My Dorothy Parker Day

Symptom Recital

I do not like my state of mind;

I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.

I hate my legs, I hate my hands,

I do not yearn for lovelier lands.

I dread the dawn's recurrent light;

I hate to go to bed at night.

I snoot at simple, earnest folk.

I cannot take the simplest joke.

I find no peace in paint or type.

My world is but a lot of tripe.

I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.

For what I think, I'd be arrested.

I am not sick. I am not well.

My quondam dreams are shot to hell.

My soul is crushed, my spirit sore:

I do not like me any more.

I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.

I ponder on the narrow house.

I shudder at the thought of men.

I'm due to fall in love again.







Ah, Dorothy Parker is so visciously brilliant! Luckily

I don't have the need to devour her quite so often as

when I was 19 and sitting in the bathroom sink drinking

Old Crow, but today she came to mind and I needed her as

desperately as ever. In the last 24 hours, I have dealt

with an insurance companies who thinks my birthday is

in the year 1900, my son's on-line financial aid scholarship

request form ala the federal government (GAG PUKE) which is

due in 8 hours, tax returns and a bout of something strikingly

reminiscent of mental illness. I hate it when my brain attacks

me like this and it's not even over anything interesting

like oceans or crushes or music or lost, dead friends. Maybe it's like

our Feng Shui consultant said, the 920 square foot house I was born

is hopelss, beyond a bagua or a fountain or a candle, that even putting

a mirror under the toilet or getting the tv out of the bedroom

won't stop the craziness from pushing the walls in.

telephone bar

Ok. Today I have to write about The Telephone Bar. It is the most elegant combination of telephone and bar that you can imagine. I'm sure it doesn't exist over here in this part of the so-called civilized world. The Telephone Bar is obviously something that can only exist amongst such minds as those that birthed Michaelangelo and Dante, Da Vinci and, well, I don't have to go on, you know exactly which insanely brilliant Italian guys I mean. They alone can foster the sort of environment it takes to invent anything as delicate, as austere and as complexly nuaned as The Telephone Bar.

(Oh no! Upon a quickie google search, the only reference to a telephone bar I can find is to a gay bar in Bangkok where the telephones are used to call hot men at neighboring tables!! Sacrilege! Oh, and a so-called "Telephone Bar and Grill" in the East Village that's just 3 British phone booths parked on their boring butts outside. Not worth a quarter to call from, I say.)

The Telephone Bar I refer to is in Florence. It is like a diner. There is a lot of orange. You can order endless pots of cafe americana and sit in a booth with your girlfriend and read books in English for three or more hours, and no one will give a damn. You can take turns reading "Let the Dog Drive," by David Bowman and "The Fan Man" by William Kotzwinkle, laughing so hard it doesn't matter if you lose all sense of time space self language borders, because that's all been lost anyway. You can even order beer to drink with your coffee. You can meet your girlfriend there at 2 in the afternoon or 2 in the morning, as you please. You can each walk there to escape the weird Italian families you have been asigned to board with for your first 3 months abroad because it is equi-distance between your two houses. You can pour over maps of Europe and fool yourself into believing that you will follow the course you chart together now after your mother sells your car back home in exchange for your train ticket. You can sit at that booth, side by side, so immersed in each other that you forget there is or ever was a telephone, a connection, a man, a map, the whole world.

more fun with the foolish virgin & the infernal bridegroom

Read Delirium if you dare!

OK, honestly in 1996-1997 I was obsessed with this witty little tale of drunken, wretched, broken-heartedness by the French poet, Rimbaud. I practically memorized it. I definitely read it at least once a day for weeks, maybe months. Talk about victimhood- this is loads worse than the worst country music song ever written. And the funny thing is, my own infernal bridegroom loved this peice too. He even made it into an opera! OK, here are some of my favorite passages:

"His kisses and his friendly arms around me were just like heaven-- a dark heaven, that I could go into, and where I wanted only to be left - poor, deaf, dumb, and blind. Already, I was getting to depend on it. And I used to imagine that we were two happy children free to wander in a Paradise of sadness.

