like you mean it

Tags

AWP, barbaric yawp, Cheesecake Factory, Cheryl Strayed, Dead Poet's Society, grad school, hipster hatred, lit, this happened, VIDA count

AWP spells three quarters of a yawp. Remember high school English class, Robin Williams, Whitman – the good old days when first exposure to the greats of poetry made us hop up on our desktops? (Remember when ‘desktop’ just meant the working surface of a desk?)

Last Thursday, under a rain of slush that turned to snow, my three best grad school girls and I sealed ourselves into the Back Bay Sheraton, connected to both the Hynes Convention Center and the Pru. We didn’t leave until Sunday morning.

The AWP is self-designated the biggest literary conference in the world. There are hundreds of panels, readings, signings, Qs and As, plus keynote speakers and a three-floor massive bookfair of some 700 stalls. You’re given a lanyard (sponsored by a low-residency MFA in Tampa) with your affiliation and your name and turned loose with your tote bag among the other eleven thousand aspirants and famous authors with their tote bags. I won’t describe too hard. It’s all been done by now, and very well. (Here, for example, at n+1.)

Writing is a solitary act and socializing isn’t something we as writers are particularly good at. There was an awful lot of awkward at that massive conference complex. (And an awful lot of complexes.) But it was a charming awkward. A collective effort of ambivalence. All of us all fired up and keen for literary conquest. All the women raving in unison about the VIDA count. All the men elbowing their way into the queue for Don DeLillo’s autograph. All of us suddenly certain of success and our delusions of it.

At my most ambivalent, I sat (no, stood) at the service end of the overflowing bar at Cheesecake Factory, chatting with an old writer idol who shouted at the bartender for drinks. He ordered us four dishes from the appetizer menu because he thought it was important that he feed me. These arrived on plates the size and heft of rowboats, and had almost to be stacked to fit in front of us. Eat more, he said, handing me tuna bites, Have some more of this. We ate standing up, until two barstools opened up and he seized them for us from the crowd. He had forty minutes to spare between events. We ate fast. We talked fast, across each other. He was certain I wore glasses as a child. Glasses and a yellow sundress. He was sure of this. You’re all grown up, he said. I told him I had not worn glasses. Even though my father always told me I would have to if I kept on reading in the dark. No, that wasn’t me, I said. He must have misremembered. When I was thirteen and in his acting class, I was two years below the age requirement, the lone fat kid in straw skirts and beefy tees among the lithe and drugged up fifteen-year-old hip. They wrote about condoms and cigarettes and I wrote thinly adapted character studies of Anne Shirley cast among the halfway houses of cities I invented for their grittiness. I thought this made me pass for edgy. I tried wearing knock-off Birkenstocks from T.J. Maxx. Then we all co-wrote a play, which we performed complete with the modern dance segment requisite of adolescent theatre.  The cool kids in their cut-off shorts lanked from slouch to slouch across the stage, exuding ‘tude. I was the wide-faced earnest one, a blow-up parade float starfish balloon who couldn’t bend and touch her toes.

Still he swore he knew me. You were very quiet, he said. I do remember you. You were very bright and very shy. That made me feel better, but then I thought about the hotel room on the 14^th floor, two double beds’ worth of girls in debt. All four of us were once (and still are, I suppose, to some degree, and always will be) bright and shy. Should I feel special because he said it?  He is a celebrated author, international best seller, and all-round charming fellow. And after all, isn’t it nice to have our favorite features recognized and reaffirmed and handed back to us by almost-strangers?

It had been over fifteen years. So that was fun. A capsule review of catching up: how the Former Fat Kid went through divorces, moves, diplomas, deaths and taxes, and ended up getting an MFA.

When he left, he was a demigod no longer. He was just another writer trying really hard. He made sure to order me a second glass of wine before he left, which was both chivalrous (in that he wanted me to have it, which was nice) and un- (in that there must be a rule somewhere against leaving a lass alone and tethered to a fresh-poured drink). But I stayed and drank it, perched on that hard-won wicker barstool. I dragged my new New England Review copy from my conference tote and started reading. I let the conference roar.

