Congestion

Yesterday I slept most of the day, on and off, dozing and then getting up to eat or watch a movie and then dozing again. It felt really good. Not much in my life at the moment is urgent, like, with a deadline or consequences, so I'm drifting a little. Spending whole days sleeping is good once in a while, like yesterday, but today, drifting does not feel good. I want to want to do things - writing or chores or editorial. But I don't really want to do any of them, or at least not one more than the other. In trying to decide what to tackle and how, I'm a little frozen, so instead here I am writing a blog post. 

One thing did get done today: my husband and I bought a cemetery plot. The timing may seem weird, but: plots always go up in cost, we have a little money to spare right now, and we're sure about where we want to go. I feel so good about this decision - having a big, final, expensive choice all settled and in order, getting something done as rare and useful as this - that I want to tell everyone, but it's also an odd, macabre thing to talk about or announce. I feel like we bought a house (a very small, very inexpensive, very specific kind of house), but with virtually none of the hassle and responsibility of being a homeowner, so I want to rejoice. Given what we actually did buy, that's weird, right? 

The weather is changing. It's overcast in the mornings now, cool and a little humid, until the sun breaks through and it becomes SoCal again. It's giving me congestion that is definitely not COVID but of course, fear, anxiety, etc. 

I've watched a pile of movies lately, from In a Lonely Place to Repo! The Genetic Opera, including a couple of docs, one about giallo (thumbs-down) and one about cult film (thumbs-up-ish). In general I am tired of the conversation about film mostly being among men. I am tired of that. Watching Magic Mike for the first time I thought about the male gaze, and how that film goes with its flow while kind of stumbling into the female gaze now and then, which doesn't make much sense because the premise depends upon the female gaze, thus the ultimate gender philosophy of Magic Mike is really kind of a mess, which of course has been true for Soderbergh since sex, lies, and I considered the wildly different attitudes of women at male strip clubs and men at female strip clubs, and how wherever you go the phallus is the point, and how deeply goddamn annoying that is, which led me to "W.A.P.", and then I just stopped thinking about it altogether because I really needed another feminist to bounce all this off of, but it didn't stop me from feeling sure that more women need to talk and more men need to shut up in film discourse. In general. Across allllllllll the genres and pockets of participation, from buffs who don't really know what they're talking about to talking heads on Hitchcock DVDs. There were guys in the cult film doc who were barely coherent. It pissed me off to have to listen to them. 

For quite a lot of years now I have wanted to own a full-size replica of Tom Servo. It took six weeks, but the one I bought on Etsy finally arrived. Here is a picture of me with him, and I promise you, I really was this excited. 

After taking the pic, I put him on a chair and just looked at him for a minute, smiling like a goober. I don't know why this puppet brings me so much joy, why I'm such a fan of this inanimate channel for comedy, really I do not know - but I am, and it does, and now he sits next to the TV so whenever what's on the screen is uninteresting I can just look at him and grin. 

Are we all as deadened and drifting as I am? I think I'm okay - there is happiness in my life (clearly), I can do what I need to do in order to live without dragging through it, I don't care much about missing dinners out or parties or concerts, I still feel love and sorrow and all the emotions in between. But all my days are the same, one upon the other, and it means I have a condition that's sibling to boredom but not quite it. Foreshortened motivation, based on having nothing at all to look forward to, no consequences for failure or sloth. I like my quiet life, and even though the days stretch out, I can always find something either practically or artistically useful to do for my brain. Yet I feel like two-thirds of myself. Whatever's missing is not fatally missing, but I do notice its absence. Is this familiar to anyone out there? 

Anyway, come see me read (virtually) at Vroman's on Monday. Deets here. 

Natural Causes

There's a dead fly on my monitor stand. It's been there for weeks. I think I haven't moved it out of some morbid urge, well-buried in most circumstances, to be aware of dead things, of the brevity of life - particularly for a fly, which lives a few days at best.

Despite this dead fly I can't bring myself to remove, I don't like taxidermied animals. I went in a shop once that was full of desiccated lizards, pinned insects, frozen furred creatures. I don't know how this shop was categorized in the retail world, because the only thing that bound all of its wares was death. A friend came with me. She is an artist and I think that she was not squeamish because she saw so many of the things in there as useful references.

I was squeamish. I saw life, flattened out and lost for butterfly after butterfly. The furs hanging on the wall once quivered above warm flesh. I did not like being in there. Uneasiness hovered like a greasy wad of dark matter in my gut.

We project peace onto our dead, when, most probably, what is there is nothing. Does a fly have a soul to be at peace? It's a husk, there on my stand, a carapace, decaying dryly. A cheap life, I think, but it meets the scientific definition of life. And who's to say that life genuinely lies along a spectrum of value? Flies are better at flying than humans are, even if we're better at thinking. Probably.

Maybe the fly reminds me that my existence is small, too, and I ought to write faster. Maybe I'm vaguely worried that if I try to remove it the fly will disintegrate and bits of it will get caught in the wire mesh of my monitor stand. Then there will be a mess, when at present there is an assembled carapace. (The fly must have died of natural causes, because I did not kill it.)

Or maybe I'm a very lazy housekeeper and I'm coming up with high-minded reasons why my attention drifts to this dead fly when I'm sitting at my desk, writing, and the real reason is that the time is long past for me to slide it onto a piece of paper and drop it into the trash, and it embarrasses me that I haven't done this yet.

I don't know.

by Karl Addison

Out in the world:

I worked extremely hard on a review for LARB of Sjón's three-novel trilogy CoDex 1962. It was not an easy book to review, given the wide differences between the literary tradition I understand and the one Sjón is working from; in addition, there was just...a lot going on with the book. I was profoundly uncomfortable saying even the mildest bad things about it, because it's been so revered across the world. But my editor supported me, and it's important to me to speak as I find, as a critic. If I don't, I oughtn't be a critic.

[Sidebar: this book + Stormwarning has engendered for me a strange little specialty in criticism of Icelandic literature. I have two more Icelandic books on my desk for review, and I've requested one more. A happy, if unexpected, development.]

I reviewed Amy Pence's hybrid poetry collection [It] Incandescent for the Bind, an outlet that's quietly doing terrific and unusual work. The review I wrote is itself a hybrid piece, and I'm very satisfied with it. I liked Pence's work so much that I also interviewed her for Books I Hate.

Bits and pieces of my interview with Alice Hatcher didn't make it into the final version, but I still wanted to get them out there, so I posted them on Medium as "outtakes."

One bit of ego inflation I want to share. Last week I was browsing the internet for information on when the third installment of the Encircling trilogy would finally come out in English, and I discovered that, when you click on the second book's page at Graywolf, my words, from my review, are blasted above the book's summary in huge letters. My heart flipped over when I saw that.

There's good stuff coming in October; I've filed seven reviews in the past couple of weeks, so once those get through editing they'll start rolling out. Also, a piece for the Establishment is coming soon, and it has outtakes I'll probably post here. I'm incredibly excited about that one. I hope you'll like it, too.