"And in that instant I could feel myself, with him gone, dizzy with fear, sinking down into the most horrible blackness: into death. I made him promise that he would never leave me. And he promised, twenty times; promised like a lover. It was as meaningless as my saying to him: "I understand you."

"I lived in his soul as if it were a palace that had been cleared out so that the most unworthy person in it would be you: that's all. Ah! really I used to depend on him terribly. But what did he want with my dull, my cowardly existence? He couldn't improve me, though he never managed to kill me! I get so sad and disappointed; sometimes I say to him: "I understand you." He just shrugs his shoulders.

So, you get the point. You more than get the point. This is the kind of love that goes into battle and gets blasted before the armor is even on. This is the kind of love that hates itself, that eats itself, that eats others and everything in its path, that leaves nothing green that's not covered in ash. This is the kind of love that readies the soul, either for eternal damnation or for that new sort of life that is born after hell, when the fires have burned away the debris and prepared a new earth, ready for planting.

book lovers

Maybe there shouldn't be a book about every relationship, but every relationship has its book. My first boyfriend, Carter, always makes me think of Dostoyevsky (OK, so that's an entire author) and my college heartbreaker will always smack of Rimbaud's "Season In Hell," particularly "The Foolish Virgin and the Infernal Bridegroom." The Captain of the fleet that I loved from afar in Juneau is "Gulliver's Travels" and the last boyfriend after Alaska and before my husband will, ironically, always be Isaac Singer's "The Magician of Lublin."

When I first met Stan, my soon to be husband, he was reading "The Road Less Traveled" by M. Scott Peck, "Slowness" by Milan Kundera and David Bohm's "Thought as a System." Of course this was a compelling triad, and as hard for me to condense into a simple analysis as his penny loafers and his combat boots, his flannel shirts and his collared rugbys. I was particularly compelled by "Slowness" because that was my new dating motto and I had just read some Milan Kundera myself. But "Slowness" does not properly characterize Stan's reading profile. Stan is an intense reader, but as I think about it, I can honestly say I don't know if we've ever read the same book! OK, that's not true. We've read all the Harry Potter's and I've started the Golden Compass series that he's read about 10 times. But Stan's main passion for reading lies more in the equation than the word. Physics, science, math and action/adventure novels abound. Right next to me at this desk are: "The Sun, the Genome & the Internet," by Freeman Dyson, "The Computer and the Brain" by John von Neumann and "Circles: fifty round trips through history, technology, science and culture," by James Burke. He's also always reading that Feynman guy (he has 3 humongous volumes that look larger than the freakin' encyclopedia), Einstein and actual physics textbooks. He keeps a Calculus manual in the bathroom and has "Meta Math: the Quest for Omega" by Gregory Chaitin on the coffee table.

I don't know if I could make it all the way through one of these books, no matter how compelling I found the subject matter and he wouldn't even pretend to be interested in reading 99.9% of mine. That used to drive me crazy. I had this vision of us lying in bed and reading to each other. To be fair, he has humored me a couple of times, but I can see him rolling his eyes behind the book. These days, I happily read my piles of memoirs, lite-novels, heavy novels, advice books and spiritual tomes (mostly) without shouting "honey! you've got to stop everything and read this!" And, occasionally he'll tell me his newest thoughts about polarizing different colors of light or number theory and I'll really mean it when I say that's nice, dear. But we have come to accept that we are very different readers, just like he is obsessed with motorcycles and I am not. All I can say is, when the shit really hits the fan and things start to fall apart, I'm glad somebody in our house understands quantum mechanics.

How Ben Affleck Changed My Life: and other delicious fictions!

