pretty dumb things

atmospheric entry

I wrote about returning to Gotham from Italy. Read it or listen to it or both. Sorry about the soothing white noise in the background.

 

mospheric entry 

 

For the past three weeks, I’ve been feeling like Ben Braddock, Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate. Vague, befuddled, ineffably disillusioned, and suffering some inarticulate loss, I have attended people’s parties with no real idea of what I’m doing there.

“How was Italy?” They ask, and then before I can answer, they exclaim, “I’ll bet it was fantastic.  Was it fantastic?” 

Yes, I say, it was. It’s easier to answer that way. I can’t quite live up to their excitement. The truth is too complex, and even when I indulge it, the truth sounds false.

“So what are you going to do now?” they ask. I want to tell them that I’m going to go upstairs and lie down, but I don’t. Mostly I say little. I keep on expecting someone to pull me aside tell me a word, one word, perhaps “plastics.” I too want to sit at the bottom of a pool and hear nothing but the gurgle of filters and the quick-quick twostep of my heartbeat.

Re-entry, as any astrophysicist will tell you, is difficult. It’s a major problem of pyrotechnically flaming thermodynamic proportions. It’s hard not to burn up when  foreign matter hits the atmosphere of a celestial body. I hedge on hyperbole, of course, but when have I not? Hyperbole is my bread and butter and metaphor my jam. I have felt moments from spontaneous combustion. I’ve imagined my sleek Betty Draper blonde hair going up in a poof of Michael Jackson flames. It hasn’t happened, not in real life, not yet.

In truth what it is, or so I hear, is culture shock. The form my culture shock has been taking, beyond pervasive sense of living in The Graduate without Anne Bancroft, is a profound feeling of being paralyzed by not caring very much (if at all) and an endless game of Anywhere But Here. No matter where I go, I don’t want to be there. Everything is wrong. It’s off. The cars are too big and the roads are too wide. The portions are too big and the berries too tasteless. The asses are too big and there are too many people having conversations that I can understand and don’t want to hear. Gotham is dirty and ugly. I hardly remember what I loved about it. Gotham’s far away, though I am in it. I am here but not here. I am Schrödinger’s cat.

I still do the math. It’s 7:45 p.m. here so it is 1:45 a.m. in Italy. It’s 8:13 a.m. here so it is 2:13 p.m. in Italy. I do the math, but I do it less and less. I’ve lost the will to order my food and coffee in Italian, but I still catch myself answering “Si” or “No, per favore” when asked anything by a waitperson. Details have begun to slip away, like pollen they drift and flow on quiet currents, somewhere else.

I suppose I am readjusting. At any rate, I begin to solidify. Gotham grows more real, my friends more important, my dog more lovable. I don’t quite want to chew my own arm off. I’m not anxiously scanning last-minute plane fares. I’m stolidly, thoughtfully planning a trip in September; I placate myself with the thought of six weeks in the fall. I’m growing in, perhaps growing up, here in this city that I used to love with untrammeled abandon and now have to fake it, lying back and thinking of Montalcino.

Which is all very weird because I didn’t come to love Italy until I’d been there for months and months, perhaps months and months and months. I still couldn’t speak the language, though I could understand it well enough (Capisco abbastanza bene ma non parlo bene, mi dispiace.) It wasn’t home, not by a long shot. It was weird and wild and foreign and things, magical things, wonderful things, transformative things, seemed possible there.

Which is to put my finger on the conflagratory problem. Here, surrounded by my stuff, in my city, near my friends, my Romans, my countrymen, I actually have to make those changes I envisioned while I was away. I’m no longer literally distant from my own life; I’m not removed. I’m here, present, accountable, and the real smacks me hard as rushing ground to a falling body. As it turns out, I like escape in multiple forms. I thought it was just narratives and games of solitaire. Travel too must go on the list.

I am going through the motions, walking through the part. Nothing seems to penetrate my heart. Not even, I might add, Buffy. This, if nothing else, alerts me to the gravity of the sitch. There is loss of country, loss of freedom, loss of love and loss of loss. There is loss piled upon loss piled upon loss, and all I want is to be anywhere but here.

Every day gets a little bit better. I suppose it does. It does, I suppose. It gets better, or something like it. It goes, and I’m here stroking my loss that grows transparent, bare and shining under my furtive hands.

 

picture this

Let’s see.

