'one is pleased to see the bugs die in a fire even though one's house is burned down.'

-- kim il-sung

we used to be friends, remember?

i want to pay more attention to this space, as here i find a vital emotional record of a few important years (though not as much, of course, this current dying one)-- my hiatus having to do with the fact that i've been working, snowed under by adult responsibility such as it is, and time got away from me. it's not the sort of work i've ever wanted to do. not dedication to a creative project. but i've never really dedicated myself to anything like this, not even the honours thesis. desire, yes, but never discipline.

i think that whole thing would have been less stressful if i had actually dedicated myself to it rather than fitting it in in pieces on the margins of spring. gave up a season rather than embraced one and tried to shape its edges. i spent time with people, lots of time. but i wrote about them. now i have even less time overall and have to squeeze this whole question into the margins of margins, my time for myself having become marginalised: where then to strike the balance between dedication the creative life and the social, when the people are more interesting than anything i could invent?

'i miss everyone. i can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that's odd, isn't it, because i was home, all the time. what on earth are we to make of that?'

-- david foster wallace, the broom of the system

i haven't blogged of late, not that there's an audience. i suppose i pictured this blog as the spot that hypothetical person from my past could catch up on a little bit of my emotional condition; if this is the case and you are that person (and i am often that person myself), recent blankness should be considered a message and not a defect.

twitter makes it easier, that being both a method of cheating and an implied honest point. i tweet plenty, one-line observations that sometimes echo the sort of thing i would have written out here in long form. laziness, perhaps-- or a symptom of the compression of time guilty full-time, benefited employment brings to the constitutionally bookish and contemplative personality during a recession. i work, and if i can gain bits of respite through experiencing tiny, convenient moments of other lives, and sharing mine. twitter works for this, and i've gone and purchased a blackberry. i text like a teenage girl: it's convenient and it's possible. of course i'd rather write letters, but last time i tried that the letter was overly long, in six (or i suppose seven) parts, and labeled an honours thesis.

that thesis of course suffered three afflictions: it was terrible as art, it was unpublishable as writing, and it was unsendable as the letter it claimed to be. i'm also sure it ruined my health somewhat. i joked back in the spring about filling out a questionnaire for the honours program and how i actually wrote, in answer to a question about possible challenges or dangers i would be presented with by my thesis, something like 'emotional damage from delving too deeply into the past'.

i won't pretend i sacrificed my health for my 'art', but rather lay out what actually happened: my nervous tendency was allowed to flourish for so long both on academic deadline and the deathly feeling of knowing that with the end of school i was going to be separated soonly from some of my favourite people, much in the same way i was four years previous. and four years previous was the time i was writing about.

so i relived one of those as another one was approaching. good plan, me. and the nervousness never went away. so, despite living with laura, which is going great by the way, i'm lonely. i have nightmares, bad ones, and i shake more than would be considered normal. other things. symptoms of a constant crisis or continental emergency.

there was something to look forward to when i lost monica, high school, and home. it was the same sort of massive shift i'm going through now-- the difference is that last time i had sort of a weird summer and hit fall running with college and the romance/extended emotional masochism spree that will probably at least partially define my life. fuck, that was living. now i work in the finance sector and october approaches with almost nothing to offer except a tax extension deadline and a series of empty anniversaries commemorating the myriad strange heartbreaks of my eighteenth and nineteenth years. i had a series of exciting falls and springs. through 2008 this held, but this year a spring that almost killed me extended into a summer of mixed blessings now extends into a fall where all the cultural associations of autumn and death are a bit more visceral, let's say, than i have yet known.

this is to say: i feel my youth slipping away and find myself no longer thinking long, long thoughts.

where i am now was the time i was waiting for, the holding pattern where i would hold a job and write in my spare time, send out manuscripts with a certain carelessness, and hope something went right. not towards a writing career, even, but because that was always the plan. i'm not doing it yet. i still may. i want to need to.

i'm in the living room watching twin peaks: fire walk with me. laura comes in.

laura: what's this you're watching?

me: a movie where ray wise kills women.

laura: so, nonfiction?

'the life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations . . . this guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. people's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. the people asleep in those houses, i thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. the growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all.'

