The Sheila Variations

Paris, Texas

I've always loved Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, and been a bit haunted by it. I'll get to Dean Stockwell later - but for now, just want to mention the beauty of this film, and by that I mean - its look. The art direction, the cinematography. What I love about it is that there are no 'sets' - and it appears that most of it is done with natural lighting (whether or not that is actually the case is irrelevant - if there ARE lots of klieg lights offscreen then it is even more of an accomplishment, because it all looks so natural). But it has a hyper-realism. A heightened sense of reality and beauty and desolation. It is NOT realism - in the way that something like Dog Day Afternoon is realism - which has no stage lights, no effects, no fancy camera moves, no set-ups, the actors aren't wearing makeup, that's real sweat you see pouring off of Cazale and Pacino - it has the feeling of a documentary. Paris, Texas is not like that, although it has a very unprepossessing manner, never in your face, never clever. Sunsets are beautiful, rain on a windshield is melancholy - but Paris, Texas digs into these things, submerges itself in these prosaic things, into the colors, the textures, the LOOK, so that the landscape itself becomes poetic, evocative of something else - like images seen in a dream. Good dream or nightmare is unclear. Most of the movie takes place on the road, in crappy little motels, and convenience stores - which are most definitely not sets. It was filmed on location. I love that kind of "found object" movie-making - and so the location scout is to be congratulated. Because that's the thing, isn't it. Reality is often more vivid, and beautiful, and creepy, and transcendent than we can ever let ourselves believe in real life. That's the beauty of movies, good ones. They can help us to see. To look.

Like I said, I'll get to the acting at some other time. I'm working up to a big Dean Stockwell onslaught (as is probably obvious) ... but for now, let's just see. Let's just look.

The look of Paris, Texas reminds me of the look of some of Kwik Stop, Michael's movie. The landscape as HYPER reality, poetry seen in the mundane, the sets look "found" - not created by the filmmakers, they exist outside of the movie, in reality. Life is sometimes bizarre, motels are sometimes absurd ... down the rabbit hole. Yet they exist.

(Punk)

Same look and feel. Intense colors, dream-like, and yet not surreal. It looks hyper real ... the way reality feels like in a dream.

The Books: "Little Black Book of Stories" - 'Body Art' (A.S. Byatt)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

The next book on the shelf is the last short story collection by AS Byatt, and this one is called Little Black Book of Stories - I'm excerpting from the second story, called "Body Art". Damian Becket is a gynocologist. One day, after his rounds, he sees a kind of grubby sullen young woman, sitting in one of the wards, making decorations to put up. He doesn't know who she is. Turns out, she is from a local art school - the hospital had asked for volunteers to put up Christmas decorations, and she was the only one who applied. Damian Becket is an art-lover and art-collector - and the hospital itself is decorated with various modern paintings, donated by the artists and by galleries. It gives the hospital a very un-hospital-like feeling. Damian was married - to an actress - but the marriage didn't work out. He had been Catholic - but his faith has now completely lapsed. He sort of befriends Daisy, the art student - but he is an awkward man, and she is sullen, and also vaguely homeless. Turns out, she has been camping out in the hospital basement, undetected. He discovers her there and offers her a room in his apartment, at least until she can get something more permanent. She stays a week - and every night, she comes into his room and they make love. Without speaking about it, or "dating", or anything like that. It is very uncharacteristic for Damian to have casual sex - although there isn't anything casual about sex with Daisy. Maybe I should just say sex outside of a relationship - because you can have pretty intense connected sex with a stranger, all the myths notwithstanding. Daisy is not a sympathetic character, not really - she scorns modern art, which is Damian's great passion, and she has a lot of anger and apathy towards things he holds sacred. But 'sacred' - maybe that's not the right word - especially in lieu of the expert below.

Excerpt from Little Black Book of Stories

He did not lose faith as a consequence of her death. Nor as a consequence of its effect on Eleanor, who now wriggled away from his body as though he was going to damage or contaminate her. Nor out of any moral outrage - though he felt some - at the Church's interference in processes he wanted to believe were human and natural. (That included contraception. Human beings were not animals. They cared for children for perhaps a third of the normal human life. They needed to havev the number of children they could decently and responsibly care for. Their sexual desires were unfortunately not periodic in the way of cows and bitches. Women were perpetually on heat unless, as in the case of his wife, the heat had been turned off. It followed that contraception was natural.) He lost his faith as a result of a vision.

The vision was conventional enough, in one sense. It was a vision of Christ on the Corss - not a heavely appearance, but the result of an unnaturally close inspection of the carving that hung in his local church, a painted wooden carving, neither good nor bad, a mediocre run-of-the-mill carving of a human body, unpleasantly suspended from nails hammered through the palms of hands neither writhing in pain nor distorted by stress, but spread wide in blessing. He thought, The anatomy is bad, the weight would rip through muscle and sinew long before the man was dead. Some crucifixes did support the feet. This one did not. They were crossed, and improbably nailed through both ankles. Some care had been taken to depict the agony of the muscles of the torso, the arms and the thighs. The gash under the heart had realistic slipperiness where it opened; unreal immobilised paint-blood spilled from it, in runnels someone had taken pleasure in varying. There were no bloodstains on the loincloth, which carefully obscured the sex. The face was stylised. Long, unlied, with downcase eyelids, closed as in sleep, and a mouth slightly opened, showing no teeth. More artistic blood had been dribbled from the clutches of the crown of thorns in the abundant shaggy hair. The dead or dying flesh - the carving was simplly not good enough for him to be sure which - was creamy in colour, with pink highlights. He thought, I belong to a religion which worships the form of a dead or dying man. He realised that he did not believe and never had believed, either that the man's bodily death had been reversed, or that he ascended into heaven, for there was no heaven, and all human descriptions of heaven made it pathetically clear that we can't imagine it well enough to make it at all attractive as a prospect. He would not meet poor Rosalie in any such place, and he did not think he would even want to. He did not believe that this one unpleasant death had in any way cancelled out the sins of the earth: Rosalie's wildness, the Church's obstructiveness and bloodymindedness, his grandfather's deaths in bomb blasts in wartime ( paternal) and peacetime (maternal). He never had believed any of it. He felt for the shape of the time - his whole life - when he would have said he believed, and was aghast to sense it like a great humming ice-box behind him, in which what he had been had kept its form, neither dead nor alive, suspended. He was a human bowed down under the weight of a man-sized icebox.

He went on looking at the figure hanging by his hands, with outrage and then with pity. There was a man, who had been dying, and then dead. And there was an idea of who he was, which was a dream, which was a poem, which was a moral cage, which was a film over a clear vision of things. A man is his body, his body is a man.

From which it followed that Damian Becket, having straightened his back, and shaken the ice-box from his sholuders to melt he hoped, at the feet of the lifeless carving, had to concern himself with bodies. His vision had not taught him that everything was without meaning, that chaos reigned. There was order, but order was in time and space and the body. If a man - who had seen the ice-box - wanted to make sense of his life and live well, he must concern himself with the body. There were multifarious reasons why in his case it was the female body. His decision to become a medical student, at the age when he should have been about to earn his living, offended his mother and made his wife extremely angry. He was not quite sure why she was so very angry, and could not find out. Communication is much harder in intimate fear and anger than between casual companions. Silence spread into their lives. He went to London and she did not. She went to church, and he did not.

The iPhone line

Here is my favorite photo I took this morning of the iPhone line. I couldn't believe my eyes. The shoes really make the photo.

More photos of the iPhone line (and other things) here on my Flickr page.

Erik!!

I cannot find your email - and I'm too rushed to search for it - but I just have to say THANK YOU for sending me The End of the Affair and for remembering our conversation about Graham Greene - that was so so nice of you, and it really means a lot. It's a beautiful copy of the book, too - just lovely.

I am now deeply engrossed in Billy Budd - and loving every homoerotic second of it - but I will probably finish it this weekend and bump it off the list.

Next up? The End of the Affair - thank you so much! I'm excited!

(To anyone who doesn't know Erik - here is his blog. He's wonderful.)

John Adams' Diary

For the dates of Oct. 1775 - Oct. 1776:

He wrote this on the inside cover:

"Colonies?"

(Politics shmolitics - this is my favorite entry in John Adams' journal.)

(Treasure trove)

Dammit.

I look at this supposedly sweet picture and I think of the Child Catcher.

DAMN him! For tainting all that is good and pure!

"Don't stop me now!"

Craig the baton twirler.

I've watched this clip about 4 times now and I cry every time. It's the looks on the faces - the judges, the audience, and Granny backstage - and Craig himself.

Killing me!! Also - the SONG he chose to perform to.

Perfect clip.

(Thanks for linking, Alex!!)

What it's like in "the line"

I walked by the Apple Store this morning - I just wanted to see the madness. I took some very funny pictures of the folks in line. People had mattresses, tents, umbrellas, dogs ... I love people. I love nuts. You could tell, too, that people had bonded - you know, you bond with the people around you in an experience such as that. It was 8 a.m. in the morning, and everybody was just ... it was like they were at HOME, but they were in public. I saw a dude sleeping. And he wasn't a homeless man. He was a well-dressed young professional, sitting in a chair in the line, completely asleep. No judgment. He needed to sleep. People were playing Scrabble, chatting. I LOVED it.