It doesn’t matter who you find to validate you, be it an alumnus of the Oprah’s Book Club, a professor, a father, or a friend. At some point you have to don your lanyard name tag and proudly come out to the world. Hey guys, I know there are a lot of you already, but add me to the list. We’re all the same and somehow different enough to not compete. Be not infuriated by the staggering numbers of the literary unemployed, be infuriated by the VIDA count. Be infuriated by your own self-doubt. Write the fuck out of shit (to paraphrase the eloquent Caitlin Moran). Write like a motherfucker (to quote Cheryl Strayed). And submit. As if your life depends upon it. Send your words into the void and show some damned enthusiasm for the privilege.

That’s what I learned at the AWP.

No one really believes in your book, but you have to. You have to yawp. You have to put your big girl panties on and finish that glass of Cabernet. Alone. At Cheesecake Factory.

scene of the crime

Tags

D.C., herniated discs, l'amour, por que no, tango, travelling

Exactly two years ago, newly in love and two years into tango, I came to D.C. for a tango festival. Because we were poor, we volunteered, and I—being the kind of girl who did this sort of thing in the first quarter century of my life—went with the boys. For three hours or so, we lugged heavy blonde-wood squares from van to loading dock, up several flights in the service elevator, and into a carpeted ballroom, where we flopped them down and screwed them to a frame to build the dance floor. To spare my back the heavy lifting, I went straight for the power drill and started screwing in the squares. At the end of the festival, I unscrewed them. For hours, I went from screw to screw to screw (about sixteen screws per square) with a wheezing drill (about eighty squares in all), bent at the waist. I thought nothing of it at the time. B., to his credit, did say, “Careful you don’t hurt your back.”

I hurt my back.

This mostly means I see a lot of chiropractors, physical therapists, and this one soft-spoken Korean ballerino who elbows my bones into alignment. It mostly means I don’t get to dance much anymore. This causes me (and B.) considerable anguish. I don’t mind the pain, per se. Just when the pain says, so emphatically: thou shalt not dance!

This year, we went again. It was an impulse purchase, two student passes and a hotel room. I packed a suitcase full of slinky cotton things that move well, plus ostentatious earrings and the mascara tube I rarely use. I packed two pairs of heels plus floppy practice flats. I packed Advil, Arnica, and a lumbar pillow.

(I felt a bit like an alcoholic. Hi, my name is Meghan, it’s been eight months since my last milonga. And even then, I really only danced with B. We’ve been to a few prácticas and afternoon affairs, but I can’t tell you the last time I went dancing.)

As tango festivals go, Por Que No is Triple-A. Another few years and it will likely number among the majors, but for now it’s a relatively small crowd—300 dancers or so—three nights, three teaching and performing couples, nine classes daily, five DJs, two afternoon prácticas. It’s got a really nice non-judgmental vibe, a secret cocoon-y-ness about it. It happens in the massive Doubletree Hilton & Convention Center, tucked out on the Arlington fringe of the capital. We had to cut across an empty lot to get there from the Metro, avoiding the longer path under a complex network of intersecting underpasses. Our room had a view of the Pentagon, the Washington Monument, the Capitol building, the White House, and a mall – not to mention several looping highways and a wide swath of construction. When the hotel dining options got too tiresomely expensive, we trudged back to the main road for suburban franchise fare.

But you don’t come to a tango festival for the location or the food. If the festival is good, you’ll not leave the artificial air shaft of your accommodations until you check out, three to five days later, sore and soaring.  You’ll eat what you can scrounge up like a woodland creature: dried fruit, nuts, bananas. And you’ll dance.

I danced. I also sat and watched (more than I danced). I sat and rubbed my lumbars, stretched my hamstrings and my glutes. I lay on the ballroom carpet with my knees up on a banquet chair. I did homework during classes, keeping one ear on the lilt and twang of the instructors, hopping up now and again to try an exercise.

I also didn’t dance. I had to stop, just when the boleos and sacadas were getting interesting. I had to take myself up to the 14^th floor pool by myself and let my hips unclench in water. I had to sit and watch and not get asked to dance. But what a gift to sit and watch and listen to Tanturi, to Fresedo, Pugliese, and Caló. There’s always more to tango than just dancing.

And then, when our night was over, B. and I ate Doubletree complementary cookies and watched Netflix in our king bed with the District sparkling out beyond our blinds. We slept extremely late.

