THE PART I EDITED OUT @adrianeq - Tumblr Blog

anthropology of a smoker

“Don’t go in there,” Charles had warned. He had been standing where, at any social outing, he was always to be found. Hovering at the fringe, at the margin, on a fire-escape, a stoop, in a parking lot or on a sidewalk outside the bar, in the rear-garden of a basement apartment or the roof of a higher unit, in the courtyard of the office park, in the driveway of the socialite, always at the edges of life, and always trying to tug closer from the wet of a limp cigarette. He puffed Virginia Slims, an affectation. His mother had smoked Newports. “It’s some kind of poetry art thing,” he said, with a wave. “One of Callie’s little projects.”

Driving in New Orleans

The girders of the bridge drifted over the car, black clouds. Against the low, brick storefronts of the business district the car whizzed and stopped, whizzed and stopped, every red light a heart attack. On Canal, she snouted around the clumps of drunks. A clown in a yellow wig limped through the cross-walk, leaning on a woman in a tight KISS top and platform flip-flops.

Down Decatur she avoided the taxis and the cyclists, the traffic from the river parking lots and the queue of tourists waiting at Iberville for the light to change so they could make their MegaBus. Avoiding a jangling, black carriage led by a ghostly white horse, she zipped through Jackson Square, miraculously, only to meet a gaggle of bros in neon t-shirts crossing against the light at St. Peter, looking down into their Grenades as St. Joan looked down from her golden perch above, disgusted.

She dipped around the node of Elysian Fields, darting around the potholes of the Marigny and honking off a battered RV, which was inching into the roadway at Spain Street. Finally, she made it to the curve of St. Ferdinand, flying past the lumberyard at top speed to screech at the stop-sign, momentarily, and take a right on Chartres near the sign for the spot where the wealthy, cultured Homer Plessy had once boarded a train in an effort to improve the world and lived instead to see children live worse, because of it. There the tires jiggled over the train rail, sympathetically, and Melanie was out. Free of traffic, free from others, and down the slight slope of the tracks pounding through darkness.

too easy to write because ugh

Melanie had waited months before bringing him to one of her mother’s “art things.” A cement-floored, white box gallery in Chelsea where the walls had been repainted candy pink with stripes of zebra, and set at regular intervals with audacious paintings of descending space ships. In the back room of these paintings were long stripes of tables where people – mostly older women in dark clothes and statement earrings – were fussing over cardboard boxes of pizzas. “Trenton hates pretension,” Melanie’s mother had said, as if there was an explanation, hugging close a small squat black man, who Andres understood to be the artist.

The pizza had been okay, but cold. The old ladies though had loved it. Laughed over the grease. It seemed to Andres that you could sell them anything, as long as it had an “artist” attached. Another one of Melanie’s mother’s artists stacked Chinese phone books and carved them with the same tool that an ice sculptor would use, in order to make sculptures of Chinese soldiers’ faces. People bought these old, carved-up phone books for tens of thousands of dollars partly, it seemed, so they could have the same opportunity that Andres had whenever the artist, Mr. Chu, came over to Melanie’s mother’s house for dinner, griping about the Mets and getting drunk on Melanie’s parents wine while Melanie’s father sat silently, as if the act of chewing absorbed the whole of his intellectual energy.

From far away, he had considered the art world to contain some special, hidden secret. But Melanie’s mother’s family had shown that it was just a different way of selling a different set of products to a different set of people. Like what his mother did at her antiques store, but on another scale, and in the present.

getting a character in

He was a tall young man with a blonde moustache who spoke shakily, with apologies for using their time. The style of his face reminded Andres of a man in a civil war-era photograph; he had the distant, distracted expression of someone who has been sent off on a pitiful errand.

This photo of Richard Yates.

here’s a weird essay I wrote in the middle of the night last night

Against Group Dinners

2017 was my year of pushing the boundaries of becoming anti social, a recluse. I had spent my youth at parties, lots of parties, expending pleasure on the explaining and analysis and even reporting of parties from New York to Beijing. I had enjoyed the game of noticing who had worn what, who had said what, the reaction from the table, the stiffness around this or that topic, the suitability of the décor. And I had expended hours around this analysis until 2016 shone like a flashbulb over the detritus of a table – napkins smeared with blood; the picked-over cakes and glasses smudged with oil– and in a flash, I saw through them.

