This is a rant:
I first became aware of my nemesis, the Amazing Girl, around the age of fifteen. Well, of one in particular: Anne Weinstock. An ethereal creature who wore scarves on her head and layers of shabby sweaters over her slender frame, Anne worked in clay, made vague, emotional statements of feeling in class, wept, and – perhaps her defining characteristic --referred to many, many things as "amazing."
Then there was her other defining characteristic. From the moment she transferred to our high school, boys worshipped her, and she moved from boyfriend to boyfriend with callousness obliviousness, cleaving to the next one with the same sensitive rapture that she'd shown the last.
Her appeal was, I could see, elemental. It was horribly depressing.
Once I started looking for them, I could see that Amazing Girls were everywhere.
Backpacking through South America, smoking hash with locals; reading Sylvia Plath in the park; earnestly worshipping Frida Kahlo in museums; dancing barefoot in the rain everywhere. While many are hippies, they are not all, by any means. They come in all nationalities, all shapes and sizes, from earth mother to ethereal. Some are insipid, others lively, some bisexual and others not, some vegan and some merely vegetarian.
But to them all there is a certain underlying sameness. All are vaguely creative, all sort of political, all sweet and kind and sympathetic and all lacking in any critical judgment whatsoever. Indeed, a lack of harsh judgment might be called the central tenet of their sisterhood, and perhaps a key to their particular magic.
To girls like me – sharp, mean, opinionated, decidedly lacking in mystery – they are a despair. Normal women cannot compete with Amazing Girls. We lack the mystique, the ready sympathy, the soul. They're twice as threatening as any bombshell, for they promise great depth. Supportive and uncritical in a way no one with any judgment can be, they also offer a famed flexibility towards traditional commitment, and the promise of utter sexual abandon. "Vice, Virtue. It's best not to be too moral." declares the definitive old Amazing Girl, Maude of Harold and fame – a favorite of every Amazing Girl. "You cheat yourself out of too much life. Aim above morality. If you apply that to life, then you're bound to live life fully." Indeed.
"Above all," wrote Joan Didion of Ur-Amazing Girl Joan Baez," she is the girl who "feels" things, who has hung onto the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young."
Sinclair Lewis captures it perfectly in Main Street’s description of the 1920s varietal: “Every cell of her body was alive – thin wrists, quince-blossom skin, black hair…a fragile child who must be cloaked with understanding kindness. “Psychic,” the girls whispered, and “spiritual.” Yet so radioactive were her nerves, so adventurous her trust in rather vaguely constructed sweetness and light. A girl on a hilltop…credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth!”
I began to keep lists of famous Amazing Girls: Joan Baez and Judy Collins, of course, but also Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Miranda July, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Edie Sedgwick, Caroline Blackwood,Vanessa Bell --to say nothing of Rima.( “So vivid was the image left on my brain that she still seemed to be actually before my eyes; and she was not there, nor had been, for she was a dream, an illusion, and no such being existed, or could exist, in this gross world: and at the same time I know that she had been there – that imagination was powerless to conjure up a form so exquisite.” )
Then one day, while staring at Vermeer's “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher” on an excursion to the Met, I had a horrible revelation: an amazing girl! And not just her, either! I thought of all the youthful poets and composers I knew, swooning after the vacant-eyed waifs who sat, chin on knees, gazing up at them at parties, nodding understandingly, breathing "amazing...” then leaping up to dance, abandoned, when someone's band started to play. Surely Raphael had been just as susceptible. The Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, the Nude Descending Staircase, the subject of every famous painting, poem, and piece of music -- they had all been Amazing Girls. I was as sure of it as I'd ever been of anything in my life -- Amazing Girls are and always have been the world's muses.
The career of an English major at a liberal arts college is littered with Amazing Girls in all their incarnations. Of course, college is their natural breeding ground. It is where they bloom and flourish, come into their own, staring up adoringly at professors and entrancing earnest young poets. They perform modern dances and read their original short stories. They hold forth in class, presuming emotion and feeling a more than worthy substitute for the harshness of fact.
It was infuriating to behold. The most attractive boys, otherwise rational creatures, worshipped them. Worse still, because Amazing Girls, by doing nothing but look sensitive, fit everyone’s idea of an artist, they were treated as such for doing nothing but sleeping with them! How had groupie-ism become such a talent?
“Primarily you belong to a special type, a special race of women,” D.H. Lawrence wrote to the mediocre muse, Ottoline Morrell. “Like Cassandra, and some of the great women saints. They were the great media of truth, of the deepest truth: through them…the truth came – as through a fissure from the depths and the burning darkness that lies out of the depth of time.”
“Like a wild and wise animal," rhapsodized Max Eastman of Isadora Duncan, “she fled from those who sought to capture the essence of her — which was motion — by making her stand still.”