And it reminded me of my own experience waiting in line for something for eighteen hours. I took a day off work. I recently found some of the photos I took during that experience (sadly, this was when I was in my throwaway camera phase ...) I'll post some of the photos later, when I'm at my scanner. I have a picture of "Elena" sleeping on the sidewalk on her yoga mat. hahahaha

I posted this piece before- but I'll post it again, in honor of the folks in line on 58th and 5th. Stay strong! You're almost at the finish line!

Here is my essay: The Line.

August, 2001

Although I knew I would be sleeping and sitting on the ground for eighteen hours, I neglected to bring a blanket or a pillow. I did, however, bring a bag of books. To keep me company through the night. Hours later, lying curled up on the hard dirt, rocks jutting into my back, using my lumpy book-filled knapsack as a pillow, staring at everyone else's elaborate sleeping contraptions set up around me, I contemplated my choices in life.

I remembered The Scarlet Letter and forgot the blanket. That is all that needs to be said about my entire personality.

Meryl Streep. Kevin Kline. Christopher Walken. Chekhov’s The Seagull directed by Mike Nichols. A much-anticipated event. Come August I started hearing the stories: people camping out, sleeping in Central Park, waiting in line for the coveted free tickets handed out at 1 p.m. by The Delacorte Theatre the day of each performance.

I was, to some degree, waiting for the random phone call from the random friend: "Hey, I have an extra ticket!" Three weeks into the run, I realized that the show was closing soon, and I had to take control of my destiny. I decided to go join the line.

Thursday

6:45 p.m. I approached the already-existing line on the green slope of grass outside The Delacorte, in Central Park. My behavior was tentative, shy. I was afraid that there were invisible rules and that I would be accosted immediately for some infraction.

Because I so believe that people are out to get me, I find that people are often actually out to get me. Which is what happened the second I joined the line.

7:00 p.m. "Excuse me – you just CUT."

My attacker had three Saran-Wrapped cushions tied to a little cart, a cooler slung over one shoulder, and some bedrolls strapped to her back. She looked like a Sherpa.

"That was MY SPOT. You can't just come along and TAKE SOMEONE'S SPOT."

Would a Sherpa yell at someone like this?

I have no way of knowing if this woman is normal and polite in her real life. To my eyes, she was a lunatic. Not to mention the fact that she was wearing a miner's helmet and I had no idea why. Hours later, in the dead of night, when I saw her reading by the beam of light shooting out of her forehead, I understood (and envied) her madness.

But at the time of the attack she was just a fiery-eyed Sherpa in a miner's helmet yelling at me.

I still don't understand how I cut in line since no one was behind me. But apparently there were invisible rules (there always are), and I broke all of them at once.

I felt like screaming, "I DIDN'T MEAN TO CUT!"

One sweet gentle guy with little round glasses came up and said, "We really would appreciate it if you would move back and give her back her spot."

His gentleness was more terrifying than the Sherpa's rage. I got very scared at his use of "we". It was an intimidation tactic, which worked like a charm. I stepped back, baffled, embarrassed, and for the next ten minutes entertained extremely satisfying revenge fantasies. Saying with haughty scorn, "Listen, Sherpa-Bitch, cut me some slack…"

I could not discern at the time that three hours later I too would become a fire-breathing maniac if someone tried to cut in front of me. And I would not have cared one bit if they "didn't mean to", either. A lot of people don't MEAN to do evil in this world and they go ahead and do it anyway. Does that mean they should go unpunished?

I learned an important lesson in that first moment. The worst crime in the universe, unforgivable, is cutting in line. The revolutionary battles in France and America can be explained thus: people simply had had it with other people who felt that it was their right to cut and get in the front of the line.

7:30 p.m. I sat in the dirt.

There was a dude to my right who had come all the way up from Baltimore just to get himself in the line. He was a playwright, choked up with possibility. He hadn't brought a blanket or sleeping bag either, so he and I eventually were complete dirtballs.

To my left were Max and Elena. He was from Long Island and she was from Russia. It was perfect that I waited in line for The Seagull with an actual Russian. I became very involved with Max and Elena's relationship through proximity and osmosis.

They got into an argument at one point during the evening. She said to him, "Max, I thought that we were in this together. I thought that we were a team. Why do you abuse me because you lost your glasses? Why is that?"

His comment was, "This is the Cold War all over again."

He had a long conversation on his cell phone with his mother who was going in for some sort of scary surgery the following morning. I did not know Max, but I could hear the anxiety hovering in his voice.

Right before he hung up he said, trying to get her attention, "Ma?…Ma?…Ma—"

There was a pause, when clearly his mother settled down enough to listen, and he said, "I love you, Ma. Okay? I love you." He hung up and lay back down on his mat, not saying a word, clearly "replete with very thee". Actually, just "replete with very 'Ma'". Elena rolled over and took him into her arms. They lay there silently, in the line, holding each other. I heard Max murmur into Elena's neck. "She's really nervous."

I thought of my own mother with longing and fear.

7.40 p.m. I called my parents from my cell phone, and left a message telling them I loved them.

8:00 p.m. We could sense when the show inside began because of the way the molecules shifted in the atmosphere, creating more space. You could smell the excitement, like ozone in the air.

8:30 p.m. His name was Gabriel, which was quite a propos, since he saw himself as a messenger. However, he didn't quite bring us tidings of great joy.

He moved down the line, in a vaguely militaristic way, shouting at different sections of the ever-lengthening line.

"Hi, everybody! My name is Gabriel and I've waited in line now 13 times—" (a little rustle of alarm went up and down the line. We said to one another, "13 times? What?") "So let me tell you how this works! We all wait in line here until 1:30 a.m., which is when they close the park. At that time, the cops come along and kick us out. There's one cop named Officer Foccaccia…" (something like that) "He gets what we're trying to do here and tries to help us maintain the integrity of the line as we march out to Central Park West—"

I got a chill at the words "maintain the integrity of the line". Suddenly Gabriel was no longer the Angel of the Lord to me. He was more like Robespierre.

"But it's up to us to keep the order of the line. So we're gonna send a list down. Just sign it and pass it on. The Delacorte will not honor this list – it's mainly for us to police ourselves. We stay out on Central Park West until 5:30 a.m. when they open up the park again. And then we come back here. There's a girl who works for the Delacorte whose job it is to watch over the line. Her name is Kathleen. If anyone tries to jump the line – and they will – tell Kathleen. They start to give out tickets at 1 p.m. No more than two tickets per person. Do you guys have any questions?"

Up went Elena's hand.

Gabriel turned to her. "Yes?"

Elena asked, her voice filled with incomprehension and scorn, "Why would you wait in line 13 times?"

I do not believe that this was the sort of question Gabriel had in mind.

He said briefly, "My uncle's a congressman" and then moved down the line to repeat his speech to the next group of people, leaving us with more questions than answers. We discussed the meaning of "My uncle's a congressman" endlessly. Was the congressman so selfish that he kept saying to Gabriel, "I've got two tycoons who invested in my campaign, they want to see The Seagull, please wait in line", knowing that this meant 18 hours out of Gabriel's life? Was that any way for an uncle to treat his nephew? And what was the matter with Gabriel that he kept saying yes?

8:40 p.m. A lifelong bond formed between two guys and two girls over to my left, strangers before getting in line. One of the girls looked so much like Chandra Levy that I considered calling the FBI. Or at least approaching her and saying, "A lot of people are very worried about you right now."

The four of them huddled around a lantern while the guys taught the girls a card game. The girls were very slow at picking up the rules. An hour into the game I could still hear what sounded like extremely elementary questions coming from Chandra and her friend.

"So … do two 5's beat three 3's?"

I hate card games and can never retain the rules because I nearly collapse from the psychological boredom but even I could tell that that was a pretty simplistic question coming so late in the game. But the guys just kept teaching the girls the same rules, over and over, by the glow of the lantern, their low laughter floating through the night air.

8:45 p.m. One guy (who had forgotten, as I did, to bring along a miner's helmet) moved his lawn chair out of the line to sit under a streetlight with John Irving's latest. Max and Elena and I murmured to one another, anxiously admiring his boldness. "Is that allowed?" I huddled over The Scarlet Letter, squinting at the pages, tilting the book towards the light, ruining my eyes in the space of one evening.

8:55 p.m. Max started to get restless and irritable. The reality of his situation was hitting him hard.

"What are we DOING?" he demanded of Elena.

Elena said calmly, "We are waiting in line for a great theatrical event, Max."

"Yeah, but … Chekhov? Maybe for Ibsen I'd wait in line all night, but Chekhov? All these people are just here to see the celebrities. And that's it."

"Max, you have absolutely no feeling for the theatre. We are not here to see the celebrities. We are waiting in line to see actors interpret a classic."

I thought, "Yes. Russians understand art."

9:10 p.m. I polished off The Scarlet Letter, closed the book, the wind moving the trees above, and put my head down on my knees. I had tears in my eyes. I wondered what became of Pearl, what her life was like.

9:30 p.m. Parts of the show reached our ears, carried on the wind. Echoes, reverberations of the play occurring 200 feet away. At one point, we could clearly hear Meryl Streep's agonized shriek. An electric current passed down the line, and we all fell silent, listening intently. I heard Chandra Levy murmur seriously, "That was her."

"Her".

I lay down in the dirt, my head on my bumpy knapsack. The dark trees covered the night sky above me. So often in life I anticipate or worry about what is coming next. But right then, in Central Park, the moment was enough. More than enough.

