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.
Author: tuckova
Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O'Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden
words for snow
When it was winter it was winter forever, it had always been winter and it would always be winter. The bleakness of it, the relentless overcast, the ugliness of yellow snow, black ice, gray icicles dripping from the eaves and in doorways. And yet you chose this, and there were small pleasures: snow piled on the heads of statues, the swoopmarks of mittens on car hoods, and the cozy sweet warmth of indoors, watching snowfall through a window, being safe. It was never your favorite season but it had some nice bits. And it was going to be winter forever, whether you liked it or not.
And then suddenly spring, rebirth, awakenings. The shock of buds unfurling, light warm rains that misted your hair, fluffy bunnies and chicks and a near-cloying sweetness that you, with your memory of tears frozen in your eyelashes and one foot still in the snowpile of winter, viewed with something between wonder and suspicion. But it was never going to be summer, never again, never, and sometimes at night the empty cold of winter swirled in, a dust cloud of snow, and things too early planted died in the frost.
And now here is summer, predicted for you for years against your brave smile and your insistence that winter was forever, and part of you still doubts, still wearing winter boots that are worn at the heels and scraped at the toes, watching the girls in their summer dresses parade by and it's very nice for them but you have learned to trust the wardrobe of winter too well to let go of it too soon, and yet you find yourself thinking of changing over your clothes, putting sweaters into cedar and mothballs, you find yourself thawing out just a bit more every day, opening the curtains to let in actual light that shines sometimes as long as all day. Here is a summer you never thought would come: this is a good thing.
And yet your winter heart. And yet you scan the horizon for clouds, find them and stare at them with… what? A child's rage at the unfairness of it: can't I even just for five minutes have an unbroken blue sky, a hot trickle of sweat down my back, a pink in my cheeks that isn't chapping and burst blood vessels? Child, it has been winter for half your life. Give things a little time. Go buy some new shoes, for summer's sake.
pillow soft silicone
It's afternoon and I cannot concentrate, lost in a time loop of every loss ever, a sadness that feels real but is more likely exhaustion from staying out late so I decide to take a nap. But the dog upstairs is barking, barking, barking, barking, howling, and after about twenty minutes a neighbor opens her door and shouts SILENCE! The word reverberates in the hall, louder than the dog's bark, I can almost feel the vibration against the wall, which is against the head of my bed, which is the end of nap time, and I get up, and make coffee against the sleepiness that I have failed to kill naturally, and I feel like I've been tired forever but of course that is not true, it just feels true.
And the dog upstairs is barking again now after about ten minutes of silence, barking and howling, and twenty minutes of barking and howling pass and I've finished my coffee and started to work and the neighbor opens her door and shouts SILENCE and I think the whole day will be loops like this. I remind myself that every moment is really just a moment, just standing there alone, disconnected by time and space from other moments, even if it looks the same; I also remind myself that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and I have to think about that, the same as I do every time this thought loops through my brain: the truth of now and the truth of history. I don't even have time to think about the future.
And in the time it has taken me to forget to work, lost in pondering, the dog upstairs is barking again, barking and barking and howling, how can they leave him alone all day, and the neighbor shouts again, and I consider posting a sign in the building vestibule pointing out that the dog does not probably understand the language of humans, or in any case, doesn't understand or remember that silence now means silence forever. I often pretend to not understand the language of humans as well, although I am terrible about forgetting or pretending to forget, because I always remember.
Of course in addition to forgetting that someone told him to stop barking, he also forgets that his owner is coming home ever, which is why after a brief pause he is barking again, barking at the wind, howling at his fear of being alone forever, barking and howling. I had an interesting conversation with his owner, who swears it is not her dog who cries all day, not her dog being shouted at, but one of the other dogs in the building. And to be fair when this one gets really frantic he can set them all off; if for example you come home late and drop your keys in the hallway the whole building erupts in terror and defensive maneuvers. But right now it's just this one dog, barking and howling at his absolute abandonment, because he doesn't remember how this morning he was loved and I think that maybe living in the moment has greater disadvantages than living with a brain full of memory loops, and the neighbor opens her door and shouts SILENCE and I get my earplugs out and go back to work.
