Hey Tim from St. Louis, This One's for You

This week, a lot of information was passed down from the Universe. Sometimes your job is to sift, stir well, and respond. Sometimes your job is just to listen. This post is sort of a combination of both. (Which, by the way, is what I have decided a blog is. Mostly.) So, here are all the things I am trying to make sense of this week:

--J.D. Salinger died. This is a tragedy.

--People at the market wondered whether Salinger wrote anything else. If, say, there were stacks of manuscripts tucked away in safe deposit boxes. People wondered if there was nothing.

--I saw in the bookstore that Knopf has published a collection of Nabokov's note cards, called The Original of Laura, which would have turned into a novel, maybe, at some point, had he lived long enough to finish it. He wanted the notes to be burned, but his wife, as the story goes, "could not bear to destroy her husband’s last work." Could not bear to see her future royalties disappear, if you ask me. Or maybe that is harsh. But art is personal. And me, at least now, I wouldn't want any half-done art in the world after I have died.

--An unfinished Ralph Ellison novel has also been published, Three Days Before the Shooting. Juneteenth, which was published earlier, was culled from this same material.

--My friend Jane wonders, in this post, if writers "become better and better at considering [their] audience not purely out of generosity or thoughtfulness, but as a strategy for getting what [they] want?"

--But there is my dear Meg, in videos of old Circus Amok shows, which are hosted on the Hempispheric Institute's website, streaming, for all to see, enjoy, study, relive. Even though she died some years ago--there she is, real again, her movements and gestures, her stature, her economy.

--Is seeing Meg on video anything like the Nabokov note cards? Or the Ellison novel? Or Jane wondering if writer's get better at getting what they want as they become better writers? Because what does it mean that these novels are published after the writer, ostensibly, isn't in control of what he wants?

Help. I'm not sure what to make of it.

Important Ages

1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 25, 29, 30, 31, 37, 40, 48, 49, 50, 55, 59, 60, 62, 65, 70, 75, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100.

GrammarPiano TweetCloud

TweetCloud, this cool new website, is "a service that lets you generate a cool looking cloud of the words your tweets mostly contain." I like that they call this a "service." This is what mine looks like:

From Eileen Myles

Most likely, we travel to exist in an analogue to our life's dilemmas. It's like a spaceship. The work for the traveler is making the effort to understand that the place you are moving through is real and the solution to your increasingly absent problems is forgetting. To see them in a burst as you are vanishing into the world. Travel is not transcendence. It's immancence. It's trying to be here.

--From the essay, "Iceland" by Eileen Myles

What Reviewers Have to Say About the South Williamsburg Post Office

--"I just moved to the area and I ship hula hoops folded in half, never had a problem.. until this horrible place."

--"She completely gave up on me."

--"After a 2 hour goose chase, My package did NOT get sent and I left the post office in tears."

--"Long lines, incompetent staff... I'd rather just take the packages to China myself."

--"This really is the worst post office ever. to top off every bad experience i have had there (and they all have been) they were closed an hour early this evening for no reason.

--"Avoid this post office at all costs."

--"GO ELSEWHERE. THIS PLACE IS A JOKE."

--"This place is hell, they never have forms, is filthy, and they blast trash TV to "distract" people from their mess."

--"I almost got jumped by two women in this post office about 4 years ago, now I cannot get them to forward my mail to a new address, it must be in a gigantic pile there somewhere."

--"This post office is THE WORST."

Oh, Vivica

Hump Day Update

--Vermont was lovely, if brief. I guess I was there for about 18 hours, total. Still, I was able to spend some time walking through the woods, and feeling like myself. At some point while I was walking up through the part of the farm that they call "The Marriage Area," I picked up a huge branch that had fallen. It was not heavy, just large and twisted. I propped it on my shoulder and kept walking, a kind of Tom Bombadill moment. As I came to the higher part, I turned around and looked out over the hill and the snow and the land all around me. I felt such a huge swell of gratitude toward the trees. I wondered, for a moment, if I should say it out loud to them, or would they know it already? Would they care?

--My brain has been pleasantly distracted by the goings-on lately, and I feel simultaneously exhausted and charged, like I'm on speed, but drunk. As soon as things pan out and situate in some kind of finality, I'll be able to relax more. I think. I hope.