Four years ago, right around Valentine's Day, 2 pretty amazing things happened. I became pregnant with my son and I enrolled in an advanced Fiction class with Susan Hankla at the Virginia Museum Studio School. The class, that met every Tuesday night from 7-10pm from February to May, managed to pull me out of the vast, barren desert of non-writing-hell that had been eating away at my soul. At long last, deadlines, page requirements, critiques. Oh, hair-pulling, nail-biting happiness! And not only was my writing given vital resucitation, I was seated across from a boy who looked exactly like Ben Affleck. I swear, I'm not the only one who thought so! All the women in the class took a vote on it one day when he was in the bathroom. Anyway, this boy was from Texas, worked both at Home Depot and Style Weekly and wrote sentences that made you weep, spit, laugh and venture into a week-long spiral of self-reflection. So, one day during the break, when I asked how he got a job writing, he asked me, as if it were a reasonable question, why I didn't have a job writing as well. All I could do was sputter. I had no answer. Not a good one. (I've just had an adrenalectomy, a myomectomy and pancreatitits? True, yes, but a good enough reason not to write? Hmmm.) I spent the whole week thinking about it, trying to come up with a witty, concise response. During class the next week, I ran up to him: "I have a million excuses for not writing in the past, but I can't come up with any good excuses for the present." And that (after some trial and error, trial by fire & blind, dumb luck) was the beginning of my writing career! P.S.-- My friend no longer looks like Ben Affleck, unless Ben Affleck were to get a bigger brain and grow some good facial hair, but he has stayed my friend and we have actually grown a circle of friends who are all wonderful writers, resembling Hollywood and Bollywood heartthrobs, living and dead. SO, after a string of crazy, freelance articles, two days before I had my baby, I was offered the job of Book Editor at Style Weekly. That VMFA class was definitely a good investment.

Mental Radio

Sometime last year, I had a dream about my friend Bryan Doerries (a fellow counselor at the UVA Young Writer's Workshop, you know the one all the 15 year old girls had crushes on?). I dreamt that he started a radio station, and the next day I wrote to tell him about my dream. As it turns out, he was trying to start a radio station, and he was reading the book "Mental Radio" by Upton Sinclair. So, I too, bought "Mental Radio" and between Richmond and NYC, Bryan & I conducted some of the same transmission techniques Mr. Sinclair did on a regular basis with his wife. I am quite convinced, that if we had stayed with it just a little bit longer, by now we'd be exchanging "Mental Emails" without even having to bootup or download. Bryan, now a well-known playwright in NYC, is recently married and has an intense passion for typewriters. He even had his mother wait in a Denny's parkinglot in the middle of her East Coast roadtrip in order to give me a typewriter he'd bought for me at a thriftstore. Then he sent the typewriter ribbon in the mail. Thank you, Bryan! No matter that you practically have to use your elbow to punch the keys, it is a real thing of beauty! So, when I heard an NPR interview with Darren Wershler-Henry about his new book, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting, I ordered it for Bryan and had it sent to him straight away. Turns out it came on his birthday! Mental Radio to you Bryan and congrats on your marriage!

Grace*India*Valley

Sarah Lawrence is the only school I applied to and thank *goodness* for me, I got in early admission. My mother and I visited the campus after the Madeleine L'Engle workshop at the Omega Institute, the summer before my senior year of highschool and I though I did fall in love with it's storybook beauty, I'd already determined to go there because of my counselor from the UVA Young Writer's Workshop India Stanley. A Sarah Lawrence student, she was the coolest, wildest, weirdest woman I'd ever met.

