Trying to Remember What I Read in 2014

Visit from the Goon Squad- Jennifer Egan
The Flamethrowers - Rachel Kushner
Lullabies for Little Criminals- Heather O'Neil
The Human Stain- Philip Roth
Pastoralia- George Saunders
The Goldfinch- Donna Tartt

Currently reading: Swann's Way- Proust and Bad Feminist- Roxane Gay

To be honest- this was a weak showing. There were many books I read half of, but I don't think I can count those. I am glad, however, how many ladies are on this list.

I'm having a bit of a rough day. I couldn't sleep last night and felt angry about it and in the process kept Kyle awake, who does have to work today. I made him eggs and kale juice in the morning as some form of an apology but it feels cruel to sabotage someone's sleep and potentially throw off their entire next 24 hours. I have become a sleep hog. I love sleeping. I love my unadorned bed. I love the weight of quilts and the different textures of blankets nuzzling my chin: so soft is our white cotton blanket, and the orange-indian rice-colored afghan from Gramps draws back in time, enveloping me physical and mental comfort. The afghan has the familiar feel of hand made, family made, of the blankets that magically appeared in every room of my childhood home each fall. Then the quilt, the only intentional blanket we bought, that is also old and frayed, but not from our families or our past but rather the generic past: the thought of unknown hands meticulously piecing it together. This last one I love for it's mystery.

I have many things to do today and can not bring myself to do any of them. I have been duped by a restless night and am in a sour mood. Thinking about the dark early morning hours of feeling like the only cure for this insomnia would be to go for a long hard run. At that moment I wanted to do anything but lay in bed but felt trapped. I had to try and try and try to sleep until morning and then feel useless all day. What is it that throws a kink in these physical routines of ours? Why do I always assume I can predict and control and coach my body into doing something different?

This is boring but functioning as an excellent way to procrastinate.
Hit me up with book recommendations for 2015 if you have them/if anyone ever stumbles upon this blog anymore.

Sweet day dreams XOX

trying to get back in the habit

I just started reading Swann's Way, the first installment of In Search of Lost Time by Proust. I feel somehow socially mandated to read this- as if I could not call myself a well educated person without those words having wrapped themselves around my tongue at some point in time.

Bear with me as I try to ease back into this blogging thing, this internet black hole that I can only assume will return to me with the structural edits embossed upon it like a tangible marker of time.

It had immediately rendered the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not merely inside me, it was me. 

a saturday i wish it was morning reflection

remembering that so much has been good and unexpected and oh-how-quickly it could change.

A Rant

I have forgot to document you- life. 

Tonight on the train, I took the Q, a train I never take that mysteriously to me curves only slightly and momentarily into manhattan, arching back into the bouroughs. When it dips out and up or out and down- it emerges out of the earth and loops itself onto the lighted bridges that gracefully connect these floating islands. 

On the way into manhattan from queens there was essentially no one on the train. I plopped my bag next to me preparing for a silent ride home- a long hour stretch to consume a podcast or read the latest harpers. 

Quickly we dove under the

His bag fell on my feet and I said sorry I have to say something- I just came from a performance where the artist was reading a piece of itali Calvino and hen I got on this train and you sat down next to me and were reading If on a winters night a traveller. And then I remember I met all those people in the Balkans and I. First read italo Calvino on a train and a bus and traveling through the Balkans. And I thought how these follow you- or you follow those that you seek after- travelled peoples and travels. And I chose to take the subway home over a cab for this reason- to watch and observe rather than to sit isolated swilling through shameless article after article served onto- dare I ruin this mood- Facebook feed.

I had a minor health scare recently. It made me feel so many things I had never felt before. In the most terrible way it made me imagine that I wanted the world to stop if I wasn't here. If I am brutally honest I wanted nothing to go on if there was not the possibility for me to witness or consume it-which for someone who simultaneously believes in ghosts and nothing after death... Well it makes absolutely no sense. And then I routine to tradition and good luck charms and amulets. And Facebook. And excerise. I momentarily and I suppose let's hope longer became crazed with throwing all tools at my disposal towards luck when only a few years ago I could have chosen science. But sometimes reason fails and smarts only come with age. 