-- willa cather, my ántonia

see volume 1.

i have again produced, as a product of tedium, narcissism, and guilt at not updating this blog more often, a collection of short utterances (chronologically unkempt) for those too cool (or not cool enough) to follow my doings on twitter. please to enjoy:


How crazy and dishevelled did I just look on my morning bank deposit excursion? The answer is: moderately crazy and dishevelled.

@emmiesaur My kitchen wants to apologise for trying to kill you last night. It doesn't have a Twitter, so I am passing along the message.

You're LARPing right now, aren't you? You've surreptitiously added me to your LARP.

@WickedlyElphie Wonder if Princess Backslash is related to Queen Underscore, who rules over the realm of not knowing what an underscore is.

Current reading: http://bit.ly/3FmAH The content says interesting story of 1980's China, the cover says free government sheep for everyone.

Tonight: To @emmiesaur 's for a movie about cars and the people who love stealing them. I think it's called Gone in One Minute.

@indiehearts You should have gone to RadioLean-To. They pay less on structural upkeep and pass the savings on to you.

Watching Howl's Moving Castle at Alli's. I have no idea what's going on or whether Allen Ginsberg is involved.

Tichborne's 'Elegy' is sort of like the sixteenth century version of Daniel Powter's 'Bad Day'.

Joseph H. Smith, I can't stand Orrin Hatch. #sotoshow #sotomayor

Laura got a decorative bird wall hanging dealie that is now near my desk, as if to say 'this is where the Twitter nonsense takes place.'

I'm going to do Sotomayor one better and suggest that we just stop letting white people make decisions, period.

Fruit paste is a thing. Food can be called 'paste' and still be okay.

Oh, fuck James K. Polk.

Now I think is a good time to listen to Mary Timony solo demos by the ocean.

Sometimes I get excited. About PREFIXES.

'That's 1666. Good fire. Good plague that year too.' -- Dr. Baker, as told by Britt.

'Cold Harbor. June 3rd. I got worried for a bit but I came out of it okay after all.' #alternatehistory

I'd like to see an increase in the usage of the term 'hydrarchy', please.

I still believe in the saving power of early Madonna singles.

It's okay, that's not Mothra. It's just Moth.

The college finally sent the little sticker for my diploma: going to miss my homemade 'Summa Cum Laude' pink Post-It. All things must pass.

The Good, the Bad and the Snuggie #failedwesterns

Relaxing post-work unwinding by the ocean today. DIdn't get any Proust read, but there was some awesome haze.

Laura: 'I feel like the Burger King king would be a Decepticon.'

The road to hell is paved with good intentions; also little bricks with fire pictograms and some arrows pointing you in the right direction.

I inherited this little blue book from my step-uncle-in-law-- The Second Amendment Primer. It's like a creepy NRA bible.

Emmie: 'George Foreman! That fucker, I want his oven.'

New self-help book, as planned in a conversation last night: 'How To Find Your Lesbian Superpower'

My Lesbian Superpower involves A/V cables and is not fully developed at this time.

In Psychology Department, rat studies YOU.

Dear Guy Pushing a Lawnmower Down the Middle of the Street: Thank you. The pavement was getting out of control after all that rain.

I want a place with an upstairs so I can hear an old radio playing upstairs.

Met Lindsay at the fireworks. Drunk woman behind us kept screaming 'Good works!' I'd like to see some fireworks justified by faith alone.

@AKGovSarahPalin I have to applaud you for being able to admit that it's best for Alaska's progress to not have Sarah Palin as governor.

You thought all your ducks were in a row. All your ducks were in a row, but then the office lost one of your ducks.

Yes, I'd love one of those 'bottled waters' I've heard so much about. A banned delicacy in Australia, don't you know.

There's a really tweaky guy here negotiating a drug deal by phone. He is not as stealthy as he thinks he is.

The room behind me in the new picture got flipped. That is our apartment in the alternate universe where William Bell lives.

Beagle! We got a beagle in the hallway. Beagle.

Found a notebook estranged from its owner. One of the first pages has the following, surrounded by white space: 'Don't Give Advice.'

I am certain all those Marine Corps veterans on the highway appreciated my Hawaiian sovereignty bumper sticker this lovely Fourth of July.

We were like Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks on that motherfucker.

I heard that one of the little dogs next door is named Arthur. I hope the other two are Jenny and Lancelot.

I hope isolated thunderstorms will choose Salem. It's hard not to take it personally when they don't.

