thirteenth september, nineteen forty

“In the case of liquor--the stuff doesn’t taste good, it has no real attraction whatever except for the oblivion which comes to those poor devils who do not have the guts to face their own reality. And the feeling afterwards is a little worse than anything you have experienced, once you have been properly “plastered” and develop a real honest-to-God hangover.”

My great-grandfather’s well-meaning warning didn’t work on his son, any better than his similar injunctions against smoking and sex did, at least in the long run. I suppose my grandfather may have made it through his years at Amherst unscathed by those delightful vices, but in truth, I doubt it. He wasn’t exactly the type to listen to that sort of warning. Plus, there’s a clear flaw in the premise: liquor tastes damn good.

But this is all digression. Packing up some old papers to move today, I came across this packed of letters, all from the fall of 1940 and spring of 1941, sent by my great-grandfather to my grandfather. So I started reading. After my old Hum notes they were fascinating, after the crazy lists an ex-boyfriend used to write for me in Genetics class, they were pretty dry. But plenty compelling either way, because even the most mundane questions gain a certain gravity in this particular context, and the personality conflicts are so clear from this distance.

The real morals here have, of course, nothing to do with drink or smoke or “very innocent-looking, sweetly appealing filthy harpies.” Instead, they are pretty simple: letters are worth saving, and fathers are always awkward about telling you how thrilled they are with you.

not quite fiction

This is the danger of commuting: one day you wake up and you're five miles down the road. You're in the right place, in the right gear, going the right speed, and you have no idea how you got there. Equally unclear is what you've been thinking about along the way, and what would have happened had a cat leapt out in front of your car.

This morning, I could reconstruct some of it. I was thinking about stockings, about how I can't wear them without destroying them, and how some people seem to be able to keep them for years. I remember looking down at my legs and wondering how much of the day would go by before the telltale skin would begin to show, and the ladders would start climbing up my leg. I don't remember my estimate, but the first one started even before lunchtime.

Suffice it to say, it was not an auspicious morning.

eurydice, lost

Julieta Campos died a few days ago. Searching online, I've been able to find only one English language obituary. It's short, and I hope that's because I missed the longer ones; maybe they've all disappeared since last week. This is probably not a reasonable hope, but I'm holding on to it, regardless.

I'll re-read The Fear of Losing Eurydice soon, and I'll write more about it then.

In the meantime, an interview.

pine

We sat in a tree, all arms and legs and branches, your hand on my ankle and my hands on the slowly peeling bark. Everything you said to me was cruel, but that didn't stop me from listening intently, absorbing every word carefully, inhaling the smell of the hardening sap along with an intense feeling that I would never be old enough to understand all the things you knew so instinctively. Not only were you older, but your mother was sick, a fact which lent you an unimaginable authority over the rest of us. Your mother was sick and your father was dead, while the best the rest of us could boast were a few assorted parental divorces, a dead pet here or there. We knew nothing of suffering.

[I'm not ever sure why I write so much in the second person. I'm sure your average armchair psychologist could make something out of it, but for now, I'll just assume I like the way it sounds. There's something delightfully intimate about the direct address, and I hate making up names for characters.]

mauve

It's about translation, about language, both written and spoken, read and heard. It's about rereading, rephrasing, rewriting, and reimagining. It's also about sex, about skin (on skin), about adolescence and about the frailties of aging, about explosion, death, surprise, and dull, extended aches. It's about the desert, about driving through the night, and about the tensions between desire and maintenance, passion and fear. In the book, a girl drives her mother's car, meets a woman, watches her die. Then, a woman works to translate the book you've just read. Then you read the translation, which is both very much different and exactly the same.

Oh yeah, and the copy I'm reading is in English, translated from the French. Which just adds another layer of complication to all of this, because you can feel the language barrier sometimes, notice that the sentences were constructed with a different kind of grammar.

I can't remember when the last time was that I was able to give a clear, concise answer to the question: "What's that book about?" Any book can fit into that question, but now I'm talking about this one.

green mercedes

she's more than
a little bit nuts, the woman,
the artist (you say that
with a certain tone in your
voice), but she has the best
hair you've ever seen,
and she drew a beautiful
picture of your cat
the day before he died.

descent

Turns out, Going Down is a very direct (if unexpected) ancestor of Reader's Block and all the not-quite-novels that followed. It's morbid and achingly intellectual, a trip through a kind of art-historical catalog of the dead, the maimed, and the crazy.

It's also very definitely a novel, a thriller, even, if you believe the jacket copy. Though I can't deny that it contains plenty of sex and death and intrigue (and, as Mr. Vonnegut points out on the cover, it does leave one rather woozy), I'm not sure yet that I'd quite go so far as to call it a thriller, but I still have a few pages to go.

hyperreality

A few days late, but maybe worth writing anyway; Baudrillard no longer exists. He is dead, and can no longer represent himself. His works survive, but are outnumbered by the many readings and misreadings of them, along with obituaries that stridently name-check popular films while ignoring the works themselves.

Heartbreaking, yes, but it's hard not to get the sense that he would take some certain satisfaction in the inevitable fact of his identity being subsumed to an image created by information overload, by the sheer volume of words produced by reporters and professors and even by audience-less bloggers such as myself.