I’m in a calendar. In fact, I’m the pin-up shot for December 2011, a festive position in which to be. The position is probably due to all the parti-colored feathers and the champagne bottle, from which I genuinely did swig. The picture-taking took place during one of those nights in an artists’ loft, and when in the artist loft, you do as the artists do. There were many women tromping around in various states of delicious undress, and all I can say is that I’m delighted to be in their company. Also, I took pictures.

You can buy the calendar over here on The Rumpus, and when you do, you can feel good about supporting The Rumpus (even if your primary motivation is to get pictorial evidence of my fake but spectacular bosoms. I mean, holy levitating boobs, Batman. My breasts look as if they’re going to float away. It's an optical illusion aided by the corset I’m wearing; my actual breasts do not defy gravity to any extent that strains either credulity or natural law). I built the wings in the photo myself, and those I’m very proud of, though were I to do it again, I would engineer them a bit differently. As it turns out, $220 worth of feathers weighs quite a bit.

In this calendar, I’m portraying one of my very favorite literary figures from one of my very favorite books by one of my very favorite writers: Fevvers of Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Carter’s prose humbles and inspires me; she has that rare ability to craft a sentence whose syntax evokes intrinsically while challenging absolutely. Her writing gives me that frisson of pleasure that comes only when the strings of the heart and the head are plucked simultaneously. Add to this precision Carter’s predilection for magical realism and her unabashed socialist-feminist political leanings, and I swoon.

The novel, sadly, is out of print in the US. That’s a deep down tragedy and no doubt about it.

I’m feeling fairly fond of the photo in the calendar. I have a vexed personal history with photographs. I didn’t take good photos, and then I did, and now I don’t so much. I think the calendar shot makes me look both hot and daft in equal measures, and I suppose I can live with that. Once upon a time, in what seems like a galaxy far, far away, every picture I took was good. My driver’s license shoots looked like Francesco Scavullo had taken them, full-on with beauty lighting and wind machine. It’s not the case anymore. My face has shifted, and where the transition from 3-D to 2-D used to play up the angelic angles of my cheekbones, now it highlights wrinkles.

That’s life, I suppose; it’s also death, but slowly. I don’t rue aging, but I do suddenly come to understand why actresses do fucked up things to their faces. Were I to blow my face up twelve feet wide and luminous, I’d probably scramble for the Botox, Juvederm, and Collagen too.

Lately, I’ve gotten drawn into photography, in part because I have friends who are models, in part because I have friends who are photographers, and in part because I got an iPhone, and every douchebag with an iPhone and a Hipstamatic app thinks she’s a photogrpher; I am that douchebag. Taking my own photographs and looking at the photographs of others is a lot like writing myself and reading Angela Carter. There is what I can do—and then there is what other people can do. I pray for the wisdom to know the difference, as well as the temerity to keep on going in the face of crushing self-doubt.

One of those photographers who makes me die a little bit is Symon Chow. I wrote about him for Filthy Gorgeous Things a couple of months ago. I came to his photos through seeing one of his nudes reblogged on one of the Tumblr sites I follow, but all of his pictures slay me. I love his full-frontal commitment to a vintage aesthetic, and I’m equally partial to his eldritch sensibility. Any man who has been given full rein to run amok in the Mütter Museum’s storerooms earns my eternal, bone-dusty respect. I’m just sad I’m no longer in the full flower of my photogenic self.

Time passes. You snooze; you lose. I snost; I lost.

So what, you ask, is the thrumming subtext in all this text? It’s this, dear reader, you may notice my face here is lots and lots. All kinds of my face. Even a gossamer shred of my first name. Which is because my “anonymity” has become more or less a charade. Everyone I know knows I have this blog. I used to have to keep it on the down-low because I taught at a Catholic college. Then I had to keep it on the down-low because I worked at a conservative community college. Today I work for a man who picked me because of the strength of my sexytime scribblings. I maintain this second name because this identity is more famous than I am.

Also, it’s fun to have doubles. Just ask any model, artist or photographer.

see me in the flesh, just not In The Flesh

I'm delighted to tell everyone who lives in the tri-state area--as well as those who live outside it and have access to a car, a jet or a matter transport machine--that I'll be reading at this month's Sex Worker Literati reading this very Thursday, January 7. I'm terribly delighted that Audacia Ray, a superwoman with an astonishing array of accomplishments, asked me to read because this series is pretty fricking awesome, and some of my personal idols like Molly Crabapple and Jo Wheldon and my close personal friend Melissa Gira Grant have read previously, and Candy Kane has performed, and David Henry Sterry hosts alongside Audacia and I might need to take a breath because, wow.