Meanwhile, the promiscuous Edna St. Vincent Millay was, “a spokesman for the human spirit....with an intoxicating effect on people," according to Edmund Wilson, who further observed that this particular charm led many a man “to feel…he had found his mate.”
The world, women-wise, being divided into two camps, my friends – mostly of the wise-cracking girl-Friday school -- recognized the phenomenon immediately, and seized upon it with rage and excitement.
"The girls who hug all the time," said one friend eagerly.
"My yoga instructor," added another.
"Greg's new girlfriend," sighed a third sadly, referring to her ex-boyfriend, a struggling musician ripe for AG picking.
My male friends, of course, had no idea. To humor me, they’d pretend to despise them, and then likely as not show up a week later with Amazing Girls on their arms.
While the 1960s were a golden age for the Amazing Girl, it seems clear to me, after much consideration, that the 18th century provided one important model: the Romantics' ideal of the pure and naturally innocent woman, a creature morally inferior to men but capable of spiritual perfection -- in short, a childlike vessel for the projection of masculine ideals. Wordsworth’s Lucy, dying in romantic perfection; Byron’s muse walking in beauty, like the night –
“And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
15
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!”
Goethe is a particular offender in this regard, draping the unremarkable Charlotte in laurels such that, “... - When I have been with her for two or three hours, entranced by her ways and the divine expressiveness of her words, and my senses gradually become excited, my sight grows dim.”
Of course, the poets of our own age are just as bad – from Bob Dylan’s vacant muses, wearing their sparkling Egyptian rings and breaking just like little girls, to the free spirits who masquerade as “ruby-throated sparrows” and go around dancing in the sand.
Mystery is the Amazing Girl’s musical hallmark. “She would never say where she came from …who can pin a name on you?” warble the entranced Rolling Stones.
“Who can know the thoughts of Mary Jane?” wonders Nick Drake.
Literature gives us Murakami’s mysteriously vanishing muses, empty vessel Griet of the pearl earring, and the particularly infuriating Theodore Roethke poem: “I knew a woman, lovely in her bones.”
Of course, they’re movie staples, Amazing Girls -- changing people’s lives, teaching the uptight to live, spreading sunshine. Penny Lane, Almost Famous’s luminous groupie; Natasha Wagner’s wide-eyed rock critic in High Fidelity, or Natalie Portman’s grotesquely adorable “Sam” in Garden State (“This song will change your life, I swear.”)
By the time the latter film made its appearance, Amazing Girls had become an obsession with me. I was not sure how, but I was certain the Amazing Girl was a very important cultural phenomenon. I talked about it endlessly. I discussed it in my thesis (title: “Amazing Girls: Or, on the frustrations of not being a muse.”) When asked to contribute a short story to a friend’s literary magazine, I discussed Joyce Carol Oates’s (admittedly speculative) hatred of Amazing Girls. (“ What she had termed ‘Amazing Girls’ had become something of an obsession with her. In her organized fashion, she had long since started a file on them. Oh, how she hated those blank-eyed children!”) The story was deemed autobiographical.
After a few years, there was some feeling that my interest had gotten out of hand. Fewer and fewer of my friends were willing to share in my indignation, to attend my film festivals, to discuss the Amazing Girl’s cultural significance in the Renaissance. I made a conscious effort to talk about it less, to avoid Young Woman with a Pitcher, to sit though Harold and Maude with a placid smile and keep my mouth shut when my brother showed up one Thanksgiving with Sascha, an ethereal vegan from San Francisco.
Then, not long ago, at the Whole Foods in Union Square, I ran into the original Amazing Girl, Anne Weinstock. She looked just the same – scarf on hair, several layers of ragged sweaters, a faraway look in her eye. She was, she told me vaguely, “an artist.” She was living with a sculptor. She pronounced the mediocre specifics of my own life “amazing” and hugged me before we parted.
Watching her walk away, I felt suffused with guilt. She was so nice, so sincere, so nonjudgmental! I had spent so many years resenting someone completely innocuous. I made a spontaneous resolve to change my ways – to approach my life with the openness and enthusiasm of an Amazing Girl. Then, as Anne’s slender frame disappeared down the Grains aisle, I saw several young men look after her yearningly. My heart hardened. I held a film festival that night.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Lightweight Foreign Legion Comedy in early color process!
“Here’s one for you,” the driver said as soon as the taxi door had closed. “If you’re standing in a house, and every window faces south, what color bear are you looking at?”
I was caught off guard; it seemed to me late in the day for riddling. The last time I’d taken a cab, the driver (who had grown up in an orphanage, was getting into amateur theatrics and whose comedic work had been compared to that of Art Carney) had asked me to name the five flags that had flown over Texas. Which I did. But that had been early morning -- I had been chipper, punchy, full of beans.
I stifled a sigh and marshaled my meager resources.
If you’re standing in a house, and every window faces south, what color bear are you looking at?
