyes burned with tears. I find this kind of photograph--old-fashioned, stark, unadorned--almost unaccountably moving. I like, too, that the prison is not being tarted-up as a tourist attraction but instead is preserved in its unrestored state, with weeds, rust, and broken windows. The rawness of the photo captures the enormity of the event for me better than TV footage would, with all those distracting, distancing sweeps and zooms. I love the stillness of still photos, the sense that the life captured in that moment is irretrievably gone. The museum guards at the torture chamber claim to be haunted by the ghosts of the victims. One guard says, "It's just like an American ghost movie." How eerie, that the notion of reality Hollywood exports can overtake real experience even there. "On the grounds, the guards sometimes play volleyball near an outdoor torture rack"--a real Apocalypse Now moment.

It's human rights violation day in the Times, what with the Khmer Rouge, the mass grave being exhumed in Sarajevo, and the announcement of Swiss compensation for Nazi victims. I liked the cover photo of Ocalan as his death sentence was pronounced in Turkey. Everyone's hands are clasped in front of them--except Ocalan, who clasps his militarily behind him, and the guard's, whose hands are on his hips. The hands say everything. What is Ocalan behind, bulletproof glass? He turns slightly, as if he refuses to be contained, or constrained, by the words being spoken.

I like to remember, every so often, that not all experience is fit for irony.

Solemnly,

LZ

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314151617
from: Lisa Zeidner

Spring Roll Pomodoro

Posted Wednesday, June 30, 1999, at 1:15 PM ET
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John Allen Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple University and the author of six books, most recently Once Upon a Number (click here to buy the book). Lisa Zeidner, a professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of four novels, most recently Layover (click here to buy the book), and two books of poems.
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