The theme of the reading is "First Times," and I'm not entirely certain what I'm going to read, so I'll take your suggestions, as long as you promise to be there. I'm most likely picking a piece from my so-called strip life in keeping with the venue and the whatnot. Still, I'm not above a request.

Anyway, do come by Happy Endings, 302 Broome, on Thursday evening, doors open at 7:30, reading starts at 8:00. I'll be the buxom blonde who bears no resemblance to a marsupial. If you say hi, I'll be sure to say howdy* back.

*Actual greeting may vary

bodies in time and space

This August, I’ll have lived in Gotham twenty years. In those twenty years, I’ve lived in eleven apartments, though I’ve spent fifteen in the one I’m typing in right now. I moved around a lot my first five years, which is pretty typical for new New Yorkers, actually. In those eleven apartments, I’ve lived with four men, with collective whom I shared around eight years, to make a smeary approximation. Add to those eight the five years or so I’ve spent with assorted other dudes (including the three-ish years I spent with Donny) and for a total of thirteen years, give or take, the cavalcade of my dating life has been traipsing through Gotham.

There are many bodies that hang like asteroids in my one-score chunk of Gotham time and space. There are bodies who throb and glow like pulsars, and others who lie dead and dormant like white stars. There are none whom I’d call black holes, thankfully. But they’re all there, somewhere. Spend enough time in a city, date enough people, and the landscape becomes dotted with relationship remembrances, a ghostly breadcrumb trail that pulses with meanings invisible to any other naked eye.

Taking a cold empiric if necessarily hazy accounting, I’ve spent only seven years on my onesy, and yet it feels like I’ve spent ever so much more time alone than partnered. I am, of course, single now and feeling fine about it. I suffer an almost rosily nostalgic glow when I see couples performing couplehood, which couples do as much to express affection between themselves as to express their bond to the world. Ah, I think, I recall holding hands. Yes, I know of having a wisp of hair brushed from my forehead. I can recollect that specific canting of torsos, the one that implies shared intimacy, emotions and bodily fluids.

I remain able to summon a vague cloud of dating interest, a romantic nebula. It’s a pretty sight when I let my mind drift into that telescopic view. I see the sparkles and the lightning flashes and that ethereal glow intrinsic to the happy clashing of two separate people who spontaneously unite into one hot element. I can visualize that moment and feel it resonate with that pleasurable bassy thrum that bounces between my solar plexus and my svadisthana, to drift a little old-agey prose-wise. I can see it, but I can’t touch it, and I’m not sure I want to.

Which is all to say that at some point in the past few years a seismic change took place. Something major shifted, almost without my notice, and the landscape of my interior life changed, possibly irrevocably. I used to feel a mad desperation at being alone. I felt oppressed by singularity, disfigured by it, strange and crazed and wild at my single experience. I dated in a frenetic rush. I flagellated myself with my own undesirability when I wasn’t dating. I felt the press and crush of my own romantic failures with gravitational force. I nearly broke myself with my own pressure to date. Without a man, I was nothing. I didn’t cease to exist—that would have been a step up in emotional health actually—rather, I turned antimatter, a singularly horrid and shadowy incarnation of my dated self.

Now that wild compunction is past. I put my eye to the romantic pinhole and see the expansive glory that can be a romantic relationship, but I’m still nonetheless aware of what lies just outside of the rim of my vision. The unavoidable disappointment, the uncomfortable sleeping, the pain and the fear and the meeting of parents and other family, the boredom and the sports watching. The apparitional specter of Xs and the weighty baggage that every human accumulates after adolescence. The bad smells and the anger and the stuff that drifts gently away like so much space detritus.

 I hope some day that I’ll be able to put these two views together—the rosy macro and the lurid micro—and finally put the “real” in “relationship.” Neither one view nor the other is valid, though neither are they false. And yet, even a contented spinster such as myself can see the value in the coupled state. Plus, I would really rather enjoy someday having sex. Bodies in space are nice, but bodies in bed are nicer.

Or, faint as the morning star, so I seem to recall.

tattoos numbers 9 and 10

Yesterday I met with Stephanie Tamez, the woman whom I refer to as my tattoo artist, to consult about my new tattoos. Stephanie is a tiny, quick person with the affect of a highly tattooed sparrow, if sparrows were themselves tattooed and rather than more often being tattoos themselves. I walked into the studio with a general feeling of befuddlement tinged with resentment that I had to have a consult at all, but Stephanie, it turns out, is a much wiser woman than I when it comes to the decoration of dermis. She quickly talked me out of my initial concept and she, being both an artiste and a merchant, convinced me to get a completely new design around my existing, raw, and kind of ugly tribute tattoo and to put the two textual tattoos elsewhere.

