Celebrity Dream Date

[Page Six]

It's hard to think, when my mind goes blank

Ash, falafel, Godard in the bed. Habit ensues. Walter Benjamin. Charlemagne. Frantic flat-hunting. Quickly developing some sort of Plan B for the summer that basically involves hanging around here, but referring to it, more affectionately, as a genetically modified Plan A. Wardrobe has consisted primarily of running shorts and flip-flops, diet of double espressos (you can imagine the effect this has had on my bowels). Some heavy naps. Tobacco intake decreases by the day. Last night, I ate half of a cherry pie and this morning, I finished the rest for breakfast. It wasn't very good; the crust, like a good number of things in this country, had way too much butter in it.

I honestly don't know where the days go. I can't tell if things have gotten exceptionally surreal, or if this just the way life generally becomes at a certain point. All I know is that my ability to step to the majority of people has, for the moment, receded almost entirely into non-existence.

English Exams

..are made much better when they end, and Andy Taylor walks in.

Bob Frost

I'm always so satisfied with how this film develops.

Elinor Carucci

Grandma Covers her Face, 1994

Mother drives me in the rain, 2000

Masks, 1996

The Hug, 2001

The only notes I have next to her name in my Art History notes, regarding "Closer," the set from which the above photos were taken, are: "The only intimacy she really knows how to portray is her own with the people she loves." This is something I really struggle with when it comes to my writing. I think photography is much more accommodating to this kind of reflection on one's own life, which quickly transgresses into indulgence when applied to literature. I think her photos are beautiful.

[Elinor Carucci Photography]

RIP

Eternity of the moment

"Cartier-Bresson has the weakness of his strength: an Apollonian elevation that subjugates life to an order of things already known, if never so well seen. He said that the essence of his art was, 'the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event, as well as the precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.' Too often, the 'significance' feels platitudinous, even as its expression dazzles. Robert Frank, whose book 'The Americans' treated subjects akin to many in the older photographer's work, put it harshly but justly: 'He travelled all over the goddamned world, and you never felt that he was moved by something that was happening other than the beauty of it, or just the composition.' The problem of Cartier-Bresson's art is the conjunction of aesthetic classicism and journalistic protocol: timeless truth and breaking news. He rendered a world that, set forth at MOMA by the museum's chief curator of photography, Peter Galassi, richly satisfies the eye and the mind, while numbing the heart." Finding flaw in the seemingly flawless, Peter Schjeldahl reviews the Cartier-Bresson retrospective at MOMA.

[The New Yorker]

above the clouds, where the sounds are original

So: thanks to this selfish, selfish volcano, it doesn't look like I'll be back in Edinburgh for everyone's favorite pot-themed holiday. Will instead be, y'know, down in Maryland, kickin' it sober, or maybe a little drunk, by myself, watching some television.

In related news:

"I am the eye with which the Universe beholds itself and knows it is divine."

Long lunches in the West Village: bowls of plump mussels and steak frites in saffron and double espressos, one after another; sunbathing and stiff drinks in mason jars and Super Scrabble on mattresses and homemade veggie burgers and guacamole and cherry pie and extra spicy Bloody Marys (tingling lips) on Lisa's roof; mini-golf and big, meaty burgers with Gareth, medium rare, talks of Business school in Switzerland, and will we still be able to do this when you're married. Mustard-yellow army jackets and horn-rimmed glasses; late-night club sandwiches and Maltese Male Models named Dante in Brooklyn; awkwardly avoiding eye-contact with Jesus as he hung on the wall of the New Museum, then following him down into the subway, wondering if it was all part of the act; driving and smoking, driving and smoking; cramming Wordsworth and Shelley into my brain while Brigid rides her one-eyed horse around the ring and my skin turns pinker and pinker in the Simmering Spring Sunshine, the soft breeze, the still grass, dotted with dandelions.

the portals of great jaws

"After three years of ripe, Southern indulgence to come upon this ash plain impregnated with a killer sea may have needed a strength not really found in nature: sustained necessarily by illusion. Not even whales could skirt that strand with impunity: walking along what served for an esplanade you might see one of the rotting creatures, beached, covered by feeding gulls who with the coming of night would be relieved at the giant carrion by a pack of strand wolves. And in a matter of days there would be left only the portals of great jaws and a picked, architectural web of bone, mellowing eventually to false ivory in the sun and fog." Thomas Pynchon, V.

Essentially.

"Dynamite Ham"

[Easter Dinner, 2010]

Karen Finley: performance artist, by Annie Leibovitz

I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.

Joan Didion is so fucking cool.

An afternoon in Holyrood Park

Stunning photos by Suzanna Zak, from her recent sojourn to Edinburgh. (We had the loveliest of times; come again sooner than soon, Suzie!)

P.S. Doesn't the first one remind you a bit of this Courbet painting?

And then, she thought, I shall get older

"She could take an apartment by herself in the Village. She would meet new people. She would entertain. But, she thought, if I have people for cocktails, there will always come the moment when they have to leave, and I will be alone and have to pretend to have another engagement in order to save embarrassment. If I have them to dinner, it will be the same thing, but at least I will not have to pretend to have an engagement. I shall give dinners. Then, she thought, there will be the cocktail parties, and, if I go alone, I shall always stay a little too late, hoping that a young man or even a party of people will ask me to dinner. And if I fail, if no one asks me, I shall have the ignominy of walking out alone, trying to look as if I had somewhere to go. Then there will be the evenings at home with a good book when there will be no reason at all for going to bed, and I shall perhaps sit up all night. And the mornings when there will be no point in getting up, and I shall perhaps stay in bed till dinnertime. There will be the dinners in tea rooms with other unmarried women, tea rooms because women alone look conspicuous and forlorn in good restaurants. And then, she thought, I shall get older." Mary McCarthy, "Cruel and Barbarous Treatment"

I read this story on the plane back from Edinburgh, and was startled by how perfectly this passage encapsulated all of my fears regarding the upcoming year. I am excited to be alone, and I'm proud to be alone--there is something about it that's thrilling and freeing, especially in the face of friends who've hurt you. But there is still that uneasiness, especially when I consider those dark winter months, and the omnipresent possibility that, perhaps, I shall always be alone.

Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine

Tell me about it, Norris Church

"The sex was always great. That was the glue that held all this mess together, or the honey.”[Norris Church Mailer, on life with Norman]

[The New York Times Magazine]

Today's Exceptional Shit

Moi aussi, Marianne