During my interview at Sarah Lawrence, my mother was worried that the butch-lesbian friend she had brought with her into the lobby would create a bad impression, but as we were to learn, she couldn't have been more wrong. In any case, I was accepted and in the fall of 1993, my adventure into the world of black dresses, lesbians, heroin and radical everything-ism began. The first semester of my freshman year I had the good luck to meet the author Grace Paley. My friend Josh and I took a subway into the city to hear her read, we got lost, we kissed and I never went out with him again because he was too nice. Now, OF COURSE, he is still just as nice and the Senior Fiction Editor at Viking Penguin. Anyhoo, oddly and wonderfully, I was given the opportunity to meet Grace Paley yet again, that very same year. My 10 page collection of one page short stories won first place in the school fiction contest and Grace Paley, a one-time SLC professor, was chosen to present the award. Abracadabra! The fates smiled and cood. However, to show an accurate trajectory of my college career, the next year I won second place in the same contest and the following two years I didn't even enter! Instead, welcome: marlboro reds, endless heartache, drunkenness, confusion, sadness, despair, box-o-wine, Leonard Cohen, raves, 4 a.m.-- you know, the regular college fare. And I'm sure that the fact that I've dreamt of the campus in some variation or another at least once a week for the past 10 years is totally normal too!

Unlike with Madeleine L'Engle, my appreciation for Grace Paley only took off after my encounters with her. Her short stories are succinct and aching and perfect and it's helped me immensely to put some years behind my understanding. I've come to treasure my copy of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute- the title alone is worthy of a byline. Now, as I sit here to write, Grace Paley is gone, her death preceding Madeleine L'Engle's by only 3 weeks. But stranger to me than the passing of these two gorgeous old writers who lived well into their 80's, was the death of India Stanley. India died the same week that my son was born, towards the end of 2004. The reasons are still mysterious to me, I think it was an accident, I think it involved alcohol, I think she died alone. I know she had been well loved, I know she'd taken creative writing classes at the Virginia Museum with Susan Hankla, the same teacher I had. I know that our paths intersected here and there, and then diverged, suddenly and forever, without my say or any input from me.

the first spider caught in my web

When I went to Bellevue Elementary in Church Hill, I came home from school every day with cobwebs in my hair from standing up against the brickwall during recess. When I did play with kids, it was generally with Rashida, the "fat girl" because she gave me her twinkies, Regina who was also known as "Regina Vagina" or with Sarah- who was half Dominican and half-German, always had a runny nose and frizzy hair, and whom I evilly picked on for some crazy five year old power trip (or because my teacher left me in charge of the class ((in kindergarden!!)) when she went to the bathroom and I felt pressured to write somebody's name on the chalkboard, so, guess what? it was always... Sarah, the one person I didn't think would "beat me upside the head" if I threw her in front of the bus). So. As a kid I read. A lot. In the afternoons, my mom had to make me go outside to play. I think I read like ten books a week. Well, maybe 3. Or 4. And my favorite writer, the one who blew me away, whose universe I inhabited more fully than my own during that golden time I was reading her books, was Madeleine L'Engle. I devoured "A Wrinkle in Time" and its descendents. Then I moved on to her connecting but different books that were all somehow interrelated like a second cousin's boyfriend's great aunt, including "The Arm of the Starfish," "The Moon by Night," "Camilla" and other such preteen beauties that made me feel like I wasn't reading about my own family, but that made my own family not seem that bad either. The heroines were always quirky, misfitted and brilliant, so it gave me hope that I could survive teenagerhood, which... I did! Anyway, as a junior in highschool, when Madeleine L'Engle was teaching a writing course at the Omega Institute in New York, I wrote to her and asked special permission to attend her course even though the minimum age requirement was 18. She said yes! So, accompanied by my mother to upstate New York, I spent a week in the presence of my literary heroine, Ms. L'Engle and I wrote my first story. Basically, she advised us to tell the truth. And I did. The story was about my father's second divorce, from my stepmother Carrie and the strange years that have sprung forth hence. Funny, but in some ways, I've been writing the same story ever since, at least writing around it in ever widening circles of reflection and introspection and hilarity and ironic melodrama. But I do believe the core story started there, at a crazy-vegan-holistic resort in the Catskills under the guidance of a woman who has written over something like 80 books. I mean, seriously. She must have been plugged in to some major creative electricity, like she'd been struck with literary lightening and it emanated out of her in little jolts everywhere she went. I was sad to hear that she died last year in September, but I also know that somewhere God has himself a pretty damn good scribe. Bless you Madeleine L'Engle and may you, wherever you are, also bless us.