The best part was the warmth, remembering there is this tango family out there that will embrace you (forgive the pun) even when you’ve been AWOL for two years. That will offer to put temporary tattoos on your boob. And that will, very generously, take your rusty gimp-ungraceful ass out for a spin.

Also: I got cabeceo-ed by a superstar. And tripped.

We spent last night on the Bolt Bus, the mid-Atlantic midnight lurch back to New York, and waking up this morning (after five hours’ sleep) felt like the good old days when I could dance for hours and the only thing that hurt me was my feet. I tried to conjure up some bitterness about Tango Por Que No and for the injury that hasn’t healed and maybe never will. I couldn’t.

Introduction to the Bible as Literature

Tags

and I quote, Bible class, hipster hatred, this happened

First (of what I hope will be many) reading-the-Bible-on-the-L-train pick-up lines of the semester:

Excuse me…

sayeth the tall, dark, decently handsome fella in the houndstooth scarf,

What church do YOU go to?

I will not talk to dead women

Tags

bushwick, crisis-of-faith, hipster hatred, Moments of Being, narcissism, Virginia Woolf

Today was the anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s birth. She, being a hero of mine, deserves plenty of auguri sent her way come any January 25th, and I duly tip my quill to her. This year in particular. This year, on this day, I had forgotten, and was remembered of it tweeting, of all things, waiting for the subway, Moments of Being tucked into my shoulder bag. An accident of books falling like Tetris blocks into my hands, one behind the other in the queue.

This year, also, I have found myself offending narcissism. Which is to say, being defensive at it. Making the case for not it. Hoping very hard to not embody it. You see, I live in Brooklyn, in anno domini 2013, and not just any Brooklyn — hipster Brooklyn. And I’m a writer (though saying so always makes me feel like a massive fraud). A memoir writer, even, telling myself my own stories, studying the ‘I’. And spending a hundred grand to do it.

Still, that word hangs overhead. I will not be a narcissist. I will not be a narcissist. I write it on the chalkboard of myself in smudgy dust. The refrain itself is self-obsessed. I spend so much time trying not to be that I become a version of the thing. Plus there’s all this chat of memoir-writing being navel-gazy; how can that not be true? I’m seven chapters deep into a manuscript whose only plot is hung upon D.I.Y. pegs, distorted and/or amplified bits of biography. I set out to write it in cold blood; it came out a confessional.

And worse, there’s Girls. Lord, but I get into fights about this show. Just Wednesday night, I found myself shouting across a hipster-cafe-table that narcissism, however trendy, was not a life goal to which one should aspire — no matter how artistic or misunderstood we are. But that’s what happens when we aren’t limited by money or time, they argue. As if it were a purpose in and of itself. As if any artist would devolve that way without the whole anxiety of paying rent. But, but, Virginia Woolf! I wailed, but wasn’t heard because our twelve dollar burgers had arrived, half vegan, half grilled in fancy bacon fat.

I decided I should let it go. I’m altogether far too angry lately. Full of rage-against-the-rudeness I-should-not-go-out-in-public city rage. Railing against all those who do not do unto others, damn them, while I’m sitting here damn well doing unto them! I will not pick fights in hipster bars. I will not pick fights in hipster bars. Least of all not arguments I know I’ll never win. But, for the record, I sat sipping my eight-dollar malbec from a juice glass and imagining ole melancholy Jinny Stephen harumphing in her grave. Had I but known what you ungrateful children had in mind when I said you’d need a room and those five hundred pounds…

The point is not that I don’t have the money or the room. The point is, I hate hipsters. And not because they wear skinny jeans with suspenders and find McSweeney’s funny. Because they cannot begin to care about anything more serious than brunch. (I’m being harsh, I know — too harsh. Hipster hatred is also not the point. I expect I’ll have to write an essay just to refute myself and begin unfumbling the ball.) The real point is this: it is Virginia Woolf day. And she cared. And so do I.

It is amazing how, in a series of sketches penned in the months before her death, she could feign such hope. (There’s a lot more darkness in there, I find, rereading it — what with all her talk about the “dismal puddle” and the “child advancing with bare feet” into that cold river, descending into the stream. Not to mention all that stuff about the cotton wool.) By hope I mean this passage:

And I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.