Watching Gone Baby Gone and rocking the bass guitar with partial competence.

Overheard: 'We have to tape-record every moment of our lives just to remember the jokes.'

It is he, the venomous pirate Sword Van Hook.

I speak proficient Vonlenska, but only in the summer.

The lesson of tonight, I think, is that this television can't handle Björk without frequent volume adjustments.

My kingdom for a front porch and a thunderstorm.

Those Pure Michigan commercials are driving me completely bitchcakes. I don't need Tim Allen's voice in my home.

Every time I see an ad for Gran Torino I imagine Eastwood as Christian Bale's Batman grown old and poor, defending his lawn with a shotgun.

Actual dream I had: @indiehearts and I are vigilante crimefighters in Wichita. We take on 'The Kansas Mafia.'

I don't believe in standardised tests. Then again, I don't imagine standardised tests believe in me either.

Dear Associates: The sound you hear coming from my pants pocket is ten dollars in quarters. As you were.

@emmiesaur Later, more reasoned call on best part of tonight: James Earl Jones destroying ancient evil with explosives?

Yul Brynner co-starred with William Shatner in a film version of The Brothers Karamazov? That must be either the best or worst movie ever.

I was just told that, due to the paperclip collection, I am like Bert from Sesame Street. Accurate?

The Awful Rowing Toward Job.

'Rain' trending on Twitter: perhaps the first step of Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital becoming reality?

Forget Flag Day-- I'm celebrating the eighth day of the Vestalia.

There's a car outside the apartment that contains a box of decorative boxes.

Going for a little walk listening to Bon Iver, which right now feels like the audio version of James Agee describing Emma Woods.

I think I'll harm myself if I ever so much as see a Cracker Barrel again.

Trying to find an appropriate Dora the Explorer product as a gift for Laura's nativist father.

This Twitter is famous, you know. They read one of its tweets on the C-SPAN.

@cspanwj The entire concept of the 'Terrorism List' rests on ludicrous sabre-rattling and is useless for productive diplomacy.

Napped a bit. Had a dream about overly precious T.H. White as an American high school student. Yes, he had an owl.

Chewbacca would probably be a libertarian.

Yes, New Hampshire driver. Go ahead and put your hair in a ponytail. It's only a highway.

Peanut butter pomegranate jelly time, peanut butter pomegranate jelly time.

Joke of the day, one Uncle Dennis has been telling for years. Q: Why did the monkey fall from the tree? A: Because it was dead.

Those Pep Boys commercials where the little cartoon guys are dressed like sailors freak me the fuck out.

On Memorial Day in America, we honour fallen soldiers with cookouts, drinking, and car accidents (order suggested but not mandatory).

Sealing envelopes. Sealing envelopes like a Coelacanth. Like a Coelacanth working in an office.

Thinking about that weird Georges Bataille novella where they see some Nazis then have sex near a cemetery. You know the one.

Mom to daughter, heard at store: 'I'm a little upset because you're slow, you're indecisive, and now I know you're gonna starve to death.'

It has to be the vibrant green paper. Not the regular green. The regular green is DEAD green.

Dear World: I insist that you start using 'Inigo Montoya' as a verb. I await your compliance.

@NicoleCristelli I would watch it. And write implausible fan fiction?

Paperclips are staples for people afraid of commitment.

I'd like to see a resurgence in the use of the word 'wield.' Get on that.

Pondering the spectrum of improbable outcomes. There's a little Judy Tenuta in my head. 'It could happen,' she insists.

Forget penny dreadful. This is Sacagawea dollar dreadful.

i've made more than a few enemies by commenting on how much i've been enjoying the great non-sun summer of 2009, how i have voted no on proposition sun and welcomed the rain and the thunder and the grey. the air conditioner is still in the basement. the windows are open and when the sun peeks though there is verdancy without heat, like we're cheating the season. i am fine with all of this, with holding off 80s and 90s, keeping it summer without keeping it hot. i know we're transitioning back into reasonable, seasonable temperatures, but it's been a fine ride.

especially the fine ride i took in the evening of yesterday, so as to enjoy one more grey misty springlike moment, even in july. it was a nostalgia drive of sorts, even though the coastal road i took did not correspond to and was actually in almost the exact opposite direction of the place i was thinking about as i drove. same ocean, same music. close enough.