9:35 p.m. People crawled into sleeping bags, settling in for the night, as though this were a normal time for night-owl New Yorkers to go to bed. It was dark and we could not leave the line. What else was there to do? Elena and Max curled up underneath a blanket. I heard her whisper at one point, "Bite my elbow." I did not peek to see if Max complied with her request.

9:50 p.m. My teeth felt fuzzy. I was hungry.

I wanted to leave the line and find a deli over on Lexington. Gabriel had told us that if we left the line for over half an hour our spot might not be there when we return. "The Line does not look kindly upon you if you leave for three hours and return looking rested and freshly showered and still expect to have your place…" Gotcha, Robespierre.

It took me 15 minutes to get up the nerve to leave.

I told Baltimore Dude my plans, just in case. I trusted he would stick up for me and my spot in line (#56) should questions or accusations arise.

10:05 p.m. I hurried through empty shadowy Central Park as though I had nothing to be apprehensive about, and gangs of wilding boys were not waiting to attack me. I was not just a foolish girl walking through Central Park at night; I knew I was part of something much much bigger.

10:08 p.m. I raced to a deli, feverishly grabbing snacks, my eyes on the clock, ants in my pants. "It's been almost ten minutes! Hurry!!" Nature abhors a vacuum and I coveted my place. Others, further back in the Line, were not guaranteed a ticket. It was a crapshoot for them. But I loved my #56 placement. For me, seeing the show the following evening was a done deal.

As I returned, coming over the grassy knoll, I could feel the Line check their watches, monitoring the length of my absence.

11:00 p.m. The audience emerged from the show, strolling by our refugee camp. They were all dressed up, suits, high heels, clean hair, but the night before they were lying in the dirt, too. There was a sort of force field between the two groups. They smiled over encouragingly. But warily, too. They did not approach us. It was like we were under quarantine.

One of the card-playing guys called out to them, "How was the show?"

Answers came back.

"Oh, wonderful!"

"Terrific!"

"Wait until you see her!"

But one guy said flatly, "If you're not too busy to take the day off and wait in line, then the show's okay."

This last comment angered the Line. We only wanted raves. Be positive and enthusiastic or keep your mouth shut, please.

I heard people on our side repeating it to each other, contemptuously. "'If you're not too busy'?? What the hell kind of answer is that??"

Envy radiated from both sides of the force field. The envy from our side came from the obvious fact that we still had 14 hours of waiting ahead of us. It was an eternity. The envy from their side was subtler. We in the Line still had so much ahead of us, so much to look forward to. Their experience was over, on its way to being just a memory.

11:20 p.m. A good friend called my cell phone before going to sleep in her warm bed, to see how I was holding up. Baltimore Dude was snoring lustily beside me, and I held the phone out towards him so that she could hear. I described to her the scene before my eyes. The dark serpent of people weaving through the trees, little rounded tents, bobbing lights, low distant conversation. "I feel like I'm in The Hobbit, you know?"

11:30 p.m. I curled up in the dirt, the wind on my face, and fell asleep.

Friday

1:30 a.m. Movement. Confusion. I opened my eyes and saw people on their feet all around me. Squinting into the flashing lights of Officer Foccaccia's vehicles, completely disoriented but following orders, I got to my feet, lugging my bag of books up onto my shoulder.

The great Migration from Central Park out to the street was soon underway.

Maintaining the Line during our march was paramount. The pace was ruthless. If your shoe became untied, if you dropped something, if you tripped and broke your leg, the Line would flow mercilessly on, never looking back. The Sherpa dropped her shrink-wrapped cushion contraption and we all marched past her unfeelingly.

Well.

This is not strictly true.

I had some feelings.

I had feelings of triumph and glee. I felt like calling out, "Better you than me, sister!"

Within six hours of being in line I did not recognize myself. All compassion for my fellow human creatures dissolved in favor of keeping the Line in order.

Emerging onto Central Park West had its own particular brand of chaos. People were hanging around out there, waiting to join the Line and we in the already-established Line were blatantly not happy to see them. They could easily take advantage of our sleepy pandemonium and start cutting left and right.

We barked at these newcomers. "Stay back! Stay back!" "The end of the line is THAT way." "I SAID STAY BACK." We were bleary-eyed and punchy, racing to re-establish the Line, tearing about, staking territorial claims. I saw people toss sleeping bags down ahead of them and take flying leaps into place. I scored two feet on a park bench. Chandra Levy and her friend feverishly erected a tent on the sidewalk. The two guys they had befriended joined them inside. As though they had known each other all their lives. I wondered about the sexual politics of the situation. Baltimore Dude, a successful man with a good job, curled up on the cobblestones surrounded by cigarette butts. Elena put her yoga mat down on the sidewalk and lay on her back. Max took up the rest of the bench with me.

During the flurry of activity, Max glanced up and down the line, taking it all in, transfixed, and then shook himself, saying, "I forgot for a second what we all were doing here."

1:55 a.m. Unbelievably, I was still #56 after all that mayhem. Someone actually went up to the front once everyone had settled down, and counted back, obsessively.

2 a.m. Max glanced down at Elena, stretched out in solitary state on the sidewalk, her hair fanning out, arms folded over her chest like a mummy. He contemplated her for a while and then said, "Right now you look just like you looked the day I fell in love with you."

After 2 Busses lumbered by with eerie lit-up interiors, like an Edward Hopper on wheels, all the people inside staring out at the scene in disbelief.

A cab drove by and I heard a guy scream from the back seat, triumphantly, "I SAW IT!!" I don't think he meant the production, I think he meant the phenomenon of the Line. The Line had been written up in the New York Times, and he had "seen it". Like aurora borealis. Or Snuffleupagus. But of course I cannot be sure of what he actually meant because I never got to ask him about it.

After 2 It did not take the Line long to discern that this was the evening for Upper West Siders to toss their furniture out onto the sidewalk. A frantic scavenger hunt began, people dashing up and down 81st and 82nd, lugging the discarded mattresses back to the Line. Mattresses, which had just that day been up in some penthouse, were now comforting the Seagull squatters a block away.

Max dragged back a single mattress for him and Elena to share, which was a relief for me. It had seemed odd to me to see Max way up on the bench with Elena way down on the pavement. There was something very wrong about all that empty space between them.

2:30 a.m. or so The newcomers looked crestfallen when they emerged from the subway station outside the Museum of Natural History and saw the sprawling tent-city which stretched into the distance. They thought they were so on top of things, so radical, setting out to get in line at 2 a.m., but they were unaware that there were throngs of people in NYC crazy enough to grab a spot in line at 7 p.m. One cute little couple slowly walked by us, holding bedrolls, making their way around Chandra Levy's tent, glancing down at Elena and Max on their mattress. They did not say a word as they passed us, but as they moved on I heard the guy murmur to the girl, "We're never gonna get tickets. These people are hardcore."

3 a.m. or so The mugginess of the day disappeared, and a chilly wind blew over us. My goal was to find a position on the bench where none of my skin touched the air. This became an interesting project for me and took up quite a bit of time. I must have looked like a Kama Sutra for When You're By Yourself video. Eventually I slept. Sort of.

Sometime after that I opened my eyes for no apparent reason. The Line slept. Everything was quiet and dark and chilly. The windows of the penthouse apartments lining CPW stared down on us darkly. I wondered what we looked like from up there. Occasional empty cabs floated up the avenue aimlessly.

I looked down at Max and Elena, curled up on their bare mattress, spooning, their legs intertwined, arms wrapped around each other. In full view. Beautiful. Simple. They were a haiku made manifest, on the pavement.

Sleepily, I thought of Michael, one of my ex-boyfriends. My favorite ex-boyfriend. He would have been a perfect partner for an adventure such as this. I lay there, shivering, twisted up like a pretzel, images of him drifting by. Suddenly, even though our relationship was long buried, I missed him intensely. It seemed wrong that I had lost track of him so completely. I have no idea where he is right now, if he is alive or dead, happy or not. I hate that: how some people are lost, and disappear forever.

5:30 a.m. The Return of Officer Foccaccia.

The world was grey. The grey dawn light seeped into the buildings, the trees, the grass, and our sleepy skin. We got ourselves together and began the surreal procession back through the misty deserted park. We walked calmly and silently in single file, sleeping bags draped over shoulders, mattresses hoisted over heads like canoes. This march had none of the cutthroat anxiety of the first one. How easily one grows accustomed to insanity. How quickly the absurd becomes mundane.

Camps were re-erected in all of two seconds. People fell back asleep instantly.

7:15 a.m. Morning in Central Park. Normal New Yorkers slowed down as they passed by us, dogs on the leash, staring at us blatantly, wondering what the hell we were doing. The Line was still asleep, for the most part, so we must have looked a bit like Jonestown.

We, by that point, had been in line for so long that our normal everyday lives had completely disappeared. We had taken time off work, gotten babysitters, cancelled plans. It was incredible to us that there were people on the planet who were NOT in line and who had no desire to get in line.

Who are these freaks? we thought, as we lay on our stolen mattresses and curled up in the dirt, brushing our teeth in public. What is the MATTER with them?