So I've now an appointment on 4 May for the work around the existing tattoo, a frame that will take the form of some Victorian filigree, which will be, according to the infinitely more expert Stephanie, both "organic" and "visual." I'm on stand-by for the two textual tattoos. The Addams Family quote will go on the inside of my forearm right under my inner elbow so that it is balanced against my Joyce quote on the inside of my wrist. The Buffy quote will be placed between the already existing Joyce quote and the to-be-added Addams Family quote so that it wraps around my forearm, more or less bisecting my forearm horizontally, and such that the phrase "love's bitch" features on my forearm. If you can picture that, which I can because I spent a good forty-five minutes taping paper to my arm, you're doing better than I suspect. Pictured below are the graphics of the two textual tattoos. I'll post pictures when I get them done.

Who doesn't love new skin art? No one I want to have lunch with. I'll make an exception for my parents because, you know, they raised me and all.

For no reason that I can think of, the Addams Family quote (it translates to "we gladly feed on those who would subdue us," not just pretty words) is the actual size, but the Buffy isn't. I guess you can click to embiggen it.

live, direct and in the flesh

If you're in Gotham, delight in the carnal, love Susie Bright like I love Susie Bright, and want to see me read, you need to go to tonight's Very Special Episode of Rachel Kramer Bussel's erotic reading series In the Flesh. Every writer who is reading appears in Susie's bordello-scarlet anthology X: The Erotic Treasury. My story gets down and dirty, while I get down and scrubbing. It's both red hot and ice cold. And there's an audience, but only one person.

Intrigued? Of legal age? Come to Happy Endings at 302 Broome St. Show up early. Doors open at 7:00, the show starts at 7:30. It's free as air and twice as bracing. I'm going on just before the two headliners, so kind of late in the program.

And if you do come, please do say hi. I'll be the hot forty-something with excessively long blonde hair, a prodigious rack and the DVF white-purple-and-blue abstract print wrap dress. I only look like a total bitch; underneath, I'm a far bigger cupcake than anything Rachel will ever put in her mouth.

For more information, get thee to the In the Flesh blog.

what I'll do for money, honey; or "power, sex, and money" rewrite

I have been utterly felled by a vicious flu. I've had a fever, which is really rare for me because, like a reptile, my basal temperature hovers around 96 degrees. I'm weak, shaky, befuddled, and beset by vague ailments like the way my hair hurts and how I'm aware of my elbows. Plus, my brain has been racing whilst doing a scansion and a close reading of Dorothy Parker's "Résumé"; tell me that won't keep you awake.

Naturally, I've scheduled myself for a reading for this writers' group that I apparently belong to. I'm not much of a joiner. I am far too misanthropic and cynical, and yet joined this group I have. Moreover, I decided to go to a meeting of all single writers, and I've volunteered to read this piece I'm preparing to submit to the New York Times "Modern Love" column. (If you're not familiar with that particular column, go here for an idea.)

Anyway, I'm feverish and addled-headed, and I have to read this thing that's a rewrite of my earlier Vampire/mistress piece. If you feel like reading it, I've placed it below the fold. It'll give you an idea of how I revise, which right now I'm thinking is not nearly enough.

the legendary susie bright, a roomful of talented writers, and me

If you're one of my readers living in the fabulous greater Gotham area, you might want to consult  your calendar and endeavor to save Thursday, 19 February. Writers from the anthology X: The Erotic Treasury will be gathered by the terribly busy Rachel Kramer Bussel in order to read from their work at Rachel's In The Flesh Erotic Reading Series. Even more exciting, the legendary Susie Bright will be there to meet, greet, read, and answer questions from the audience. Oh, yeah, and I'll be reading too.

The hottsexycoolglamfun starts at 7:30 at Happy Endings, located at 302 Broome Street in glorious Loisaida. The event is free, a glad tiding in this wintry economic climate, and it should be packed. I'd come early if you want to, you know, come.

