How to Murder Your Life

It took some wheedling, but Peg came through for me, like she always does, and HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE, Cat Marnell's tell-all memoir, arrived from the High Plains Library District via interlibrary loan just a week after I'd requested it. It wasn't something we'd be ordering for our own library, Peg explained. Too....something. So when the book arrived, it had that tinge of bad, of banned, and I grabbed it up and held it close. Illicit. The cover itself was a guilty pleasure, the title scrawled in pink and blue - lipstick and smeared Adderall? I took the book home to read and, for the next two days, did little other than that.

HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE is one addict's story of growing up rich, white, beautiful, and hungry - for drugs, for men, for experience, for food, for beauty, for love. Cat Marnell, in gossipy, inviting prose, draws us up the crystal stair of her childhood. Born and raised in a Bethesda "Shangri-La"—her words—Marnell endures her parents' constant fights and her own sweeping mood swings against a backdrop of professional landscaping and a kindly grandmother, dear Mimi, who bails out Marnell way more than once.

So I figured I'd hate it: rich bitch, catty prose, and a barrage of exclamation points. Like, every third line....! But despite the irreverent style and the decidedly "unwriterly" quality of the book, I found myself falling ever deeper into Marnell's sticky web of crushed pills, Gatorade spiked with Ketel One, and all-nighters fueled by speed, heroin, and 4 AM visits to the 7-11 for binge foods. I'll admit it: I fell for Marnell, right away and then increasingly so as this raunchy memoir progressed. Her style is so refreshing! It's so candid! The exclamation point really can serve a function! The exclamation point, in essence, is Marnell: a little showy, a little gaudy. Plus, it takes the right person to use it well - it only looks good on some people.

It looks good on Marnell, whose style seems to edit as it goes, reflecting the many layers of revisions that went into this book. This narrator is constantly referencing editorial desicions - for example, in comparing her first boarding school to a "concentration camp," she admits that she put the phrase in and took it out literally fifteen times. "Let its presence here," she writes, "be a harbinger of bad judgement to come."

And come bad judgement does: in the form of a late-term abortion, a series of failed relationships, a best friend who sucks blood from the character's nose after a night of too much coke, a series of babydoll dresses and an infatuation with Courteney Love, a string of champagne-filled events in which our narrator gets obliterated, a second abortion, many falls and accidents, several assaults, several robberies, and several rapes. At times, I couldn't go on, but go on I did, barreling through Marnell's raucous, battered, wired life like an addict myself.

In the end, I'd fallen into twisted love with Cat Marnell. This wasn't the healthiest relationship, and her final lines left me unsettled, disgusted, and weirdly smitten. In her Afterword, which serves primarily as a way to report on all the book's characters - most of whom Marnell cares about far more than you or I - she writes:

Yes, my addiction is still very much part of my life—distracting me with cravings, obsessive thoughts, and negative self-talk. Yes, I see my Chinese night pharmacist more often than I see my pregnant sister. Yes, I was recently 'caught' doctor shopping on the Bowery...I'm keeping my disease active as long as I'm not in recovery. By keeping away from AA or NA, I remain in the danger zone. Things could—and probably will—get bad again. Real talk!

Recovering addicts, current addicts, would-be addicts, new mothers, old mothers, grandmothers, my mother, and Peg: I can imagine all rejecting this book. Maybe it starts with discovering it somewhere it shouldn't be, like in a teenager's bedroom. Maybe it escalates to reading, just out of curiosity, a few paragraphs, but then burning it, destroying it, disappearing any evidence of what many readers will call filth. Being sick and hating herself made Cat Marnell famous, and in many ways, her book advocates drug use. "I may be back on speed," she writes at the book's close, "but I take way less than I used to." In 2017, Marnell is wealthy, well-dressed, well-groomed, and comfortable. "Runner's high is so crazy!" she writes of her new fitness routine, Barry's Bootcamp in Noho. "Especially when you boost that shit with a little nibble of Adderall just before you hit the treadmill."

Hate Marnell if you want. She's expecting you to. The whole story, after all, is about keeping an addiction alive, sabotaging your goals and dreams, and still winning in the end. Still, Marnell isn't without a conscience. In HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE's final pages, she writes:

So what can all you pretty young addicts learn from this? Beware. Unealthy people attract other unhealthy people—and girls on drugs attract bad guys like a wounded baby deer attracts vultures. When you're high every day, you are vulnerable every day. You are making your jugement all screwy. You will let bad people into your life.