the temperature dropped rapidly in the evening hours of that fine yesterday, creating a billowing, rolling fog off the water. i brought laura down to the park on the cove for the air and the view-- the power plant was so obscured it was as though nothing was there. the park akin to being inside a low-level cloud, and in the distance on the water the sound of either a lost boat or traffic across the cove. we could only imagine what it must have been like at the willows, or forest river. here be pictures:
















the fog rolling. over the seawall in white puffs, through the chain-link fences like the breath of meteorology.

later, as the capstone to movie night, down to the water to investigate the fireworks we seem to hear almost nightly, regardless of season. we live here and get locked into the routine of hearing, of wondering, and of not bothering to look much into it. visitors change that. thence to the sand, where the fog had lifted and the tide gone out, leaving stagnant pools and the muddy, impassable expanse to beverly. it turns out, at least last night, the fireworks are the work of one man, a sketchy guy who sulked away sketchily upon our approach. he left a paper bag and a neat row of boxes. next time, rosie said, we should go down and catch him before he's fired off all of his ordinance. cheer him on. we could hear you from the street, we'll say. why do you do this?

'the book was very right, of course, so long as everyone started living by it at the same time.'

-- aleksandr solzhenitsyn, cancer ward


*


when i was ten, i thought my brother was god
he'd lie in bed and turn out the light with a fishing rod
i learned the names of all his football team
and i still remembered them when i was nineteen

strange the things that i remember still
shouts from the playground when i was home and ill
my sister taught me all that she learned there
when we grew up, we said, we'd share a flat somewhere

when i was seventeen, london meant oxford street

where i grew up, there were no factories
there was a school and shops and some fields and trees
rows of houses one by one appeared
i was born in one and lived there for eighteen years

then when i was nineteen, i thought the humber would be
the gateway from my little world into the real world
but, there is no real world
we live side by side, and sometimes collide

when i was seventeen, london meant oxford street

it was a little world
i grew up in a little world

-- everything but the girl, 'oxford street'

'in fact he was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful--the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality.

cosimo was still at the age when the desire to tell stories makes one want to live more, thinking one has not done enough living to recount, and so off he would go . . . and tell the folk of ombrosa new stories, which originally true, became, as he told them, invented, and from invented, true.'

-- italo calvino, the baron in the trees

an ongoing series:
summer 2005 , 05-06 academic year, summer 2006, 06-07 academic year, summer 2007, 07-08 academic year, summer 2008.

i'll have to come up with a new method of spacing out these lists now that school is over. or just discontinue it, because, well.

Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America – Thomas Fleming [re-read]
Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse [re-read]
Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess – Tim Ward
Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
The Devils – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism – Mary Daly
Nature – Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers – Henry David Thoreau
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne [re-read]
Billy Budd, Sailor: (An Inside Narrative) – Herman Melville
Bee Season – Myla Goldberg [re-read]
The Cossacks – Leo Tolstoy
The Rainbow Stories – William T. Vollmann [re-read]
Beautiful Losers – Leonard Cohen [re-read]
The Wordy Shipmates – Sarah Vowell
The Rifles – William T. Vollmann
Olinger Stories – John Updike
White Niggers of America – Pierre Valliéres
Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Blue of Noon – Georges Bataille [re-read]
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway [re-read]
Omensetter’s Luck – William H. Gass [re-read]
When Red is Black – Qiu Xiaolong
Continental Drift – Russell Banks
How the Reformation Happened – Hilaire Belloc
Red Azalea – Anchee Min [re-read]
Nana - Émile Zola
More Pricks Than Kicks – Samuel Beckett
Rabbit At Rest – John Updike
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto – Chuck Klosterman
Rabbit Remembered – John Updike
The Kingdom of God is Within You – Leo Tolstoy
Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Children’s Hospital – Chris Adrian
Independent People - Halldór Laxness
I’m Not the Only One – George Galloway [re-read]
The Ice-Shirt – William T. Vollmann
Watch the North Wind Rise – Robert Graves
I Was Told There’d Be Cake: Essays – Sloane Crosley
Dynamics of Faith – Paul Tillich
Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible – Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet [re-read]
Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China’s Peasants – Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao
1984 – George Orwell [re-read]
The Seven Storey Mountain – Thomas Merton
The Torturer’s Apprentice: Stories – John Biguenet
The Complete Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi
Tristan – Gottfried von Strassburg
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The Sorrow of War – Bao Ninh
Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy – Norman Lewis
Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut [re-read]
Iodine – Haven Kimmel
Raids on the Unspeakable – Thomas Merton
Le Morte D’Arthur – Thomas Malory
Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race – Stephanie Nolen
The Atom Station – Halldor Laxness
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
The Hour of the Bell – Harry Mark Petrakis
Continental Drift – Russell Banks [re-read]
Idylls of the King – Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Uses of Haiti – Paul Farmer
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys [re-read]
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Mark Twain
A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway [re-read]
The Once and Future King – T.H. White
Beautiful Losers – Leonard Cohen [re-read]
The Black Jacobins – C.L.R. James
Shepherds of Shadows – Harry Mark Petrakis
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson [re-read]
Liars and Saints – Maile Meloy
A Family Daughter – Maile Meloy
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson – Camille Paglia
Death in Midsummer and Other Stories – Yukio Mishima
Death of a Red Heroine – Qiu Xiaolong
The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920 – Charles and Barbara Jelavich