I know next to nothing about geography, but it seemed clear that the riddle dealt with a geographically anomalous zone. Probably a pole. Which meant…
“A polar bear?” I suggested.
“What color bear?” he repeated, clearly disappointed.
“Oh. White.” I said. He sighed, deflated.
“Yes.” He said, and we drove in silence for a few minutes.
“What have you eaten in the way of exotic meats?” he asked after a while.
“Let’s see,” I said thoughtfully. “Ostrich, alligator, elk, bison…I guess venison doesn’t count, does it?”
“Oh, it counts all right,” he said with suppressed violence. “I count it. So you’ve never had bear? Moose? Bear?!”
“No,” I said. “Is it good?”
“Bear?” he barked. “It’s the worst damn thing I’ve ever tasted! That is,” he amended. “Grizzly bear is. Tasted like it was raised on garbage. Brown bear, now, isn’t so bad. It’s greasy, of course, but I grilled it up and it wasn’t so bad. You have to grill bear,” he added instructively.
“I guess Indians ate a lot of bear,” I ventured.
“You bet!” he said. “You bet they did! I’ve had lots of animals. Squirrel, muskrat, bear, elk, bison….oh, just about everything you can eat, I guess.”
“Raccoon?” I asked.
“No, I’ve never had raccoon.” He sounded deflated again.
“Well, talk about tasting like garbage!” I said helpfully.
“You’ve had raccoon meat?” he asked resentfully.
“Well, no, but I see what they eat. The raccoons get into our garbage all the time. Do you hunt?”
“No, I don’t. The fishing shop where I buy tackle sells exotic meats. I tell them, ‘I’ll try whatever you get in!’ And they save some for me.”
“Oh. Well, you certainly have had a lot of meats,” I said. We lapsed into silence again.
“Ever had whale?” I said after a while.
“No,” he admitted, “but I have a friend who has,” he added hastily. “It’s illegal to eat it, but he used to eat it when he was a kid. Said it’s tasty – firm, like tuna, you know? A little rubbery.”
“That sounds about right,” I said. “I guess once the blubber’s been scraped off, it’s really fairly lean.”
“Maybe,” he said.
I wondered about grilling whale. I was hungry.
“I’ve been cooking a lot these days,” he volunteered.
“Do you enjoy it?” I said.
“Well, I don’t have much choice,” he said. “My wife passed away six months ago. I was doing the cooking, the housework, for about six months before that, too. I like it all right now. I’m experimenting a little bit, now.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” he said. There was a prolonged silence.
“Did your wife …enjoy different meats?” I said tentatively.
“She liked the venison,” he said, “and she ate, you know, beef and chicken. Veal. I think she tried the wild turkey. She wouldn’t try the bear, though.”
“From what you tell me,” I said generously, “that was a smart move!”
“What?” he said blankly.
“Not eating bear,” I clarified. “You said it tasted like garbage.”
“I said grizzly bear tasted like garbage,” he said.
Silence.
“I hear you can get meats now on the internet – clubs, that send you different kinds.” He told me as we pulled off the parkway. “I’d do it if I were you. Nice to get something in the mail. My wife used to order from…Home Shopping Network. QVC. Dolls, all kinds of things. You know?”
“I do,” I said.
“A doll came in the mail yesterday,” he said. “Real fancy. Lace, pearls, everything. I thought it was meat for a second there,” he added. “But it was a doll. Nice to get packages, you know?”
“’Brown paper packages, tied up with string,’” I ventured lamely. He ignored me.
“Gives you a little something to look forward to,” he said.
When I arrived at the reading the bookstore was almost full. I could see Adam Rothstein Kurtin, the wunderkind author, milling around near the podium, talking to some organizers. I craned my neck to get a look at the crowd, and waved and smiled to a couple of college literati I knew and one very earnest girl in my Shakespearean Theory class. Lots of late-middle aged neighborhood types carrying library tote bags, a few professors.
Adam Rothstein Kurtin was small. He was wearing a dark suit. I studied him covertly, wondering idly if I could get him to fall in love with me. Adam Rothstein Kurtin went to the podium then, smiled in an ingratiating fashion and started talking in a rather urbane way.
“So, the publisher gave me all these shirts,” he said in a self-deprecating way, displaying a tee shirt with “Little Circles” written on it and the words “A masterpiece!” in quotations.
“Obviously, I can’t wear this,” he said, indicating the quotation to general laughter, “so I’m trying to think of creative ways to get rid of them. Here’s the deal: if anyone asks me a question I refuse to answer, you get a shirt. I give you fair warning, this has only happened twice – but there are things I won’t talk about!”
Well, that wouldn’t be too hard, I thought irritably. He probably won’t talk about how much money he’s made, or something. And maybe his love life. But who wants that ridiculous shirt, anyway? In the grand tradition of free shirts, they were all enormous.
“So, I’m going to read a little bit for you,” he said, “but only a little bit, and then we’ll talk – that’s what I really enjoy.”