Snap

Crafty Cactus

I Spy Kansas City

Found via Fold Object. 

Some Notes

"The century concludes on the motif of the imossibility of subjective novelty and the comfort of repetition. This motif has a categorical name: obession. THe century ends with the obession of secuirety, under the dominance of the following, rather abject maxim: It's really not that bad being where you are already; it is and has been, worse elsewhere. Yet precisely what was most alive in the last hundred years placed itself, in the wake of Freud, under the sign of a devasting hysteria: What novelty have you to show us? Of what are you the creator?" --Alain Badiou, The Century

"my easgerness to wander in search of everything, which, I am confident, keeps me in mysterious commnication with other open beings, as if we were suddenly called to assemble. I would like my life to leave after it no other murmur than that of a watchman's song, of a song to while away the waiting. Independent of what happens and what does not happen, the wait itself is magnificent" - Andre Breton, Mad Love (1937)

A Minute

It is cold out and the snow is brushing along the streets gently pressed along by the wind. I love how quite the corner is. i  hear only some loose metal singing slowly swaying back and forth. This is a novelty here where typically you hear music born not of new york city streets but of Caribbean islands and cars honking and reeving. 

It is also dark in my apartment and it is a rare moment when everyone has already fallen asleep.

It is so warm in here the window is cracked and the smell of snow is wafting across my bare red and steamy shoulders. I should be more concerned about the tips of my hair freezing. 

I suppose I should mention the new year. I want to tie my tongue in knots and roll my eye balls backwards and twist my fingers into painful contortions because never have i ever dreaded such a new years task as this. 

I am miserable because my tone has swam away from me and control meandered for a walk. I have always been lost so to pretend this is something new would be disingenuous, but I have always had an excuse to be doing what had presently presented itself.  For the first time I am not sure if anything monumental has changed except I have learned more of how things are made in factories by many strange hands. I am the opposite of an artist. the multitude of people touching.

Turkey Day

Comics as Fortune Tellers

One of my besties is leaving New York soon. There will instantly be a drop in the quantity of quality hugs I partake in. I've been so lucky to live near so many close friends- it is honestly the most appealing part of living here. 

A Lovely Watercolor Book

Book By Artist Rop Van Mierlo  

Via  Fine Little Day 

Pretty Things

Fredun Shapur via Present & Correct

A Letter to My Midwestern Cohort

Dear Friends,

I am sorry I haven’t written in a long time. Every time I start a letter to you I think about recounting all the boring things I do everyday starting with the mundane task of dragging my ass out of bed, which I do at approximately 9:00 am. I never want to leave my bed because Kyle is I a quiet kind of guy and I only know he loves me by the way he pulls my body closer to his before we have to acknowledge we are both awake. So I cherish this moment as a kind of secret we keep between the two of us--that is before I wrote it in this letter to everyone I know.

When I think about writing you and telling you about my life in New York I throw up a little bit in my mouth and then I get a dull nausea feeling that is sort of like what happens after drinking not-so spoiled spoiled milk. I can envision how pretentious I must sound when I tell you about sitting only a few rows back at lincoln center and watching the san francisco ballet envelope each others bodies, devouring the space with their delicate movements until the air is literally sucked backwards into audiences lungs as they uniformly gasp when one ballerina falls into the floor. There is immediately collective guilt.

I also wonder if you judge my tone when I rattle off the artists I have recently seen, including Yayoi Kusama whom Kyle silently escorted around the gallery in Chelsea. Her hair was burning bright orange and she always dresses in polka dots. People were hoarding around her extending their arms and cell-phone-finger-tips into arching buttresses to see her, if even only through a screen. We cowered in a corner, either to reject this stardom or to feel above it all. Our motives were unclear. Nonetheless we were there to witness.