Of her life now, Marnell writes, "I've got a hot career, a clear head, and in ice pick in my kitchen in case I need to Basic Instinct a bitch."

Not quite sober, not quite free, but five stars for courage to Cat Marnell.

I've never quite heard it told like that before.

Eileen

I'd been hungry to read EILEEN, Ottessa Moshfegh's first novel that competed with DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING for the Man Booker Prize in 2016. I'd already read the New York Times' tantalizing review: "Through Eileen," Lily King writes, "Moshfegh is exploring a woman’s relationship to her body: the disconnection, the cultural claims, the male prerogative." I was seduced by King's descriptions, which paint Moshfegh as a feminist, and her protagonist, Eileen, as a pioneer, a woman venturing into the unknown realms of her own capacity.

What King glossed over was the gross intimacy of the book, the grotesque confessions at every turn, and the narrator's relentlessly described proclivities for the debased and the disturbing. EILEEN is the story of a woman disgusted with herself, revolted by her life, sickened by her job. Everything disgusts her, it seems: her co-workers, who she imagines to be lesbians. Her father, who lies drunk in the house all day and night. Most of all, though, Eileen hates herself: her breasts, the unexplored "caverns" between her legs, the slime-sludge color of her eyes. This narrator is writing from a place of maturity, looking back at her 24-year-old self with pity, shame—and perhaps a slant of amusement.

EILEEN spans several weeks in the life of its namesake, who floats from work to the liquor store to home in her father's beat-up Dodge. She watches the world through eyes hardened by hate. She shoplifts compulsively, touches herself at work, and uses the bathroom without washing her hands. Some of the Moshfegh's lines horrify, and that, I suspect, is the point—this is a book that shocks and awes. This is a book about agency and passivity, action and inaction, but it's also a book about being a woman - in any age. What I both hated and loved about this story was that I could see myself in it: the dirty nuances, the graphic revelations—these belong to Eileen, to Moshfegh, and to me.

The book's dramatic finale left me underwhelmed—especially since the Boston Globe claims that it "culminates in a dynamite ending." In fact, as King writes, "For a while we hang on to the hope that more will be revealed about her...that somehow the gun-blood-death culmination will feel as fresh and particular as the first part of the novel. And then we have to let those hopes go."

Ultimately, EILEEN is a bold, brave book—a book not for the faint-hearted, the squeamish. Not a book, I think, for my mother. If you ate up SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW or THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, you'll be drawn, I think, to EILEEN—she's a similar narrator, after all: mannish sensibilities, moments of unreliability, and a raw, confessional voice that forces you, grimacing, on.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Madeleine Thien, in her sprawling, complex, and vigorously beautiful third novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, manages to simultaneously devastate and inspire. The book is poetic balm, even as it tortures.

Thien begins by introducing us to Marie, who remembers the day Ai-Ming, a mysterious family friend, comes to live with her and her mother in Canada. Ai-Ming instantly becomes a part of the family, offering Marie a link, however tenuous, to the rich tapestry of ancestors she barely knew she had.

What begins in present-day Canada soon shifts to a  China under Chairman Mao's regime, where “people simply didn’t have the right to live where they wanted, to love who they wanted, to do the work they wanted. Everything was decided by the Party.” In this China, there are very few liberties, but, as Thien muses, “It was still possible to keep your private dreams, only they had to stay that way, intensely, powerfully private. You had to keep something for yourself.”

Do Not Say We Have Nothing has many faces: A pair of wanderers, hunting the desert for their missing girl. Sparrow, Ai-Ming’s father, who filters everything he hears through the language of musical notes. Zhuli, daughter of the desert nomads and a brilliant violinist who, mid-novel, takes her own life and whose character lingers throughout the narrative long after her death. Always there’s Ai-Ming, coming of age in a country where nothing is hers, not even her body, not even her family, and just barely her thoughts. To Ai-Ming, Thien writes, “The only…question that mattered was, How was it possible for a person to write her own future?”

Ultimately, Do Not Say We Have Nothing is about both loss and inheritance, destruction and rebirth. The book hinges on revolution—first, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when China was brutally forced to erase its past. The country’s artists, educators, and thinkers become the enemy to be spat upon in the street. The gifted are forced to unlearn their abilities. Sparrow, Ai-Ming's father, has only ever known music, but he submits to a lifetime of work in a wire factory. Kai, Sparrow’s closest friend, his maybe-love, manages to leave the country while he still can, forever branded, at least to himself, as a coward, a traitor to his family and his country both. Zhuli, Sparrow’s cousin, kills herself rather than betray what’s inside her heart. No option ever seems wholly right; no character can be fully blamed. All are intensely, relatably real. As Ai-Ming remarks, “Maybe we should mistrust every idea we think is original and ours alone.”

