a cup of tea & a wheat penny

What We Need

2009-11-09T23:21:00.003-05:00

Last time I met up with Rich and Maija, we talked about swapping lives. Cobblestones for Central Park; herring for hot dogs. This time, we talked about the economic crisis. About inflation rates, accountability. How the entire staff of the major newspaper in Latvia up and quit because of questionable practices of the owners. How friends live paycheck to paycheck and who knows what will happen next?

With the bad comes the good. The arts spaces that have popped up thanks to cheap rents, the second-hand bookstores and art collectives in old warehouses. Melnais Knābis — The Black Beak Barbershop and Reading Room — and Pērle — bar/used clothing shop/art space/exercise equipment supplier. Places that could never exist the way the bubble swelled a few years back.

We dissected both sides of the coin. Wondered which would fall heavier.

I joked that I would write about our conversation, about how I subconsciously foisted food upon them and joked with the waitress about starving children in Latvia as she carted away the last bite of a biscuit. I didn't think I would write about it, until I came home and saw that a catalog had arrived in the mail, a catalog filled with magnets that look like precious stones, little rubber thumb sleeves for taking dishes out of microwaves, special towel mitts made for drying the paws of one's pets. A doorstop that does double-duty as a putting practice hole. And, as if it couldn't be more obvious: a fake to-go coffee cup made of porcelain and silicone.

The things we think we need.

Immediately the minimalism of a Latvian summer house floods my mind: blankets and a mattress, a platter, a long-handled scythe for mowing grass, wooden chairs, a paring knife, and a bucket. A window flung open to the breeze racing across a field of dandelions.

And it made me think about what it means to get by. What comfort means. I'm certainly oversimplifying the issue. Or overcomplicating it with imagery and — here we go again — allegory. What we were really talking about, the lives of people living day-to-day and paycheck-to-paycheck both here and in Riga, can't be simplified into a blog post written late on a Monday night. But sometimes the thoughts come without ration.

The restaurant we dined in had a woodpile by the front door, used to feed the stove that gave my ribs their smokey flavor. Rich pointed to the woodpile, and said "just like our old apartment."

Flavor, or survival, I think. Two sides to the coin: flavor or survival.

Sunday Zen

2009-11-08T22:11:00.001-05:00

An Open Letter To Nick Hornby

2009-11-04T13:02:00.001-05:00

Dear Mr. Hornby,

I'm on to you. At least, I have a theory.

I spent last Saturday with your most recent novel, Juliet, Naked, one elbow resting against the arm of the sofa much longer than I probably should have had it there. My back has been cramped for days, but I honestly don't mind. I devoured the book in a single sitting; on several occasions I laughed out loud and found myself ignoring my husband's repeated requests to decide what I wanted for dinner. Needless to say I enjoyed it; thank you for that.

But something has been bothering me ever since I finished the book. I've heard it said — not that you can control what is said about your work — that Tucker Crowe was a Dylan-esque character. Tucker Crowe, like Dylan or Leonard Cohen. Something along those lines.

I played along. For the first half of the book, I put Blood on the Tracks on the turntable, only getting up from my prone position on the sofa, book in hand, when the last notes of "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" or "Buckets of Rain" started to fade and the needle made that beckoning spin-POP sound it makes when it reaches the end of the record. I dutifully performed this act several times before I realized that something was wrong.

He isn't supposed to be Dylan, is he? Or even Leonard Cohen. Nick Hornby, I've figured you out, the jig is up: Tucker Crowe is Alex Chilton.

A studio in Memphis? An accountant's haircut and specs? Admired by Peter Buck and Jeff Buckley (who once gave Big Star's "Kangaroo" the 14 minute treatment)? And this (fake) album cover you and your pal Wesley Stace came up with... An homage to a young Alex Chilton if I ever saw one.

With that, Blood on the Tracks came off; Third/Sister Lovers went on.

It's entirely possible you yourself don't even know that this is the case. In the same way we sometimes see ourselves portrayed so precisely in the fiction of authors we've never met, it's possible that you have drawn up the perfect characterization of Alex Chilton without even realizing it. An accident of "Blue Moon" coming on your iPod at just the right time, the image of a shaggy-haired singer infecting your prose, a singer whose love songs only a handful of people had the chance to learn by heart before he moved on to other pastures, a seemingly distant forgotten legend.