He read three very long passages: a funny part, a sad/ heartwarming part and some other part of indeterminate characterization. His reading was only okay, not how I’d imagined it when I read Little Circles. I was reminded afresh of what I thought didn’t work about the book.
“I just sort of put in the humorous part to entertain people – it’s not really where my heart is,” he parenthesized at one point. What nonsense, I thought. The funny parts were the best thing in the book. The rest of it, while written with technical skill, seemed to me trite and easy. It was pre-approved morality and flights of courage that might have been courageous and taboo fifty years ago, but had been the currency of sentiment for as long as I’d been around.
When he had finished reading, everyone applauded and some hands shot up immediately. An elderly woman asked something about his approach to his craft.
“I regard writing merely as a means of transport,” he said. “The process of writing is to me incidental. The vessel, as it were. It could be painting, or acting, or any form of self-expression. The point is to reach the destination of moral clarity.”
The girl from my Shakespeare class, quivering with earnestness, demanded to know whether he regarded his work as meta-fiction, and what were his opinions of meta-fiction as a genre?
He responded with, I thought, inappropriate irritation.
“My work is not meta-fiction,” he replied coldly. “And I don’t feel competent to comment on meta-fiction.” He turned his attention away abruptly, and the girl looked crushed.
“The cover of your book looks like the Yin and the Yang,” said a moron. “Is it supposed to look like that, and what are your opinions of eastern philosophy, and what do you think about world peace in our lifetime?”
He laughed a little bit, but more at the enormity of the question than its stupidity. No, the cover had not been intended to evoke the Yin and the yang, but he liked that people could see different things in it. He was no student of eastern philosophy, but he found it fascinating and hoped to get into it in a big way. He couldn’t predict world peace with any kind of authority (and this government was doing its best to prevent it – applause), but he devotedly hoped that with mutual understanding and respect things could improve, and such-and-such an author had just written an amazing anti-war tract we should check out. He was much nicer than he had been about the meta-fiction question, and I was annoyed. Really annoyed. In fact, I hated him. My hand shot up.
“You, in the glasses,” he said, pointing to me.
“Building off of the last question,” I said coolly, and wishing he hadn’t referred to me that way, “If you’re standing in a house, and every window is facing south….what color bear are you looking at?”
“Excuse me?” he said blankly.
“If you’re standing in a house, and every room faces south,” I said more loudly, beginning to feel an ass, but brazening it out, “what color bear are you looking at?!”
“What color bear…?” he said again. There was silence.
“Give her the shirt!” someone shouted, and several voices added their endorsement.
“No, hang on,” he said. (“Give her the shirt!” said the same voice.) “I said questions I wouldn’t answer, not riddles that stumped me.”
“All right, what color bear?” he finally asked, in irritation. A bunch of people shouted “white!” and I didn’t have to say anything. I tried to look jaunty.
The worst part, of course, was that I’d already bought my book, and I figured I had to get it signed for my friend David, a Little Circles enthusiast. My tension mounted as the line shortened. When it was my turn, I handed him the book and said, “to David, please.” At least he would know it wasn’t for me! Adam Rothstein Kurtin bent his head over the book, and he looked very young.
“I…I’m sorry about that bear question,” I said timidly.
“That’s okay,” he muttered, without looking up.
It was very clear he was not in love with me. Now I was broke, and I took the bus home.
I was caught off guard; it seemed to me late in the day for riddling. The last time I’d taken a cab, the driver (who had grown up in an orphanage, was getting into amateur theatrics and whose comedic work had been compared to that of Art Carney) had asked me to name the five flags that had flown over Texas. Which I did. But that had been early morning -- I had been chipper, punchy, full of beans.
I stifled a sigh and marshaled my meager resources.
If you’re standing in a house, and every window faces south, what color bear are you looking at?
I know next to nothing about geography, but it seemed clear that the riddle dealt with a geographically anomalous zone. Probably a pole. Which meant…
“A polar bear?” I suggested.
“What color bear?” he repeated, clearly disappointed.
“Oh. White.” I said. He sighed, deflated.
“Yes.” He said, and we drove in silence for a few minutes.
“What have you eaten in the way of exotic meats?” he asked after a while.
“Let’s see,” I said thoughtfully. “Ostrich, alligator, elk, bison…I guess venison doesn’t count, does it?”
“Oh, it counts all right,” he said with suppressed violence. “I count it. So you’ve never had bear? Moose? Bear?!”
“No,” I said. “Is it good?”
“Bear?” he barked. “It’s the worst damn thing I’ve ever tasted! That is,” he amended. “Grizzly bear is. Tasted like it was raised on garbage. Brown bear, now, isn’t so bad. It’s greasy, of course, but I grilled it up and it wasn’t so bad. You have to grill bear,” he added instructively.
“I guess Indians ate a lot of bear,” I ventured.