And these experiences are different from the ones I had with you all not so long ago that were compilations of abandoned buildings and undetermined car trips. Evenings when we took our  joy and pleasure from our perceived secret city status. This conception that the lack of canonized culture rooted beauty in moments of unexpected discoveries. Empty rooftops and the unique vibrations of particular train tracks more suited to flattening pennies then others were kindling for the tumbleweed nature of aimless nights. The abandoned trolley tunnel, the forgotten wax figurines in the messanie of the train station, our favorite valley in our favorite park were enough minutiae to stimulate some thoughtful, and often satisfying, internal evolution.

Here I do not think about porches or barbeques. Here I think about the physical and the act of moving my body through space. The choice to be in one location, and then another. It is a daily practice to master this negotiation. I acknowledge my thigh pushing into the thigh next to me on the subway and I take pleasure in the free warmth and how this pressure absorbs the jerk of the stop and go of the subway train. I imagine licking the poles and rubbing my tongue against the ridges on the top of month until I can taste all the flavors that have come from these people’s food, jobs, and own salty selves. I know this sounds sexual, but it is not, it is simply about the magnitude of bodies here, especially in relation to space. I sit on the subway and I want to trace the bags under each individual's eyes with the pad of my thumb and tell them I don’t live here for Lincoln Center. I don’t live here for Yayoi Kusama.

I am tired of reading about why people love New York and I have despised my entire life those who have preached its superiority over other cities. But today I brushed my hand against and noted the color of the pupils of so many people I will never know and there is pleasure in those moments.

I could tell you about my job, or the nutty people I have encountered, or even my inspirations, but I’d rather tell you that today I crammed my body into a subway and a man stepped on a woman’s toe and she threatened him. Then a man recognized another man and they discussed a readers theatre one was on his way to perform, his nose was exaggerated, and he was stooped with a snow drift for hair. When I went to the bodega one grumpy customer was giving another grumpy customer a hard time and the guy behind the counter chirped in “You need a wife? I have plenty of single customers, I can introduce you!” The man slapped a handful of coins on the counter and walked out with his beer.

So, come visit me and we’ll ride the subway all day to every borough and take notes of all the tiny discoveries we make in someone’s hand gesture or their hushed conversations. Maybe it won’t seem so different from our adventures back home after all, we’ll just be looking for the details in different places.

Thinking of you always,

Emily

It has been a very long time since stopping by, from ringing your doorbell unexpectedly. I can not recall the last time I lingered waiting on a porch, the anticipation of your arrival braided with the heat of the sun--anxiety and calmness enveloping me. It has been awhile since I dropped with no intentions other than to chat, to claim the fact that our days are never full, that in fact hours and minutes often beg for substance. Somewhere deep inside that substance is bare feet and sun and popsicles. And it instantly feels trite like a greeting card.
Summer is promise.
My apartment feels safe.
My gums ache and the thought of the roots of my teeth being exposed to air, and coffee, and beer makes my head ache right above my brow.

Something about reading a book visibly titled the fortress of solitude alone at a hotel bar seems really depressing.

Human circus-16 floors of continuous dangerously packed escalators. Luminously white hair on rugged leather skin. Women toting men toting rolling suitcases (+)

People saying pardon, finally reaching starbucks to 1. Find no line! 2. Hear a guy order a vanilla latte: 6 pumps of vanilla and only 1 shot of esspresso.

Funny things about tradeshows: following the starbucks coffee cups to coffee.

it is the space where the tectonic plates are moving, and the gravitational pull has shifted and everything i used to know about how our words flowed back and forth has been shifted through the dirt and the soil down into the core, it is there, but unattainable.

Then there is the fact that I am looking at the stars differently. I used to strain to see the faintest, stare steady so that in any instant i will not miss a thing and now instead I let them wash over me and consume me. I take comfort in their quiet chaos, the reminder.

Settling can happen by particle. It can happen while pushing the back of your teeth with your tongue, your eyes narrowing, and momentarily deciding not tonight, not this moment. And something inside you burrows down from the tip of your tongue, busy shaping the back of your teeth like the ocean turning shards into sea glass, down through the front of your throat, cast straight through your sternum, and out through the curve of your back, there is relief and there is lack.

and the drilling of your teeth feels like nothing but the blast of cold air penetrates your spine.