The second revolution, the student protest at Tiananmen Square, lends the book its strongest, most compelling scenes. “When the demonstrations began,” Thien writes, “the students were asking for something simple. In the beginning it wasn’t about changing the system, or bringing down the government, let alone the Party. It was about having the freedom to live where you chose, to pursue the work you loved.” In this revolution, the victories are staggered, balanced by violence. The city is stagnant with heat beneath a yellow sky, and the protests go on for days. The students weaken, starve, collapse. The city occupies an uncertain, unsettled no-man's-land. “I want to live,” Ai-Ming thinks to herself, “but nobody here knows how.”

Those still reeling from Trump’s November victory might find solace in Thien’s sensitively penned and ever-shifting saga. It is, after all, a story about survival: cultural preservation, family bonds, and the enduring strength in courageous art. Even as power corrupts, our ability – or, perhaps in Thien's world, our desire and will – to enact change prevails. Facism, however brutal, eventually fuels change. Human rights violations eventually fuel change. Censorship fuels change. Ultimately, Thien’s novel affirms, the power to enact meaningful change exists within us all. Sometimes, we just need someone to light the fire. Sparrow walks in protest with his fellow citizens - police, bus drivers, shop owners, all daring to walk in protest, all daring to risk their lives. “He felt," Thien writes, "as if all his past lives, his past selves, were walking beside him.”

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is about our most fundamental freedoms: the ability to think, to create, to imagine, and to feel. Thien's story is about remembering, even when the safest thing to do is to simply forget. Even when an entire cultural history is destroyed, families are shattered, and song lyrics are buried deep into the ground, “Not everything," Thien wryly reminds us, "will pass.”

Take Your Broken Heart

Make It Into Art.

To a productive, inspired 2017. #StillWithHer #NotMyPresident #Hope

Patagonian Road: In Print!

It's official, dear readers!

PATAGONIAN ROAD is due to hit presses in the spring of 2017, with a soft release in February and an official, real-deal, bigtime release in April! Thanks to Andrew Gifford at the Santa Fe Writers Project for believing in this project.

While you await my pages, do feast your eyes upon the preliminary cover, as well as the tantalizing copy that we hope will lure in readers near and far.

Thanks for the years of support, dear readers. It's finally happening!

Spanning four seasons, ten countries, three teaching jobs, and countless buses, Patagonian Road: A Year Alone Through Latin America chronicles Kate McCahill’s solo journey from Guatemala to Argentina. In her struggles with language, romance, culture, service, and homesickness, she personifies a growing culture of women for whom travel is not a path to love but a route to meaningful work, rare inspiration, and profound self-discovery.

Following the route Paul Theroux outlined in his 1979 travelogue, The Old Patagonian Express, McCahill transports the reader from a classroom in a rugged Quito barrio to a dingy rented room in an El Salvadorian brothel, and from the storied neighborhoods of Buenos Aires to the heights the Peruvian Andes.

A testament to courage, solitude, and the rewards of taking risks, Patagonian Road proves that discovery, clarity, and simplicity remain possible in the 21st century, and that travel holds an enduring capacity to transform.

“McCahill is a blues traveler, singing for citizens of the world who have no public voice. She depicts beauty within despair, allowing us to hear a comforting melody in an unsettling breeze and see the gorgeous colors within a bruise. If a feeling of loneliness pervades her essays, so do feelings of wonder and pleasure. It’s simply impossible not to share her joyful and frequently bewildering sensations of travel.”
— Sascha Feinstein, author of Black Pearls

Vida

The Diver’s Clothes Lying Empty

You are sitting here with us,  

but you are also out walking in a field at dawn.

You are yourself the animal we hunt  

when you come with us on the hunt.

You are in your body  

like a plant is solid in the ground,  

yet you are wind.

You are the diver’s clothes  

lying empty on the beach.  

You are the fish.

Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

**************************************************************************************

Give me something easy, I say to Peg, the head librarian. She juts her chin towards the farthest rack from the reference desk. Vida, she says. At this point in the semester, everyone's gruff, but Peg is always like that - at least at first, when you don't yet know that she's just got a really acute bullshit meter, and - in the beginning - you've got to prove yourself to her.