i have produced, as a product of tedium, narcissism, and guilt at not updating this blog more often, a collection of short utterances (chronologically unkempt) for those too cool (or not cool enough) to follow my doings on twitter. please to enjoy:


@AKGovSarahPalin Sure, remain all smug with those ethics complaint dismissals. Polar bears are organising against you even as we tweet.

Read your Mencius.

#Fringe prediction: Gene comes to terms with his Vicodin abuse, goes to bovine mental hospital.

I also like my history notes because of lines like this: 'PM Deligiannis mobilises Greek army and attacks Ottoman Empire, gets served.'

Does this #tweemyjobs thing have anything to do with working for a revived Sarah Records? If not, I am not interested.

The National Brain Tumor Society almost sounds pro-tumour. I mean, the National Rifle Association isn't a support group for gunshot victims.

Driving behind a truck carrying something called 'Icynene,' kept thinking it said 'Ice-nine.' Kept thinking no, no. This is a bad idea.

World: please cease all usage of the phrase 'rugged individualism.' Thanks!

Lessons learned from Sabrina the Teenage Witch: true beauty is on the inside, be careful what you wish for, 'Russia probably will collapse.'

I can't stand grown men who refer to their friends as 'buddies' and talk about professional wrestling with such...gusto.

Topics covered tonight: Melville's sexuality, pipe wrench fights, the oddity of a barber shop called 'Killy's,' Sylvia Plath, and faeries.

No love for Denise Crosby, Family Guy?

Two minutes of Fox News: an OH NO OBAMA COZYING UP TO CASTRO story and a commercial for Total. This channel exists to scare old people.

I wrote in 'Anti-Zombie Civil Service Brigade' on a survey of what community service I would volunteer for.

I got Laura so into Fringe that when she hears John Noble speaking with his normal accent she calls him 'New Zealand Walter.'

@NicoleCristelli Started looking into pirate schools. We should have started the search a while ago. They want so many extracurriculars.

Comment I made in Arthurian Literature:'Neil Gaiman's "Chivalry" reads like something Steven Millhauser would write if he ran out of ideas.'

In class that Twain book was described as 'a permanent smile burning to death.' You know, like if somebody set the Cheshire Cat on fire.

No one on Jeopardy knew what 'deus vult' means.

Just for the record, I spent the morning quoting Philip Larkin at confused freshmen and musing on an independent Hawaiian queendom.

As Meat Loaf gets older, his resemblance to Neil Young approaches 100%.

Partaking of the devil's ham.

I keep hearing about angry populism. Grand. Let's codify it, harness it, shall we? We need Ignatius Donnelly up in this motherfucker. #AIG

Okay, T.H. White: it's fine that you spell the queen's name as 'Guenever,' but she still can't be 'Jenny' for short. It doesn't work.

As a tribute to Genevieve, I want to bring back the expression 'on the horn' to the workplace.

MySpace became self-aware at 6:36 P.M. today, sending me an e-mail with the subject 'Hey Matt, did you watch The Simpsons last night?'

@NicoleCristelli So, Angkor Wat Barbie? Pretty awesome.

Laura bought a Star Trek action figure (new Spock) which features a creepy severed 'interchangeable Vulcan salute hand.'

I think I would love the Caucasus in the morning.