I had seen how large groups of people acted. How we preened and angled, performed for each other. How we hide our inner darkness. I did not want to be seated anymore with a group larger than five. I did not want to be CC-ed. I did not click through on E-vites. I no longer performed for the competition over who had brought what to the table, no longer jumped into conversation to flex my ego, no longer worried over the other wives. I was against Group Dinners.

What had once seemed natural now felt like a performance. When others spoke, I could feel my face flinching to support an expression of interest. And in response, I could hear myself reciting familiar lines, dropping anecdotes whose origins I no longer fully remembered. “No, you tell it.”

My friend Bryan observed that he hated being part of a group that required a feeling of positivity about the group. A swim team, for instance; a work retreat; any situation that mirrored nationalism. I thought of that while at a soccer game, I found that I did not know when or how to cheer.

But every group seemed to require that forced positivity, a feeling of being unique -- set against the outside world. How could you feel that way when you saw yourself "engaging the group” or pouring wine like your mother had once instructed. Group dinners required the lie of our uniqueness, in order to function. And yet they mimicked the oldest human acts. I had seen a photo of Eva Braun, hanging over Hitler’s words at a group dinner in the Third Reich and I did not look much different from her, down to the black and white polka dot dress she might have bought on ModCloth. Group Dinners only enforced power structures. The men, speaking loudly over each other. The women, helping bring each other in. And if there was a server, how we would speak to her in tones of false charm, or hungry need, or muted frustration. Never human to human, never one-to-one.

Planning a bachelorette party for a friend, I halted the invites at two, believing no one could enjoy the feeling of being around more than two other friends at any given time. The larger the group, the higher the probability of our desire to exclude a member. In high school, there was always the sole outsider, a girl we would laugh over and yet invite to every function. By analyzing her difference, we could perpetuate the lie of our uniqueness. Arriving at a group dinner at the home of an acquaintance on an evening when my husband was traveling, I found myself playing this role. “You see,” the host told the other guests, when I arrived, “I have friends outside of work.” And I saw that I was the only guest who didn’t work in the same office, handed the role of asking them each about their work projects, so they could deliver practiced speeches to intimidate their colleagues.

I’m obsessed with characters’ mothers now

Sorry, New Orleans ;)

Across the street and one house closer to the river -- separated from the crime scene only by the narrow, vacant lot where his sprawling empire of discarded furniture and faded vinyl tents had taken root -- the potbellied artist sat out on the porch of the slim camelback at 723, watching the police like they were actors in an operetta that he had paid to see. LaLambe wore his usual regalia – a battered, circusy top hat; red cummerbund and dirty tuxedo jacket, over his tan and shirtless chest prickling with white hairs like a beach bum Picasso. Andres had seen him in the same get-up, barely balancing his girth on a folding stool in Jackson Square, reaching out his cartoonish cane to pretend to trip the tourists – an opening he had perfected, for the three act play he ran every half hour, which ended on the sale of one of his clownish “local” paintings -- lurid, jewel-tone acrylics painted on found wooden garbage, depicting alligators and piano keys and daiquiri cups alongside nonsense local sayings like Making groceries or Fais do-do.

After Mavis Gallant...

In California, he’d learned to embrace the stereotype of pale loner, forfeiting oceans for the back office of his mother’s shop; school yards for library shelves. But in New York, arriving on a search to find himself, he had lost his identity. He was any man on the street in a vintage blazer, leather boots, busted-up messenger bag. And setting down his copy of The Leopard on the countertop at Veselka, he had spotted another Tancredi peering over the final pages at a plate of pierogis just like the ones he had just ordered from a waitress flashing eyes at each of them in democratic turns. Even in the Turkish baths, stripped to his nakedness, he had blinked over the azure water and seen, dripping, a flank of leg with the same tattoo as his own: his father’s name in Victorian script, a lacy type-setting he had copied from a book on the history of mourning. Even his past had been xeroxed by others, he thought, dipping his head below the water so he could cry without being seen.