8:30 a.m. One of the members of the line began to stretch. Endlessly. This was not your basic morning knee-bend. She stretched as though she were about to randomly run a marathon and be back in time so she wouldn't lose her place. She flipped herself over a park bench and did crunches. She used trees in innovative ways. She did dance-y runs up and down the path in front of us, her long grey hair billowing. Perhaps she had taken a break from her Navy SEAL training to join the line. I tried to read Catch 22 but she kept pulling focus. I heard Chandra Levy say to her friend, "I wish she'd stop. She's stressing me out."

9:10 a.m. Kathleen from the Delacorte stalked up and down the line, screaming at us, letting us know what was going to happen and when. Gabriel had done the same thing the night before and the Line, as a whole, had bristled with resentment. Who does he think he is? Who elected him Lord of the Line? Who gives a damn that his uncle is a congressman? But our night out in the open had beaten us down. We meekly accepted autocracy now. People waiting in line, confused, bored, ambitious, cling to the one who promises to organize them. The Line yearned for a strong hand after a time of chaos and hardship. Many incomprehensible regimes from history began to make sense to me.

10:30 a.m. "Would you like to sign our petition?" "Want to join this mailing list?" "Here's a petition – you want to sign?" Representatives of every boneheaded cause in New York moved up and down the line. Or at least the causes seemed boneheaded to me on three hours sleep. By the time the 5th or 6th person came down the line asking us to support turning all of the East Village into some matriarchal society of grass huts, we categorically refused to sign. Please stop taking advantage of us because you know we cannot get away from you.

10:40 a.m. A festival of bonding around me. The card players finalized plans to get together again in their normal lives, outside the Line. Strangers found obscure things in common. Two men, one from Norway and one from Mexico, who had met only because they sat next to each other, struck up a chess game. A deep emotional bond clearly had formed between them. I gave my email address to at least five people. I overheard one man say to a woman he had just met in the Line, "Well, send me your resume. I can pass it on to HR."

11:10 a.m. My cell phone rang. Tearing myself away from Catch 22, I answered.

"Hello?"

I heard my friend Rich say, "How do you like your coffee?"

11:45 a.m. Rich appeared, carrying a picnic basket which contained two steaming thermoses of hot coffee, and two bagels with cream cheese. He sauntered up, grinning, and tossed a New York Times into my lap. We chowed on bagels and I talked his head off. I beamed upon him, thinking, like the song says, that I "must have done something good" to have such a one as he in my life.

12:10 p.m. As Rich was about to leave, a petitioner approached, her smile tentative from rejection. "Hi … excuse me … we're trying to get cars banned from Central Park. Would you like to sign our petition?"

Elena said, kindly but firmly, "I don't think that will ever happen."

The woman's smile looked now like a shriek of rage. "I was there when they took down the Berlin Wall and people thought that would never happen either."

Rich said, "But Central Park was built for cars to be able to go through it."

A guy sitting to our right chimed in, "I think we have more to fear from the roller bladers in Central Park. One of them plowed into me once."

A tense silence fell, and No-Car woman snapped, "Okay, fine. So I guess you guys don't want to sign" and stalked off.

Rich and I marveled at the ludicrous equation of no cars in Central Park to the Berlin damn Wall coming down. What are you SAYING, woman?

"Only a truly privileged person would make a comparison like that," I said with gusto, gulping down the last of my coffee, filthy, happy, righteous. (And privileged myself.)

12:30 p.m. Kathleen ordered us around like Lucy Van Pelt. "Okay, everybody! Stand up! Make a single line! Tickets are handed out starting at 1 p.m." We obeyed, packing up our sprawling selves, sucking our meanderings into a single-line formation. We felt threatened by the people wandering around on our outskirts like hyenas, eyeing us greedily, waiting for us to look the other way so that they could leap into the line. We huddled together, closing up the vulnerable spaces between us.

12:40 p.m. Baltimore Dude and I had a conversation with only three elements to it:

1. One of us would state the title of one of Meryl Streep's films.
2. Both of us would make some sort of brief subjective exclamation.
3. The other would vehemently list another one of her films.

And so on. It went on forever.

"Silkwood! Amazing!"

"Oh! Totally! And Sophie's Choice! Come ON!"

"Yes! And how about French Lieutenant's Woman? Gorgeous!"

"Oh my God. And Postcards From the Fucking Edge. Hilarious!"

"Brilliant! And don't forget Kramer vs. Kramer—"

"My GOD…"

What can I say. We had had three hours of sleep in the dirt. We did the best we could.

12:50 p.m. Baltimore Dude told me that he had just had spinal surgery and was missing his morphine. He blatantly confessed, "Morphine is great for the pain, but it makes it really hard to go to the bathroom." There was a pause. He went on, clarifying the finer points for me: "Number One and Number Two."

I did not find it at all odd that a stranger would confess this to me, or that an adult would say the words "Number Two" right to my face. I was completely sympathetic and horrified for him. "Wow. No Number Two, either? That sounds terrible!"

"Oh, it is! It is!"

12:52 p.m. The inevitable occurred. Someone "cut". It was far back in the line and word of it flashed up to us in front at the speed of light.

"Someone cut—"

"What? What?"

"Where?"

"Wait – what? Someone cut?"

"Who cut? Who cut?"

We craned our necks to see "the cutter", all of us straining out of the line diagonally, surging with blood lust. Someone, a grown man, called out at the top of his lungs, "KATHLEEN! SOMEONE CUT!" His face was in a frenzy of rage. We applauded him. Tattle-tales get what they want out of life.

Kathleen catapulted into action, and charged down the path toward the "cutter". We cheered ferociously, as though we were at the Coliseum.

"You GO, Kathleen!"

"Get him, Kathleen! Get him!"

She was a tiny girl for a gladiator, wearing plastic barrettes and high-top sneakers, but she was our defender because we could not defend ourselves. We loved her.

The entire line had turned away from the Delacorte to watch Kathleen's blazing trail. Suddenly Max exclaimed, in a tone of horrified realization, "It's a diversionary tactic! Now the front of the line is undefended!" Alarmed, we whirled around to face the Delacorte again. Max kept talking, pumping up our paranoia: "It's a classic flank maneuver! This is how Napoleon won the battle at Lodi!"

1:15 p.m. The next thing I knew my dirty little fingers clutched two free purple tickets.

1:20 p.m. Baltimore Dude and I had a happy beaming moment of parting, saying, "I'll look for you tonight." I floated down the path, triumphant, in my filthy baggy overalls, my hair sleep-spiked around my face. All around me I saw people saying goodbye to the new friends they had made in line.

"I'll see you tonight."

"I'll see you tonight."

We looked forward to seeing one another again.

7:00 p.m. I ran into Elena outside the Delacorte in the midst of the teeming hoard, while waiting for my sister Siobhan. Elena and I greeted one another with the affection of old friends. Her green eye shadow swooped upwards, like Cleopatra. Over to our right I could see the line burgeoning on, folks getting ready to spend their second night out in Central Park.

7:50 p.m. Once we were inside the theatre, Siobhan eventually stopped asking, "How do you know that person?" I recognized almost everyone there from the Line. I heard a woman say a few rows back, "It's so funny seeing everyone look so nice now. The last time I saw these people, they were all so grubby."

I saw the Sherpa. I almost didn't recognize her without all the gear strapped to her back. Now that she was out of the line she seemed like a perfectly nice normal woman. Her mission was accomplished and she was in HER seat. At long last. Having a seat of one’s own was what each of us wanted, after all.

The Seagull A couple of times during the show, when we all would laugh or clap, my consciousness would slip itself up over the wall and peer down on the Tolkien landscape below. I could see the twisting line, the gnomes crumpled in the dirt, pricking up their ears, keeping hope alive in their Hobbit hearts. I remembered when we heard Meryl Streep's voice flying out over us, and how exciting it was. Hearing her voice helped us to endure, to hang on, because at the end of the 18 hours, at the end of the line, there would be her.

We had waited long hours, we had peed in the bushes, we had no sleep. All for them. In return, they bombarded us with their gifts. We were a raucous vocal entranced audience, letting them know at every second how we felt about them. It was a two-way current of love and appreciation, the likes of which I have rarely experienced in the theatre.

At some point during the ovations, I burst spontaneously into sobs. I cannot explain why I was crying except to say that suddenly I was overwhelmed with the "too much-ness" of everything.

11:00 p.m. Siobhan and I staggered down the path, not speaking. I glanced over and saw the lanterns, the tents, the dark forms on the ground. The Line went on, but it was a different Line now. Not my Line. I felt a little bit lonely for my Line. I wondered how Max liked the show. If he became reconciled to Chekhov, and forgave the seagull for not being a wild duck.

11:03 p.m. A couple charged up to us, holding hands, smiling excitedly. I noticed the sleeping bags under their arms. The guy demanded, "Is it worth it?"

For a brief moment I hesitated, for the production was not without its flaws.

But as I took in the happy open-faced couple, I remembered how angered we all were the night before at the "If you're not too busy to wait in line, it's okay" comment. So I said, smiling, and sincere, "Oh, yeah. It is totally worth it."

Dean Stockwell montage

Because I MUST!

I can't stop NOW, are you crazy?

I have a lot of work to do tonight - but I also have Paris, Texas to watch. I've seen it before (I agree with Ebert - it is, indeed, worthy of the name "great") - but I've never sat down to watch it just to hone in on one person - my new BFF, Dean Stockwell. That will be my task tonight.

Dean Srtockwell and Ernest Hemingway, 1950s

That's Stockwell in "Compulsion" - the Leopold and Loeb story - from 1959. Orson Welles stars.

