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Two pastorals of Oscar Wao:

“Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about – he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock. And except for one period early in his life, dude never had much luck with the females (how very un-Dominican of him).

“In those blessed days of his youth, Oscar was something of a Casanova. One of those preschool loverboys who was always trying to kiss the girls, always coming up behind them during a merengue and giving them the pelvic pump, the first nigger to learn the perrito and the one who danced it any chance he got.

But poor Oscar, when he got into college, after he morphed, his luck with the ladies ran way, way out:

“When it came to the mujeres my roommate was like no one on the planet. On the one hand, he had the worse case of no-toto-itis I’d ever seen. The last person to even come close was this poor Salvadoran kid I knew in high school who was burned all over his face, couldn’t get no girls ever because he looked like the Phantom of the Opera. Well: Oscar had it worse than him. At least Jeffrey could claim an honest medical condition. What could Oscar claim? That it was Sauron’s fault? Dude weighed 307 pounds, for fuck’s sake! Talked like a Star Trek computer! The real irony was that you never met a kid who wanted a girl so fucking bad. I mean, shit, I thought I was into females, but no one, and I mean no one, was into them the way Oscar was. Homes had it bad; couldn’t so much as see a cute girl without breaking into shakes. Oscar’s idea of G was to talk about role-playing games! My favorite was the day on the E bus when he informed some hot morena, If you were in my game I would give you an eighteen Charisma!

from Junot Diaz’s first novel (FYI 2008′s Pulitzer winner) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
From Riverhead Books, $24.95

This spring, my occupational experimentation landed me a caretaker’s position for a woman who, due to her illness, spent a significant portion of her time watching television. She introduced me to her favorite channel, an entire channel, dear friends, dedicated to home improvement. I haven’t been around TV much since junior high, so this cornucopia of “professionals” re-rendering color schemes and knocking out walls and quick-fixing the furnishings set my teeth on edge. It was the faux of Vegas gone homestyle, people pitching beaucoup dollars to reconstruct something pesky, something just not flowing in their lives – I mean houses.

This encounter left me a little baffled. The shows were superficial, the construction superficial, the peppy music and peppier hosts bubbled meretriciousness, but the yearning – heartache even – from folks involved seemed quite real.

With that, here’s Alain de Botton in The Architecture of Happiness: “Our sensitivity to our surroundings may be traced back to a troubling feature of human psychology: to the way we harbour within us many different selves, not all of which feel equally like ‘us’, so much so that in certain moods, we can complain of having come adrift from what we judge to be our true selves.

“Unfortunately, the self we miss at such moments, the elusively authentic, creative and spontaneous side of our character, is not ours to summon at will. [...] We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need – but are at constant risk of forgetting we need – within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.”

from Vintage Publishers, IN STOCK $16.95