Bitesize Nicktoon nostalgia: a sad crying clown in an iron lung, Wheezin' Ed, Tommy in the dead letter office, MR. SENSIBLE.

I have rarely cared less about a fictional ship.

Conficker will give your computer Sphaeropsis blight and cause your sister to carouse with botanical illustrators of questionable character.

Apparently buying the coconut chicken product I am about to enjoy implies joining a 'Chicken Revolution.' When do we storm the embassy?

tammy ealom, the quiverfull movement, the poetry of mao zedong, whether gandhi or william penn would win in a fight, clouds that look like asia minor seen from orbit, mary lease, björk (in the same sentence as john donne), the toast of europe, sunsara taylor, sex and international maritime law, medieval proverbs, john vanderslice, the war of the worlds, and green apples.

graduating. it's going to be difficult to get used to this: the rhythms of each year for as far back as i have conscious memory have been determined by the academic year. i resent this and cling to it at the same time. then the current season. forgive my emo moments as i mourn past springs. i guess just that one.

cherry blossoms are out. you know how much i love those. i'll talk about something else:

i got another used book with an interesting inscription, though this time it's actually a piece of paper folded up inside the front cover. sort of an ornamental piece, too, inside this copy of qiu xiaolong's death of a red heroine. it reads, thusly (all spelling errors in the original):

hold fast to dreams
for if dreams flop
life is a boal of rice crispies
without the pop

by Jill
and some somewhat
less well known auther
named
Langston Hughes


Dear Jill, I was on the plain from Punta Cana
and practicing ciligraphy. I couldn't think of any
other poem except yours
love Nancy

i managed to get out for a while and went to used book superstore in danvers with laura. people had recommended the place to us, but we hadn't had a chance to actually go there, and i hadn't bought books in a while due to the austerity measure called OH MY GOD I'M GRADUATING NEXT MONTH.

anyway.

i found some good stuff: william h. gass, cloudsplitter, aung san suu kyi, maxine hong kingston's the woman warrior: memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts. the hardcover of maile meloy's a family daughter i used to see in the window of cornerstone books back when they were new.

i even continued my quest to gather as many varied religious texts as possible by snapping up a copy of the book of mormon, which is sort of like twilight in that it has mormon social values but unlike twilight in that it doesn't have any vampires. it's brand new and has suggested reading highlighted by friendly brainwashers along with beautiful coloured plates of jesus, jesus visiting the americas, and joseph smith. laura said she's not sure if she wants it in the house, but i made sure to balance it out by also picking up mary daly's beyond god the father: toward a philosophy of women's liberation. so it's okay.

i also got a copy of joan didion's book-length essay salvador which came with a puzzling inscription:

Merry Christmas 1983
to Jim
love Andy

You're supposed to read this
on Christmas night in bed
after making the bed with
your new flannel sheets.

this, of course, on the inside cover of a book whose review blurb on the opposite side reads 'joan didion brings this insanely violent world to life so that it ends up invading our flesh...'

i wonder what i'll find next time.

so i'm in full-on, get everything done to finish school crisis mode. i'll get through this the way i always have: long periods of panic, long periods of hard work, and longer periods of lying quite still in a darkened room listening to shoegaze.

'i tell her that maps used to end, the world had edges and no one knew what was past them. i tell her she and i are standing on such an edge; all the rest of the map is blank parchment, and one sentence. beyond this point: monsters.'

-- haven kimmel, iodine

i still like this. i'm glad i wrote it.

'as i get older, and nearer growing up, i often sit wondering here, and think how unfortunate it is for me that i can't reconcile you to home better than i am able to do. i don't know what other girls know. i can't play to you, or sing to you. i can't talk to you so as to lighten your mind, for i never see any amusing sights or read any amusing books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk about when you are tired.'