“You bet!” he said. “You bet they did! I’ve had lots of animals. Squirrel, muskrat, bear, elk, bison….oh, just about everything you can eat, I guess.”
“Raccoon?” I asked.
“No, I’ve never had raccoon.” He sounded deflated again.
“Well, talk about tasting like garbage!” I said helpfully.
“You’ve had raccoon meat?” he asked resentfully.
“Well, no, but I see what they eat. The raccoons get into our garbage all the time. Do you hunt?”
“No, I don’t. The fishing shop where I buy tackle sells exotic meats. I tell them, ‘I’ll try whatever you get in!’ And they save some for me.”
“Oh. Well, you certainly have had a lot of meats,” I said. We lapsed into silence again.
“Ever had whale?” I said after a while.
“No,” he admitted, “but I have a friend who has,” he added hastily. “It’s illegal to eat it, but he used to eat it when he was a kid. Said it’s tasty – firm, like tuna, you know? A little rubbery.”
“That sounds about right,” I said. “I guess once the blubber’s been scraped off, it’s really fairly lean.”
“Maybe,” he said.
I wondered about grilling whale. I was hungry.
“I’ve been cooking a lot these days,” he volunteered.
“Do you enjoy it?” I said.
“Well, I don’t have much choice,” he said. “My wife passed away six months ago. I was doing the cooking, the housework, for about six months before that, too. I like it all right now. I’m experimenting a little bit, now.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” he said. There was a prolonged silence.
“Did your wife …enjoy different meats?” I said tentatively.
“She liked the venison,” he said, “and she ate, you know, beef and chicken. Veal. I think she tried the wild turkey. She wouldn’t try the bear, though.”
“From what you tell me,” I said generously, “that was a smart move!”
“What?” he said blankly.
“Not eating bear,” I clarified. “You said it tasted like garbage.”
“I said grizzly bear tasted like garbage,” he said.
Silence.
“I hear you can get meats now on the internet – clubs, that send you different kinds.” He told me as we pulled off the parkway. “I’d do it if I were you. Nice to get something in the mail. My wife used to order from…Home Shopping Network. QVC. Dolls, all kinds of things. You know?”
“I do,” I said.
“A doll came in the mail yesterday,” he said. “Real fancy. Lace, pearls, everything. I thought it was meat for a second there,” he added. “But it was a doll. Nice to get packages, you know?”
“’Brown paper packages, tied up with string,’” I ventured lamely. He ignored me.
“Gives you a little something to look forward to,” he said.
When I arrived at the reading the bookstore was almost full. I could see Adam Rothstein Kurtin, the wunderkind author, milling around near the podium, talking to some organizers. I craned my neck to get a look at the crowd, and waved and smiled to a couple of college literati I knew and one very earnest girl in my Shakespearean Theory class. Lots of late-middle aged neighborhood types carrying library tote bags, a few professors.
Adam Rothstein Kurtin was small. He was wearing a dark suit. I studied him covertly, wondering idly if I could get him to fall in love with me. Adam Rothstein Kurtin went to the podium then, smiled in an ingratiating fashion and started talking in a rather urbane way.
“So, the publisher gave me all these shirts,” he said in a self-deprecating way, displaying a tee shirt with “Little Circles” written on it and the words “A masterpiece!” in quotations.
“Obviously, I can’t wear this,” he said, indicating the quotation to general laughter, “so I’m trying to think of creative ways to get rid of them. Here’s the deal: if anyone asks me a question I refuse to answer, you get a shirt. I give you fair warning, this has only happened twice – but there are things I won’t talk about!”
Well, that wouldn’t be too hard, I thought irritably. He probably won’t talk about how much money he’s made, or something. And maybe his love life. But who wants that ridiculous shirt, anyway? In the grand tradition of free shirts, they were all enormous.
“So, I’m going to read a little bit for you,” he said, “but only a little bit, and then we’ll talk – that’s what I really enjoy.”
He read three very long passages: a funny part, a sad/ heartwarming part and some other part of indeterminate characterization. His reading was only okay, not how I’d imagined it when I read Little Circles. I was reminded afresh of what I thought didn’t work about the book.
“I just sort of put in the humorous part to entertain people – it’s not really where my heart is,” he parenthesized at one point. What nonsense, I thought. The funny parts were the best thing in the book. The rest of it, while written with technical skill, seemed to me trite and easy. It was pre-approved morality and flights of courage that might have been courageous and taboo fifty years ago, but had been the currency of sentiment for as long as I’d been around.
When he had finished reading, everyone applauded and some hands shot up immediately. An elderly woman asked something about his approach to his craft.
“I regard writing merely as a means of transport,” he said. “The process of writing is to me incidental. The vessel, as it were. It could be painting, or acting, or any form of self-expression. The point is to reach the destination of moral clarity.”
The girl from my Shakespeare class, quivering with earnestness, demanded to know whether he regarded his work as meta-fiction, and what were his opinions of meta-fiction as a genre?
