emptiness has its solace
Saturday 24 January 2004 | I like a cookie
The pointed plangent pungency of educated guess is not helping much. It is possible it’s even making things worse?
you broke me bodily
the heart ain’t the half of it
and I’ll never learn to laugh at it
in my good-natured way
in fact I’m laughing less in general
but I learned a lot at my own funeral
and I knew you’d be the death of me
so I guess that’s the price I pay
Cranberry zinger, dull as dishwater, can’t even take the time to type this but oh God I’m typing anyway aren’t I. I’m eyeball-deep in the Manuscript, aching sciatic everything and shaking and weeping and all the rest of it. Last night Mrs. Librarian and I embraced in mutual shared hysteria—she’s putting off a big graphic design project for a national glossy, and we’re both feeling insane—she said in a hushed awe, it hasn’t been like this since before I knew the Librarian. I’m not quite that bad but I did feel, for most of yesterday, as though I were coming off something.
And the Librarian and I spent a precious hour and a half in the library on the hill, trying to coerce three Macs into printing my own most recent effort. Finally one of them did. We discussed in the meantime: if you could only have ten bands/artists/poets on your CD player for all time, in permanant shuffle (but you can have their entire available oeuvre), then who? We contended and defended, I wanted Joni Mitchell, he Tom Waits; Emily Dickinson, James Joyce. Why are you trying to change my mind, he laughed, in the middle of a hotly debated Bruce Cockburn. We don’t have to collaborate on this too, you know.
And M. looks at me uncompromisingly and says he feels used. And I say, wrenched and wrong-headed, please do anything you need to do.
Still I think I’d stoop for you, Ani confesses quietly. This album is horrifically uneven and raw but you know, I have no problem with that.
Mandarin tells me about a fellow monk who was accidentally given someone else’s bowls, and sat foodless for an entire meal period. But why couldn’t s/he just eat out of them? I mean, I’ve heard of worse…I once drank a woman’s washing-up water because the server had sadistically (and not in an attractive Fiennes way) given her an ocean; so I got to practice with my raging germ phobia.
Not only is Anthony Lane utterly brainy but he’s also dishy and he’s approximately my age. One both loathes him (if one is as unpublished as I am) and slavers with lust at the same time. M. made sure I watched him on Charlie Rose last year and I nearly choked on my quesadilla, because I’d thought he would be about 65 and paunchy and with a gelled-down comb-over—not Jude Law!
I’m beginning to believe I gained much of my anglophilia from reading countless, and I really mean countless, Mills and Boon romances. I remember being puzzled early on as to why a man would touch a woman’s breast. I mean, he’s grown-up, right? I was genuinely mystified as to why it was any more erotic than her elbow. Of course since then I’ve passed through the entire dialectic, and know a lot more about elbows now.
The cloud dragons offer: how can you not like an organization which is as modestly titled as the Institute for Interesting People?
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