The Strangest Sameness [Fresno, CA]

At the end of July, I left Hawaii, on my way to southern California via Philadelphia, New York, and Pittsburgh. Like all my new beginnings, it's been disorienting. I have an apartment in Long Beach, a partner in Irvine, and somehow for the last week I've found myself in Fresno and Stockton for my new job. Traveling for work, it turns out, isn't all that glamorous -- particularly when my new 'home' is mainly a storage space for suitcases and boxes. I'm most confused, though, by the lack of change that's come with changing places. The hotels are the same, give or take a kitchenette or a bathtub, and so, it seems, are the towns. The double beds all have the same cheap bedspread that implies but refuses to provide warmth; the endless strip malls offer me the same Denny's and P.F. Chang's, the same Target and Wal-Mart, the same 21-screen cineplex with the same 15 blockbusters; the sky serves up the same indifferent shade of blue; the temperature rises and falls a negligible amount. Driving back from work at the end of the day, I marvel at how well I fit into this pattern. Business casual, aging cup of Starbucks, microwave dinner and Law & Order waiting on the TV. I feel a great and irritating sympathy for contemporary photographers whose body of work is made up of large, richly colored prints of office buildings, freeway on-ramps and parking lots. Somewhere, an artist is waiting to make an 18-minute film entitled 'White cupboards on a beige wall'.

Perfect timing, then, to read some melancholy tales of the supernatural written by Isak Dinesen, known in life as Karen Blixen, a Danish aristocrat with more than a little standard-issue Scandinavian morbidity. Her Seven Gothic Tales run the gamut from a prioress who turns into a monkey, a street prostitute who is most beautiful as a skeleton, and two sisters who return to their house in Elsinore for a long-overdue reunion dinner with their dead brother. A duel and cross-dressing in Tuscany; murderous identity theft amidst a great flood in a seaside town; give them to me with a little cheese and pumpkin ale and I can flavor my studio suite enough to imagine some history into its durable patterned carpet.