liquidnight:Esther London, Mt. Vernon, Indiana, USA, circa 1900
From Anonymous by Robert Flynn Johnson
It’s so cold in my apartment the end of my nose feels like refrigerated putty. When I lived in Colorado I looked forward to the coziness of my apartment, but in LA, we generally don’t have central heating, so when it’s cold it’s cold all the time. To warm my nose I’ve been covering it with my scarf and breathing into the fabric. People think that I think they smell.
When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer — not entirely facetiously — that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to burden her daughter with the name Quintana Roo; I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by migraines that can be triggered by her decorator’s having pleated instead of gathered her new diningroom curtains. These, and other assorted facts — such as the fact that Didion chose to buy the dress Linda Kasabian wore at the Manson trial at I. Magnin in Beverly Hills — put me more in mind of a neurasthenic Cher than of a writer who has been called America’s finest woman prose stylist. (Thinking of Didion’s drapes, it occurred to me that in the worst of all possible worlds, Franny Glass might have grown up to be Maria Wyeth of Play It As It Lays. Her faith in the Jesus Prayer permanently misplaced, and possessed of no secular equivalent to fill the vacuum, in her second incarnation Franny is Maria, a fragile madonna of acedia and anomie. This feeling was confirmed when I reread all of Didion, an activity that, trust me, is roughly akin to spending several days in the company of Job’s comforters.)
…Didion’s “style” is a bag of tricks. Some of the effects she produces are quite pretty, even momentarily beautiful. But make no mistake: these are tricks — techniques — that can be learned (I don’t know why they have evoked so much wonder). If, for example, I put Al Capone and sweet williams in the same sentence, I can be fairly sure that a certain number of readers will be jolted by the juxtaposition — their eyes will cross, and they will assume that they are in the presence of genius. They will be wrong, of course, because unless I use this technique to draw them into meaning, I will have cheated them: a magician can pull a rabbit out of a hat and get away with it; a writer’s job is to tell us what the rabbit was doing in the hat in the first place. And, as Didion will gladly acknowledge, she is interested only in the what (the “empirical evidence”), not in the why.
-Barbara Grizzutti Harrison
People who still listen to jam bands in earnest fall, for me, under the same category as people who enjoyed high school.
Yesterday on the radio I heard a girl singing a song about how she “wasn’t that kinda girl.” But judging by her voice and the song’s frame of reference, I’d probably assume that she was that kind of girl. I could be wrong, but whether someone is that kind of girl can usually be intuited by things like shrillness of voice, or, for example, the degree to which a girl lets her mouth hang half-open when she isn’t speaking.
I see girls who are evidently that kind of girl all the time. But they would never identify themselves this way. We know there are girls who are, and girls who aren’t, but could it be that no girl actually believes that she is that kind of girl? And are these the ones who are most obviously that kind of girl?
The result of all these confessions was very strange: for me, you are no longer simply a woman I desire, but one I love for her sincerity, her passion, her freshness, her youth, and her folly. I have lost much over these explanations.
- Baudelaire (via Alex)
I have a reoccurring dream that one of my paternal grandparents, who both died on the same day in 1999, did not actually die, and has been alive this entire time. Last night it was Poppa. He had been living in Galveston in a beach house outfitted like a cruise ship. There was a brass staircase and an absurdly high ceiling in the living room, but also familiar things from their real beach house: white whicker furniture, a set of perfectly-made twin beds in one bedroom, a balcony overlooking the reedy bay. In my dream, the house was a mess, evidence of a lonely life.
I was devastated that he’d been there all along, that I’d never even called. I began throwing things across the room and screaming that he’d been here for 10 years and no one had called or wrote or anything. I imagined conversations we could have had and how he must have wondered why we never contacted him. As in every manifestation of this dream, I buried my face in my elbow and cried. A terrible, guttural, beyond-sadness sort of cry. I’ve never cried exactly this way in real life. This is the dream, above all bad dreams, from which I am most relieved to wake.
NOTES ABOUT SIMON, MY CAT
He wears a tuxedo all the time. He never takes it off. He’s always dressed up, looking fancy, ready for a date.
He likes to tear toilet paper into shreds. This is a recent thing. Is he acting out? He seems to be building himself a hamsters nest beneath the sink. After he shreds the paper, he curls up in the pile.
He squeaks. A vet listening to his breathing asked me if he swallowed a squeak toy.
He’s Jewish.
He’s a molester. Every day he molests his girlfriend, Mama. As if Mama hasn’t been through enough: I found her in a grocery store parking lot, starving, nursing a litter a kittens, and Simon molests her several times a day. She likes it for the most part, but when she tells him no, he really amps it up. Chases her around, pins her down.
Whenever I have to pee, he follows me into the bathroom and climbs into his litterbox and we pee together.
Give her a helmet, shield and lances
When I see a mother reading a book while her toddler quietly draws pictures across the table, I think that maybe one day I will have a child after all. But then it is never clear which person I am identifying with; perhaps what I really want is to draw pictures across the table from my mother.
*
Yesterday after Simon and I laid on the bed and stared into each other’s eyes, I went downstairs to the organic grocery store to buy a bottle of water. These staring sessions often leave me dazed because Simon lays right on top of my chest and I hold his paws and his belly is warm and I usually fall asleep.
I like to buy the 1.5 liter bottle of Crystal Geyser for .75 cents. In and out. But yesterday the clerk pointed to a guy at a little table and said he has water too. I looked at this guy which he took as an invitation to tell he was sampling the freshest water I’d ever drink. Then he handed me a blue fluoride cup full of this water. I was already holding my Crystal Geyser, but I took the cup anyway because I felt awkward and dazed. Then he and the clerk both watched me drink this water for what seemed like too long. I was uncomfortable and still dazed. It tastes like water, I said. And then the clerk burst out laughing. The water guy looked disappointed, insulted, shamed even, and I felt guilty. So I backtracked. But yes, I said, it does taste very fresh, much better than regular water. Regular water?
There was an awkward silence, and then the water guy pointed to the water freezer and said, well it’s here, for next time.
How accurate are these categories, and how much or little do they have to do with money?
-Women who will always have organized silverware drawers/Women who will never have organized silverware drawers
-Women who have at least four matching wine glasses/Women whose wine glasses are mismatched
-Women who never stain the armpits of their white t-shirts yellow/Women who always stain the armpits of their white t-shirts yellow