I appreciate the accident. This may make me seem as mad and obsessive as your Duncan, but realizing Chilton was your likely muse made the book all the better for me. And I just wanted to say it out loud.

Sincerely,
A Fan

More serious reviews of the latest Hornby novel at The Second Pass and The Guardian. Also: An entire record label of artists that only exist in the pages of books.

Silver Edges

2009-11-02T13:52:00.000-05:00

I once read about a Latvian poet who renamed himself "Sudrabu Edžus" — "Silver Edges." I like to picture him in his wooden house, surrounded by bare birch trees creaking under the weight of freshly-fallen snow. The poet writing away by the fire, his felt boots hung in the hall, composing his poems about tears in the gloomy Daugava, and taking a deep, satisfied breath before he signs his chosen name at the end. As if his name could wipe the soot off his brow, tip the snow from the trees. As if his name could drag the sun kicking and screaming in through the window on a dark and gloomy night.

The importance of names. I sometimes translate the names of my Latvian friends: Partridge. Basement. Daugava dweller.

I wanted to write something warm on such a cold day. Create words that could melt snow. Something I could wrap my hands around so that they'd be toasty again. Instead, I play these word games, changing one word into another to see the world a new way. Like lying on a bed upside down.

Imants Ziedonis's wrote in his Epiphanies:

Words flirt, vowels are coquettish, consonants vamp. Here anecdotes are told. A deceptive mosaic of words shining in a playful light. Are you going to eat those pepper-cakes, or are you going to decorate the Christmas tree with them? Tonight are we talking about caradmom, cinnamon, or vanilla?

I love those coquettish vowels. And for some reason I feel warmer.

Could it be that these words come from such a cold place that, when bent and twisted into my own words, broken like a pocket warmer, they begin to warm my hands?

I don't know how it works. But somehow the sky doesn't look so gray anymore, there where the silver edges peek from under the clouds.

(Related: At Granta, Jeffrey Yang wrestles with translation, via Maud.)

Sunday Zen

2009-11-01T17:59:00.001-05:00

B(ooOOoo)links

2009-10-30T12:52:00.001-04:00

11 Scariest Horror Movies Of All Time
I'm with Marty: the film version of The Haunting is just as spooky and amazing as Shirley Jackson's original novel. While these are all great choices for your spookfest, we'll be watching Dario Argento's Suspiria under the covers like we do every year. (My god; I just watched this early scene in my office and leaped from my chair. Terrifying. And yet somehow beautiful.)

First Scary Movies
The Morning News writers and readers (including yours truly) discuss seeing our first horror films; mine was The Beast With Five Fingers. I can't tell you how much the idea of a disembodied hand that walks still terrifies me. You can read the short story it was based on here.

Did a Meteorite, or Nerdy Hoaxsters, Strike Latvia?
It's just like the beginning of The Blob. Only with lots of Latvian swear words and a subtext of PR.

Meat Hand
You're welcome.

The Blackening Porches Of Winter

2009-10-29T13:05:00.002-04:00

Why has no one ever forced me to read Elizabeth Hardwick before?

If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. Perhaps. One can would be marked Rand Avenue in Kentucky and some would recall the address at least as true. Inside the can are the blackening porches of winter, the gas grates, the swarm.

(from Sleepless Nights)

Photograph, unrelated.

The Return of the Porch Swing

2009-10-27T13:53:00.002-04:00

"Step away from the internet," said J. He could see the steam coming out of my ears. "Take a deep breath."

He could tell that something was getting to me more than it should. By the way I was hacking away at the keys on my keyboard, perhaps, louder and louder as I got deeper into each sentence, turning red in the face, huffing out air.

"Let it go."

He's right. I lifted my hands from the keys in surrender position. I would let it go.

Just as soon as I hit "publish."

* * *

It was a photograph I had taken when I was sixteen or seventeen. A photograph from a series of black-and-white portraits I'd taken with my mom's old Canon AE-1. One of a student teacher in our art class, the water tower that once lived in the center of our town barely visible behind him, already fading from view. One of my grandmother at the end of our lane. One of a long-haired girl in overalls leaning against a tall dark-haired guy called Oliver, who I always thought was a bit mysterious. And this one, a portrait of a friend on a porch swing, knees up and smoking a cigarette, his hair in his eyes.