-- charles dickens, hard times

i want to get a call in the middle of the night. i want to answer that call and find i'm wanted, needed, and to scramble to get clothes together. i want to wonder for a moment how long i'll have to wear those clothes but banish that thought as irrelevant so i can focus on getting to the car. i want to curse the engine, the keys, and the clock, time itself, for not going, turning, passing faster. i want to drive safely and alertly, but with haste, and i want to let other thoughts flit across my consciousness because there's no sense dwelling on the situation just ahead, any thoughts at all-- huguenots, the ralliement créditiste du québec, john dryden, the labrys, cinnamon, the anachronistic marxist flag of angola, pink post-it notes, visual field screening, jean rhys. i want to make sure (at stop lights) that i brought bottled water, then i want to feel thirsty. i want to tell myself that it doesn't make sense to waste limited resources now, and it's probably just nerves anyhow, but secretly keep a mental checklist for signs of dehydration from that point onward. i want it not to be serious, but to be appreciated for having tried. i want it to be night into morning and i want to belong somewhere through the alchemy of the event, for all involved to be bound in it and to it, into tomorrow.

http://www.twitter.com/annus_mirabilis

carlea (looking at women's leadership conference pamphlet): i don't get how they mix being green with feminism.

me: ecofeminism. it's a thing.

carlea: they should just call it the vermont happy conference.

yes. let's have one more snowstorm, one more day and night where we wearily congregate in warm places and talk about slick roads and shovelling. let's watch it fall one more time and appreciate our interior spaces.

my car crests the big hill by the lutheran church in salem at or around three in the morning, mid-november. emmie and i are driving with the windows open despite the cold, or maybe because of it— there is spastic sitting-dancing, music blaring, singing: ‘when you call my name, it’s like a little prayer…’

i have a lot of memories like this, because ‘like a prayer’ happens to be among the songs of my life and, if not many others feel the same way, those who do gravitate to me as good friends. sometimes, they need a ride, and will readily sing-scream with me in the manner of the insane, the possessed, the blessed.

*
‘like a prayer’ was, and remains, the center of an experience i had that, while logically explicable, is my only brush with transcendence that stuck. in late nights of my youth, i tuned the archaic radio set into the recess of my headboard to a dance music station. my head was just below the speaker, and i would thrash it from side to side with the beat, tiring myself at last; occasionally i went beyond this mechanical purpose to actually enter into a song. there seemed to be a pretty regular playlist, so i got to know a few songs very well (this is before i owned any recorded music), to the point where i could reproduce them in my head when the power went out (which always seemed more frequent and catastrophic in childhood) or when i wanted a distraction in school. this accounts for my encyclopedic knowledge of mid-90's hip-hop singles, if you're keeping score at home.

one night, in drowsy half-sleep, the opening of ‘like a prayer’— orchestral, churchlike, everything serious but with a hint of the personal that makes you think that this is part of the officially sanctioned Big Thing but that it is meant for you— brought me back up. i was on automatic recitation, channelling the songwriter. this is what happened: i sang along, knowing every word and being able to visualise words and lines ahead just as singers do, even though it was the first time i had ever heard the song. i surprised myself even as I did it, trying to find an explanation as i teared up on ‘no end and no beginning,’ touched that the radio, with my help, was bringing that fleck of ephemeral beauty into the dark world.

it must have been playing before that night, of course. it seeped into by brain as i slept. ‘like a prayer’ was sponging out old memories, or filling in unused space— one intense night, or a string of them, in which it must have been producing the most beautiful dreams i don’t remember having.

there i was, an impressionable pre-catholic, not yet in enough to comprehend the faith, let alone reject it (although that would come later). i realise now that the theological engine driving me those nights was more akin to that which is familiar to me now— anything that sounds angelic must be angels, anything that means something means everything. these are signs, provided for you, wherever you may find them. madonna may very well have been the actual queen of heaven of my french-canadian grandfather’s favourite prayer, ‘hail, holy queen,’ which my uncle recited at his funeral in after years. the song carried me into sleep, and each word became embedded into me night after night as the song entered regular rotation, or as i modified my sleeping patterns to be awake around the time it played every night.

these are not point-by-point observations on the song’s lyrical precedent for heterodoxy. the message of the song, taken on its own, is that sex is the closest thing to authentic religious ecstasy. this is likely the best systematic theology humanity has ever come up with up to this point, or is likely to in the future, despite what sex-phobic religious will tell you. but my idea at the time was that religious things were not to be discussed lightly and on that everyone was copacetic. there was an amicable agreement at regions above and nothing would filter down that was not God’s truth. therefore, any discussion of religion was received wisdom, or what they used to call a revelation. ‘like a prayer’ was a prayer, and the sexual subtext (or, if you will, text) present was irrelevant in what i took away from the song.