He responded with, I thought, inappropriate irritation.
“My work is not meta-fiction,” he replied coldly. “And I don’t feel competent to comment on meta-fiction.” He turned his attention away abruptly, and the girl looked crushed.
“The cover of your book looks like the Yin and the Yang,” said a moron. “Is it supposed to look like that, and what are your opinions of eastern philosophy, and what do you think about world peace in our lifetime?”
He laughed a little bit, but more at the enormity of the question than its stupidity. No, the cover had not been intended to evoke the Yin and the yang, but he liked that people could see different things in it. He was no student of eastern philosophy, but he found it fascinating and hoped to get into it in a big way. He couldn’t predict world peace with any kind of authority (and this government was doing its best to prevent it – applause), but he devotedly hoped that with mutual understanding and respect things could improve, and such-and-such an author had just written an amazing anti-war tract we should check out. He was much nicer than he had been about the meta-fiction question, and I was annoyed. Really annoyed. In fact, I hated him. My hand shot up.
“You, in the glasses,” he said, pointing to me.
“Building off of the last question,” I said coolly, and wishing he hadn’t referred to me that way, “If you’re standing in a house, and every window is facing south….what color bear are you looking at?”
“Excuse me?” he said blankly.
“If you’re standing in a house, and every room faces south,” I said more loudly, beginning to feel an ass, but brazening it out, “what color bear are you looking at?!”
“What color bear…?” he said again. There was silence.
“Give her the shirt!” someone shouted, and several voices added their endorsement.
“No, hang on,” he said. (“Give her the shirt!” said the same voice.) “I said questions I wouldn’t answer, not riddles that stumped me.”
“All right, what color bear?” he finally asked, in irritation. A bunch of people shouted “white!” and I didn’t have to say anything. I tried to look jaunty.
The worst part, of course, was that I’d already bought my book, and I figured I had to get it signed for my friend David, a Little Circles enthusiast. My tension mounted as the line shortened. When it was my turn, I handed him the book and said, “to David, please.” At least he would know it wasn’t for me! Adam Rothstein Kurtin bent his head over the book, and he looked very young.
“I…I’m sorry about that bear question,” I said timidly.
“That’s okay,” he muttered, without looking up.
It was very clear he was not in love with me. Now I was broke, and I took the bus home.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Liveblogging from NWK
Not sure that's actually Newark's code, but close enough. It's 5:15 now; my car came at 4; I'm a little bleary. I paid for some kind of airport pay-as-you-go plan so as to download a few 'Friday Night Lights' episodes for the flight, and might as well get a little mileage, (unintended but I'll let it go.) Nothing's open yet; there's this amazing cereal bar that opens at six, where (the menu tells me) they do custom blends of cereals! There's a list of "customer favorites" and there's this "Very Berry" deal that combines Fruit Loops, Cap'n Crunch Berry, and dried berries, to good effect one imagines. Anyway, I'm going to try it.
The reason I got here so early: I just have that expired 12-year-old Learner's Permit by way of ID, which means extra security plus a few forms. I'm starting to own the horribleness of the picture though, in which I resemble a nine-year-old troll and which neatly substantiates my teen-ugly-duckling claims.
I had all kinds of elaborate plans for getting the apt spick and packing efficiently, but a very trying extra hour at work (confidentiality, sadly) threw my plans off with a bang, and I was forced to eat both the steak sandwiches I'd packed by, well, five a.m. Besides the ID shenanigans, forgot about the little matter of suitcases and was forced to choose between one of the two vintage Lady baltimore hunter green suitcases which serve as my TV stand: a mammoth 2x4 deal filled with Christmas decorations, or a diminutive overnight case quite inadequate to the demands of a week's trip in sweater weather. Went with the latter; sat on it; it will most certainly pop open at some point in transit. However, will be unmistakable on the baggage carousel. Still, like the small scale of my arrangements.
Slim texted me some directions to the place, where I've been told to ascend to the garret and immediately ply some dog called Malcolm with a piece of cheese. I don't have a piece of cheese, but I guess I can find one before I arrive. The key is under a sandollar by a yellow flower in the third window box. In case you were wondering.
(Download progressing well, but it'll be close, for sure. I really, really don't want to have to fall back on this Iris Murdoch novel I'm plowing through, full of arid dialogues and remote interrelationships between asexual persons.)
Turns out Eloise will be in California, too, assisting with the olive harvest. So this weekend I'm going to join them in the groves and hopefully get a little EVOO out of the business.
Really want this cereal bar to open.