Dean Stockwell in the classic "Secret Garden" - in 1949 - I saw that movie a million times when I was a kid.

Dean Stockwell in "Psych-Out" - another movie I remember seeing a bazillion years ago - this was pre-cable years - I saw a helluva lot of good movies on network television and public television. I don't even remember if this was good - but I do remember it - so I imagine there was something there. Susan Strasberg (who died a couple of years ago) was the star - she was the daughter of Lee Strasberg, famous acting teacher. I should try to track this movie down again.

That's him in "Married to the Mob", of course

That's Stockwell in "Kim" - the movie adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling tale

In "Blue Velvet". If I let myself think too much about that guy, I would have nightmares

Macho macho man

I rarely say I "hate" anything (unless it's applesauce and coconut - damn you, Tom, daaaaamn you!) but I have a vivid memory of haaating "Billy Budd" in high school. I had to read a lot of "hard" books in high school - Scarlet Letter, Tess of the D'Urbevilles - and while they were hard to get through sometimes, i didn't despise them. But I despised Billy Budd. I have no idea why, though. I remember this - I remember thinking Billy (the character) was boringly good - unambiguously good - a goody two-shoes, actually - and I had contempt for him because of that. I still have contempt for goody two-shoes. So that's no surprise. And that's all I remember. Billy Budd was no Sydney Carton, is what I'm saying. Now THERE'S a character I want to read about it - and I felt the same way at 15. But Billy Budd? You want to put a frog in his bed just to see him freak out. And then point and laugh at him.

Uhm, yeah. Don't think that was Melville's intent.

So over the past 5 or 6 years, I gave myself the task to go back and read my entire high school reading list (not all at once, of course, but eventually). And thank God I did. Tess! Moby Dick! Love 'em all.

But my hatred-memory of Billy Budd remained.

So finally, I decided to bite the bullet - and put Billy Budd on my Summer Reading Challenge. I don't enjoy random free-floating hate. It's my least favorite emotion.

I've finished 2 of the books on my challenge (Never Let Me Go - by Kazuo Ishiguro - post here and here - and Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill - post here) - and so what the hell - Billy Budd is 90 pages long. Just DO it, Sheila. Even if you hate it again, what do you care? It's 90 pages!

So I'm 2 chapters in.

Imagine my surprise to find that it is actually a homoerotic novel full of hard bodies, bronzed muscles, physical descriptions of men hanging off of masts - descriptions that go on for (no lie) an entire page, words like "specimen" and "Greek" sprinkled throughout. It's one of the gay-est things I've ever read. Like: OPENLY gay. Like showtunes night at Sidetrax gay. Gay gay gay.

It makes sense when you know a bit about Melville - but I'm actually surprised how OBVIOUS it is. At the 3rd reference in 2 paragraphs to ideal Greek statues, and bronzed brows - I'm thinking, "Uhm, was this book ghost-written by Jean Genet or something?"

I'll report more when I'm more than 2 chapters in - but so far so good. I'm putting the Billy Budd hate to rest! I'm enjoying it. I still wish Billy Budd was more human - but it's certainly not AGONY to read like it was way back when. I love it when that happens.

Letter to EB White

I found the letter to Mr. EB White very touching. It has to do with a real-life Mr. Stuart Little, which - naturally - makes me think of this.

Today in History: June 28, 1914

Excerpt from the towering magnificent "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" by Rebecca West:

This [June 28th] was a day of some personal significance to him [Franz Ferdinand]. On that date in 1900 he had gone to the Hofburg in the presence of the Emperor and the whole court, and all holders of office, and had, in choking tones, taken the oath to renounce the royal rights of his unborn children. But it was also a day of immense significance for the South Slav people. It is the feast-day of St. Vitus, who is one of those saints who are lucky to find a place in the Christian calendar, since they started life as pagan deities; he was originally a Vidd, a Finnish-Ugric deity. It is also the anniversary of the battle of Kossovo, where, five centuries before, the Serbs had lost their empire to the Turk. It had been a day of holy mourning for the Serbian people within the Serbian kingdom and the Austrian Empire, when they had confronted their disgrace and vowed to redeem it, until the year 1912, when Serbia's victory over the Turks at Kumanovo wiped it out. But, since 1913 had still been a time of war, the St. Vitus's Day of 1914 was the first anniversary which might have been celebrated by the Serbs in joy and pride. Franz Ferdinand must have been well aware that he was known as an enemy of Serbia. He must have known that if he went to Bosnia and conducted maneuvres on the Serbian frontier just before St. Vitus's Day and on the actual anniversary paid a state visit to Sarajevo, he would be understood to be mocking the South Slav world, to be telling them that though the Serbs might have freed themseves from the Turks there were still many Slavs under the Austrian's yoke.

To pay that visit was an act so suicidal that one fumbles the pages of the history books to find if there is not some explanation of his going, if he was not subject to some compulsion. But if ever a man went anywhere of his own free will, Franz Ferdinand went to Sarajevo.

Another excerpt:

In January 1913 [Danilo Ilitch] had gone to Toulouse with a Moslem friend and had visited the wonderful Gachinovitch, the friend of Trotsky. He had received from the leader weapons and poison for the purpose of attempting the ife of Genera Potiorek, the Military Governor of Bosnia, but on the way he and his friend had thought better of it and dropped them out of the carriage window. Ilitch had also enrolled two schoolboys called Chubrilovitch and Popovitch, and gave them revolvers. Neither had ever fired a shot in his life. The few days before the visit of the Archduke Ilitch spent in alternately exhorting this ill-assorted group to show their patriotism by association and imploring them to forget it and disperse. He was himself at one point so overcome by terror that he got into the train and travelled all the way to the town of Brod, a hundred miles away. But he came back, though to the very end he seems at times to have urged Princip, who was living with him, to abandon the attentat, and to have expressed grave distrust of Chabriovitch on the ground that his temperament was not suited to terrorism. It might have been supposed that Franz Ferdinand would never be more safe in his life than he would be on St. Vitus's Day at Sarajevo.

This very nearly came to be true. On the great day Ilitch made up his mind that the assassination should take place after all, and he gave orders for the disposition of the conspirators in the street. They were so naive that it does not seem to have struck them as odd that he himself proposed to take no part in the attentat. They were told to take up their stations at various points on the embankment: first Mehmedbashitch, then Chabrinovitch, then Chubrilovitch, then Popovitch, and after that Princip, at the head of the bridge that now bears his name, with Grabezh facing him across the road. What happened might easily have been foretold. Mehmedbashitch never threw his bomb. Instead he watched the car go by and then ran to the railway station and jumped into a train that was leaving for Montenegro; there he sought the protection of one of the tribes which constituted that nation, with whom his familiy had friendly connexions, and the tribesmen kept him hidden in their mountain homes. Later he made his way to France, and that was not to be the end of his adventures. He was to be known to Balkan history as a figure hardly less enigmatic than the Man in the Iron Mask. The schoolboy Chubrilovitch had been told that if Mehmedbashitch threw his bomb he was to finish off the work with his revolver, but if Mehmedbashitch failed he was to throw his own bomb. He did nothing. Neither did the other schoolboy, Popovitch. It was impossible for him to use either his bomb or his revolver, for in his excitement he had taken his stand beside a policeman. Chabrinovitch threw his bomb, but high and wide. He then swallowed his dose of prussic acid and jumped off the parapet of the embankment. There, as the prussic acid had no effect on him, he suffered arrest by the police. Princip heard the noise of Chabrinovitch's bomb, and thought the word was done, so stood still. When the car went by and he saw that the royal party was still alive, he was dazed with astonishment and walked away to a cafe, where he sat down and had a cup of coffee and pulled himself together. Grabezh was also deceived by the explosion and let his opportunity go by. Franz Ferdinand would have gone from Sarajevo untouched had it not been for the actions of his staff, who by blunder after blunder contrived that his car should slow down and that he should be presented as a stationary target in front of Princip, the one conspirator of real and mature deliberation, who had finished his cup of coffee and was walking back through the streets, aghast at the failure of himself and his friends, which would expose the country to terrible punishment without having inflicted any loss on authority. At last the bullets had been coaxed out of the reluctant revolver to the bodies of the eager victims.

June 28, 1914: Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie - setting out in their motorcade in Sarajevo, that fateful morning - as the assassins, unseen, move into position.

The Books: "Little Black Book of Stories" - 'The Thing in the Forest' (A.S. Byatt)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

The next book on the shelf is the last short story collection by AS Byatt, and this one is called Little Black Book of Stories (which is such a good-looking book - I LOVE the design of it. Kudos!). There are five stories in this collection - and the first one is called "The Thing in the Forest". This story is creeeeepy. I love, too, when AS Byatt writes about the WWII generation - not the adults - but the kids, the ones who were little during the war in England. What did it mean - to not be fully conscious of world events, at least not the political ins and outs - but to have your lilfe be so impacted? And that generation stands apart, in terms of its thrift, its practicality - etc. Byatt comes back to this time and time again. That era is closer to the Victorian era, in terms of sensibility, than anything closer to the modern era. "The Thing in the Forest" is all about that.

It's written like a fairy tale, which adds to the creep factor - because it's a fairy tale during the Blitz. Penny and Primrose and two little English girls who are one of a huge group of kids evacuated to the country during the war (a la Lion Witch and Wardrobe). Penny and Primrose befriend each other on the train. The kids are sent to a massive drafty country estate - and are basically set free, to do what they please all day long, before they have to go to sleep in makeshift dormitories set up throughout the estate.