so i learned to take my religion where i could get it. this took years of reactionary attitudes and sexual guilt before it sunk in, even though i should have known it when the madonna first visited me in my bedroom all those years ago. i still want that transcendent moment, but not necessarily for the eerie autosuggestion, but for a manifest identification with a creation. musical, literary, otherwise— i want to enjoy something that i could have made myself to the point where it feels as though i create it simultaneously with my first witness of it. that it was meant for me because it testifies to my condition— that my name is being called. we all build our own vocabulary of what attracts us as well as what ails us, but the interactions necessary for that to come about, the common points of culture we rally around, the moments we share and need others for— your voice can take me there.

amy and i are talking about good friday, since she's trying to give up men for lent (her mother would rather she gave up drinking) and i find it all a wonderful bit of cognitive dissonance, considering church sexual teachings. anyway.

'my grandmother is crazy about it,' amy says. 'at her house you can't speak between noon and three o'clock. she sits there and prays. we'd have school off that day and it sucked because we would have to stay at her house and we couldn't even watch a movie or something. "you don't watch tv. you sit there and pray and think about jesus up there on the cross giving it all for you!" i'm like, yeah, i recognise that, but three hours? ten minutes, yeah. i get it.'

'christ our lord appreciates your support,' i say.

'he does,' amy replies. decisively.

ellen and her husband loved children, but they only had one of their own-- his name was adam, and he had a strange blocky head that sort of resembled that of the boy in the hands resist him. ellen is, as i recall, dottie's daughter, which makes her related somehow to julie, my closest childhood friend. dottie lived in our neighbourhood and let us use her pool in the summers when i was growing up, and it was during this time we often ended up playing with adam or being supervised by ellen.

i remember one particular afternoon, although there was probably a whole series of them, of wavy green grass and blue skies, but on the one i remember julie, adam, ellen and i were lying in sort of a spoke pattern in the back yard of my parents' house. we were talking about ellen's new baby: if it would be a boy or a girl, how big she was going to get (she was just starting to show), what she would call it, and when it would be old enough to come and play in the pool with us. she explained the whole thing in calm, teacherly language (she may actually be a teacher, i'm not sure), but i remember being able to hear the excitement in her voice as she talked about the coming addition to her family.

then i remember seeing ellen and adam a lot less over the next few months, and it must have been sometime during the next summer that i was lying down around the same spot and it suddenly occurred to me that the baby and ellen should have been separate entities by now, and that i should have met her. in my mind, the baby was a girl. i didn't think to ask my parents about it, but i knew that something had gone wrong. in after years i realised that she must have miscarried, and i was informed by my parents recently that exactly that had happened, and a few more times since. ellen couldn't carry another child, and even lost twins at one point, a devastation for her that i cannot begin to imagine.

'that poor girl,' my mother said.

the image of that afternoon, of that hopeful young woman looking forward to the birth of her second child, stays with me today.

warmer today. taste of spring. walked down by the water and looked at antique books. the last time i could take a walk comfortably it was the last warmth of october-- today felt just like those days. looked like them, too: stripped trees and crisp, skittering brown leaves that survived the winter in gutters and between stubborn, clinging patches of soiled city ice. the main difference is that, though the temperature is the same, the air carries a promise, however frustratingly distant, of spring and winter's end. the water is a more intense blue and cloud formations march across the sky with rainy purpose.

elsewhere, becky experienced a day more or less like mine, or at least i'd like to think so. on facebook, where the voices of a generation speak without a conversation, she suggested everyone listen to at war with the mystics and take a walk outside.

'and i asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.'

-- kurt vonnegut, slaughterhouse-five

you write carefully
sentence after sentence
to make your meaning clear
the meaning is
that you are dead
dead with hope
dead with spring
dead with the blurred hummingbird
dead with the longing
to shine again
in details of the past

-- leonard cohen, 'your death'


'it wasn't until he was about to die that for one moment he opened his eyes. o govinda, he sighed, the rain never stops, the dream never ends, maybe we screwed it all up. and he was gone.'

-- natasza goerke, 'siddhartha'

'i suppose most men would say, where has the time gone? but not me; i know where it has gone. ask any exile. he will tell you where the time has gone.'

-- john biguenet, the torturer's apprentice

'this sort of thing cannot make anybody happy, but it is a way of saying: "i wish you were happy."'

-- thomas merton, the seven storey mountain