And there it was on Facebook, number 4 out of 5 in an album of pictures posted by someone I'd never even met before.

I had used these last two photographs in an end-of-the-year high school art show, and so I assumed that maybe this guy had gone to the art show, seen a photo of a friend of his, and taken a photo of my photo. Or some other equally logical explanation.

In the hopes of shedding some light on the situation, I sent him a message asking him how he came across that old photograph of mine. And waited. And then, half an hour later, a response:

Hmm, no I took that. I was doing a B&W photography project at the time. I have several from that week... ???

And I felt as if I'd been hit over the head with a sack of flour.

We had a brief back-and-forth conversation, trying to determine if we might have been standing next to each other when we took the picture, if maybe I knew him and we shared a roll of film. Or doubles. Or something.

But I couldn't shake that odd feeling. The sensation I felt after I'd read his response was one of complete doubt in everything I've ever known, everything I've ever remembered, or written, or believed. And the questions poured into my brain: How can we trust our own memories? Who owns an image? Do we own it if we've owned it for fifteen years in our own memories? How do we know for sure it was ours in the first place? Even when the style is consistent with yours, has the watermark of your eye, your tone, your storytelling with the lens, how do we authenticate the origin of a simple snapshot taken of a friend on a porch swing?

Worse: When we surround ourselves constantly with the comfort of memories, when we define ourselves through them, what does it mean when these memories are challenged?

I'm living in self-doubt for the moment. I'm entirely convinced that I took the picture, and at the same time, trying to remain open to the fact that I could be wrong. What is most difficult is that it's one of my favorite portraits I've ever taken. I remember being disappointed that he was slightly out of focus, the return of the porch swing a bit too fast for my shutter, but I decided that the composition was too perfect, my emotion in it too real for it to be tossed away into the back of a drawer. I loved that photograph. And suddenly I'm being told that it was never mine to love in the first place.

Almost as if I was never there.

What that must feel like.

Sunday Zen

2009-10-25T16:45:00.002-04:00

You May Remember Him For His Hit Single "I Ain't Madchester"

2009-10-23T13:39:00.003-04:00

J: This place is fantastic!
Me: I know, right? They're playing Echo & the Bunnymen and The Cure. And I love all the art!
J: Apparently it's musicians from Northern England. Happy Mondays, The Smiths, Richard Ashcroft...
Me: Isn't that Tupac?
J: [...]
Me: You know, Tupac, he was from Manchester.
J: You'd never know it, would you?
Me: He hid it well.

(Full disclosure: a friend of ours is a co-owner of the Black Horse Pub. We each got a drink ticket on entry, and paid for the rest of our drinks last night out of our own wallet. But you can bet that if we lived in Brooklyn this place would be our new local.)

We Come Seeking Dragons

2009-10-21T13:21:00.001-04:00

A few months ago, I put the feelers out to see if anyone had better access to my memory than I do. Reach inside my head! Try to see what I'm seeing since I in no way have the means to describe to you what's in there! I like to be challenging.

I was trying to remember a series of fantasy books I'd read when I was younger; the problem was that I couldn't remember anything concrete about them, but I had a fading image of the cover in my head.

Several of you came up with ideas, but nothing struck the right chord. I sent my childhood best friend a note to see if she could remember. She came up with the Xanth series, but that didn't feel quite right either. Yesterday she left a note on my Facebook wall asking if I'd ever figured it out, saying that it's been killing her too. Her older sister Sally then piped in to ask what we were trying to think of, so I replied with the description.

And Sally, bless her well-preserved memory, came up with Robert Asprin's Another Fine Myth. And, wouldn't you know it, when I clicked on her link and saw that cover, it was like the image in my mind came tumbling out onto the page.

As disturbing as it would be to have a Until the End of the World-style mind recorder*, I sometimes wish we had some way of digitally preserving our very thoughts. The ability to use a search engine to search your brain for the name of the babysitter you had when you were seven, the outfit you wore on your last day of high school**, the script of everything he said to you that night you watched the sun rise over Trafalgar Square. Then again, if we could do that, we'd certainly lose the thrill of throwing out the little scraps of memory we have left, piecing them together with the scraps others have held onto, and discovering what a fine quilt it makes.