I’ll leave you with that. Good night, Jinny. May the heavens be praised for your mastery of semicolons. And for your words.

this thing I wrote

Tags

Adam in Eden, Carlos Fuentes, mexico, review, The New Inquiry

Review of Carlos Fuentes’s Adam in Eden for The New Inquiry:

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-first-man/

but seas between us braid hae roar’d

Tags

2012, bushwick, grad school, school year, year end

I always tend to get a little sad after the holidays, in the quiet hammock between Christmas and New Years Eve. This year it has been wonderful: big, crusty loft all to ourselves (recently cleaned), surprise overnights and dinners out, breaking back into tango (slowly, arduously), and sleeping more than six hours at a stretch. I am healthy. The people I love are mostly healthy. The people I love mostly love me back.

Christmas was a patchwork blanket: twinkle lights and jelly jars, christmas carols blasted through an empty building (the hipsters all gone home to townships north, to Connecticut and Westchester), a nine course feast prepared, a party for the orphans and the jews. Whisky, flaming pudding, new traditions, and charades. The whole house smelled of rosemary for days.

Thinking back on calendar year two-thousand-twelve, the year the Mayans stopped their counting, I come up with: a semester, a summer, a semester. Friends made, friends lost, another few tens of thousands drawn against the bank. Another several dozen books stacked on the shelf.

I will look back on this (somewhere ages and ages hence) and it will be my golden age. Poised on the brink of thirty, everywhere a possibility. Old enough to know better, still young enough to try. Eating grad school pizza, drinking my tuition in 6 oz. plastic cups of grad school wine.

And there is the writing. All told, 218 pages this semester, plus 14 pages of translation. Of that, about seventy-five percent belonging to the tango book, or my presumptive thesis, coming in at just over 45,590 words. The last two weeks away from it have been a mercy.

And then this quote, from Betsy Lerner:

“The only real difference that I have been able to quantify between those who ultimately make their way as writers and those who quit is that the former were able to contain their ambivalence long enough to commit to a single idea and see it through.”

The world didn’t end December 21st, but I imagine given Newtown, earthquakes, hurricanes, and civil war, it could end any day. We have this hour and not much more.

So that’s my project for the coming year. Commitment. To friends, to love, to auld lang syne. To living well, to honesty, politeness on the MTA. To writing this one thing until it’s good or done. To being thankful for the fact of spending almost every waking hour each week either reading books or writing them. And that ain’t bad.

five o’clock somewhere

Tags

bushwick, hipster hatred, labor day, school year

The heat is evening breaking, though the air is thick with coming rain and the usual Bushwick grit blows on the wind.

A reedy-voiced hipster is tinkling the ivories through the Elton John songbook. He is the sort of person I immediately distrust—cut-offs held up with clip-on suspenders, going barefoot in a neighborhood of factories. He sounds every bit as white as of course he is, sometimes new-growth bearded gruff, sometimes warbling like a hamster,  a teenager in heat (sex organs slaked across a chalkboard), but his spindly fingers are contributing a  certain charm to this our semifinal night of summer.

We moved back yesterday, to this place we now call home (for one more year). It’s every bit as scrappy as it always was—dirt slick concrete, crumbling walls, unfinished wood—and every inch clotted with dust. It’s about a hundred degrees in there; a sun-baked kiln, but we’ve got every fan in Christendom whining and ticking in hopes of circulating air. The shower’s still broken—though at least for now the lack of water heater isn’t vexing anyone—and there’s a distinct smell of dead thing somewhere in some wall, but it is home.

And so, we threw out spices in their sticky jars. We sorted a summer’s worth of mail and magazines. We beat the rugs. When all was done, we had a beer, and it was worth it, being together, being here. We’ve got philosophy from floor to ceiling, baby.

Today it’s back to tricks, writing in this coffee shop of half-shaved heads and unironic outfits, miniskirts and ankle boots. The hipster has switched to his guitar, singing city-country songs to those who drink martinis from a Mason jar. For all my hipster hatred, I am complicit in this world. Young and underfunded, a kitchen full of patchwork dishes, book stack for a night stand.

The heat will break. Winter will come. Year two begins.

 

the last time I saw Paris

Tags

hubris, jazz manouche, l'amour, pantheon, paris, tango, the louvre, travelling, voyeurism

It might be time to talk about Paris. I don’t want to talk about Paris. In Paris, I felt like a fraud.

