Some Thoughts
As few Fridays ago, I read from my new book, On a Clear Day, at Ben Seretan’s book release party at Troost. There was a crowd, spooky green lighting, and a DJ who played Moog music between readers. Ben read excerpts from Past the Breakers, his words underscored by ambient cassette drone. Afterwards, Hannah, Dan, and I ate lobster rolls. I remember a Greenpoint where I couldn’t even imagine eating lobster rolls. The neighborhood feels like the East Village now, girls barhopping in Canada Goose jackets and clogs. The $1,200 hoods are trimmed with dog fur. Dan sent me pics of the anti-Canada Goose posters that’ve spread through the West Village and Chelsea. Before he’d sent them, when he’d only told me about them, I imagined the posters black and white, photocopied and wheatpasted. But our resistance graphics have changed: the plastic decal posters feature hi-definition photographs of bloody, slaughtered wolves.
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After an afternoon meeting at BRIC, I bought a copy of Jen George’s The Babysitter at Rest at Greenlight Books and read it at the Greene Grape Annex. The next night, I read David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, which Dan had mailed to my office almost a year ago. The script sat on the shelf for so long, ignored for no good reason, but I loved it as soon as I opened it, staying up crying until the end. Allison and I went to Franklin Park to hear Mary Gaitskill read an unearthly story accompanied by a synth soundtrack that sounded like haunted lemon candy. A story unlike anything of hers that I’ve previously read, the kind of surreal where the character slides from one moment to the next as though in an Escher drawing. “Where is my bag of treasure?” the character asks at one point, of a bag of treasure she’s stolen from the Devil, and an old woman says, “it’s inside of you, and you will tear yourself apart to retrieve it. This is what we call suffering, here on Earth.”
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I’m 80 pages into Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. I’ve already alienated at least one person by explaining the Koch family patriarch’s involvements with Stalin and Hitler at dinner in a restaurant in Brooklyn Heights while Joni Mitchell sang, “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now” on the speakers, before he insinuated that he, too, was from a holding company family and crossed his corduroy legs and sighed. I have to take breaks from reading this book; it makes me feel like I have a dark cloud on my chest. I bored the spoiled bachelor. He made me feel like I had a dark cloud on my chest. Can I explain the disdain that wealthy men have for people who aren’t like them? A Park Slope dad removed my belongings from my cafe table and sneered “remember not to smile!” when I said “oh, hello, I’m sitting here.” Rex Tillerson doesn’t want state leaders to look him in the eye. “I really don’t know clouds at all.” The only people who prosper from conflict are the families whose shells bill both sides for fuel. The man told me his father was sick. I knew without asking what he would inherit. He wanted me to know. He always wants you to know, to distinguish him, to know him without asking.
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Hannah and I saw As I Lay Dying, a theatre adaption of the Faulker novel, at BRIC. Dan and I saw Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s film As You Are at Cinema Village. I met Miles when our bands played together upstate almost seven years ago. (What have I accomplished in the past seven years? Miles made a movie.) That show was the last show I played with Alex. On the final bar of the fifth song of our set, the metal legs of my keyboard stand collapsed - they melted - that’s the only way I can describe them, warped like vines, and the sudden, hideous crash: The keyboard flipped backwards, fell directly onto its power plug and quarter-inch direct output, cracking the internal circuit boards through the external speakers. Distortion howled through the PA. Everyone clapped. They thought I’d destroyed my instrument on purpose.
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Whole lives are dedicated to a certain kind of obliteration, an earnest erasure in American life equally present as the microwave background radiation of the American Dream: the denial of the fact that one can’t wake one day and transcend their class. I loved a code-switcher once, like me, a translator: attorney, not lawyer; physician, not doctor; rubbish, not trash; tissue, not Kleenex. Not that he would openly admit to the analysis. He grew up in a trailer park. He wanted quiet. In high school, I had many friends who’d only ever spoken one language: One man refused to see how easy it is for a toddler to pull a trigger. He couldn’t empathize with any accident that couldn’t surface under his own protected childhood spell. In his denial, I saw his cultivated omniscience fail. My code-switcher, on the other hand, I loved his journalistic anxiety: he saw everything, heard everything, so hyper-aware of status and stature and how he fit, including where he fit in my own words, especially when my words were poorly chosen, and for a brief window, he loved me for them regardless as the men seated around us in restaurants continued to spend their entire lives analyzing, scrutinizing, parsing anything but who they were.