(I guess I owe Sally that pewter unicorn.)

*A film whose screenplay, I've only just discovered, was co-written Peter Carey, Booker Prize-winning author of True History of the Kelly Gang, Theft, and Oscar and Lucinda. What interesting paths this train of thought has carved.
**This I actually do remember: The Clash/London Calling t-shirt, moss green corduroy cut-off shorts, black combat boots.

The Echo

2009-10-19T17:50:00.001-04:00

We chit-chatted with our neighbors in line. Stomping our feet to keep warm. Blowing hot air into our scarves then tucking our noses inside.

"Looks like they've got DirectTV on their tour bus."

"Is the line moving?" A glance at the red velvet rope.

"Don't think so."

The line up and down was on the wizened side of 30. Women with heads shaved at the sides wearing sensible shoes, men who had come to terms with their comfort in button-down flannel long-sleeved shirts in navy tones. But all of us with this wild, excited look in our eyes. We weren't our own ages; we were all the same age.

* * *

I recently found a piece of paper on which I'd written a list of videos I'd watched late one night on MTV when I was about 14 or 15. Somewhere in the middle, in felt-tipped blue pen, I'd written "Echo & The Bunnymen - The Echo!!!!" surrounded by stars and smileys before smileys had been turned sideways. That's not even one of their songs. I probably had a huge crush on the singer.

That dusky guy with hair in his eyes, singing in the shadows.

* * *

"I suppose you could fit a few dancing horses in here if you tried."

The place was tiny. Intimate enough that each person in the crowd went home with his or her own story, his or her own moment. The guy who yelled "brilliant!" when Mac asked "how's that?" The girl whose scream, according to Mac, was worse than feedback. The guy who punched the air at all the right times, unable to believe they were playing this one, that one, oh my god it's "Villiers Terrace" can you believe it?

Or even J, cheering the boys onto stage as they filed past us. "Go 'ead, Maccccc." (The extra "c"s are what it actually sounds like. For instance: "unhygeniccccc.")

Mac stopped, causing a comical ripple of band members bumping into each other, turned around, pointed, and said "You a scouser?" J nodded, eyes barely blinking, open and wide and smiling. Mac reached out his hand, feeling in the dark for J's extended in handshake.

That was a moment.

"Good to hear some Liverpool accents in the crowd," said Mac as he ascended to the stage. And then Will broke into "Rescue." And we danced staring at each other open-mouthed, gobsmaccccked.

Everyone in the room composing letters to his or her 16-year-old self. And one-by-one, as we shifted our bodies to shiver and say the words of every lie you've heard, they all began, as I knew they would: You are so welcome.

Echo & the Bunnymen @ Mercury Lounge, October 17, 2009

(UPDATE: Ear Farm was there, and has a fantastic review with links to live video. Including "Rescue," during which Mac thanks J for being from Liverpool, and I spell "soliloquy" completely incorrectly.)

Sunday Zen

2009-10-18T17:59:00.001-04:00

(Rest in peace, Chucky.)

In the Broadest Sense of the Word

2009-10-14T14:01:00.001-04:00

Evany was pinching her cheeks, making fish face. "My smilers hurt."

I hadn't seen Evany in a year, not since she was visiting New York last October, when we gathered in Brooklyn to watch the second debate over cookies and cake, then rode the subway home discussing clogged drains and applying late night lip gloss because we felt parched.

When I heard Evany would be at Broad Summit, it made my day. I couldn't wait to see her again. And I knew that if Evany was the caliber of woman this thing was going to attract then I'd be in good company. Because if there's one thing Evany can do really super well, it's make my smilers hurt.

My smilers hurt all weekend. My throat, scratchy from saying so many things. My ears warm from listening to the laughter late at night, skipping across the courtyard, up past my bedtime and full of cookies and milk. My head swelling from the collective wisdom of a stellar group of women, and their stellar lives (and possibly also the wine).

I knew I had the potential to sit in a corner, terrified of the power in that circle, in awe of their style and grace, counting different ways to hide the way my eyebrows curled funny at the edges or how I could never get the hang of when to reapply the lip gloss or where the eyeliner went. This is what I used to do around most girls. Sneak off into the grass to stare at the foliage, toss a ball to the dog, away from all of those smart, beautiful women.

