following the simple instructions
Monday 29 October 2007 | 5 cookies in the jar
Well, the Un remains a big contender in the search engines for seasonal query how to pronounce Samhain. And we’re still #1 for metahemeralism. Other than that, the DreamHost stats show only that the majority of readers have bailed from our mostly neglected, seldom-updated, entirely self-absorbed experience of…a great big enormous nothing, like a jar. Go us!
In other news…six weeks left in the semester. I turn down the ringer on the answering machine, don’t return the calls of either Mandarin or Persephone who both leave very sweet messages every few days, fail to finish poems (though I start at least one every day, scrawled on the backs of TA seminar handouts or departmental junk mail), spend too much time online looking at sewing machines and bicycles, clean the house obsessively, watch movies with the Brujo (in companionable avoidance of various unpleasant tasks—now he’s finally seen Lost in Translation, I’ve seen Peter Weir’s 1979 apocalyptic oddity The Last Wave and maybe tonight it’ll be Five Easy Pieces), visit cactus nurseries with the Brujo, eat fish tacos with the Brujo, take naps with the Brujo…you get the idea. I’m having way too much fun living with him and not nearly enough misery doing academic work—and now there are only six weeks left in which to do it. TA seminar requires an 18-page paper on something or another, and while I can write 18 pages in my sleep, I suppose it should be researched and annotated and argue something coherent and all that. Then too there are several assignments for magical realism, which include finishing Márquez and Allende, making some kind of sense out of Pedro Páramo, which I frankly loathed, and writing handouts for The Tin Drum and “my” two songs, “Las Golondrinas” and “Perfidia.” And the usual personal life weirdness, including why did I just get a $50 phone bill from Santa Fe, and can I really be bothered to go to a hearing for my parking ticket when I could easily just pay the $29, and why is the writing department apparently shorting me $1K worth of fellowship for the spring semester and should I do something about it?
October haunts, invariably. I probably need a shrink, but I’m too happy. I retreat to my study for hours, lolling on the spare bed reading fiction by Jim Crace (The Pesthouse, oh my, and Quarantine) and Denis Johnson (Fiskadoro, The Name of the World, anything I can get my hands on), reading poetry by Cate Marvin (like Crace, entirely thanks to Miss Bovary) and Sarah Vap. I dream about Maman, who’s always alive and outrageous and wearing fabulous $200 straw hats; I dream about the Monk, who’s always innocent and blonde and wronged. I wake up so saturated with the feeling-tone of these dreams that I stagger dazed through the mornings, sturggling [sic] to relate to the tanned Midwestern extroverts at the State School, whose football team is undefeated (the Brujo and I keep track on Saturday nights because they set off fireworks every time they score). Forced to talk and interact for twelve-hour days, I then come home and don’t want to talk to anyone but the obliging shrieking cat (who’s still settling in, herself). The weather is magnificent. The Brujo and I cook Kimber’s amazing gigli pasta with three-cheese tomato sauce and sautéed squash; now that it’s not 100 degrees in the kitchen, we can stand to have the stovetop on and thus he begins experimentally to use his pots and pans again, after many years in flight from domesticity. Coffee filters, I write blearily on the shopping list, which is stuck to the fridge with a Santa Fe souvenir magnet; bread, pumpkin butter. I shave my legs weekly, and the backs of my calves have tiny bumps. I don’t know where to buy azulene oil here.
Wednesday night before last I dolled up in Vincent Millay rig, midnight-blue plunging-neckline polished-cotton full-skirted retro dress ($13 from Ross!), oxblood pumps and yes, stockings and lipstick, and read from Doe and House to an assemblage of my peers. I think it went okay. House was a lot dirtier and more raw than I remembered. A couple of people said afterwards they wanted copies of one or the other. The Brujo bought me a vanilla cream Italian soda, as he does every Wednesday for the weekly MFA reading, and was warm and reassuring next to me before and after. He said later he laughed at all the jokes. I don’t know if anyone else realized there were any jokes.
We clamber up boulderous mountains on the weekend, seeking Peniocereus greggii lurking beneath creosote shrubs, and I scratch my legs to shit, getting separated from the Brujo (who’s calling me, but I can’t hear him nor him me, because of the weird granite acoustics) and suddenly finding a shard of creamy thin surely pre-Columbian pottery. It’s a rich, smooth chocolate brown with glittering micaceous flecks, and thumbprints still visible. I remove it from its shelter underneath a rocky ledge, place it carefully on a stone tabletop to show the Brujo, and then the faeries hide it again and we can’t find it and I suffer agonies thinking about it being dashed over by the wind and broken.