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I have a photograph of me, crying, at the back of the venue. Snot on the hem of my dress, which I’d used as a Kleenex, a tissue, crouched in a corner, out of humiliated sight. I’d saved for a year to buy that weighted-key Korg. Miles’s dad approached me and said, “you sounded wonderful. No one knew that the keyboard was an accident. It looked like you did it on purpose,” but I could see in his eyes that he knew it hadn’t happened on purpose. “It sucks,” I said, with a sad, humiliated sob, thinking, what a sad slob I am. If I had known Miles’s last name, I would have known that the kind man was Pierre Joris, the legendary poet that I had only just read, scrutinized the works of, in school. I would have said something, but I didn’t have this information yet, I wasn’t even a poet yet, so I said, “I’m sure I’ll find a way to fix it,” and Miles’s parents left, leaving only the bands and the venue owner and sound person in the room. And Miles and his bandmate helped me bag my decrepit equipment, wind the cables, Alex and me and the venue owner and Miles and his band saying, things break, it’s only equipment. Only music is made to last.
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My co-workers and I filmed a teaching artist at an elementary school in Park Slope. The sun flickered through the classroom window and I spun the camera on its tripod to catch the light but autofocus dimmed the window bars’ metal mesh into a dark, backlit mass. The artist led the class in a classical Indian dance. Split into groups, each group in a corner of the room, the students circled to the music; the circles widened and closed, then unwound. When the music was over, they gathered in the center of the room and the artist dressed them in silk scarves folded and tucked and knotted into saris and dhotis. She asked for a volunteer. They waved their hands; she picked a girl in pink sweats to pose at the front of the room. The girl lifted a cornrow braid and raised her right fist so that the artist could wrap the silk around her torso. That’s when the students pointed to the girl’s new robe, their own right fists in the air. They shouted, Lady Liberty! Lady Liberty!
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”Philosophy learns from art that truth does not demonstrate itself but presents itself,” writes Jean Luc Nancy. I went to the Friends of Park Slope Library book sale fundraiser. I bought The Beginners by Rebecca Wolff and read it on Saturday and Sunday. I cancelled a date. I’m more interested in learning something new than repeating myself. I want more than anything to absorb enough genius that one day I might create something that reaches an audience. I can’t stand the thought of spending one more minute sitting in a restaurant with someone who is ghosting other women. I want to sound hopeful and ecstatic, but is hopeful and ecstatic realistic? I remember sitting with an established poet who’d designated my manuscript “Runner Up” in a contest. No one was around, so she said, “Do you want to know how to win the contests?” Of course. “Celebrate something. It doesn’t matter what. That’s how you’ll win the big money.” Be indiscriminate in your manufactured ecstasy. I want to be more generous than this.
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”Have you ever seen the offspring of a lion eat grass?” -Ijeoma Umebinyuo
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After the play at BRIC, the producer and director opened the floor for a talk-back. They asked the audience to describe what they’d seen, to share lessons, impressions, revelations. One person said: “the need for social services.” Another said: “the way our families teach us to survive, even if they are ill-equipped, they teach us whatever they can.” Another said: “like Odysseus, the circular journey, but broken.” All I could think of was how wrapped-up I’d been, reading Faulkner in high school, with the meaning of “my mother is a fish.” What did it mean? My teacher pushed our English class to think metaphorically, think critically, think of the Christ narrative, think outside of the Christ narrative, but I felt blocked by meaning. The statement - “my mother is a fish” - the absurd fact of its explosiveness, felt as language-less as a sneeze. Hearing the phrase blurted onstage - “my mother is a fish!” - offered a new pleasure - the pleasure of witnessing a character give a depleted corner of her world a name, of watching an actor unearth a world from her body, over and over again, with the sidelong pleasure of knowing that the expression wasn’t original but scribed, not new but already ancient, years old, above my suspended disbelief; in the audience, I agreed to witness not a character, not an actor, but a person exclaim the absurd with a forcefulness that approached relief.
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(Photos: 1. Prospect Park, 2. my new books, The Stag and On a Clear Day, and 3. Prospect Park, in the snow.)
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