Introvert (verb).

But that didn't happen (apart from tossing the ball with the dog, but that's just because I felt like tossing the poor dog a ball). There was no insecurity, no pressure to be anyone other than who you were, no fear of saying anything wrong. Even when I tripped over my tongue, someone was there to say "no, I know exactly what you mean." All of us our own flavor of awkward. Even when there were silent pauses, we were simply digesting, taking in what had just been said, rolling it around in our heads and coming back up for air with a new way of looking at the world.

Or realizing that we should probably check with the woman we were sharing our bed with if she was ordering beans from the taco truck, too.

Mostly, when we weren't speaking, we were laughing. Those ladies made my smilers hurt.

"I'm just going to ask them to massage my cheeks and tongue," said Evany, wisely, before ducking behind the curtain.

After the weekend was over, as I cooed and gurgled over Evany's bouncing baby boy in their East Bay home (Marco buzzing around us, installing a clothesline and painting the spice shelves in the few hours I was there, and still managing to sit for a chat and help soothe the baby to sleep), I mentioned how overwhelming it must be to read all of those baby books, how much of what you read and learned might never be used, because there's just so much information. We decided that these books exist to replace the village of women that used to (and in some societies still do) use all of their collectively gathered wisdom passed down from generation to generation to help a new mother raise a child.

It's a shame we don't use this community learning model more with our female friendships. Melissa and Helen Jane both said as much when writing about this weekend: too often women will get together and judge, or feel the need to impress, rather than learning from each other just by being themselves, giving and taking equally, letting down their guard, accepting our differences. Ignoring for once the competitiveness we so easily revert to when confronted with strong, independent women and instead reminding each other that we do good things. That we are good people.

I've tried to surround myself with friends like this all my life. The ones who spend less time dissecting and more time laughing. After the Summit, I met up with two such friends over Pisco Sours and Old-Fashioneds on Haight. Alexis, who used to play hide-and-seek with me on our block, sit on the curb and poke sticks in the gutter, later in life making sure I said "yes" to rooftop parties, forcing me to drink in the city. Charlotte, with whom I shared a pair of rollerskates bought at the Salvation Army in college, white with blue wheels; we'd each wear one and lean against each other, coasting across the hardwood floors, an exercise in balance after a few beers.

They'd never met each other before, two different friends from two different worlds who now just happened to live in the same city. So I introduced them. Here, you two will get along. Pitched forward over plates of noodles in a dark cafe, we discussed our expectations for cities, bonded over our love of Happy-Go-Lucky ("you have a bit of Poppy in you, Zan"—these ladies know what strange compliments I seek) and revisited the idea that you need your art and you need your work and sometimes it's best to have both on opposite sides of the coin. Our own little mini-Broad Summit.

How nice it felt to share my friends with each other, a lesson learned from the very ladies who brought me out to California in the first place.

Before I get too Mother-Gaia-touchy-feely on you (too late? just wait until I get to the part about placentas and yoga), let me say this: if you want to be known to the world as generous, kind, and good, you should be that way with your friends. (Heck—you should be that way with your enemies, but that's not why we're here today.) Express joy for their successes—not jealousy. Spend more time listening to them. Laugh together. Most of all, laugh together.

We would all do better to seek out those people who are going to encourage the good in us. We would all do better to be that way ourselves. Gather these good people in our lives together, smart people, funny people, and laugh with them late into the night over a campfire, or a coffee table, or the sink in the bathroom of a fast food restaurant, or wherever else we might find ourselves with a moment to spare and the inclination to remind ourselves just why we're friends in the first place.

Now come over here and let me braid your hair.

(The rest of my pictures from Broad Summit are here; links to the very fabulous women and their very fabulous blogs are in the right column here.)

Sunday Zen

2009-10-11T14:34:00.001-04:00

Blinks: Translating Myself To The West Coast Edition

2009-10-07T21:29:00.002-04:00

I have barely had time this week to sit down and make sure I still have all my fingers and toes, much less collect my thoughts into anything worth sifting into this little white box. There are beautiful things right outside my window (honestly! you should see the clouds today) that I'm fighting to tie down inside my brain until I'm able to find a moment to wrestle them onto the page.

