Current Obsessions

--Mylo's record, "Destroy Rock and Roll"

--Cormac McCarthy's novel, "The Road."

--Artisinal cabecou feuille:
This tiny, round cheese is made with a raw goats' milk from the plains of the Midi-Pyranées region of France. A classic, it can be eaten fresh, and you'll find its flavor is subtle and milky.

Theater Series, Vol. 4: Hairspray / Gypsy / Spamalot

Something happens at the theater, we know this already--this is why we go. To laugh, cry, experience, all that shit--as a community. Way back when the Greeks starting yukking it up in big masks and dragging their tired old deus ex machina's to the party. (We still use those today, naturally: see any sitcom or movie, made...oh...basically ever.) This is not the big idea here.

What is the big idea here, is that when that magical thing that happens happens, it's impossible to predict, duplicate, fake or force, and that's why it's so rare. And interesting. And important. When I went to see Hairspray, Gypsy and Spamalot, all on Broadway, the room was decidedly alive with that nebulous thing that is what everybody calls "the magic of theater."

In Hairspray, that big baddd show about embracing your otherness, people were screaming and giving standing ovations in the middle of the show, just whenever their whims dictated. And Harvey Fierstein, as Edna Turnblad, chewed up the scenery in the most loveable, honest and beautiful way. Harvey is one of my heroes. John Waters said that the best thing about the fact that Hairspray had been turned into a musical was that in the future, when high schools all over the country put it on, "the fag and the fat girl will get the biggest parts."

In Gypsy, people began cheering as soon as the overture began--hooting and hollering like it was a basketball game. When Bernadette Peters came trodding down the aisle, screaming "Sing Out Louise!" you could hardly hear her for the excitement. When she sings that 11 0'clock number....wow. People in the audience kept saying "Not since Merman!" and stuff like that.

Spamalot was like a big family reunion, everyone in the audience knew the bits, and we laughed and laughed and laughed. The show tells five jokes when one will do--of every kind: visual jokes, physical comedy, puns, slapstick, witty banter, etc. I was like: "I smell Tony, yo."

The Nominations are In

Oscar nominations were announced yesterday morning, and so I now have that very silly sense of happiness about myself, having seen, appreciated, and championed most of the movies on the list. It doesn't make any sense that I should feel vindicated, but I do. As if I have anything to do with the making of these movies. Let alone the selection of the nominees, voting or results.

Oscar votes should be tallied using preferential voting, not winner-take-all. (Or maybe the Condorcet Method, which ranks nominees in relation to each other in a similar way.) This way, you get to vote first for Hellen Mirren in "The Queen," but you'd rather Kate Winslett win over Judi Dench if it comes to a runoff. You assign a ranking, ordering the nominees by number. The issue, of course, becomes that you end up with 100,000 voters (or however many there are) and maybe 75,000 sets of ordered numbers, but it gives you a clearer idea of who people actually want to win.

I don't pay too much attention to the winners, really. After all, I know how the voting works--it doesn't always happen like they say it does. Some years ago I sat down with a well-respected voter and her ballot and we checked things, seemingly at random, off the list. "Did you see that?" she would say. "Oh, so-and-so was in that?"

However, with Ellen Degeneres hosting, it should prove to be a fabulous party. You go girl.

Sunday Morning

One thing I miss about grief is the clarity. The focus it puts on your emotions. The way it illuminates the muddiness of the day to day, lengthening the time it takes for the sun to cross the sky, and perversely, achingly, stretching the night into an endless quiet space (those frozen hours when the rest of the world is asleep and so who are you going to call?) At any moment, if asked how you're feeling, you have the answer. And though you are grappling with everything, (compounded by bullshit like the electric bill and the goddamn subway,) grasping at complicated feelings like you'd pick a Bingo number, what pervades the entire experience is something simple, strangely comforting.

The one-year anniversary of Meg's death was back in September. So now everything I do, if I mark the time, a year ago, well, she was already dead.

Kip never met her. He was the first seriously important person in my life that didn't know me in the context of her. For a time I didn't know who I was. I guess this happens after long marriage that ends in divorce, when your parents die, or your child is lost to history, the ocean, a careening drunk driver, whatever. You aren't sure who you are. You aren't sure if you know how to go it alone. We so often bounce ourselves off another.

I miss her still, every day. But the sadness has lifted. And, mostly, only the charming, laughing love for her remains.

Excerpts in Limbo, Vol. 7

I don't write short stories. Rather: I don't write them successfully, and therefore I do not write them. Writers of short stories tend to have a clear vision, a more focused intention. Or, I suspect they do.

And yet.

I give you this, from an unfinished story began, according to Word, on 1/11/00:

The dirty cotton rope. It hangs there now, now that the bruised weight has come off of it and the memories are mostly rubbed away, a pink eraser smudge on clean white paper. It was the rope that hung clothes; she remembers that. The shirts and pants making limp body-shapes curling to greet you in the late wind, the last firm wind of summer. Because it was summer. And it was windy. That she also remembers. Some memories of that day shrivel. Others expand.