--After all the fuss, I joined Facebook. (And I have since updated my previous post on this blog about not joining it, so there.) People have been going on an on about it to be, as if it were the savior of mankind. It is not that. It is no more or less interesting and annoying than any of the previous social-networking websites, although this one has a certain reach, and therefore people who, I would gander to presume, were not a part of Friendster, for example, have signed up and send inane messages to my boyfriend about assinine right-wing causes. Hello? The interesting part to me--so far--at least, is how people talk about connecting on Facebook, but there really isn't any connecting going on that I can see. There's just confirmation and information. "Hi, it's been 15 years since I saw you!" the notes say. I am glad for them, but we are not really sharing anything other than some kind of intangible proof that we still exist. "Here I am," the thing says to the universe, and here is my data. It also makes me realize that I have no photos of myself. I stopped taking pictures with my own camera a while back, and so now my digital self lives inside other people's computers--the modern era is so fractured.

--I think the boyfriend and I are going to Prague sometime in May-ish.

Indigo Boys

My friend Alex created an entry for "Indigo Boy" in the Urban Dictionary. WOOT!

Back in the days of AOL--this was in my early teens, back when they actually charged something like $2.95 per hour to be connected to the internet, and I kept a tin of money near the computer, like a piggy bank of sorts--my email was "indigoboy6," though I don't remember there being 5 before me.

Indigo Boys:
Gay men who are emotionally connected to their sexuality, or basically, lesbians in men's bodies---political, Birkenstock-wearing, anti gym-culture, often vegetarian. Sensitive enough to listen to the Indigo Girls song "Closer to Fine" and maybe cry. As in: I went to the KD Lang show and it was all lesbians and Indigo Boys.

Open Letters, Vol. 8

Dear Modernity,

Oh, Modernity, you bitter mistress, you taught me so much over the weekend.

Actually, you didn't teach me anything concrete, nothing I could say for sure--which, in itself is its own kind of modernity--you just brought up a whole new set of questions. Socrates would say that is teaching, but you know, whatevs.

First, on my Twitter feed, I watched as Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore began complaining about their neighbors. Then I watched as very slowly, the story got picked up by various "news" outlets and broadcast all abouts the interweb. It was the first time I was able to see one of those celebrity stories from beginning to end. What started as something rather vacant and light suddenly became a news story, and people were quoting the Tweets and talking about how Ash and Demi were feeling. Who really knows how they were feeling? The machine took something and chewed it into bits.

And second, me and some other gay boys (plus a real live lady) sat around on Saturday night drinking beer and watching dumb videos on YouTube. We watched the one where the guy pukes on the morning news show, the one where the Swedish lady pukes on that morning show, the one where the lady falls and really hurts herself while trying to stomp grapes, the one where the lady falls on the Segway, the farting aerobics instructor, the farting newscaster, Sue Simmons and her important question, the gay/blind hiker, the weather man with diarrhea, and many, many others. How did we miss this typo?

Kip suggested that this was the current version of sitting around the campfire telling stories. It was pretty remarkable, in a way, all of us sitting in a circle, passing around the laptop, calling up one crazy narrative from YouTube, and turning the computer around so everyone could watch together. It didn't feel vacant, which you might presume.

I'm not the kind of person who bemoans how technology and modernity are keeping us apart from one another, but I'm not foolish enough to believe that things like YouTube and social networking websites are actually bringing people closer together--perhaps in an organizing sense, in a mobilizing sense, but never making quality interaction among people, surely. Right? Maybe? Instead, I think it's some unknown mixture of the two. Our language is becoming these videos, truncated for cultural ease--like that joke about the prisoners telling jokes in prison*. Our consciousness is becoming the translation of Twitter feeds.

Help us, I want to scream. But, to whom? And from what?

Sincerely,
Lee

*Let me know if you want to hear that joke.

WUUFF / DIET SUV

A Summary of Text Messages Received

Capitalization and punctuation preserved.

-Whoo hoo! Feels a little brighter
-Its amazing. And majorities in both houses!
-in shock.
-Free at last!
-I don't even know this feeling
-OK!
-I haven't been this happy in a very long while. I'm elated.
-Overjoyed. Overwhelmed!!
-Crying. Hugging. Never felt so full of hope.
-Yay!!!!!!!!
-Holy sht
-AMAZG! AMAAZZG!
-Loves it
-Are you seeng ths?