And one day Penny and Primrose take a walk in the forest. And while in the forest, they see a "thing". A terrifying huge slug-like creature - out of a nightmare - stinking of death and decay. By huge, I mean - fairy-tale huge. They hang back, and watch it slither by - destroying everything in its path. It doesn't swerve for trees in its way - it moves right through, so the tree slices it in half - and then the slug re-attaches itself afterwards. Penny and Primrose never speak about what they saw. And they never speak to each other again.

Until .... many years later - when they are both in their 40s or 50s - and they are taking a tour of that old country estate - which has now been turned into a WWII museum. And they happen to be there on the same day.

What was "the thing"? Was it real? They BOTH saw it. But there is something unspeakable about it. Do they feel marked by it? It's like the kids in Stephen King's It - they will be forever changed, and forever linked together, by the horror that they saw. How to live with it?

This is a dark fairy tale. Wonderful writing.

I'll excerpt from the beginning.

Excerpt from Little Black Book of Stories - "The Thing in the Forest"

The two ittle girls had not met before, and made friends on the train. They shared a square of chocolate, and took alternate bites at an apple. One gave the other the inside page of her Beano. Their names were Penny and Primrose. Penny was thin and dark and taller, possibly older, than Primrose, who was plump and blonde and curly. Primrose had bitten nails, and a velvet collar to her dressy green coat. Penny had a bloodless transparent paleness, a touch of blue in her fine lips. Neither of them knew where they were going, nor how long the journey might take. They did not even know why they were going, since neither of their mothers had quite known how to explain the danger to them. How do you say to your child, I am sending you away, because enemy bombs may fall out of the sky, because the streets of the city may burn like forest fires of brick and timber, but I myself am staying here, in what I believe may be daily danger of burning, burying alive, gas, and ultimately perhaps a grey army rolling in on tanks over the suburbs, or sailing its submarines up our river, all guns blazing? So the mothers (who did not resemble each other at all) behaved alike, and explained nothing, it was easier. Their daughters they knew were little girls, who would not be able to understand or imagine.

The girls discussed on the trin whether it was a sort of holiday or a sort of punishment, or a bit of both. Penny had read a book about Boy Scouts, but the children on the train did not appear to be Brownies or Wolf Cubs, only a mongrel battalion of the lost. Both little girls had the idea that these were all perhaps not very good children, possibly being sent away for that reason. They were pleased to be able to define each other as "nice". They would stick together, they agreed. Try to sit together, and things.

The train crawled sluggishly further and further away from the city and their homes. It was not a clean train - the upholstery of their carriage had the dank smell of unwashed trousers, and the gusts of hot steam rolling backwards past their windows were full of specks of flimsy ash, and sharp grip, and occasional fiery sparks that pricked face and fingers like hot needles if you opened the window. It was very noisy too, whenever it picked up a little speed. The engine gave great bellowing sighs, and the invisible wheels underneath clicked rhythmically and monotonously, tap-tap-tap-CRASH, tap-tap-tap-CRASH. The window-panes were both grimy and misted up. The train stopped frequently, and when it stopped, they used their gloves to wipe rounds, through which they peered out at flooded fields, furrowed hillsides and tiny stations whose names were carefully blacked out, whose platforms were empty of life.

The children did not know that the namelessness was meant to baffle or delude an invading army. They felt - they did not think it out, but somewhere inside them the idea sprouted - that the erasure was because of them, because they were not meant to know where they were going or, like Hansel and Gretel, to find the way back. They did not speak to each other of this anxiety, but began the kind of coversation children have about things they really disliked, things that upset, or disgusted, or frightened them. Semolina pudding with its grainy texture, mushy peas, fat on roast meat. Listening to the stairs and the window-sashes creaking in the dark or the wind. Having your head held roughly back over the basin to have your hair washed, with cold water running down inside your liberty bodice. Gangs in playgrounds. They felt the pressure of all the other alien children in all the other carriages as a potential gang. They shared another square of chocolate, and licked their fingers, and looked out at a great white goose flapping its wings beside an inky pond.

The sky grew dark grey and in the end the train halted. The children got out, and lined up in a crocodile, and were led to a mud-coloured bus. Penny and Primrose managed to get a seat together, although it was over the wheel, and both of them began to feel sick as the bus bumped along snaking country lanes, under whipping branches, dark leaves on dark wooden arms on a dark sky, with torn strips of thin cloud streaming across a full moon, visible occasionally between them.

Snapshots

-- It's annoyingly hot. The heat makes me feel fat and grubby. The subway is particularly awful, and I have to grit my teeth to NOT say to people who brush up against me, 'Do you mind?' My aversion to crowds is especially interesting considering where I have chosen to live. I do not mind crowds in the winter. I find them bracing then. But in the summer, I am one step away from going postal at every moment.

-- I just signed another year's lease, which is an odd sensation because of all of my other plans I had a mere 2 months ago, which involved upheaval and change. Well, I've still got the upheaval and change - it's just that it's happening in New York now for the time being, and I have to be here. I had been living in my apartment looking around, calculating how long it would take to transfer everything into boxes - and I even got started, took down pictures, boxed up some books ... and now I'm still here. I think I might leave the stuff in boxes, though. To remind myself of that other plan, which is still a good one. Can't ever get too complacent.

-- I seriously cannot imagine my life without Nag Champa incense. I get NERVOUS when I run out.

-- After finishing Veronica, I decided to go with something a bit lighter - and I'm in a fiction phase - so I picked up Elinor Lipman's The Pursuit of Alice Thrift. Elinor Lipman is a wonderful writer - one of those rare rare writers who can make me laugh out loud - and I'll be posting more about her.

-- Speaking of books, here are two funny related stories. Years ago, Allison and I were sitting in a loud music club - so loud we had to scream - and I was telling her about Philip Gourevitch's amazing We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families. I was shouting about it in her ear. She was into it, excited to read it. Later in the night, we came back to it - when she said, obviously intending to buy it, "Now - what was that book you mentioned? Please Forgive Me But I am About to be Murdered In Front of my Mother?" I still shake with laughter when I remember that. And she wasn't being snarky - she truly did not remember the title, and that was her best shot. And then last week, after my two posts about Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - she called me. "So tell me about this book!!" I raved about it to her. And then this past weekend, she went to the bookstore across the street from her apartment and said to the clerk, "Hi - I'm looking for a book and it's by the guy who wrote Remains of the Day and it's called .... Never Push Me Off the Cliff??" Again, she wasn't snarking - she was trying to remember and that was her best shot. I am guffawing. hahahahahahaha The clerk was like, "Uhm, never heard of that ... " Too funny. But she now has it - and she's tearing through it!

-- I've got Rio Bravo to watch tonight. And Paris, Texas to watch tomorrow night. And a shitload of work to do between the two movies. It's good to have bookends.

Happy Place

I'm sure you all saw this one coming.

Inscriptions

I love the site Book Inscriptions Project dearly - so glad I discovered it! I love to just scroll through there, reading, perusing - it makes me feel like I'm snooping, or something. Maybe that's part of the appeal. But it's not just that.

I have some second-hand books that come with random inscriptions (the one from 1912 is my favorite) - and there are a couple of books in my own collection with inscriptions that have huge capacity to transport me back in time. Antonio and I always used to sign the books we gave to each other - so there they remain, in my collection - ghosts of that relationship, years and years gone by.

The book that really 'got us together' was The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler - Antonio was reading it that summer, and he gave a copy to me to read, before we even started officially dating - and wrote in it (in response to a joke I had made, I guess), "No. We are not just two attitudes bouncing off of each other. Tonio." There was something about that book - and its portrayal of an unconventional woman, and a quirky relationship - really spoke to him, and made him see me in a new way (his words). We had known each other forever - and it was as he was reading Accidental Tourist that the thought occurred to him .... what about Sheila?

I remember reading that inscription and feeling a little crinkly thing in my stomach, like: hmmmm, this FEELS like something is there ... Am I reading into that inscription? Or .. is he saying there is more between us than just jokes and banter?

I always think I'm reading stuff into everything, but the thing is: I am usually right. My instincts have rarely been off - even when friends have tried to say, "You're being paranoid", etc. Nope - I know. (The weirdest example of my intuition being here.)

The gift was symbolic - and I still have it - inscription and all. Strange. None of the feelings remain from that time - he's one of the few guys I DID get over with no lingering regrets - so when I look at that inscription I feel strangely distant, and poetic almost. Like - wow. Look at that poetic thing that happened to someone else. Look at that poetic romantic thing that means nothing to me.

Snippets, fragments of humanity, of connection - missed or otherwise- Human beings writing to each other, to themselves ... I don't know, I find it very touching - like Dr. Frank's ongoing found objects series. latest here. Or this one

There's something about The Book inscriptions project that really speaks to me. Hieroglyphics, remnants, ghosts, echoes ... and yet oh how important these messages were to someone, once upon a time.

NY skyline

1906.

I love stuff like this. Found in the New York Public Library digital library.

The Battle of Bunker Hill

Lego style. I love the Lego dudes digging in the beginning.

Found this on Boston 1775 - which, honestly, is the best website ever created.

