I don’t even believe in jeebus
Saturday 31 January 2004 | I like a cookie
Poor David Denby! But really, working alongside Anthony—it’s worse than being Midge next to Barbie—it’s enough to make anyone turn to Internet porn for solace.
I haven’t written in a gazillion hours or more, mostly because the faeries are eating my innards slowly and voluptuously. Ghost World was watched, and worthily so; and a novelization of the life of Wittgenstein was read (The World As I Found It by Bruce Duffy, recommended me so long ago by dear G. Lee, as was that book by Nicholas someone—Something Monsters?—ah, I’m so fucking normal) and it too well worth itself. I kept picturing Almasy instead of Ludwig in the middle of the prewar “nervous splendor,” but there was far too much about Russell and Moore.
Then, a three-hour phone call with a sobbing suicidal suffering Parisienne was undergone, until my phone beeped and hung up on us just as she wanted to know if I loved her or Mandarin more—if I ever thought about her, or if I thought about Mandarin instead. I flinched, thought of fifty different answers in the space between two beeps, and then gave up and told her, truthfully, that I fell asleep last night thinking about her body. I didn’t tell her I made myself stop, because I was lying next to my sound-asleep husband and it was two in the morning and I never know what to do with these old thoughts, the shaven stubble of her white calves ten years ago, when she hennaed her hair a greenish-black and fucked me over for a man half a dozen times. I didn’t tell her that I have an internal edict regarding my otherwise excessive fantasy life—a stern clause which is that no matter what I’m not allowed to think about Mandarin, ever, because she’s very happily married and because I don’t feel I’ve been thusly invited to muse on my aging memories of her beautiful everything. I also didn’t tell her, and maybe haven’t even ever told Mandarin, that I haven’t forgotten anything—that I remember it all, that I will see her eyes, shining above an armful of undeservedly wine-colored roses, on my deathbed. Or anyway I hope I will.
And to answer Mandarin’s Plath question—yes, Miss Sylvia did indeed “sizzle in the blue god’s volts.” When the insulin shock therapy didn’t work. I just finished a new bio of her and Hughes, Her Husband, and have a new crazy-scholar theory that her last two “missing” journals are hidden somewhere in the attic or walls or floorboards of Ted’s mum’s house in Yorkshire, or Court Green in Devon—anyone want to go Byatting with me?
M. has the cold too now, after a day being brainy discussing Poincare and Whitehead at St John’s. It’s snowing, he’s out to dinner with the other brainy people, and I’m going to put on thicker sweatpants and pick him up and drag him to see Lost in Translation—Scarlett Johanssen hooked me in the Terry Zwigoff film. More than that even, the M. and I were entranced by the massive wild inexplicable Hindi surf music scene at the beginning (of Ghost World). We watched it twice again after the film was over. Dear Lord, that alone was worth $2.99. It out-Tarentinos Quentin himself.
And in the realm of too much sharing: at around three a.m., as I was casting helplessly about for a new fantasy object, all old girlfriends now off-limits, I realized that since August of last year I haven’t indulged in one single vivid imagination about shagging that most logical of persons, the ravishingly lovely man to whom I am actually wed. I got chills and welling eyes, and then couldn’t think about anything, because it’s all a bloody shrieking abortive mess and I couldn’t move because it was three a.m. and he was asleep and I needed to stay under the covers where it was warm(er).
Okay. Three nice things that happened since I last posted. Come on, Un.
1) comestion of much junk food because I’m in pain and don’t care to be healthy—thus, salt and vinegar crisps! peach-flavoured (oh totally artificial of course) instant oatmeal! and my favourite bad thing which will someday no doubt give me adult-onset diabetes, whole wheat spaghettini with plain double-concentrate tomato paste straight from the tube (i.e., fructose);
2) a very flattering email from the Film Critic (though he too finds my electronic influx of prose overwhelming and intimidating, though at least he’s honest enough to admit it’s primarily the latter), who confesses to liking The Orb and owning all episodes of The Simpsons; and
3) a packet full of Guardian/Weekly/NYer clips from Mandarin, my own personal news digest of the hilarious, the bizarre, the thought-provoking. Of course I want to answer them all one by one, and will, but on paper, continuing my “daily mail to Mandarin” tradition of three days’ standing.
Can I post this, torrid and shameless and full of romantic agnoy, mine and that of other people, just as it is? Can I live with myself if I do is, I suppose, a better question. Or, can I live with the faeries, dancing to sixties Hindi film music in my abdomen as they are. Celebrating their hours of gory freedom.
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