The toy horse. The wooden broom handle hacked off and glued snugly to a wad of cloth covered paper towels. When there was rain the head would soak and then dry, a new shape each day. Always a new grimace, a new stare. The toy horse that Daddy made for him. The toy horse that, later, brought out the worst in Daddy. At least she remembers it as the worst. How could there be any worse?

The cellar that filled with water from the outside in. Pooling toward her, silver mercury approaching from all the corners. The pump running all day. All night. "Run down and check on it," her mother always said. "Make sure the water isn’t reaching up too far." She remembers the coolness. The cold loam floor, dark as violet tar, smelly and rich as butter.

Quote of the Week

From a Greenmarket customer:

"You know who I don't like: couples who enjoy fitness together."

Janette Turner Hospital

Having just finished re-reading her novel The Tiger in the Tiger Pit, I must (once again) proclaim that she is one of the finest novelists writing in English. Take this, from that novel: "The greatest mystery, Elizabeth thinks, is the wildness of the beast within us. At any moment we may move in some primal way, take a mere step in the direction of private desire, stretch an arm: and our claws have left blood in their wake."

When I began writing Yield, my first novel, I had this insane notion that the writing was separate from the story. Hence, I would slap these precious, poetic little interludes at the end of a chapter, thinking okay, I've done what I want with getting the plot where it needs to be, and now I can enjoy myself a bit, maybe write a pretty sentence with the words 'light' and 'face' in it.

Janette taught me that the writing is the story, and the story is the writing. They are not two different things. She manages to write highly-political novels of very intimate circumstances. They are spotted with Shakespearean references, and nods to modern art and philosophy. I wrote once that what I liked most about her books was that they seemed to "be aware of where they are in history." So that the novel is less an island--and more a response, a reaction, a dialogue with the entire scope of art and artforms: music, opera, poetry, painting.

You can read about her at her website, or here on Wikipedia, or read interviews with her here, and here.

Strange Odor Lingers Over Manhattan

That was the CNN headline: Strange Odor Lingers Over Manhattan. "So what else is new," said Witold.

What we were actually talking about was the lingering odor of natural gas--mercaptan, specifically, the chemical additive that makes odorless gas detectible--which pervaded Manhattan all afternoon causing some alarm and much annoyance.

They told us that it wasn't anything to be worried about, that they had looked and looked for gas leaks and found nothing. That it was certainly not terrorism. It was certainly not dangerous. This, despite the evacuation of buildings and the closing of a handfull of subway lines and stations. For a time, that is.

Kip thinks it's an internal test, a way for police and security teams to see just what happens when you let loose a strange odor over Manhattan. They did it a while back with the scent of maple syrup--something I know plenty about--but it didn't give them the results they wanted. People weren't alarmed, they were merely confused. Lots of blogs went on about it, as I'm sure they will this event.

It could also be a sign of the apocalypse.* Last Saturday it was nearly 70 degrees. That's a Saturday in January, mind you. Plus Joan Didion was on the Martha Stewart show and I about died. I was just glad Martha didn't ask Joan to stick around and ice a Lady Baltimore Cake.

*I don't actually believe in "the apocalypse." It seems to me more likely that we all just muck around in our own makings until everything grinds to a sleepy, near-missable halt. Like something out of Beckett.

A New Year

Last Saturday morning, December 30, my longtime neighbor and surrogate grandfather, Bob Buckingham, died at home of congestive heart failure. I think they should change the name. Failure sounds so passive, like your body made an error. It should be called "Pro-Active Soul Liberation."

If we are lucky, that is.

As a gift for my birthday when I was twelve, Bob took me on a train ride through Chattanooga--the Missionary Ridge Local, which runs from Grand Junction to the East Chattanooga Depot and back. We stood against the railing while the engine changed direction on the turntable. Bob was slowly disappearing for the last couple of years, retreating into his memories, into story after story, each carrying an immense gravity. Talking to him, it was impossible not to feel a space opening, a strange distance which must have been even more alarming to him than it was to us. Wasn't it?

My mother's great-aunt Marie, who lives in a nursing home in Atlanta, said the woman who shared her room was walking down the hall one day and just fell over dead. "What a way to go," we all said.

My dad's parents, both in their late eighties, are stuck in time at different moments--quite possibly the time in their lives that were, for them, the happiest. My grandfather when he was a boy, aged eight to thirteen maybe. My grandmother later, in her years as a tourguide. I try not to think much about how these times are decades apart, about how neither much includes the other. Where are they? I sometimes wonder. And I don't blame them.

This year I learned that Meg is still gone, and gone really is forever. That her objects, her furniture, do not really contain her as much as they contain my memories. "Do you want to take a trip?" they say, peeking out at me from the bookcases, from the cabinets and locked boxes. They are wyrm holes you can touch.

Back in November, my friend Ashley wrote to me in a card: "May all your dead be at peace." I'd never heard anything so comforting.

My nephew, on the other hand, is remarkable in his alive-ness, his pure person-ness. The way he has adopted what is, apparently, our family posture--some slack-kneed way of standing that I've seen in photographs of my brother and I. The way he'll just tell you sometimes: "I don't know what that is."