Go here to read the full list, or just sneak below the fold.

live clothed girl

This Thursday, December 18, I'll be live and in person reading out loud my story from Best Lesbian Erotica '08, edited by the eminent Tristan Taormino. It's all part of the Drunken! Careening! Writers! series put on at KGB Bar at 85 East 4th St, just off 2nd Ave. In Gotham, everyone who reads anyone knows about the KGB Bar and its lit series; I'm terribly proud to be a small running dog cog in the capitalist wheel and to be reading along side such lesbian luminaries as Sinclair and others.

The fun starts at 7:00 p.m. and from what I understand, this even tends to fill up faster than Gertrude Stein on Alice B. Toklas pot brownies. Want the book? Buy it here.

Also, if you're the type who likes to plan your social calendar far into the future, I'll be reading with--gasp!--Susie Bright and many talented others at Rachel Kramer Bussel's February In The Flesh. It's all part of the promotion for Susie's gorgeous new anthology, X: An Erotic Treasury. You can buy it at Amazon or even at your local Urban Outfitters. It makes a superlative great Chrismukkuhkwanzivus gift for that special amorous someone.

a return to Gotham and other things

Riding across 14th street, coming back from the beach today, I noticed the world felt a tad tilted. New buildings, new businesses, new art, new stuff in and around my neighborhood had sprung up in some kind of Lamarckian evolution. The world changes quickly when you live in the petri dish of Gotham. There were strange structural half globes glinting metallic in Union Square, and I noticed frozen yogurt shops I’d never heard of; it felt as if I’d been away a lot longer than the seventeen days I’d been gone. New York grows inexplicably, like a fungus.

My apartment, however, was exactly how and where I’d left it. While I was gone, one blogebrity stayed at my apartment. She pet my cat and watched a bunch of Buffy, which was a set of activities far from how I’d imagined this woman would spend her time. I had hoped my sheets would finally, finally see some hott, hott sexy squirting dick-thrusting action, but alas, they did not, or if they did, both they and she are playing it very close to the breast, vest or chest (depending on the dialect). I am still going to cling to my fantasy of this woman screaming sweet strings of obscenities to dusky lovers, just because it pleases me.

While one blogger was in my bed, another was at my beach house. She is also a blogebrity, a woman whose generally prim appearance belies a Batali-style erotic appetite (which in my figuring would be both discriminating and capacious). This writer lives a life I less imagine than am permitted to see in glimpses. She talks in scraps; the bits she tells of her life feel ephemeral, as if she’s projecting her narrative in Wayang, those Indonesian puppet shows wherein you look not at the puppet, but at the shadows the puppets makes. This woman moves her hands like she talks in arcs as graceful as those of a Balinese dancer. Her stories are made more luminous by their fragmentary nature.

Another friend visited me too. On Saturday, we woke to find that though our house was bathed in the assertive sun, pearly mist intermittently dropped like a bridal veil caught in an updraft. A few hundred feet to the ocean, and the Atlantic was shrouded in mist. A family played in the grey. The weather ambivalent, we decided to take a long walk.

We walked and walked along the shore, the oily grey sea on one side of us and the pearly grey mist on the other. We walked and we came across a crowded beach. People laid in beach chairs, beers in their hands. People lounged on blankets. People played active games of Kadima. People batted volleyballs from one to another. People watched their children toddle into the crashing surf. People gathered in groups, talking, laughing, drinking. People, their chairs, their blankets, their beers, their Kadima paddles, their volleyballs, their toddlers, their friends were enveloped in grey, clinging, palpable mist. It was like going to the beach in Hades, a post-apocalyptic vacation, the shades taking holiday on the shores of the Styx.

I have returned to Gotham under-employed and rather broke and trying to cling on to optimism. I have returned to Gotham without having finished revising much of my proposal. I have returned to Gotham actively trying not to freak the effing fuck out. I return to Gotham the color of a tasty toasted marshmallow; I could be the sweet, gooey center of a S’more. I have returned to Gotham having flirted, oddly, surprisingly with a man. Well, two, actually, though the contact with one was so brief as to be more a flirtette than an actual flirtation. But one of them I have most definitely flirted with. There has been unquestionable flirtage with this guy.

I might meet him tomorrow. I might not. I am in this, as I am in most things, profoundly ambivalent and engaged in reminding myself that just because I come from a long line of dour and pessimistic people, I need not keep up the tradition. I’m meeting this guy primarily because he told me outright that I need to get over my X. I am inclined to agree, and as he is the first single man to present himself and to boldly say what was on his mind, he may go where no other man has gone, well, recently.

Or not. Things can change quickly here in the greatest city in the world. They can also amazingly, against all entropic odds, stay exactly the same.