If not for the infrequent but regular nauseating shocks of reminder that I have hundreds of hours of work left to do, including the dreaded grading of papers, it would all be sort of like this passage from Weetzie Bat:
She was still living in Fifi’s cottage with Dirk and Duck and My Secret Agent Lover Man. The film was quite a success, and it brought Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and their friends money for the first time. They bought a mint 1965 T-bird, and Weetzie went to Gräu and bought a jacket made out of peach and rose and gold silk antique kimonos. They had enough to go to Noshi for sushi whenever they wanted (which was a lot because Weetzie was addicted to the hamachi, which only cost $1.50 an order). They also ate guacamole tostadas at El Coyote (which had, they agreed, some of the best decorations in Hollywood, especially the painting with the real little lights right in it), putting the toppings of guacamole, canned vegetables, Thousand Island dressing, and cheese into the corn tortillas that were served between two plates to keep them warm. Weetzie also bought beads and feathers and white Christmas lights and roses that she saved and dried. She decorated everything in sight with these things until the whole house was a collage of glitter and petals.
“What does happily ever after mean anyway?” Weetzie said.
Of course Weetz’s solution to her contentment is to start badgering Max to reproduce with her; but the Brujo and I have already propagated an electronic facebook baby, and there are the demanding canine and feline besides. No, my complication is probably going to look more like wanderjahr, with some literary ambition thrown in. I still haven’t heard whether I’ll get to be in Oaxaca for the winter break, nor have the B. and I found petsetters for our Baja trip. And I won’t know about my course proposal until November 5. And I give finals on December 6-7, and suddenly I am sick of this paragraph—
That’s October talking. I want to hide and curl and brood, and the world I’ve chosen keeps turning me outward, outward. The suicide of a post-doc at the State School turned me morbid and Scorpionic last week and I can’t shake it, despite taking stabs at a poem circling the unknown man’s death (five a.m., seventh floor). I wear my favorite new cloth liner, the one with Dia de los Muertos skulls on it, and think about the snakes and myriapodia the B. and I saw at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum this weekend. An agitated navy-tipped scolopendra; dozing docile-looking Gila monsters; an albino gopher snake who tried to taste my molecules through the glass with his frustrated agile forked tongue, surprisingly wet and pink. And the river otters, which the Brujo obligingly photographed for Mandarin. The false sense that the mountain lion was just a big puddytat and you could easily scratch beneath her chin and behind her ears and make her purr.
5 cookies in the jar
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Neither fatal nor uninteresting. I don’t know why October does inspire such brooding thoughts of climbing under a big fluffy comforter and hiding until spring comes or of obliterating one’s online existence, cutting the phone wires, despite the need to know one is thought of or perhaps exactly because of it, indulging in shared food and movies with one’s beloved, and wondering about the responsibilities others have bestowed upon one, finding the balance between inwardness and outwardness precarious and exhausting. One cannot blame the weather because it is glorious weather… How does one accept the cyclical nature of moods and seasons without feeling utterly invalidated in the experience of them? And what the hell is one trying to do this in the third person for?
You look bloody fabulous. And the B. is all that and a bag of chips. Please post river otters!
I might have more to say for myself, if I weren’t getting up at four and had already eaten dinner.
LOVE LOVE LOVE
Your ever-lovin goose-down Fruitbat
Kind of a lame post title, but the right one refused to come to me. As far as why one is doing this (successfully, I think, not merely “trying”) in the third person: because one knows this is a weirdly sophisticated and adult way to have a weird amount of linguistic fun? :o) And as far as the B. being all that–yeah, but, so, why am I going to have to nurse him through his fatal lung cancer, why, Why, WHY?!?
Thank you for the post title change! Among the lessons of four days of art with middle aged women was that the impulse to bond by putting your own stuff down is a good one to resist. Again with the impersonal and passive constructions, which have become ironic and political in a “mistakes were made, lessons were learned” sort of way! And linguistic fun is a much more charitable explanation than over-identification and not being sure where the appropriate pronoun is you and where it is I.
It’s funny cos only a couple of weeks ago were we talking about the passive voice in class; I asked students to bring in examples and one guy came up with “Bombs were dropped,” which I thought was brilliant—I mean, in terms of rhetorically eliding the agent of action, not in terms of taking moral responsibility. So….yeah, it can get messy when we (you? I? them?) leave in that process-piece which creative writing workshops like to call “prewriting,” and which I call (in ENG 101) “throat-clearing and pointing.” What Ezra Pound is trying to say is that she wonders when/if her prewriting will ever NOT be instinctively self-deprecating? And for some reason she is saying it in the third person? With question marks?
Thank you for your deep cookie generosity. I don’t know where I’d be this fall without you. Even more addlepated than I am, prolly.