Anyway, I trust Peg. She thinks I am a good customer of the library, and she gives good advice. Sometimes, head librarians are the only ones you can trust. When all I needed was something lusty and artsy and crimson, Peg gave me Paris Red by Maureen Gibbon. When I looked like I could use a very tall glass of wine and a very easy read, she gave me Misty Copeland's Life in Motion. Once, Peg and I discussed Lily King's Euphoria for half an hour, gushing and gushing and, in the end, laughing snidely. I don't remember why. I think Peg reads at least one book a day.

And so when she says, Vida, I go and figure out what she's talking about. I scan the covers until I see the author's name: Vendela Vida. I haven't heard of her, and I'm sometimes intimidated by writers with exotic names. But it's a smallish book, and the cover pictures a woman walking beneath a Middle-Eastern looking arch. Vendela Vida: The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty. I check it out.

As often happens, Vida languishes on the kitchen table until it's due back at the library. Laura from reference calls, as she does once a month or so, to remind me my book is late. I bring it back to Peg, and she checks it out again, and I take it home again and this time I read the jacket, the back cover, and then I turn to the back jacket and look at Vida: pretty, fortyish, vaguely sexy, vaguely foreign. I begin to read.

After about two pages, I close the book. No. Once, an agent told me that no one will ever represent your manuscript if it's in the second person. You, you, you, you, you, Vida's book goes, and I don't read any farther because no, no, it isn't me, it's you, Vida, it's you. I go upstairs and look up Vida's review on the New York Times. Parul Sehgal writes:

Ms. Vida has opted for the second person, hoping, it seems, that its intimacy might invite the reader to plunge more deeply into the story...There’s a temptation to set the book aside immediately, preferably with tongs. Resist the urge.

OK, fine. So she gets to break the rules. She has like three books already, after all.

I go back downstairs; I pick up Vida; I read on.

In the end, there's intrigue and mystery and little echoes of Beautiful Ruins, that fantastical (and fantastically popular, though I couldn't ever quite get into it) book by Jess Walter. There are relationships with "famous American actresses" who look radiant, radiant, but in real-life are predictably bitchy. There are predictable American tourists, and even a storyline I could predict: a baby, a sister, an escape.

Still, I read Vida's book word for word, page by page. Lush, rich detail, as one reviewer praised? I don't know about that - I'm not sure I ever quite saw Casablanca, where the story was set. And Lena Dunham, one of the more prestigious reviewers, claims there's great humor there, but I never laughed aloud. And I mean, the most beautiful part of the whole book is the Rumi quote from which the title - the diver's clothes - is drawn.

Yet there is something about Vida's book that snagged me and held on. I devoured it in basically one sitting (I did get up to pee and feed the cat and cook dinner and sleep and wake up). Still, in the morning I sat down with Vida before I even started the coffee, and by the time I read the final page, I was late for class. My heart was beating hard.

I love a book like that.

Thanks, Peg.

First Fiction

Dear readers:

After a long hiatus (whirlwind semester!) I'm back on Patagonian Road...but only to share my first published piece of fiction, 'Absence.'

Thanks to the Adirondack Review for editing and publishing, and especially to editor Angela Leroux-Lindsey and intern Erin Duffy.

And, thanks to my writing partner, Katharine Beebe, for reading this story more than once.

Happy winter, all! Think snow :)

Come one, come all!

Come on down, Santa Fe! 

It's the annual Santa Fe Literary Review reception from 5-7 on November 5. 

Take note: we've changed locations for this year only, and we'll be in the West Wing atrium.

Contributors - shoot me an email if you wish to read!

Anne Boyer on Not Writing

[Writers: to fall in love, please read immediately] 

Thanks to Book Forum for posting and to Philip Graham for sharing  Anne Boyer's poetic list-style essay on the seldom-discussed topic of not writing:

It is easy to imagine not writing, both accidentally and intentionally. It is easy because there have been years and months and days I have thought the way to live was not writing have known what writing consisted of and have thought “I do not want to do that“ and “writing steals from my loved ones” and “writing steals from my life and gives me nothing but pain and worry and what I can’t have” or “writing steals from my already empty bank account” or “writing gives me ideas I do not need or want” or “writing is the manufacture of impossible desire” or writing is like literature is like the world of monsters is the production of culture is I hate culture is the world of wealthy women and of men.

—Excerpted from Garments Against Women (Ahsahta Press, 2015): "Not Writing" and "What is 'Not Writing'?"