Traveling is thumbing through a catalogue of cults we cannot join. We plagiarize the native choreography; we come in costume, slink into their ballrooms, follow all their customs as observed. Never take milk in coffee in the afternoon; learn to sip it bitter, black. Never leave chopsticks in the rice, like incense sticks in funerary pots. And so on. We are charmed, repulsed, in equal parts.

We tell ourselves we aren’t tourists. We go looking for the off-the-beaten path, but nonetheless it is a path. The so-called road less travelled, albeit worn “really about the same.” And when we get there, there we are. This is the filter through which we see the world: this flatfooted, omni-oppressive ‘I.’

And Paris is, well, Paris. We go there to be tourists, after all. To stand spine-center in a beloved novel, knee deep in that Woody Allen film. We stake no claims on authenticity as long as she will honor our idea of her.

I didn’t go to Paris. I went to my idea of Paris. I was a teenaged journal version of myself: slow dancing to Lucienne Boyer, sipping Sancerre by the river from a plastic cup, congratulating fishermen for snaring one enormous carp. My Paris was champagne bubbles in the afternoon, rain-scented oil slicks on the street, kisses at ordinary intersections, and low-pitched sirens wailing through l’heure bleue. My Paris was whimsy built up into bricks, and everything I’d hoped for. Ninety-nine percent romance and wandering.

We walked until my feet went bloody, back and forth across the Seine. We stumbled into Saint-Sulpice and Notre Dame, the Jardin du Luxembourg, Ile St.-Louis, and the Marais. No need for guidebooks, parapluies, or maps.

We treated ourselves to five euro café crèmes on charming streets (and not so charming ones). We rode the Montmartrebus round roller coaster turns and corners, chugging downhill, almost off our seats. We caught a glimpse of Sacré Coeur, then spent an hour dancing at a milonga at the bottom of the hill. We had dinner in a tiny blue couscous-erie: clay bowls full of steaming grain. There was still a line around the block an hour later when we finished eating, finished our bottle of rose, finished taking in the square and saying “acht.” Très romantique, non? And not just that—the stroll across the Pont des Arts, the locks! The old and battered books, the salt-and-nutella smell of crepes, the Seine, the stately islands and their sparkling facades. We did jazz caveaus and four course dinners, rose petal macarons, long walks along the river where the romancers and hoodlums kiss and pee (respectively). We watched bateaus go by. We breakfasted on buttered dough in varied forms, then walked for hours through cathedrals, cobbled streets. We lunched at sidewalk tables, sipping tiny glasses of rose. We made a point of getting lost.

We walked home in the rain, sought cover under tombs in Montparnasse, sought cover in cafes. Market women with their carts took refuge with us under awnings. Dogs stepped up their homeward pace, not bothering to sniff the market stalls, the fish counter, the racks of wholesale cotton clothes, and a magnificent display of pocket pastas, flour dusted, piled like cockles over ice. We sat and watched the vendors, standing elbows out of aprons, watch the heaving rain.

We did our own thing too: B. at his conference, I at my markets and museums. A blur of oil paint and marble body parts, herb-wrapped chèvres and strawberries, long-horn tomatoes, chickpea latkes with basil yogurt sauce. Bouquets of lavender thrust in my face. Beggar guitars. The unfamous fountains. The coffees and the endless glace. Salted butter caramel and fig sorbet. Sea foam colored silken lingerie.

That last reads like the status update of a silly girl, unemployed and city hopping, high on self esteem. But you’ll forgive me. This was Paris. And Paris should be a patterned china set, a light blue laundry list, something written in calligraphy. Some photos of linens hanging out to dry, or open windows, trellised balconies. A pair of leather shoes. The remnants of a lunch. Look up, look down; it’s always Paris. Victory is ours and true love matters more than currency.

*

Day five. I had this sense all day something was wrong. I’d spent seven hours in the Louvre, on line before the fountains were—before the hordes of tourists glutted all the escalators, belching themselves through every entrance, bee-lining to the Mona Lisa. I felt superior to them. I took my time. I forced myself to stand in front of shards of china, Ptolemaic steles, and lesser-loved Classical canvases. I would not elbow my way into a better glimpse of armless Aphrodite, my view of her obscured by cell phone cameras and disembodied hands. I stood and looked at things for seven hours. That’s what we do, when travelling; we stand and look at things.