I'm about to head to California for the amazing Broad Summit, and just when I thought I could completely relax and enjoy my preparation for the fun ahead, I get word that my translation skills are required to bulk up a fragment for the Frankfurt Book Fair next week. So! I will be spending the flight trying not to be too distracted by the enticing smile of the woman sitting next to me, and instead decorating sheets and sheets of paper with red pencil, trying to find translations for words that I don't think actually exist. (This is where I try to creep closer to calling myself a translat*r.)

Thus: a theme for the links below. Or at least as far as I could shape them into some sort of theme in my addled, busy, westward-gazing brain.

Living in Riga brings appreciation for heat
From now on you can just assume I'm going to link to everything my friend Rich writes, because descriptions like this deserve to be shared: Juris looked like an exiled officer from some Russian novel, fallen badly into disrepair. His long tangled hair spilled out from under a greasy fur hat that he apparently wore all year round. He had only a couple teeth left in his mouth, which emitted a putrid stench laced with garlic and sausage. And on his feet, jutting out from under a ratty brown overcoat, was a pair of pink bedroom slippers with embossed golden letters which, when placed together, spelled out the words "TOO SEXY."

The invisible hand
Sounds like translator Anne MacLean could probably teach me a thing or two. (via Bookslut)

Formal
Jim has no idea, but he's just taken a picture of the inside of my brain when I'm translating. Or, alternatively, what a translation feels like when it's nearly done. (I love this picture. So much. I wish there was a word for it, in any language.)

See you on the left coast.

Hedges

2009-10-05T17:06:00.000-04:00

On Saturday, I was walking down Broadway when a man started walking alongside me. An older man. As I concentrated on my steps, he seemed to be leaning his head into my path, trying to get my attention with a bow of his neck. I scooted past, annoyed, slightly intimidated, wondering what this man could possibly want from me, and having lived here for ten years, certain it couldn't be anything worth my time. I could feel him stopping on the sidewalk behind me, dejected. Then I caught his reflection in the curved window up ahead. Gray beard, navy blue shirt. Smiling.

There stood the man who helped me learn how to ride a bike. My childhood next-door neighbor.

I apologized for trying to avoid him. "Now you know how I act around strangers." He shrugged his shoulders and looked around him. "What are you gonna do?"

He and his wife have lived here over a year now; they'd just been to see the new Mamet play. "She loves the theater, you know. We can't get enough of it." She caught up to us a moment later, her jaw dropped in a "well, look who it is!" expression, digesting my presence on this city's streets. We talked city life, errands, their kids, how you beens. They couldn't believe I was entertaining thoughts of leaving the city anytime soon.

"It's just like we're standing there in the lane back in Ohio!" he said, as a siren cut through in the distance.

I spend too much time living in my own head; once in a while it would be wise to look up and make eye contact with the world. It might serve as a reminder that this "foreign" place isn't so very foreign after all.

Sunday Zen

2009-10-04T19:51:00.001-04:00

Say We Can, Say We Will

2009-10-02T13:18:00.007-04:00

Dear 16-Year-Old Me,

You are so welcome. (Also, the keyboardist from Jesus Jones is following us on Twitter. You'll learn what that is eventually; for now, you should enjoy still thinking that DMs are Doc Martens.)

Sincerely,
33-Year-Old Me

The Unexpected Metaphor

2009-10-01T13:32:00.007-04:00

I never realized the way I felt could be so well illustrated by the red-lipsticked smile of a Korean woman in a brown snowsuit rollerblading wobbly through the intersection of 72nd and Broadway with plastic bags slung over her shoulders and hips like a pack mule.

Rogers Park: Reading Myself Into the Story

2009-09-28T13:06:00.008-04:00

Rogers Park was where I bought my first legal six-pack. Six aluminum cans of Natural "Natty" Light, bound by plastic rings. Natty Light was what I drank all summer, a ritual that culminated in slamming a can on a sofa we'd dragged out to the yard on moving out day.