Euphoria

I had just finished Wild by Cheryl Strayed—a book that made me laugh, weep, and write earnestly into the night. Next I mused over In Some Other World, Maybe, a smart, very trendy, and ultimately memorable novel by Shari Goldhagen. I was having a blast. These women writers were feeding my summertime soul, and I wanted more. I wanted something fresh, something that would make me think, but not too hard. It is summer, after all.

Euphoria, Lily King's newest, had been sitting on the kitchen table for about two months. Before Wild and In Some Other World, I'd gone through a reading drought, so to speak. Do you ever have those? All through a hectic semester and a month-long road trip across the country, library books languished on my kitchen table. I unwound with LL Bean catalogs, Every Day with Rachael Ray Magazine, and The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks. Some choices we just can't explain.

In any case, finally. The moonsoons had arrived, bringing to a blessed close my reading drought. I poured a glass of wine and took Euphoria outside. For a moment, I watched the setting sun and inhaled hot pinion.

Then I opened the book, and almost immediately my world fell away, replaced swiftly and fully with King's. Euphoria was a different animal than anything I'd recently read, and I understood immediately that King writes at a whole other level than most. Above being a storyteller, she is a sort of research-artist, a painter whose pigments include facts, dates, and theories. She is a setter of well-researched scenes and well-considered characters. She is a master of point of view, structure, and restraint. An hour and a half later, my full glass of wine had some flies in it. The sun had set, and I realized I was cold.

I warn you, fellow writers: in King's presence you'll be humbled, whoever you are.

Of King's fourth novel, Emily Eakin of the NYTimes writes, "[Euphoria] is rife with such visceral imagery and pungent with the stink of disease, foul breath and unwashed bodies." Eakin adds that "The threat of violence and death looms from Page 1." The review closes with this: "In King’s exquisite book, desire — for knowledge, fame, another person — is only fleetingly rewarded, and gratification is inseparable from self-­deceit."

Ms. Eakin, I must politely disagree with it all. Well, all except the exquisite. Euphoria is certainly filled with visceral stink and foul breath and the threat of violence, but this after all is a book about white anthropologists traveling the Sepik River in New Guinea in 1933. What did Ms. Eakin expect? In her vaguely coy (but ever stylish) review, she overlooks what really roots the reader to Euphoria: the book's humanity. A sustained, dynamic current of sensuality and desire runs beneath the whole story, connecting each character and scene. This is the Copula Spider Doug Glover was talking about: bodies, sweat, pain, want, over and over again. Desire may be fleetingly rewarded for the characters, as Eakin claims, but for the reader the effects endure.

Speaking of want, it's immediately clear in Euphoria what every character wants. I've heard this is something you're supposed to do in fiction: understand what your protagonist wants most in the world, and tell your reader. In Euphoria, one character wants more than anything to learn. Another wants a place to call his own, and a woman to join him there. A third wants—well, I guess there is one character whose desires are less clear. Maybe he wants to forget. Maybe he wants never to leave the Sepik River.

It's all in the book, my lovelies, it's all in the book, so best not miss out on this lush work of art. King will take you to a place you've never been, a muggy, buggy place you won't want to leave. Weird, I know, but just trust me on this one. Euphoria looks short, like maybe you'll finish it in one night, but I assure you, dear reader, you will not.

Blue is the Warmest Color

Blue is the Warmest Color is timely, sensual, smart, and emotional. Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, the film explores women, hunger, and what it means to be a lesbian—or not—in today's open-minded world. Love will always be a rose—beautiful, expensive, potentially dangerous—and in that, Blue is nothing new. But for anyone who has ever wondered what lesbians do—in and out of bed—Blue is a must-see. Be warned: you'll weep, laugh, and blush madly. Not one to watch with your mother, methinks...but then again, I don't know your mother.

Released in 2013, Blue begins as a slow-moving movie, paced more for a 1980's audience than that of today—though the French, perhaps, are less device-addled and ADHD-plagued. And yet Blue quickly reveals that the French, in many ways, are less many things than we Americans are: less addicted, less guilty, less repressed. The characters love preparing and eating food, making love, drinking wine, lying in the sun, standing in a park, cuddling on a bench. Pleasure is taken at every turn, and as a result the actors boast clear skin, bright eyes, and toned midriffs.

Anyway, you might not make it through all three hours of Blue, and that would be okay. The first hour is satisfying in itself. The first ten minutes are. But the movie in its entirety is a lesson in patience and its subsequent reward, for those who sit through Blue are paid handsomely.

