Author: tuckova
U Nork, oh tee hee
Adam Gopnik bugs me. I expect it's the thing where someone is super-similar to you so you see your own flaws writ large in them and HATE them. He's so smug and so "my experience is universal" about his upper-middle New-York etc etc and it grates. I'll be reading an article and start feeling myself getting irritated and look back and aha! it is Adam Gopnik, of course.
So okay, just out the gate we have problems, Adam and I. But the Shakespeare article in the recent (okay, it's not recent; it's from April. I was busy!) New Yorker was just so uhhhhhn. The article is ostensibly about a book that Shakespeare might have owned and a portrait that might be of Shakespeare. Gopnik interviews the owners of both objects and presents opinions supporting and refuting their claims. Fine. He also goes into excruciating detail about oh, everything. What Manhattan used to be like twenty years ago vs. how it is now is a long little bit of meander for an opening paragraph, citing Jane Jacobs and broad-shouldered strollers, and it's nice I guess but what has it to do with Shakespeare? Uhm nothing, just a piece of pretty prose.
And then and THEN, he really gets going. He casts Wallace Shawn and Paul Giametti as the book dealers, he describes accents in such detail that I suspect he's been reading a book on accents and wanted to show off, he's got sentences like "They find a great deal of nourishment in this word salad" where you just KNOW he's getting up and patting himself on the back after he writes them. In this he reminds me of Michael Chabon, who also yanks on my nerves with his excessive cleverness. Yes, you are very smart, now go and get mama a plot of some sort. I mean because… meanwhile, back at Shakespeare? Can we…?
Alright. Gopnik's main point (I think) is that we are fascinated not only with Shakespeare's writing, but with him as a person, with the world that he inhabited and the objects and people that surrounded him. We want to believe we can better understand the masterpieces if we know the master. And so in service of this sort of celebrity-crush hunger for knowledge, Gopnik is offering up a similar details-rich portrait of the two objects. That's kind of elegant, conceptually. I don't like how he did it because for example there was a particularly straining sentence about "the tallest mountains produce the most abominable of snowmen", seriously. BUT if I am right (and I hope I am right) and all the flourishes were meant to create a frame for the objects in the same way that the objects are hoped to create a frame for Shakespeare, then at least I can say that I admire the idea.
You can still skip the article, though. Adam Gopnik has had enough attention for one day.
The More Loving One (Auden)
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
lather rinse repeat
I wake in the darkness, even the sleep mask doesn't help, but I push it down under the pillows along with the dreams, and I stretch like a cat and make the bed before I can crawl back into it. Work for a few hours in the dark, the room lit only by the glow of the computer. Choke down an egg on toast for breakfast, the toast with not enough butter, sad hobbit toast, and coffee without milk or sugar because why. It's okay black. Answer emails, work more, "Another perfect Job, Anne!" writes David, and I think: job. Although Job suffered and I am suffering perfectly so there is that. In the afternoon I pull a yoga mat out onto the balcony and take a nap in a sunbeam which is nice. I forgot lunch. Late afternoon my youngest friend comes over and we wash all the legos in the bathtub together, the clack of plastic brick against ceramic is nice, and then we read about dinosaurs and I smell her hair and feel about as happy as possible. When it's time to cry I close all the windows and muffle myself with a scarf; when it's time to laugh I call someone and we go out for coffee and talk about boys, or white wine and talk about women. At night Squire comes home and we sit on the balcony and rest our feet on the railing and I have a cigarette and he has a root beer and we talk about our days and look at the stars. It's pretty good, and if I thought about it being better well that was just a minute and minutes pass. There went one just now.
perhaps
I rolled off the bus soaked with salt water and took a taxi directly to the beer garden. It goes without saying that the taxi driver needed to say racist things to me; for the last few months it seems that any stranger that gets me alone wants to say racist things to me and at this point I'm just keeping score. Stranger taking the tile down in the bathroom? Yes by all means I want you to tell me how integration ruined the state of education in the US and how it's ruining Czech culture too, because gypsies. Thai woman giving me a massage? Please share with me your hatred of all the Vietnamese people here, that is a perfectly logical thing for one foreigner to say to another. Dear new eye doctor, I so very much enjoyed your summary of our fair city as being nice until you get out of downtown, at which point you are surrounded by gypsies, which is not only a very strange thing to hear while someone is looking deep into your potential cataracts, but also just objectively false. Miss Manners recommends just telling people you are from whatever group is being stigmatized, and sometimes I do that (" Perhaps you didn't realize that I am an immigrant" is plausible; "Perhaps you didn't realize that I am Roma" is less so, although still fun). Handyman fixing the taps, I was happy to hear about your job in Italy and your hatred of immigrants here, and I sure was relieved to hear that you didn't mean an immigrant LIKE ME, that makes it so much better. Taxi driver, I am not crazy about militant Muslims either, being not a fan of any religion that takes itself seriously, but why was that the topic for the cab ride, when I led with the weather and we were only together for five minutes? I'm not trying to say that the same exact thing keeps happening to me again and again, the same offense, because I am sure that each one of these people is an individual with their own agenda and feelings and intentions, and their own reasons why they want to say those things to me, but from where I'm sitting, it sure feels the same. Perhaps you didn't realize.