I lived in Rogers Park with two roommates on the second floor of a three-floor house with black-and-white checkered linoleum in the kitchen at back and bright yellow walls in the sunporch at front. Paula spent lots of time in her room listening to David Bowie and making art projects out of pins and vinyl cushions. Both of her parents were deaf; whenever I answered the phone and heard what sounded like a fax machine, I had to put the phone onto a special machine where I could type responses to her parents if Paula wasn't home. (I'd like to find Paula again.)

Amy's 21st birthday was the same day as mine. Her friends threw her a party in our apartment with a huge cake and plenty of alcohol; my name was added to the birthday song as an afterthought. I didn't invite anyone to the party, and ended up leaving early on the back of a motorcycle with one of Amy's friends, racing up Sheridan to the Baha'i temple in Wilmette. He kept telling me not to lean the opposite way, to fight my natural instincts to overcompensate for the tilt of the bike as it rounded corners. On our way back we tried to buy a bottle of wine in Evanston after midnight, only to be reminded by some guy in a deli that Evanston was a dry town. He drove me back to the house where the party had dried up too, so I went to bed and he rode home. I can't remember his name.

I was in Chicago for the summer, studying Estonian and Baltic History and serving coffee in the basement of the second tallest building in Chicago. We learned about the deportations of Baltic citizens to Soviet work camps in an airless campus building on the south side of the city and then I'd go home and sit on the side porch with Amy's boyfriend - who happened to be involved with the Chicago Socialist Workers Party - arguing over whether or not what Stalin did was okay to the point where he'd say "sometimes people have to give things up for a greater cause" and I'd have to stand up and slam the door. Or open a beer and make angry noises through gritted teeth. Or walk down to the shore and smoke a cigarette.

I spent a lot of time on my own back then. Went to the movie theater on our block with the frayed couches and stale, saltless popcorn. Tried to make conversation with boys at record stores and concerts. Went to the zoo with a guy I knew from IRC (where are you now, godboy?) whose Lincoln Park apartment overlooked the site of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre.

Amy knew someone who worked for a late night Showtime series and was looking for couples to be filmed during their most intimate moments, and discuss their opinions on sex for a small fee. I called my ex-boyfriend and told him this; he was poor and I was poor but we still laughed at the thought. "How could you do that without giggling? How could you do that at all? Could you ask them to turn the lights off?"

This is what has been pouring out of me as I've been reading Stephen Elliott's The Adderall Diaries. That's kind of like saying "I once walked up a really steep hill" while reading the biography of Sir Edmund Hillary, but I can't help it. Someone mentions the name of a familiar street, a million associations pour out of that recognition, and the writer's instinct is to get them all down before they fly off into the ether. Which is exactly how this book seems to have come to be.

Page 56: "We're all just writing about ourselves."

Maybe we all read like we're reading about ourselves, too. Inserting ourselves into the story, blanketing ourselves in the author's voice as if it were our own. My 9th grade English teacher once told me that I tended to write book reports in the style of the author I was writing about. Which makes perfect sense. Everything I'm writing somehow comes from the book I happen to be reading.

This is what my experience of The Adderall Diaries has been: reading a story the author has written himself into, finding myself in that story, bringing my own story out of it and onto this page, into which you may certainly read your own story.

A strange, endless loop of literary narcissism. (In the kindest sense.)

So every mention of Rogers Park becomes a time when I was suckered out of my last $10 in a cup and ball game on the red line ("It's in your hand," I insisted when they asked me to pick a cup, over and over, until finally they pressured me into making the wrong choice) and had to get my mom to send me money via Western Union so that I could get a train ticket the next morning to pick up my paycheck. A time when I was crazy enough to jump on the back of a motorcycle, say "where are we going?" and trust him when he said "you'll see."

Sunday Zen

2009-09-28T00:12:00.001-04:00

Blinks

2009-09-25T13:09:00.006-04:00

The Best Fiction of The Millennium (So Far)
I haven't been weighing in much on any book world discussions lately; I'm enjoying reading and writing at the moment, and to get involved in the discussions of either might ruin that enjoyment. But I did want to weigh in on this because oh my goodness are you kidding me The Corrections? And everyone knows I melt into a puddle of warm tinglies at the slightest mention of anything to do with David Mitchell, but I think even DM would acknowledge that 2666 belongs higher than Cloud Atlas. Gilead deserves some nudging up the ladder as well. And where, pray tell, is Snow? Then again, these things are always subjective. As proof, my top book of the last decade? Darkmans. (My sympathy to the listmakers, the dreamers of dreams.)