Blue tells the story of pouty-lipped, 15-year-old Adele (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who lives in France with her parents. They serve her wine at dinner (while the American audience sighs...if only the US could be that mature) and in the mornings, Adele goes off to high school exhausted and tousled. For the first thirty minutes, the movie goes on like this: Adele is a hearty eater, smokes cigarettes on her way home from school, and has sex with a cute guy at school who takes an interest.

Of cute guy, Emily Greenhouse, in her New Yorker article "Did a Director Push Too Far," writes, "Early on, Adèle tells a suitor that she likes languages—the word is langue. It’s the same word, in French, for “tongue,” and the camera hardly ever leaves hers: her mouth, her rude chewing, her sucking, her wails." Langue, langue. It's a theme that pervades the film. Anyway, predictably, the sex between Adele and suitor is uninspired and, by the end, pretty sad—a vacant look in Adele's eyes and all that. Still, something tells us that this behavior is nothing new, and this is not the first time. Something else tells us there's much more to come.

The movie's first turn comes when Adele, late at night and alone in her room, conjures an image of the cute blue-haired gay girl she passed in the street. Subtle and fine, this scene is erotic and transcendent. Blue hair is there, and then she's gone, and Adele is left alone with her body. From there, the movie picks up, though there remain many long camera shots of Adele's pouty mouth.

Eventually, in a lesbian bar of a caliber that surely only exists in France, or in a French dream, Adele meets blue-haired Emma (Léa Seydoux). Their meet-cute is sexy and smart. Adele is almost painfully earnest, and so, so young. Still, the scene grips and holds.  What follows is one of Blue's crueler turns, arriving in the form of Adele's so-called friends. They have seen Adele with blue-hair, and they accuse her in the schoolyard of being lesbian. They taunt her mercilessly—almost unconvincingly—and a crowd forms. Adele, so obviously gay, turns red in denial.

From there, Blue chronicles the lives of Adele and Emma. Adele's sexual awakening—her true one, not the one she's faked all this time with men—takes place in the form of many long sex scenes with Emma, the first famously seven minutes in duration. Do not, I repeat, watch this with your mother. Let's just say that the women go from casual to serious fast, and then they have made a life together. They throw parties together. Adele is the object, constantly, of our gaze and Emma's.

Greenhouse's New Yorker piece goes on to expose the director as a slave-driver: "Seydoux and Exarchopoulos said that the shooting had been unbearable and they would never again work with Kechiche. The French union representing the film industry spoke of deplorable conditions for the crew. Seydoux [...] said she felt like a 'prostitute.' Exarchopoulos described a 'horrible' continuous take in which Seydoux hit her over and over, leaving her raw."

Of Blue, the New York Times writes, "It’s a three-hour movie about women, a rare object of critical inquiry perhaps especially for American men working in the male-dominated field of movie critics. The truth is we need more women on screen, naked and not, hungry and not, to get this conversation really started."

Scathing reviews, forced prostitution, and director brutality aside, the truth remains: Blue is an astonishing film about women, beauty, and sex. Three hours passed quickly, and when Blue was over I wanted more. 

Sol LeWitt at the Mass Moca

It's a gray day in June, and I am driving to Williamstown, Massachusetts to meet my brother. I’m coming from Boston, and before that I was in Brooklyn, New York and Washington, D.C. I’ve seen Little Rock and Linville Falls, North Carolina this time around, and I even spent a night in Chatham, Tennessee, birthplace of two Nobel Prize winners. Who knew.

Anyway, I’m due to meet my brother in two hours, and there’s time to spare. I wonder where I’ll eat lunch, where I might stroll while I wait for him, and then I pass a sign for the Mass MoCA, an art museum I’ve studied in college, read about in magazines, and in general vaguely wondered about for many years. "Great!" I think, and pull in. Ample parking!

The beauty we love

"Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the earth."

-Rumi

http://thehappyfiddler.blogspot.com/2011/09/blog-post.html

Balls Out

McSweeney's Internet Tendency is consistently excellent and addicting. Philip Graham had a wonderful column there, 'Philip Graham Spends a Year in Lisbon,' which was eventually expanded into his luminous book, 'Moon Come to Earth.' And right now I'm loving Tim Peters' Notes From the Caddieshack. And I think my mother and brother and all golf-lovers and summer-job lovers out there would love it, too.