But in New Orleans, he stood out against the backdrop like a Plimpton in Postwar Paris, Gaugin in Tahiti, Armstrong on the moon. And if asked what he had accomplished as a young man, he would have first said moving there. Often, as he looked on its lazy, gutted streets, he would wonder how he had gotten there and notice afresh how far he had come. He felt that way presently, as the stairs coughed him up into a long hallway that stretched, empty and unpeopled, toward a far, dark window.

using the structure of a fable

She had looked at three houses without Andres. The first was beautiful, a wedge of light in the Marigny with a courtyard of old brick, and a bathtub that a low palm was growing out of. But the landlord, a white woman in her forties who wore a straw fedora and athleisure gear as she toured Melanie through the place, warning Melanie “in the interest of full disclosure,” that the apartment had been the site of a murder. She said that seven years ago a man broke in through a pair of side windows that were now barred, apparently trying to rob someone for money for crack, and had shot a woman with a stolen pistol. The landlord said the crime had been “random,” and then through tears she said that the woman who was killed had been her friend, her “good, good friend.” Though Melanie had tried to reassure her, sitting with the landlord on a low, tattered couch, and cupping her hand around the woman’s shoulder, saying “I know, I know,” she also knew that she would not take the house. The position she had taken on the couch stared straight into the windows and their jail-like metal bars. And later, explaining it in a jokey way to Andres, who called her every evening as he walked from the library to the L train on 14th, she had said that she refused to live anywhere so glamorous as somewhere a murder had taken place.

The next house she saw was further from the core of the city. Chickens walked up and down the dirt grooves of the road. The landlord, a man her own age in workman’s gear, said “They’re re-paving this whole part soon,” as they walked past a black woman sitting on a low stoop, who watched them like she was observing the strange amusement of a parade, nodding her head to the beat of Melanie’s footfalls; the landlord’s jangling of keys. The house was enormous and empty, a dark feast of woodwork cluttered with carved cherubims, smelling of varnish and lemons. The landlord waited for her admiration as he unfurled every detail: the bamboo paper lining the kitchen drawers; the rare built-in closets with mirrored doors; the tin tiles he had sourced from a restaurant tear down that now spangled the ceiling of a bathroom painted in matte navies and creams. He repeated the phrases a “diamond in the rough,” “built with love,” and “can’t take any shortcuts.” But as Melanie stood on the porch, watching the enormous effort of his locking — four keys, twisted in three different ways — she was sure that she would not take the house. It was like a rich, indulgent pastry that could be eaten only in private. She did not imagine liking the taste.

From the moment she parked the car at the third apartment, she knew that she would not live there. Three white girls in bikini tops and cut-off jeans were sunning themselves on a short square of bermuda grass, where they’d thrown a sheer blanket patterned in an oriental paisley. They were all three studying from the same text-book, with the word “MICROBE” on the cover. The upstairs apartment was like a hotel you arrive at in the middle of the night. Formless. Unmemorable. Rooms led to other rooms, carpet where there should be carpet, wood where there should be wood. The countertops were the same as was being advertised in every magazine, television show and the views looked on trees and roads. A dog could be heard, barking. The place had no character, Melanie’s mother would have said. But to Andres, she said, “We’d be living with a bunch of party girls. And not the fun kind. The ones who love science.”

Hipster tote bags as motif

“He flipped past the grubby, canvas tote with a Brecht quote (“Art is not a mirror to reflect reality but a Hammer to Shape it”), a purple nylon number from her childhood that Andres thought made her seem homeless (“‘Never Forget.’ Brearley Remembrance Day January 27, 1995”), and a thrift store find she had bought in the suburbs (“Go Hog Wild for Environmentalism. Earth Day. Lucher, Louisiana”), which Andres was certain was somehow offensive but could not pin how seeing as pigs were not capable of arbitrating for fairer representation.”

I had to start keeping track.

Muriel Spark books I’ve read v. bought to read. To be updated. (Last update 1/5/18) If you want to read any not in italics with me, consider it a book club.

1957 'The Comforters' 1958 'Robinson' 1959 'Memento Mori' 1960 'The Ballad of Peckham Rye' 'The Bachelors' 1961 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' 1963 'The Girls of Slender Means' 1965 'The Mandelbaum Gate' 1968 'The Public Image' 1970 'The Driver's Seat' 1971 'Not to Disturb' 1973 'The Hothouse by the East River' 1974 'The Abbess of Crewe' 1976 'The Takeover' 1979 'Territorial Rights' 1981 'Loitering with Intent' 1984 'The Only Problem' 1988 'A Far Cry from Kensington' 1990 'Symposium' 1996 'Reality and Dreams' 2000 'Aiding and Abetting' 2004 'The Finishing School'

Rawness + empathy

The spit-polished shine of classic news writing can often make a problem seem further away rather than shove it bloody and steaming below a reader’s nose. And with the liability issues that surround reporting on sexual misconduct claims, our language becomes so stultified, bogged down by legalese. Situations that, when re-eneacted on television, spur us to empathy and horror become gauzy, gray, unseen.