Teenage Diaries: The most embarrassing thing you'll ever read
The UK version of Sarah Brown's fabulous Cringe book is out now, and I'm very ~~embarrassed~~PLEASED to have had an excerpt from my own 1993 journal included. If you think I write purple prose now, wait until you see the kind of stuff I wrote when I was seventeen and liked to pretend I'd actually done drugs.

View from the Q train
The moment I stop noticing this view is the moment I know I should just leave New York.

The Remembered Visit: Edward Gorey's House

2009-09-23T17:59:00.001-04:00

On my way up north, I made a slight detour and availed myself of my aunties' treehouse attic in Cape Cod for a few days. I biked up and down the arm of the Cape, visited beaches, ate lots of chowder and donuts, and enjoyed the company of some good folks who also happened to be vacationing on the Cape as well.

It was their idea on my last day to visit the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port. Antonia had been before, and talked fondly of what it felt like to stand in his kitchen and imagine him standing there too in the fading light of the kitchen window, getting ready to feed his cats, maybe making a cup of tea.

It's a sacred thing to visit an artist's or author's house, to see how they live outside of their work, to see their things in place, the things they collect. Weathervanes. The ends of curtain rods. Little glass objects on the windowsill. Something as intimate as the marks his shoes made going up the staircase, or the placement of the toaster on the counter. Even the homes of authors I've never even visited (homes that may not even exist) invade my dreams sometimes, so fascinated am I by their things.

Antonia stood in the kitchen and inhaled deeply; I excused myself to use the bathroom, probably just to say I'd been in Edward Gorey's bathroom.

Gorey's presence followed me up north, where shadows looked like etchings, strange noises took on wild presences in our imaginations, things we might have named "Curious Tethering Snifflegrabs" in his honor. I read The Other Statue out loud by the campfire.

In the folly a candlestick mounted on a horse's hoof rested on page 47 of The Romance of a Soda Cracker.

I think he would have found it fitting. And then served us all some buttered toast and crackers.

Appropriately, I came across these photos of Edward Gorey's house taken the week of his death just a few minutes after I'd finished writing this post. (via NYRB)

Here and There

2009-09-22T13:50:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure what I'm doing here right now. Here in this city, here on this internet. Not yet. I'm hopped up on roasted peanuts and Bill Bryson, steel-cut oats and maple syrup, wool, wool, and more wool. Today I had to put on clothes that would make sense in a meeting with the head of some department or other and nearly succeeded until I realized I was wearing a wool cloak over cowboy boots on a 75-degree day. And then I found a knot in my hair. And I almost didn't care.

My head is swimming with back there, by the fire, using sticks dug out of the depths of the woods to poke the embers in the darkness, watching the skies above us for shooting stars (of which I saw at least three). Back there in our little lean-to, offering us shelter in the momentary, passing rain. Not here, in this odd maze of cubicles, elevators shuffling people and papers, books and pens, up and down, door open, door close, and what are these strange pebbles with letters on them. The sound of traffic outside, sirens, spectacles.

It's the sounds that you notice the most out there. I made a list in my notebook:

Every one of them, magnified times ten to remind us of how remote we are from our everyday lives. Just us — him and me — and our little cast of camping sounds.

I like to mention to everyone I meet how strange it is to be back. As if I've just spent months in the wilderness, catching my own food, making clothes from bark. But, not really.

"Just got back from camping," I said to the car rental clerk as I handed him the keys to a car spattered in pine sap.

"Camping? Like, in a tent?"

"Yeah." In my monosyllabic post-vacation speech. "So nice."

"Did you catch your own fish for dinner and all that?"

"No, restaurants."

"Restaurants?" I've been caught. "That's cheating."

"But we built our own fire and cooked weenies over it..." Tell him about the frost. "And it got down into the thirties one night."

He raises one brow, unconvinced. "Restaurants, huh." That's not real camping.

But if he could hear those chipmunks, racing with their cheeks full through fallen leaves in the dark, see those stars shooting through the night sky in the clearing in the branches overhead, smell the campfire smoke in my hair...

I dig my heels in. With all my might, I won't let them drag me back here. Not yet.