In this post, though, I especially wanted to plug Casey Plett's column on transitioning genders. Her 19 entries made me laugh and moved me to tears and I highly recommend them to you all! Her writing exudes a maturity, an honesty, that's ironic and beautiful. Below, a lovely excerpt from her fine column, 'Balls Out: A Column on Being Transgendered.'


Your confusion is not a weakness. Don’t get hung up on the world, it’s changing and accepting more with every day. The closet is worse, and there are all kinds of closets. I can’t pretend I know what you may have to go through or what you will become. But for divining the choice yourself you are beautiful, you are beautiful, you are beautiful, and you always will be. I promise you.

Color in Space and Time

To my dear readership:

A few words on Carlos Cruz-Diez's exhibit, 'El color en el espacio y en el tiempo,' shown at the MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2011

Carlos Cruz-Diez makes art you have to enter. He makes sculpture-paintings you must move around to see fully; with the slightest shift, the barest breath, the surface changes, and  sometimes it even slides right into the opposite of itself. 


I discovered Cruz Diez last weekend at the MALBA Museum’s tenth anniversary celebration. The MALBA, one of BA’s largest and most-respected museums, mirrors both the architecture and content of the Whitney in New York: high ceilings and a blocky, triangular exterior, and highly experimental exhibitions of modern art inside. Buenos Aires and New York remind me of each other as well, so that similarity could be reinforcing my comparison. In any case, how good it felt to be in that fine museum, which felt to me so reminiscent of those contemporary galleries in New York and Boston that I’ve been missing.

The MALBA presented an excellent series entitled ‘Art in Latin America: 1990-2010,’ which I admired for the incredible, exhaustive portrait created by this curator—but there were crowds, how could there not have been, on a glorious BA weekend….and I couldn’t really breathe in there, let alone stand and look. So I’m taking Sam there when she comes—on a weekday, and meanwhile, I let Cruz-Diez’s quieter show upstairs pull me under.

Cruz-Diez’s exhibit presented some of his earliest drawings and watercolors, which echo the tiny points and blocky, emotive patches of color employed by the later European Impressionists. Yet the ‘painting-sculptures’ that quickly followed those drawings are made of slats of painted wood glued to canvases. They show how fast this artist shifted from both literal expression and the limits of a two-dimensional surface. The sculptures, at first reminiscent of Piet Mondrian’s paintings of white lines and squares of color, morph within two years into luminous, shapeshifting surfaces that engage without employing anything literal.

From a few slats of wood on a canvas, Cruz-Diez moved into a process which involved laying, centimeters apart, dozens or hundreds of paper-thin slats horizontally. By varying the colors of the geometrical shapes on the canvas, as well as the colors on the slats themselves, Cruz-Diez made the works—the ‘sculpture-paintings’—different depending on where the viewer is positioned. He made it necessary that the viewer move in and out of the canvas to see the 'whole'. The effect is a work that shifts and shimmers as you pass it, drawing you in to inspect and then asking that you step back and take in the whole. These pieces are made to take time.

Self-defined as a ‘kinetic’ artist, Cruz-Diez finally moves beyond the canvas altogether; at the end of his MALBA exhibition, viewers are invited to slip gauzy hair-nets over their shoes and enter an all-white room: white floors, white ceilings, and white walls. Except that nothing is really white; the gallery is cordoned off by half-walls, and each ‘half-room’ exudes a color. Light is the medium here, light and white walls. An all-pink room envelops you, the pink, boxed bulb in the center of the room radiating more the heat of the pink than the light of it. A similar blue room induces melancholy, and a green room invigorates. At least, these were my impressions; each colored room absorbed me, completely shifting, albeit momentarily, how I felt. It was an amazing end to a truly powerful exhibit, one where I entered so many rooms, shifted between so many dimensions and so many times of day. It was a Rothko-like immersion, that all-absorbing color, except in this case the light was literal.

Cruz-Diez was born in Caracas in 1923. He’s divided his time between Mexico and France since 1960, and has exhibited extensively on both those continents.  I encourage you to see his works up close if you’re ever given the chance, and I’ll leave you, my dear readership, with this excerpt from Mari Carmen Ramirez’s essay, “The Issue At Stake is Color,” as printed in MALBA’s write-up, ‘Carlos Cruz-Diez: El color en el espacio y en el tiempo.’

Cruz-Diez immerses us in unprecedented situations—what he calls ‘événements,’ or events—in which color happens, becoming several things at once; an unsuspected dimension of space; an unrestrained, real-time experience; and an essential means for reconditioning and stimulating our senses.