art and artists and my overuse of the word “interesting”
Apparently they're making a movie about David Foster Wallace. I don't understand. I remember… was it Salinger who complained about how people knew more about Percy Bysshe Shelley than they did about his poetry? Well… here's the thing: Two vast and trunkless legs of zzzz that sexy monster Byron, though, amiright? Sometimes art is interesting, sometimes artists are more interesting. I would think that ideally your art is more interesting than you are, since that's what will survive (to the extent that anything survives, see also: Ozymandius). Although you get some artists and the reason their art survives is because their lives were interesting. But with Wallace, is his life really that interesting? I mean, I'm sorry, is he more interesting than his art? Because I don't think he was; in fact I think he worked pretty hard to not be, to put this voice into his essays that was both extraordinarily personal and self deflecting at the same time. It makes me sad to see people so increasingly fascinated with him as a person when I feel like they probably haven't read anything he wrote beyond This Is Water.
Ironically in a conversation with Squire two days ago, regarding a comment someone had made about keeping good music under wraps, so as to protect it from "teenage fangirls"; I wrote "Great art is not cheapened by having stupid people like it… [If you're looking at art at the same time as a group of unappreciative schoolkids], the art itself isn't diminished, just your experience of it in that moment. And maybe in that school group there is one kid who is changed, who becomes a slightly better person. Do you keep the art out of the museum because somebody ignorant might see it? Or do you put it in the museum for that one kid? Because I would argue that art is PRECISELY FOR that one kid, you know? and the more people art reaches, the more likely that it can transform people."
So I'm here all "these people don't DESERVE to watch a film about him" and on the other hand, who am I to say, if some How I Met Your Mother fan who had never heard of Wallace comes to at least TRY Infinite Jest or A Supposedly Fun Thing, then that's good, right? His work will not be tarnished by a movie. And at least the movie is based on an interview with actual him instead of cobbled kiss-and-tell interviews with people who knew him. So I don't know. I'm uncomfortable. But I'm not going to dismiss the idea out of hand. I always felt like I knew him; I did not. That was part of his gift, that voice that felt like he was standing right beside you, telling you what he saw so that you could see it, too. I'm not unhappy if other people feel that way. The world is lonely enough; when we hear the voices of great artists, however we come to hear those voices, it becomes less so. I hope.
I hope the revolution will be televised.
If you want to know how I got to have a perfect seventeen year old, I will whisper in your ear that television has been an important part of my child-rearing technique. Among other things, watching television with English subtitles taught him to be a great speller. But maybe more importantly: talking to Squire about difficult stuff was never easy when we tried to do it head on, and so I had to think of ways to approach things sideways. If we lived in the States, we'd have gone for long car rides where we talked about teen angst and teen pregnancy while staring intently at the road, but we're stuck with excellent public transportation and he walks to school so we have to stare intently at the screen instead.
Partly we watch stuff because it's super entertaining. Battlestar Gallactica, Deadwood, every episode of Star Trek ever, the West Wing, Firefly. We seem particularly interested in the epic formation-of-society types of shows, we like a good battle in outer space, and we are partial to snappy dialogue.
Some of the best shows we watched were American high school dramas — specifically I would say Friday Night Lights, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Veronica Mars were helpful. If you don't know how to talk to your kids about bullying, social stratification, economic issues, vampires, sexism, racism,,, well, this triptych has you covered. We learned about people who love sports, witty repartee and trust, romance and heartbreak, the varieties of parent/child relationships. It was easy to talk about heavy issues after we'd seen it happen to other people — wow, so that was a hard time for Matt… what do you think he could have done differently? Would you have trusted Spike after what he did? Should Veronica tell her father the truth or should she try to protect him? And through talking about these things we were able to practice talking to each other about most serious issues before they even became issues.
On Friday the Veronica Mars movie came out, and we sat on the couch in our old standard formation, popcorn bowl propped between us, and watched every character we loved light the screen. It has been ten years since the show was on, five years since we watched it, and it felt like it had only been days. Weevil! Mac! We got to talk about how some people change, but not a whole lot, just enough to give you hope that we are capable of change. How nice the respect and love that Veronica and her dad have for each other is. And of course some conversation (because we are way meta) about how entertainment gets funded and the future of media etc. It was great.
That's all. Possibly the best parenting tip I've got, though: television. True story.