I was very difficult the other night and attempted a breakup. The attempt was rebuffed, and Slim very sweetly suggested we get married so he could support me, which is really neither here nor there. The whole thing gave him terrible dreams. Must be very good this week. He has some nice things planned. Hoping one of the nice things isn't some kind of surprise wedding - always possible with him. Not that I wouldn't do it, just to be a good sport. And my calendar's not that full, either.
xo,
Gossip Girl
The reason I got here so early: I just have that expired 12-year-old Learner's Permit by way of ID, which means extra security plus a few forms. I'm starting to own the horribleness of the picture though, in which I resemble a nine-year-old troll and which neatly substantiates my teen-ugly-duckling claims.
I had all kinds of elaborate plans for getting the apt spick and packing efficiently, but a very trying extra hour at work (confidentiality, sadly) threw my plans off with a bang, and I was forced to eat both the steak sandwiches I'd packed by, well, five a.m. Besides the ID shenanigans, forgot about the little matter of suitcases and was forced to choose between one of the two vintage Lady baltimore hunter green suitcases which serve as my TV stand: a mammoth 2x4 deal filled with Christmas decorations, or a diminutive overnight case quite inadequate to the demands of a week's trip in sweater weather. Went with the latter; sat on it; it will most certainly pop open at some point in transit. However, will be unmistakable on the baggage carousel. Still, like the small scale of my arrangements.
Slim texted me some directions to the place, where I've been told to ascend to the garret and immediately ply some dog called Malcolm with a piece of cheese. I don't have a piece of cheese, but I guess I can find one before I arrive. The key is under a sandollar by a yellow flower in the third window box. In case you were wondering.
(Download progressing well, but it'll be close, for sure. I really, really don't want to have to fall back on this Iris Murdoch novel I'm plowing through, full of arid dialogues and remote interrelationships between asexual persons.)
Turns out Eloise will be in California, too, assisting with the olive harvest. So this weekend I'm going to join them in the groves and hopefully get a little EVOO out of the business.
Really want this cereal bar to open.
I was very difficult the other night and attempted a breakup. The attempt was rebuffed, and Slim very sweetly suggested we get married so he could support me, which is really neither here nor there. The whole thing gave him terrible dreams. Must be very good this week. He has some nice things planned. Hoping one of the nice things isn't some kind of surprise wedding - always possible with him. Not that I wouldn't do it, just to be a good sport. And my calendar's not that full, either.
xo,
Gossip Girl
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Saturday
Because I work on weekends, my news is rather less glamorous than one might hope. I got up early in order to turn the (newly scoured) apartment over to the landlord and co. When they'd failed to materialize by ten-thirty, I hied me down to the basement apartment and rapped smartly on the door. This was in due course opened by a mammoth gentleman (they're all kind of mammoth and weather-beaten) who informed me that they'd all done "too much drinking lat night" to allow for any work; and that he was Joe ('I'm the one who speaks perfect English'), works the door at a club called 'the Fireplace' and that I should go by this weekend, because he'll hook me up because everyone in this building "is like family."
The building, fyi, contains the landlord, an Iraq vet called Bonecrusher, and the Polish family upstairs, who have a little dog with an extensive wardrobe of sweaters and coats. Oh, and me. Because I don't speak Polish, my contact with everyone's pretty limited. Well, I guess Bonecrusher's English is pretty good, but the landlord told me when I first moved in that combat drove him crazy. He's home all the time and watches TV non-stop. Sometimes I see him in the hall and we hug; I've brought him cookies a few times. Oh, and occasionally the family upstairs drops things off their washline onto my little deck. After an unfortunate incident in which the daughter walked in on Slim drinking coffee naked (inevitable; he's naked a great deal of the time, being from California), we devised a system in which we put anything of theirs in a basket in the hall.
There's a party tonight, but my apartment is so lovely and clean; and I'm too tired to brazen out being a shopgirl tonight and act like some kind of z-list 'it' girl and put on an outfit besides. I did all that stuff last week.
There's a meat recall on; good thing I just had frozen peas and canned tomatoes for dinner! oh, and a Kozy Shack. Shak? Inquiring minds want to know. Oh, and apparently the Big Apple Circus is back in town.
The building, fyi, contains the landlord, an Iraq vet called Bonecrusher, and the Polish family upstairs, who have a little dog with an extensive wardrobe of sweaters and coats. Oh, and me. Because I don't speak Polish, my contact with everyone's pretty limited. Well, I guess Bonecrusher's English is pretty good, but the landlord told me when I first moved in that combat drove him crazy. He's home all the time and watches TV non-stop. Sometimes I see him in the hall and we hug; I've brought him cookies a few times. Oh, and occasionally the family upstairs drops things off their washline onto my little deck. After an unfortunate incident in which the daughter walked in on Slim drinking coffee naked (inevitable; he's naked a great deal of the time, being from California), we devised a system in which we put anything of theirs in a basket in the hall.
There's a party tonight, but my apartment is so lovely and clean; and I'm too tired to brazen out being a shopgirl tonight and act like some kind of z-list 'it' girl and put on an outfit besides. I did all that stuff last week.