Portrait of the artist (daylife.com)

Reaching Esquel

for Paul

There's been an absence of actual writing on my blog, and that's because I've been struggling with what to say about Patagonia. It’s not that I don’t want to share things with my beloved readership, for Patagonia was incredible; it’s that I've been afraid, because I know that a post about reaching Patagonia won't be like any other post.

Esquel, a small city four hours south (by bus) of Bariloche, was the last city Paul reached. The Old Patagonian Express, literally, brought him there on rickety tracks. I, on the other hand, flew into the tiny Esquel airport from Buenos Aires with my father and brother. And although we took a twenty-two hour bus ride back to Buenos Aires, and although there have been times when Paul has flown and I have ridden many hours over dirt roads, I still feel a twinge, knowing I wasn't on that last train. 

It’s how I began eleven months ago; flying into Guatemala City, though Paul had taken the train. Esquel happened so fast; the wheels touched down and then the desert was everywhere. There was the rush of pictures we snapped, standing in the wild airport wind, and the air traffic controller who ushered us on. The purple gray of ash, the ribbons of loose, brick-red stone, and the blotted blue of the enormous sky. The same snowy strip of peaks Paul gazed at. That was all, and then we were hustled away.

Paul described it like this: “Ahead,” he wrote, “there was a succession of hills, whittled and fissured by the wind, which now sang in the bushes. The bushes shook with this song. They stiffened again and were silent.”

*

Although his book was, in part, the inspiration for my year in Latin America, Paul and I are not connected in the way I’d imagined we would be, having followed his route for so long. I now realize we’ve had different goals and different means, and in forty years so much can change. I think I just kept waiting, as I made my way down and compared my experiences to Paul's, for some epiphany, some moment when he felt and saw exactly what I felt and saw, but that never came and I know now that I shouldn't be surprised. A man’s experience traveling solo will always differ drastically from a woman's, but beyond that, Paul and I consistently made different choices about places, and took away such different impressions. We are different people, and that helps me to feel less sorry for missing the particular Patagonian silence he described.

Anyway, haven't I known other silence? Haven't I listened alone to the wind, the way it shifts and pauses, so many times? And didn't I always know that I could never travel the way he did, fast through every town and forest, and over, without stopping, every peak? His relationships were fleeting ones (well, with a few admittedly notable exceptions, and a nod to Borges). Paul never entered a rural school on his way to Patagonia; he never walked a dirt road to a mountain town. 

So hadn't I better ask myself, instead, what Mary Elvira Stevens would have wanted? What would have mattered most to her? The fellowship's parameters state that "preference shall be given to persons with good temper and a natural generosity of view when confronted with alien conditions, common sense in observing and comprehending social, economic, and political situations, a strong desire to travel, and a deep love of beauty."

Have you done your best to keep your cool? Mary might have asked me. I imagine she was a woman with a little glimmer in her eye, a little streak of wildness behind the put-together, old-school Wellesley exterior. Have you shown common sense? And I would admit to her that I have, almost always. I think she'd understand that. Have you wondered, have you explored? She’d ask, a smile playing at the edge of her mouth. Have you read, have you learned?

And I would tell her in reply that this year, I’ve opened so many doors. I have laughed and wept to extremes. So many things have caught my breath; so many nights I’ve spent alone. But above all that, I’ve been so lucky, I would tell her, to have fallen in love so many times, with so many streets and forests and markets, and with so many people. I've seen so much beauty, I can promise Mary that, and I can only hope, now, that some of that graces the page.

As I’ve written before, the year’s not over. My life, for now, is in Buenos Aires, where rain beats on the roof in the night, turning the grass in the morning green. It’s a city of trees on the sidewalks: weeping willows in Palermo and the ten-story-high jacarandas that line my Barracas street. The light, now that it's springtime, seems always to be luminous, ethereal and muted through the leaves. In the evening the cobblestones look golden. I try not to count the days I have left, but instead to wrap the city around me. Walking the streets, I'm a breath and nothing more. I feel almost wild with freedom, and my sleep runs thick with dreams.

*

So thank you, Paul, for your map and your book. Thanks for reminding me there are trails across continents, and that sooner or later, you can get almost anywhere. I hope our routes cross again someday, and I wish you the best, wherever on this planet you are.

I’ll end these musings, for now, with a quote I am shamelessly stealing from Christine’s blog. The following comes from Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 short-story collection, The Interpreter of Maladies.

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”