Look at the sentences I just wrote, for example. “Surround” is vague enough that you can’t see that I’m not actually pointing to a specific wrongdoer; “Claims” allows wiggle room for the (outrageous) viewpoint that every sexual misconduct claim ever filed was false; and “misconduct” is a legal term that umbrellas harassment, which could mean assault, which could mean physical assault, which could mean rape. An “allegation?” That just means something someone said happened. And yes, that can mean anything. “Situations”? “At the heart of”? Anything, anywhere. I could “claim” I live in “the heart of” America though geographically I should be in America’s left kidney, depending on how we position our collective corpus to face the heavens.

This language makes what women say happened to them feel more distant. Let me say that again: our courts restrict our writers to describe Rape in terms that alienate us from its victims.

Plus... The words themselves don’t exactly do anything to bolster womens’ voices.

“Misconduct” sounds like something childish-- a prank that lands our cowboy hero in boring old jail. Aren’t “claims” what gets filed in those lame back offices where insurance workers sort out our catastrophes, our mistakes? “Alleged” is even worse; Americans mostly hear it in relation to some awful trial for some boldface crime. And “Harassment?” “Stop harassing me,” we unfortunately say to everyone, ever, including but not restricted to our younger brothers and those pesky canvassers who show up on our doorsteps begging charity.

So I was heartened to see Variety’s latest reporting on sexual misconduct claims (see what I did there). The piece describes how “Lauer... was paranoid about being followed by tabloid reporters” and goes on to quote a bunch of people who worked with him and apparently did not feel the same way. Those people are the brave, honest employees who spoke to reporters.

Reading the rawness of their quotes, I was reminded of how rarely I see it.

#mattlauer

Irony --> Fashion --> Shame

He’d bought the boots in a dusty shop in Denham Springs on one of their day trips; American eagles, embossed onto the navy alligator skin, held pairs of slanted shotgun rifles in their beaks and together they’d laughed hopelessly over the pattern until he had tried them on and found that they fit snugly, and she’d said, They’re actually very good with that jealous twinge in her voice, so that he knew she was probably telling the truth. Though he had still been embarrassed to hand them to the cashier who said Oh, how beautiful slightly under her breath as she scanned the $12 price-tag.

Skipping through time to defuse sentimentalism

All this was told through muffled tears and big, watery eyes that reminded Andres of his short tenure at a musical theater summer camp, where he had tried to direct a troupe of rich, suburban fourteen-year-old girls in hand-torn rags to infuse “A Hard-Knock Life” with real feeling. “Pretend your parents are dead,” he had shouted at them, wincing even as he heard himself. But it had worked immediately, the girls’ faces filling with what appeared to be real sentiment. And he kept thinking of that summer as Grace Gilbert in the back seat, and on the drive home, and as they pulled the sheets over the green velvet sofa in the front room kept repeating like a song she sang to herself: “They had a gun. They had a gun. They had a gun.”

Diagnosing a certain disease

He had sought out the old in New York at Caffe Dante’s and McSorley’s but also the old busted grates and the jostle of the cabs. He huffed the bindings in the aisles of the bookshops and as the subway car rattled over the river, stood in the person-shaped windows, watching for the moment when the tint of the glass seemed to turn the river sepia, when the scratches looked like dust in the old film, when the city like an old photo of itself of a photo of itself of a photo. On Madison Avenue Andres startled at the site of J.P. Morgan’s library, like a lost white poodle in the midst of Madison’s midday rush. And trying to enter, had found himself buzzed inside a lobby of glass, where a guard directed him to a stand selling tickets, and Andres had understood that what was old in New York had only survived like that ancient girl in Argentina, found trapped in her cage of ice.

Not so in New Orleans where the old was everywhere and left to rot, kept out in the sun, enjoyed. A place for parties. Who cared if the deck tilted, the roof caved, the walls crawled with mold. Bugs underfoot – squashed. Weeds let to grow up through the brickwork, around the columns. And beneath it all the smell of the river thumping like a bass note – salt, then fish, then death.

Write what you know, they said

She swiveled, the rosy lights of the mirror giving her a carnival look as she flashed him a smile so fake it had become conceptual, a commentary on other smiles.

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THE PART I EDITED OUT