I rode the city bus, then rode it in the wrong direction. I backtracked past unlovely courtyards, dry cleaners, and B list eateries, passing benches lined with women sitting with their ankles crossed in rubber shoes, and men with thermoses and plastic shopping bags. When the streets got lyrical again, I treated myself to a rhubarb sorbet.

Then, twilight: at the wine joint tucked back behind the Pantheon, its fourth wall windows pulled away, its tables spilling into sidewalk. We sat among the music executives and intellectuals and shared a plate of cheese, a basket of baguette, a plate of leeks with vinaigrette, the night, the Roussillon, the company (my B. in his favorite shirt).

This was our last full night in Paris, and there we were. On that darkened square: the shuttered bakery, a bubbling water source, some benches, and a lawn. Evening, gaslight, cold white wine. We began as two and ended up a crowd. Chairs were borrowed, rearranged, and someone ordered beer instead of wine, Pastis. Cell phones and cigarettes consumed the table. We were summarily forgotten by our waiters. I believe this was deserved.

And then the fire. A dozen pompiers and trucks arrived. We saw no smoke, so they seemed funny sprinting back and forth, spooling and unspooling hoses, spraying jets of water at the night…

I said I had this sense all day something was wrong. Something (or I) was out of rhythm, unbelonging. And then a woman in a linen dress, a cardigan, and harem pants, hysterical. Someone brings a wicker chair. The novelty of firemen and trucks is not so funny anymore. Smoke trickles acrid-smelling, to the street, and still no flames. A portly neighbor pats the woman’s back. They are both middle aged. The one screams; she’s crying “mother,” crying something unintelligible as the crowd gathers to gawk. Some, of course, clasp hands across their mouths in courtesy; others just accumulate. A voyeuristic view into the scene reveals a darkened courtyard full of grey, smelling of molten plastic, full of neighbors shaken from their homes.

I still hear her screaming. Like the time the 2 train hit the drunk man at eleven on a Wednesday morning and took his leg. I took the smell of screaming rubber, that pink spray of flesh across the subway door. It is the same with her.

I ask how we distinguish what we see. Is she drama prone? Is her hysteria an idiom, or does she wail in universal parlem? We leave Tragedy in privacy. We’ll never know what happened, or the damage done. We leave tomorrow anyway. Jack finds a POLICE ball cap fallen, forgotten, on the street and takes it, makes a souvenir of it. “We aren’t animals,” he says, reassuring as we walk away.

The night is over, or it must be, but we’re walking, one foot then the other, past the pillars of the iridescent Pantheon, glowing twenty watts. We end up in the back room of a rock bar, in the backroom concert space, where bald, pot-bellied men play Jazz Manouche to a full house. They wear fedoras, t-shirts, tailored pants. They slap their instruments like fishermen or gods. (I plagiarize myself.) The evening drama melts into the banquette where we’re crammed buttcheek to buttcheek among students sipping wine and amber beer. The plucky le pompe strumming rhythm gets underneath our nail beds until it beats another jolt of joie de vivre into our blood. We sway our heads in rhythm, glancing glassy-eyed up at the dusty bottle-covered bar, bedizened with ceramic cows. A mammoth bull’s head guards the wood piano. Everything gets better; Suffering is temporary.

We order drinks. The girls in front of us, adjacent to the stage, all snap their gum and fix their hair, or fiddle with their phones. They’re bored. They do not clap. We are outraged on behalf of Paris. Someone in a jaunty cap hisses out a “shhhhh” (if such dialects can be recorded), and they collapse against the booth in sullen silence.

To travel is to look at things. We judge them and we judge ourselves.

*

Virginia Woolf wrote: “as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”

It’s different for me, I tell myself. I’ve moved around too much. When asked where I am from, I always answer “miscellaneous.” I travel thirstily and open-eyed, blank pages in my purse. I’m desperate for a country. Home is out there somewhere to be found.

That somewhere isn’t Paris. Not even Paris how I might have seen her—in the far arrondissements, where people live like everybody else—above Chinese food takeaways, where there are launderettes and rats, and people shop at Carrefour. Maybe that was Paris, real Paris, and I missed it.

