Daily Archives: September 5, 2007

You are browsing the site archives by date.

The Deaf Poet

Her fingers flexed the stanzas. The blind man in the audience thought he was shit out of luck. But then an announcer in the wings began translating her dance into our language. It didn’t matter that we didn’t speak in signs. Padma Vowell was the most famous poet in the world, and we were in the front row of the auditorium. She was a seamstress of signs, turning birds into hearts and making hearts fly in her fingers. Her hands never stopped moving, yet the words seemed perfectly still, like they were on a page. She wore a black gown and white gloves to her elbows. Her face revealed nothing but a steady scowl. She didn’t acknowledge our applause when she moved us in particular. My favorite was the sonnet about her mother and father. I think her hands rhymed in iambic pentameter.

My Shocking 6 Hours with Topless Britney

I know someone who went to Helsinki and spent $10 on an Us Weekly with this headline. Ten dollars seems extreme, but I can’t really deny that after a few days in Finland I might feel an expensive need to read about Britney Spears. Traveling outside of my comfort zone, where I know exactly who and what I’m contending with, I might feel so swallowed up by the sheer number of other, anonymous lives being led that I need celebrity reassurance. Reading about Britney might assuage my feelings of being no one in the world. She is a lighthouse around which we can all gather. “Come home to me,” she says. “Drink soda out of my baby bottle. Take shelter from the storm.” It comforts me that for a moment, one human can be the epicenter of the universe, even though she’s depicted as a bipolar cartoon from Louisiana. “You will not be anonymous for long,” she says. “Some people can break through the Earth’s crust. My genes are famous. My children have fan clubs. This magazine says I’m immortal. Do you want to bump uglies?”