There's a meat recall on; good thing I just had frozen peas and canned tomatoes for dinner! oh, and a Kozy Shack. Shak? Inquiring minds want to know. Oh, and apparently the Big Apple Circus is back in town.
Friday, November 2, 2007
Update
Well, now it's three plus months later. In the intervening period, I've embarked, rather against my will, on a relationship with a thoroughly unsuitable boy. (That same cheapskate.) I'm sure his lack of respectability will become manifest in the coming days - for now, suffice it to say that I have major qualms about the whole endeavor. To say nothing about having become the creepiest sort of serial monogamist.
I live in Greenpoint now, with the ever-present threat of pogrom hanging over me, Damocles-sword-style. The landlord (who has a decidedly rapey air) informed me this a.m. that he "needs access to my apartment" tomorrow morning. I must obviously give things a thorough clean. Luckily, have strung a large length of bark cloth across the entrance to the "bedroom" nook, affording me some minimal privacy. Why have I never seen an electric bill, by the way?
Guess where I am now? Cafe Grumpy. Besides having a really gruckimish name, Cafe Grumpy is the closest spot with IT. It's big and airy, has a book exchange and hawks patrons' art. Music's kinda all over the place, too. Not really my scene (as we say), but it's the setting for more than its share of Missed Connections and I'm angling for one. I've been making eyes like crazy but a quick check of Craig's List has returned no dice for either "Cafe Grumpy' or "Glasses." While we're on the subject, how come no one in the waiing room at my shrink's office will ever meet my eyes in a conspiratorial fashion? I'm forever twinkling at people.
('I Walk the Line' is playing now. I hope Slim is being true to me in San Francisco. I daresay; he is a rascal, but very good-hearted. Well, now that we've established that we're not in an open relationship, anyway. Which I thought was fairly obvious but which his father described as a "classic error of judgment" on his son's part. Anyway, I got a funeral's worth of flowers out of it, plus the loss of three lbs in tear weight, give or take. But that was some time ago. Some day I'll tell you about it. Gosh, we have a lot to catch up on! Did I mention that GK4 (my former fiance) and I are simpatico again? Or that British David has moved here for the nonce? Readers of my Paris blog will doubtless rejoice.)
I got a haircut yesterday. (Must remember to change my facebook status to 'is newly shorn' although in fact trimmed and shaped is more accurate.) Monica, the hairdresser, does a terrific job, even if Maeve thinks she was born a man. (I don't think so. Maeve is my brother's flame and a good friend besides.) I learned two things about Monica yesterday: 1. she was married before. 2. she loves Nascar. She and her boyfriend went down to Georgia, devil-fashion, so's he could be grand marshal of a race. (I wasn't clear on a lot of details, but that's okay.)
I just took an antidepressant. Delicious!
I live in Greenpoint now, with the ever-present threat of pogrom hanging over me, Damocles-sword-style. The landlord (who has a decidedly rapey air) informed me this a.m. that he "needs access to my apartment" tomorrow morning. I must obviously give things a thorough clean. Luckily, have strung a large length of bark cloth across the entrance to the "bedroom" nook, affording me some minimal privacy. Why have I never seen an electric bill, by the way?
Guess where I am now? Cafe Grumpy. Besides having a really gruckimish name, Cafe Grumpy is the closest spot with IT. It's big and airy, has a book exchange and hawks patrons' art. Music's kinda all over the place, too. Not really my scene (as we say), but it's the setting for more than its share of Missed Connections and I'm angling for one. I've been making eyes like crazy but a quick check of Craig's List has returned no dice for either "Cafe Grumpy' or "Glasses." While we're on the subject, how come no one in the waiing room at my shrink's office will ever meet my eyes in a conspiratorial fashion? I'm forever twinkling at people.
('I Walk the Line' is playing now. I hope Slim is being true to me in San Francisco. I daresay; he is a rascal, but very good-hearted. Well, now that we've established that we're not in an open relationship, anyway. Which I thought was fairly obvious but which his father described as a "classic error of judgment" on his son's part. Anyway, I got a funeral's worth of flowers out of it, plus the loss of three lbs in tear weight, give or take. But that was some time ago. Some day I'll tell you about it. Gosh, we have a lot to catch up on! Did I mention that GK4 (my former fiance) and I are simpatico again? Or that British David has moved here for the nonce? Readers of my Paris blog will doubtless rejoice.)
I got a haircut yesterday. (Must remember to change my facebook status to 'is newly shorn' although in fact trimmed and shaped is more accurate.) Monica, the hairdresser, does a terrific job, even if Maeve thinks she was born a man. (I don't think so. Maeve is my brother's flame and a good friend besides.) I learned two things about Monica yesterday: 1. she was married before. 2. she loves Nascar. She and her boyfriend went down to Georgia, devil-fashion, so's he could be grand marshal of a race. (I wasn't clear on a lot of details, but that's okay.)
I just took an antidepressant. Delicious!
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