*

I had this idea of Paris, see, of who I’d be in Paris. I tried to honor her.

That next morning, before the train to Charles de Gaulle, we stood and looked at things some more. Maybe we didn’t purchase any plastic Eiffel Towers, but we held hands and strolled. We bolted our trinket to the bridge and split two keys between us, tossed the third into the Seine. It was cloudy, but we didn’t mind. A gruff accordioniste was playing a tango, and so we danced—right there on the Pont des Arts.

Glasgow (19 june to 4 july)

Tags

and I quote, glasgow, scotland, summer, surgery

Just now, it rained hard and fast enough to flood the garden. I’m sitting at the wide wood table in the kitchen, scene of several crimes that I’ve committed against English in this fortnight, grappling with chapters that never quite cohere. It isn’t raining anymore, but we can hear the aftermath, the draining and the dripping into puddles. A plane takes off somewhere.

Last week we plucked a rose. One past perfect dame we spared from fading on the bush where other roses wilted—low to the front stoop and dripping from the wet. Outside roses turn first watery, then brown. Petals turn to leaves, plop off like raindrops.

We’re still in solstice mode. Morning might as well be noon. On day three of official summer, it was light for fifteen hours straight. At ten pm, the sun had barely, sparely set. Not much changes. Afternoons are all day long; evenings are exposed. There is this bright and bluing shaft of light where night should be. The rhododendrons and the snail-pocked shrub are blooming past their bedtimes. The birds are all confused. Fat pigeons pace the back lawn, hunkering their beaks down to their puffed-up breasts against the periodic rain.

Annie Dillard wrote: we can’t identify the moment winter turns to spring. The arsonist of the sunny woods. We cannot catch the snake who eats his tail, once he’s gone hooping past. Scotland is the same with any season. Summer, winter, autumn. Blossoms come with rain, and fall. When things become too delicate for clinging to a center stem, they die. Meanwhile, the lawn shoots up, weed-high with buttercups and dandelions, thick with clover. It must be cut, and cut, and cut. And yet we do not bring bouquets of lawn into the house, like armloads of late-May lilacs or that one rose, fat and fuschia, which sat in a pint glass on the entry table until yesterday.

Meanwhile, sheep are shorn. We squish across the muddy grass to catch ten minutes of the 18^th International Black Face Sheep Shearing Competition in Lochearnhead, watch thick muscle-shouldered men run shavers “up the brisket,” shuck the fleeces off in one wooly go. We’ve caught the quarter final, and the commentary is tremendous. Five minutes on the clock, eight sheep per man, each one patted on the naked rump and scooched back down the chute in turn. They run back leaping, weightless, to the herd.

 

I think I could now die happy.

It rains on sunny days, and suns on rainy ones. Suddenly a flower you have never seen before looks painted on, like wallpaper. Purple paper, tapered leaves. It also blooms and goes. Trees grow onto the sidewalks, beaded curtains shaking rain.

Can we name the moment when our summer culminates? The human summer, when the gardens grow. When blooms and babies are arranged in rows, and beans all line up for the counting. When we are held accountable for clipping plants and bringing them inside to dry. (A botanist once told me, if you stick your nose into the center of a bloom to smell it, that contact with your skin will ruin it.)

Sometimes I fear growing old. One bursting organ pulled out through my navel and I wonder what else in me pickles, what other petals have started wrinkling within.

But there isn’t any darkness here. The flowers haven’t time to dry. The blue hour, which is pink in winter, shows up tardy, stays until tomorrow. The sky is made of fountain pens, leaking milky ink. In winter, maybe it’s the opposite. Dark for longer, sunless. (The flowers all take sleeping drugs.)

This is summer at its perfect, soggy peak. Some nights I find it hard to sleep, so bright it looks like false dawn through the shades. I turn the yellow pages of a book, brittle from my folding of them; I want to remember this. We don’t catch or name the slide of nights, the moment of increasing speed. The bending stem. Sleep is always winter, even when it isn’t winter.

Tomorrow we will fly to Paris. But right now, this is Glasgow wet and wide awake.

this thing I wrote

Tags

guanajuato, mexico, published, travel writing

 

…for Printed magazine:

Feast of the Epiphany (which is to say: excerpts from a travel journal, observations across two days in Guanajuato.)