You and me

This'll make my dad laugh. Grammar Girl has finally addressed my one grammatical issue. The best thing, though, is that once my dad started reminding me about it (he'd send me an email after reading a post of mine, and the subject line of his email would be: "You/Me" - and I'd know: DAMMIT. Where is it??) - I actually became conscious of the problem, and have nearly licked the habit. But still - it cracked me up. Here is just one example of this fond loving father/daughter phenomenon. I wouldn't even open the email from him mostly, because the subject line said it all - I'd just go back to the post and scour it for the problem. You know some rules you just KNOW, because you learned them so well during the Mesozoic era? For example: I never get the "your" "you're" thing wrong. Or "they're" "their" "there". I haven't made a "they're" "their" or "there" error since I was 8 years old. Or the whole "it's" "its" debacle. I never make that mistake. And if I do? It's a typo. You'll just have to trust me on that. These rules I KNOW. And most grammar rules are like that for me (for I? - hahahaha) ... but the you/me thing gets me. However, over the last year, I have decided to learn the rule - and I think I've got it licked. It still cracks me up, though. All it took was a little focus on the problem.

I love, too, how Grammar Girl writes:

The proper sentence is I love you, not Me love you.

Oh, really? You want to tell that to him?

Grammar Girl. Indispensable site!

Veronica - by Mary Gaitskill

I've finished my second book on my Summer Reading Challenge - Veronica, by the great Mary Gaitskill. (Voila.)

Here are some of the many posts I've written about her, marvelous writer:

Commonplace

Mary Gaitskill

Happiness (and the comments to that post are great, Gaitskill fans!)

A birthday post

Veronica is a novel - it's about two women - Alison (the narrator), who was a teenage runaway turned high-fashion model - and her friend Veronica - a blowsy fierce middle-aged woman, whose boyfriend is bisexual - who eventually gives Veronica AIDS. I first encountered Gaitskill with her knock-one-out-of-the-park debut - the short story collection Bad Behavior. Her firts novel is called Two Girls Fat and Thin - and I read it, and honestly remember almost nothing about it - while I can remember certain scenes from stories in Bad Behavior word for word. I should go back and read Two Girls Fat and Thin. I then read, last year, Gaitskill's second short story collection Because they wanted to - and ate up every word. Some of her stories (especially "The Blanket") move me to tears. But there was something in Veronica that left me cold - and I would imagine that a couple years from now I wouldn't remember a bit of it - just like I don't remember a bit of Two Girls Fat and Thin. It makes me wonder if short stories are Gaitskill's true milieu. Like I believe is the case with Lorrie Moore - one of the greatest short story writers ever. I haven't read any of Moore's novels - I think there are two - so I may be wrong in this. I'm just saying that I have rarely read anything more perfect than Moore's collection Birds of America. She is a MASTER. And Gaitskill is a master too. But, to me, there was something lacking in Veronica. I have to think a bit more upon it.

One of the things that occurred to me is this:

Gaitskill is at her best (meaning: better than anybody else) when she hones in on the specific. The people she writes about - from the beginning - are very often nasty selfish weird little people. You don't LIKE her characters. That's not the point. Reminds me of Tommy Lee Jones' point about playing villains - and whether or not an actor needs to LIKE the character he plays. Jones says, "You don't need to like the character. But you do need to want to WATCH the character." I can't look away from Gaitskill's people. Some of it does read like a traffic accident, and I'm rubber-necking by. She's an entryway into a world peripheral to mine, a world that has occasionally touched my own - a world of sex clubs and strippers and whores - not whores meaning "promiscuous" - but whores meaning "sex for money". She writes about girls who strip as they go through art school. She writes about S&M - people who get off on pain, who yearn to go to their limits of endurance ... and yet why? Is it loneliness? Love? What are these people looking for as they beg strangers to whip them, or piss on them - or whatever. The movie Secretary is based on one of Gaitskill's stories - and while it was domesticated up a bit (hard to believe - but not if you've read Gaitskill's actual stuff) - and made into a kind of touching love story ... the grain of truth remains. The lead character accepts the spankings ... for the first time in her life, it gives her purpose, makes her feel needed, necessary. The point is not to find oneself for these people. The point is to LOSE oneself. Anyway, I could go on and on. Gaitskill knows what she's talking about here - this is her topic. I don't know much about her life story, and I won't make any guesses, just because I have read her work. I do know she was a teenage runaway, and did work as a prostitute for a while. There is a strong sense of authenticity in her work - but more than that: this woman is a kick-ass writer, fearless - It takes your breath away. There are no tidy endings, no morals ... But what she does do is she LOOKS, she sees, and she TELLS. She's so very good in the details.

My issue with Veronica is not with the writing. But it seems to me that she was going for something universal here, and I just don't think that that is Gaitskill's particular gift. Not that I don't relate to some of her characters - I always do - it's not a freak show, after all. These people - the addicts and runaways and whores and wanderers - all have something in them that connects them to the human race. I cannot look at them and say, "That, is YOU, over there, and has nothing to do with ME." But she remains honed in on the specifics, the details - what their apartments look like, how they eat, how they talk, what they say when they do talk ... She doesn't worry so much about a message, or about being universal. And I felt a certain drive in her in Veronica to push upward, into some kind of universal truth. For the majority of the book, Alison - who is now a sad middle-aged woman, with Hepatitis C, her beauty gone ... takes a walk in a redwood forest - and ponders the past. We go back and forth in time. And I felt that the past sections were far more vivid - the present-day sections involved Alison looking at the moss, and the trees, and the running streams ... and I felt that Gaitskill was going for something here, something that did not quite work, for me. However, my point here reminds me of the quote I linked to above, from a review of Bad Behavior, a quote I love so much:

In "The Wrong Thing", the novella that concludes the collection, Ms. Gaitskill seems to be striving toward an uncertain goal, and (like her narrator, Susan) she isn't entirely successful. She's slightly out of her depth -- which is exactly where she needs to be; it's the only place she's going to make the discoveries that will take her up to the next level and the levels beyond. Once an artist of her command relinquishes enough control to let her brilliance lead her where it wants to, anything is possible.

YES. She is not "entirely successful" in Veronica either - a bit "out of her depth" - at least in the meandering "look at the moss on the trees and ponder the universe" sections. But I agree with that reviewer that this, on the edge, and not entirely successful, is "exactly where she needs to be". She is a writer who takes risks. Not just for the sake of taking risks. Not for the sake of being shocking, although some of her stories are shocking. She is not in it for the shock. Having known people who live in the world she describes - the underworld, I guess you'd say - I can say that she gets it right. Much in this world would shock the comfortable middle class. Gaitskill lives on the sidelines, her characters do not participate in society in that full and open way ... they are shadow people, tunnel people, forgotten - and many times, have no concept whatsoever of the things many others take for granted. There's a moment in Vernonica where a boyfriend of Alison's breaks up with her - because he has met someone else. He wants to be fair to Alison, so he comes clean. Gaitskill's description of this conversation is brief, stark - and the main thing you come away with is the realization that Alison does not understand his sense of honor. She recognizes that he is behaving honorably - but instead of appreciating it, it embarrasses and shocks her. This is a corrupt world, full of corrupt people. Alison would love to participate in a full life - where things like love, and kindness, and honor are expected, and also understood. She is not so completely gone that she SCORNS such things ... but she certainly knows that she is left out. And that her boyfriend is better off without her. But then - much later in the book - Gaitskill pulls one of her jujitsu moves - and there is a moment of pure and fierce love ... and it was enough to bring tears to my eyes. Gaitskill is not cynical - that's what makes her so fascinating as a writer. You would think she would be, what with her topic - and what she has seen. She is not. But it is an intense and bleak view of the world, pared down, raw. Hard to take.

And for me - all of that is clear when she stays in the details. The "universal" is not for her. At least not when it is gone at directly. Some writers can do that - it is their sensibility, how they see things. Gaitskill's gift is most clear when she is in the muck, describing what she sees.

Example from Veronica:

Because we sold flowers outside bars and go-go clubs, prostitutes were some of our best customers; the nice ones bossed their johns into buying from us. Most of them weren't beautiful girls, but they had a special luster, like something you could barely see shining at the bottom of a deep well. They treated us like sisters, and we were tempted to join them when men came around looking for "models" - which everybody knew meant stripper or whore. Mostly, we would indignantly say no, but sometimes somebody would say yes. I said yes a couple of times. Why I picked those times to say yes, I don't know. One was an old fat man with a spotted face and pale, aggrieved eyes. He ran some kind of business, maybe postcards or comic books. He leaned on a counter in the back room of his store and blinked his pale eyes while I took off my clothes. When I was naked, he looked awhile and then asked if he could look at me from behind. I said okay; he walked around me in a circle and then went back behind the counter again. "You have beautiful hips and legs," he said. "Beautiful shoulders, too. But your breasts are small and they're not that good." He talked to me about the kind of work I might do while I put my clothes back on.

"You mean porn?"

"Sure, we do some porn. There's more money for the girls that way. But we do seminude art, as well." His eyes became more aggrieved. "Do you care what the other girls do?"

I shrugged. Outside the window, electric music corkscrewed through the air. If he hadn't insulted my boobs, I might have tried it out. But I just said bye and left.