Abiding the Great White Dude
Roger Angell's article in a February New Yorker about getting old (he's 93) started off pretty well and I was really enjoying it. I do not personally want to live that long, I think. I am sharp as a tack and do not wish to have people saying that about me when it is no longer true. People don't keep me around for my good looks, so I am not terribly worried about losing them, but nor am I particularly loved for my slow and easy charm (as I do not have much). Once I've lost my quick wits, I'm of no use to myself or anybody else, and I can't imagine I'll hold on to those into my nineties. Still, there is Angell, keeping it together pretty well, maintaining at least a sharp wit (though whether he is quick I can't say; the article may have taken ages). So in sum: he's getting old and his body is falling apart; this is pretty much what I would expect from getting old and I'm not excited about it but it's not unpredictable. People die around you left and right if you live long enough, and he finds this survivable (I am not sure. I take old people dying pretty well. I deeply resent it when people die young. So I am not sure if I start outliving people in great gulps how I will be.). He's learning different ways of communicating, and I found this part of the article fascinating — how your thoughts get shorter and you adapt the things you think about to fit that. Short poems and short witticisms, both easily memorized and easily dredged when appropriate. So he's got me, I'm thinking, my mind is with him, and then: THE PENIS. Oh my god, dudes, can you really not write five pages without sticking your penis in there? I just wonder. Fascinating thing you may not have realized about aging dudes: they still like getting it on and talking about it. Which would be ugh I guess a little boring but fine except he does insist on going on about it with that exhausting icky coyness that he's managed to keep off the rest of the article entirely. Sex! It's not just for young people! Nudge nudge! And his wife was totally okay with him doing it with other ladies if she died first! Ladies, Roger is single and primed for action!
I'll be over here trying to keep my smartypants mouth shut over whether he lies about his age and height on OKCupid. Well, never mind: I can assure you that he does, because the Great White Dude can get old and liverspotty and wise and know all of Auden off by heart, but he's still looking for a nice young woman to cook for him and arrange a porter for the baggage he will insist he does not have. Barf.
she said it to know.
I went to a contact tango workshop last month, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.
It was an interesting class — I'd never been to a contact workshop before, nor learned tango, so it was a lot of new all at once. Plus I only knew one person (though some people seemed to have met before in other classes). I'm fairly introverted, and though I've worked hard at speaking extrovert, it's not my native language and I can freeze and stumble over simple things, so meeting large groups of strangers all at once is sometimes scary. On top of that, the teacher spoke English, and many but not all of the other students did as well, but there were times when I needed to understand Czech in order to communicate, and so there was some gear-shifting in my head over that as well. I want you to understand how off balance I was just in general, the canvas on which this picture is painted.
Saturday morning we all started with warm ups and it was clear that we weren't going to go as far as the teacher wanted. I'd seen videos of other classes he'd taught where people appeared to toss their partners, who flew away into the air like birds and fell back to entwine with each other, arms and legs wrapped like vines. Even the most physical Czechs I know kiss the air beside you more often than they kiss you, and my California bear hugs are tolerated more often than they are welcomed, such that I have learned to temper my affections until I am not sure I even know how to express them. I could not see myself locking arms with a stranger, wrapping my leg around anybody's thigh, any of the things that I could feel this poor Argentinian instructor yearning for us to aim towards. And even if I had, I would have been alone, or at best in a small minority. So we were set with games where we accidentally might run into each other, in this class where within eight hours we were scheduled to be doing some pretty toss-your-partner style tango.
By noon we were as close as we were going to get, the lesson adjusted to our actual levels, working on the basics of communication, practicing eye contact, holding fingers and rocking. And then we started changing partners and changing again, trying these new skills with new people.
In this style of tango, who leads is a negotiation rather than a gendered default, and "lead" is more like "propose", which I liked as a concept but it made more work in practice. Each partnership thus started with two top questions: which of us is going to be proposing what we do? and what kinds of things will you be proposing? Under this question was the base note of what language we would use to negotiate — was this person a confident English speaker, in which case English made sense, or a nervous English speaker whose ego would be hurt if I switched to Czech, or a poor English speaker who was hoping I would start with Czech, or a non-English speaker who was possibly having some issues with the fact that the teacher didn't speak Czech and not everything was being translated. And the heart note running through each partnership – are you a confident dancer or a shy one? Do you prefer a lead/follow style or a dance-together style? Do you want someone to challenge you or keep you in your comfort zone? Do you want to talk while you dance, and if so about the dancing itself or other things, or do you need silence to concentrate? In short, what are your communication needs and which of them can I actually meet? And meanwhile think of hands and feet, arms and legs, eyes on eyes and not on the floor, don't look at anybody else and don't bump into them either.