PS- Sarah, the runny nosed kid I picked on in Kindergarden is now, of course, a stunningly beautiful olive-skinned, hazel-eyed, corkscrew-curled, athlete/academic/world traveler who also happens to be one of my very best friends in the world to this day. So! The years do bring redemption after all.

cake

In the past two weeks I have had a professional tarot card reading, eaten scones with a clairvoyant, stumbled through a moving meditation, catnapped during a guided meditation, had healing touch to align my chakras, tried system integration?? (the Feldenkreist method! I literally sat on a chair while the practitioner moved my shoulder up and down 1/2 an inch!), bought incense from an Indian video-rental store, attended 12 step meetings of which I am a member, expressed Gratitude in a Gratitude journal, kvetched my way through the Morning Pages, prayed for others, prayed for myself, turned it over, taken it back, vowed to go to Church, vowed not to go to Church, considered reintegrating my Judaism, thought again, let it be, cursed, ranted, raved, moaned, begged, pleaded, oscillated, vascillated, felt superior/inferior/posterior to, wrestled with guilty/blessed/titillated (can't get enough of that word this week!). I have read about God, sex, the internet, universities, sin, Spiderman 2, noodles, infertility, bad toilet energy and Prometheus. I have eaten cake and I have not eaten cake. Mostly though, I have eaten cake. ******

books: not supple models make

Well. I have found that books are not very photogenic. This morning, I tried to photograph 4 of my current reads atop a silky red robe. I found the results disappointing. They were flat, 2-D and uninspired. So this post goes without illustration. I am more of a verbal person anyway. A talker. A writer. A reader. I even love to read license plates. I think I only got about half of the experience of Florence, and that through a haze of hash and chianti. Art dripped off the street corners, the street signs, it was even in the garbage of the alleyways. It practically bit me in the face, but my focus was on the cocentric circles of Dante's rings of hell, Calivino's surreal world of inverted stories and the mythological mis-matches of Boccaccio's lovers.
*********************************************
May 1, 1996
My thoughts are almost completely consumed by my story which is taking away from the importance of this crazy reality. Two days ago we spent 3 1/2 hours at the police station filing a report for our denuncia. Then we got led through restricted Kafka sections of the train station to find a package of insect repellant from my mother. And then Francesco, the cop, the schitzophrenic neighbor from upstairs and Barbara the landlady all came over at the same time and yelled at each other in our foyer. Halfway through, we discreetly closed the door and hid. I have five weeks left which is a knife in my heart and my wings of flight. Gwen saw the Psychic Boyfriend walking by her phonebooth eating Dove icecream. Everyone we see in the street we think to be the one who broke down our door. There are countless suspects. I realized that 2 different Diegos have come by to retrieve 2 different tapes on 2 different occasions. I can't stop smoking and the weather won't stop raining. I can't stop writing and trying to figure this damn story out. I am so completely myself that I can't see, think, feel or hear anyone else. I realize that I am a fucking woman and a writer and that I'll be both all my life.

Firenze, Italia
76 Via Guelfa
Age 20

How can I be true?

With so many smart, insightful, sensitive, sexy books to choose from, how can I be true? Is there enough of me to go around?

Books have always been my primary love (aside from chocolate eclairs, cowboys and, um, my husband of course). I have had many fiery one-night stands as well as long, committed relationships with books. Someone I know (a college professor? Erma Bombeck? Mr. Noodle?) said they wanted to be the kind of person who finished every book they ever started. Well, I wish I were that kind of person too. But me, monogomy and books have never made it last. There are more than eeehhh a dozen half finished books laying next to my bed alone. Not to mention on my desk, in my closet, in the attic, in my son's room and piled next to the toilet. Yes, I am a book slut.