Like a cat in the dark, your whisker touched something the wrong way and you backed out. Except sometimes it was a trap baited with something so enticing, you pushed your face in anyway. Once when I was out with my basket, a short man with a square torso said, "Hey, hot shit - you should come work for me." He bounced a rubber ball on the pavement, caught it, and bounced it again. "I'm a pimp." His face was like lava turned into cold rock. But inside him, it was still running hot; you could smell it: pride, rage, and shame boiling and ready to spill out his cock and scald you. I stared in fear. He just laughed and bounced his ball; he knew that for somebody what he had was the perfect enticement.

And then there's this - one of the many sections of the book that describes the world of high fashion, and this image really really struck me:

At a magazine party, I sat at a table with the most famous model of the year, a seventeen-year-old whose laughing face was a fleshy description of pleasure, satiety and engagement that engaged at one decibel again and again. Photographers pitilessly filled her with their radiant needles until she was riddled with invisible holes and joyfully pouring radiance out each one. As an afterthought, a photographer turned and photographed me. My picture would appear later in a magazine society page. In the photo, I ws sitting next to the young writer who had briefly occupied the chair next to me when it was vacated by a columnist. He sat down to ask me if I'd ever seen Modigliani's paintings. "Because you're lilke a beautiful Modigliani painting," he said. "You should go see the exhibit at the Metropolitan." I waited for him to ask me to go with him, but he didn't. He had intense eyebrows and hazel eyes with bright changeable streaks glowing emberlike through the solid color. His name was Patrick. He gave the impression of a fast current that you might ride on, laughing. We talked about nothing and then he got up and left. I waited a very pleasant moment before getting up, too. Six months later his friends woud ignore me and sting me with weapons made of the finest jealousy and gossamer contempt. A woman writing a book on the history of troll dolls would look at me and talk loudly about the trivial nature of beauty and fashion. A short actress would turn her back on me while I was speaking and put her arms around Patrick. I would break a wineglass in a hostess's bathroom and walk on it until the splinters were unseeable. I would change my mind and guiltily mop the glass with a wet towel. "Alison?" Patrick would pound on the door. But that night, he proudly introduced me. That night, I said, "I'm a model," and it came out shy and shining at the same time. People smiled and parted, and allowed me to enter the social grid.

Or this section, when Alison leaves a party with Jamie, a guy she just met. I love how Gaitskill, in 2 or 3 words - can call up an entire personality.

We left the party and went for a walk. On the bottoms of his severely pointed shoes, Jamie wore cleats, which clicked loudly on the pavement. The only people I'd ever known to wear cleats were middle-school boys, who wore them so they could kick hard and make a lot of noise when they walked. I asked Jamie why he wore them, and he said, "I just like them." His words were modest, but they whirred with secret importance. He said everything that way. The British monarchy was very important; Prince Charles's recent marriage was particularly so. Ornette Coleman was the only good jazz musician. He approved of men's shoes on women. He approved of Buckminster Fuller and Malcolm McLaren. He approved of Bow Wow Wow.

His opinions were frivolous, fierce, and exact. He worked in a smal graphics plant that made logos and labels for sundry products. But he was as proud and particular as any Parisian playboy. His favoirte logo was the brand name of a line of white paper sacks commonly used by small grocers; I had never noticed, but TORNADO was printed in brown letters with a vibrant round T at the top of each bag. "It's so elegant," he said, and it was.

Brilliant. So clear. You can't argue with such clarity. It just IS. And the last 3 words of that excerpt - the "and it was" - is typical Gaitskill. It's what makes her so wonderful. You may be lulled into a false sense of superiority towards Jamie, you may think: God what an ass, how pretentious ... You may hate his type. But Gaitskill will never go there with you, in your judgment, she is more interested in being on the inside of the experience. Jamie may be an ass, I mean - he's wearing cleats to a party ... but then he raves about a logo he likes ... and Alison realizes how right he is. That his eye is, in fact, good. And of such small moments are connections made at 2 o'clock in the morning in this dirty lonely city. I've been there. That's just how it is.

The book loses much in the present-day sections, although I can see what she is going for. It is elegiac - and you do feel, by the end, that Alison has lost much ... her past is far more vivid than her present ... Yet the writing is less DETAILED in the present-day sections. It doesn't have that spark of danger, which is one of the reasons i find Gaitskill so compelling. Her work feels on the edge. There is something dangerous about life, and it shows in her writing.

The Books: "The Matisse Stories" - 'The Chinese Lobster (A.S. Byatt)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

The next book on the shelf is another short story collection by AS Byatt, and this one is called The Matisse Stories. This excerpt is from the last story in the collection "The Chinese Lobster". Byatt takes the gloves off here about art theory, academia, political correctness, social mores - and the problem with lack of context. Context is everything. How do you study Matisse without context? In this story - the Dean of Women's Studies has met up for dinner at a Chinese restaurant with a professor in her program - who has been accused of sexually assaulting a student. (The Dean has, in her possession, a horribly written - in terms of grammar and spelling - accusation from the student). There's no real plot here - the two people just sit and talk over their food, as a lobster meanders about in a big tank behind them with open staring mute eyes. Perry Diss, the professor, is outraged - not just that he has been accused, but that he has been accused by an ignorant politically correct anorexic women's studies nitwit, who hasn't even TRIED to understand the work of Matisse. All the student sees is the fleshy naked bodies, the voluptuous females - and she hates it. She thinks the work is misogynistic. Perry Diss thinks: what a waste of an education. To see everything politically. What a waste. Missing the point of life. The students aren't even able to SEE any more ... because of all the "theory" surrounding such education. How does one LOOK at Matisse? THAT is the question. Perry Diss has reached the end of his rope with this kind of nonsense. And he also happens to love Matisse. He knows the student is ignorant, but he also begins to realize that the student is the one with the power here. All it takes is to make the accusation, true or not. However, very important: Perry Diss is no saint, and Hillelblau has a point. Oh, and Perry Diss also says inappropriate things about the student - as you can see in the excerpt below. He could easily be misunderstood. Nothing is simple in Byatt's world, and those looking for nice little black and white representations of their own rigidity should surely look elsewhere. Byatt - as always - means to engage reality - not point a finger. She observes, and reports. I feel she does take sides, she's on Perry's side - on the side of art, pure, she is not neutral in the argument - yet she is also aware of the validity of the other side (all of Possession is like that). She concedes points all the time. That's what makes good writing. Oh - and I like this story too because it's funny. It's a serious matter - but she writes in this rollicking free way - most of it is conversation, and you can just hear both of the voices.

Anyway, really interesting story - a topic very dear to my heart. Byatt knows this shit inside and out.

Excerpt from The Matisse Stories. This excerpt is from the last story in the collection "The Chinese Lobster".

'I have had this rather unpleasant letter which I must talk to you about. It seemed to me important to discuss it informally and in an unofficial context, so to speak. I don't know if it will come as surprise to you.'

Perry Diss reads quickly, and empties his glass of Tiger beer, which is quickly replaced with another by the middle-aged Chinese man.

'Poor little bitch,' says Perry Diss. 'What a horrible state of mind to be in. Whoever gave her the idea that she had any artistic talent ought to be shot.'

Don't say bitch, Gerda Himmelblau tells him in her head, wincing.

'Do you remember the occasion she complains of?'

'Well, in a way I do, in a way. Her account isn't very recognisable. We did meet last week to discuss her complete lack of progress on his dissertation - she appears indeed to have regressed since she put in her proposal, which I am glad to say I was not responsible for accepting. She has forgotten several of the meagre facts she once knew, or appeared to know, about Matisse. I do not see how she can possibly be given a degree - she is ignorant and lazy and pigheadedly misdirected - and I felt it my duty to tell her so. In my experience, Dr Himmelblau, a ot of harm has been done by misguided kindness to lazy and ignorant students who have been cosseted and nurtured and never told they are not up to scratch.'

'That may well be the case. But she makes specific allegations - you went to her studio - '

'Oh yes. I went. I am not as brutal as I appear. I did try to give her the benefit of the doubt. That part of her account bears some resemblance to the truth - that is, to what I remember of those very disagreeable events. I did say something about the inarticulacy of painters and so on - you can't have worked in art schools as long as I have without knowing that some can use words and some can only use materials - it's interesting how you can't always predict which.

'Anyway, I went and looked at her so-called Work. The phraseology is cating. "So-called". A pantechnicon contemporary term of abuse.'

'And?'

'The work is horrible, Dr Himmelblau. It disgusts. It desecrates. Her studio - in which the poor creature also eats and sleeps - is papered with posters of Matisse's work. La Reve. La Nu rose. La Nu bleu. Grande Robe bleue. La Musique. L'Artiste et son modele. Zorba sur la terrasse. And they have all been smeared and defaced. With what looks like organic matter - blood, Dr Himmelblau, beef stew or faeces - I incline towards the latter since I cannot imagine good daube finding its way into that miserable tenement. Some of the daubings are deliberate reworkings of bodies or faces - changes of outlines - some are like thrown tomatoes - probably are thrown tomatoes - and eggs, yes - and some are great swastikas of shit. It is appalling. It is pathetic.'

'It is no doubt meant to disgust and desecrate,' states Dr Himmelblau, neutrally.

'And what does that matter? How can that excuse it?' roars Perry Diss, startling the younger Chinese woman, who is lighting the wax lamps under the plate warmer, so that she jumps back.

'In recent times,' says Dr Himmelblau, 'art has traditionally had an element of protest.'

'Traditional protest, hmph,' shouts Perry Diss, his neck reddening. 'Nobody minds pr