I don't know. It was beautiful and lovely, so much thinking and feeling, and a little sad for me. I wanted to be a better dancer, a more intuitive dancer, but I could not offer intuition, just my frantically churning brain and a real desire to do well, to be the best partner to each person. At the end of the day I was so tired that I couldn't dance, couldn't even imagine how to communicate with my own body, much less someone else's, and so I sat and watched the others dance, some confidently and well, some confidently and poorly, some in other combinations. And I kept thinking about how every relationship is like this: friendships, partnerships, even strangers on a tram, this constant flow of unspoken negotiation and decision – how wonderful and exhausting the business of being human in the world.
Storyboard Art
The article in the New Yorker this month about Storyboard P will not leave my brain. I keep thinking about how we learn (though doing, through repetition, through the desire to achieve some goal, etc), about creativity, about success.
I'm trying to learn to play the ukulele. I stink, frankly; I can't hear the differences in the notes, which makes it difficult, and I'm easily frustrated by any learning process that is difficult. Most things I've wanted to learn, I've suffered through the learning to get through the goal of knowing. And if the goal is not easily reached, I give up. See also: Japanese. Usually, the only time you can get me to learn something I don't need to know is by sneaking it on me. Like I learned basic manners because my parents valued them, but I learned details because Judith Martin is a great writer. Ukulele is maybe the only thing I've actively tried to learn simply because it seemed like a neat idea, and it's hard. Storyboard P getting an idea for how a movement might look, and drilling himself on it for ages, and just for the joy of it, is so out of my reckoning that I can't imagine it.
In the article, there's a bit where he talks about a series of gestures to convey feeling beautiful, smearing cream on his skin, and then having that gesture morph into peeling his skin off. My friends, I have turned a phrase from time to time, but I have never come up with an image that powerful (and now I cannot erase it from my mind). I have a friend who makes art and when she explains it I think — I understand the idea, I just don't understand how it came from her head into this expression, although it makes sense. I get the origin and the destination but I cannot comprehend the journey. And isn't the journey the point? When I've tried to make visual art, it's so LITERAL that it's almost absurd. I can't get away from the words of the idea, and I'm never particularly creative beyond metaphor. I don't know how the mind gets there; is it naturally so or does it take a certain kind of training?
And success… I don't know how artists manage this. I've been talking to some people lately who make some or all of their living from art, and some people who assiduously avoid accepting any money for their art, lest it become commercial. Not that success is only measured in terms of money. But here is this guy, and probably this New Yorker article is going to be a factor in his success, his fame, whatever. What does this say about media, about the nature of success, about all of those things. Do I care? Not personally. But it is still important to think about.
And I was thinking that it is interesting that an article about art (not the art itself) is what got me thinking about it, and how this is how I often approach art: thinking, not feeling. Which is not wrong, but is part of what the article stirred up, here in gray January. How are you doing?
take this longing
This is the language they speak in the open spaces between them, the spaces formed by their outstretched arms, the language of emptiness and wishes, the things they want, the same things spoken into the same vast vacancy every time, because the wants are never satisfied. I want to see you, touch you, dance with you, variations on the theme, over and over, the Greek chorus of longing veering dangerously close to lamentation.
And the language they speak when they face away from that aching void? They are casual, code names, dismissive humor. I mean seriously, she says, I'm more picky who I watch movies with, and it is true, and the knowledge that what she says now is truer than what she says into her own empty arms helps her feel less hollow, filled with the stone she has rolled in front of her heart.
Envying the Crows by Ronald Baatz
A cold winter day spent
reading, collecting tinder.
But, my god, the loneliness
of the hours was overwhelming.
With age it becomes more and
more apparent that I need to be
among people. I have to stop living
like a monk. Although, it is true,
monks do live with other monks.
They pray, take their meals together,
and perhaps life at the monastery
is not such a burden. I would never
have to eat alone in such a place.
Earlier, I stood eating a can of sardines
and a piece of unbuttered bread.
I envied the crows. From the
kitchen window I had seen them pecking
at the leftover rice I had thrown out.
The crows, that had arrived in a group
and that had left in a group.
Same as the sardines.
tuckova 