how much should this really be allowed to bother me?
Friday 30 January 2004 | I like a cookie
I mean, it’s got a really groovy cover and all. Maybe I should focus on that, and not on the fact that the incredibly hot young woman who wrote the forthcoming novel Here Kitty Kitty (Little Brown, May 2004) actually beat the pants off me (oh don’t I wish) at a dumb poetry contest in college in the nineties.
I remember vividly one poem she read, about frat guys and beers on the front porch and ceiling fans. I think the frat guys turned over the refrigerator on the front porch, or maybe the fridge was holding all the beers, and then they turned it over. Not for any reason in particular, other than it seemed like an entertaining thing to do on a summer night. I ached during that poem, wanted to shed my uncomfortable manly laced shoes and baggy pants and prissy pleated shirt and plop down under that ceiling fan in my cotton underwear and taste her lipstick on the rim of the beer can. I fear a lot of my current aesthetic probably has its roots in looking up at her on the podium and thinking, starrily, she’s so cool and wild and bare-skinned somehow, and I’m so desperately square. I’m not a bit surprised she turned to fiction.
But in case I was counting, which I was this makes five in fiction (including Nicole Krauss, Zadie Smith, Trezza Azzopardi, and Jhumpa Lahiri) and four in poetry (Andrew Zawacki, Nick Laird, Don Share, and now Jennifer Dick). Who Have Books Out. Books which were, in some cases, nominated for the Booker Prize. And, oh yes, who are people with whom I went to school or somehow know personally, with exactly zero degrees of separation.
I am an idiot, I am not getting any editing done, and I’m going into Santa Fe to rent and watch movies with M. Probably Ghost World if I have anything to say about it, which in point of fact I do not. And after today my New New Year’s Resolution (since Persephone and I decided yesterday that 2004 will officially begin on the first of February) is not to be so goddamned self-engrossed. I tells you I’m done with it, comparing, assessing; the covert operation, the surreptitious point of every story I tell being, “why I am such a unique and beautiful snowflake.” Even telling stories on M., claiming credit for his damaged brilliance or complicated, implicated Anglo-Indian upbringing as if it’s my own. And none of it getting me any closer to writing what’s under the skin, between the legs, coating the scalp like sweat, scratching at the door like a plaintive angry raccoon. And lethally premenstrual. And—and what. And something. And I don’t know what.
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