the prophet’s garland
Cassandra sits in a rocking chair in a large, circular room. It has the slightly stale air of a room rarely visited. The sunlight filters down through the skylights; dust motes dance in the sunbeams. The shelves are lined with mementos, and fingerprints in the dust show which ones have been recently looked at: the wooden mask of a monkey, a perfume bottle, a puzzle box, shells and stones collected from the beach, an urn. There are books on the shelf, too: poetry, some prose, all thumbed at the edges, stains of red wine and coffee, marginalia. One book full of little scraps of paper that fly out from the pages and scatter across the floor when you open it. What was marked? It doesn't matter. Cassandra rocks in her chair and the creak on the wooden floor says what she is tired of saying, hates to say: Told you so, told you so, told you so.
the fanciest dijon ketchup
She said it's like how people say they want a million dollars. Everybody says they want a million dollars but the thing is you get it, and your whole life is disrupted. You don't know who your real friends are any more, you obsess over stuff you never used to worry about, you quit your job and then wander purposelessly through your days, and the money doesn't make you happy, and the things you buy don't make you happy, and you question everything. I like my job, I like my life, I know what I'm good at. I don't want the drama and confusion of that kind of change. I don't think I'd be good at being a millionaire.
And he said sweetheart, everybody wants a million dollars, and you sort the rest out later.
from the casemates
The moat the drawbridge the tower the turret the little holes where the archers peek out… you know, the usual castle features. You can embellish it up, make it a superfancy metaphor, where the moat is your tears and the turret is where you hide your fragile heart and the archers are, oh I don't know, those catty asides, sarcastic barbs, your explosions of wit and cruelty. High walls, one assumes, well defended and whatnot, not to be scaled by the cowardly. Also vines from years of neglect.
Everybody wants a castle and by everybody I mean you. You wanted a castle, you built it, you carried in the cold smooth stones and fixed them into place; the fortress the buttress and you the mistress. Walking the ramparts, then. Surveying. Taking the measure. Games of strategy in the throne room and needlepoint by candlelight. Remembering all the stories you once knew.
Well that's all very fine but what now? You should probably have a conflict of some sort. You can't have a story without a conflict. You can't have a conflict until you lower the drawbridge. You had thought you wanted a wonky spell cast upon the walls: nobody ever goes in and nobody ever comes out, except that gets boring after a while. Perhaps a horse of the trojan variety or maybe some circus performers could come by. A bard, singing songs of other castles, everybody likes a little peek at the neighbors and if the wandering minstrel (wandering minstrel!) beds the queen at night well that just livens up the tapestry a little, doesn't it.
Of course there is a part of you that is frightened; not everybody comes out of every story alive. Digging your nails into the rough wooden underside of the banquet table to stay calm; the shadows of strangers against the walls turn into monsters by firelight and pebbles have been carelessly skipped across the moat as if it doesn't hold the history of a thousand sadnesses. It's still okay though; you wanted a story and now you are getting one. Quick, look or you might miss something.
ten pocit
It is difficult to have deliberately chosen to be a certain way because it is easy and then wonder if perhaps you shouldn't have chosen a different way, or no way at all. To have chosen to stop tasting the foods that make you sick, and then wonder when standing at a table laden with meat whether you really really didn't like it or if you just decided at some point to stop wanting it.
cultured like a pearl
In London I slept on a mattress on the floor and woke up to tea with milk in first and cereal that comes in blocks. I went to the British Museum where every sign tells you not to touch the art, tells you about the oils on your skin, which all I could imagine was the imprint of a hand, the memory of a fingerprint, I wanted so badly to touch everything, the folds of Demeter's dress, the hollows where the noses were missing, the velvet ropes. I hesitated over beer and fish and chips, but finally ate chicken tikka and drank crisp cider. I walked around in the dark and watched people kissing in a telephone booth in a diner, and a beautiful woman with wide eyes and an unplaceable accent wrapped my hands around a glass of poison and made me give it to her; later she put her arms around me from behind and whispered in my ear what would happen next, and then it did. I wanted to dance but I did not. We talked about poetry and ate vegetarian peking duck and spoke to random Czech people, as one does in in a Chinese restaurant. In the morning I cursed London outlets and we went to the portrait gallery to see where Julia Roberts broke up with Clive Owen and to puzzle over Andy Warhol. I had coffee and chocolate caramel and coffee and a brownie and coffee and they weren't serving sweets so I ate the brown sugar lumps in the bowl on the table. I walked past more art than I could see and finally stood in front of two paintings and wept with happiness that they had been painted. I thought a lot more about creativity, the old man in the wheelchair still making art, then bedridden, his assistant a beautiful live thing in the room, following his directions to help him continue to create even as he dies, the primary colors of a child's garden and her red red lipstick. In a rainstorm we ducked into a cocktail bar with surrealist photographs on the wall, a skull and a butterfly flickering in the candlelight, and I drank a lavender fizz, which tasted like springtime, the opposite of outside and a perfect contrast to the deep leather chairs. We saw a ballet that was a naked nightclub of strobe and boredom beyond tedium, what I can say is that it was wonderful to see so many people at the theater and the men's room line snaking up the stairs as it usually only does at sports events. We ate more and drank more and got lost and took a taxi and talked about The Knowledge and I fell asleep on a mattress on the floor and woke up and handed my toiletries to a stranger at the airport and came home.