monday

 

today leah and i decided that this would be a prudent january but i’m already really interested in this spoon. oh ceramics!

wednesday

i grew up in a small-ish southern town, big enough for two high schools but small enough that i know the personal histories of everyone who has lived on our block, past and present. (this fortunately includes the elderly couple two houses down who, in the summer, arrange a row of lawn chairs in their driveway and host a sort of neighborhood office hour. people routinely drop by for very strong mixed drinks. frequent conversation topics include weather, time, stability, abstract worries, and the state of the republican party).

in some ways, being back at my parents’ house transports me to a former shell of myself: i still drive the same route to the grocery store that i did in high school; i sit down in a specific chair in the living room to do the crossword puzzle; i am nostalgically overjoyed by a greasy taco wrapped in tin foil. before long, i lose the words to explain the substance of my actual life. my role in the rhythm of the “big city” seems unneccesarily difficult, disorganized, and trite. i become aware that i live a lot through vicarious half-hatched plans. and i wonder, do things always feel this way?

it’s just a complex feeling, being familiar and foreign at the same time, to be aware of your own movement in a place that is still. sometimes it is better to keep quiet.

lately i’ve taken to reading the letters of paul bowles, who is so unbelievably concise with his writing and seems to hardly waste a word. in a letter to his friend bruce morrisette in 1929, bowles writes,

For you, as for me, it will mean so much more than “a trip to Europe.” I had suspected it would. I who discovered that when “people” said “honeysuckle smells sweet” they were expressing in words what was utterly inexpressible verbally to me, also have discovered that I cannot tell what I have found here because it means so much more than I can translate into thoughts, and so much more than even yet I realize. It means, as I said, dying and beginning another life. It would mean the same for you.

 

(this came from In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles)

friday.

winter in texas can be quite cold. or, not that it’s that cold, but it feels unexpectedly damp and biting, like the chill won’t quite detach from your bones (‘that’s just your rickets,’ says my dad). i don’t know. something in the air just feels slow, like time can be occupied by staring for hours at a dusty candle or the tiny woven rug that my parents keep on their coffee table and use sometimes as a coaster.

 

aerial views of texas, from texasfreeway.com

thursday

“What a wee little part of a person’s life his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of the brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history.”

Mark Twain in the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume I.

saturday

sometime between boarding my flight to texas and arriving at my parents’ house i contracted the virus of death and now sit, propped up among way too many pillows, watching one of those movies that came out this year about non-committal relationships. i’ve been nursing a big tumbler of limey, flat san pelligrino for the last day or so, served to me by my father on a little tray with some toothpick-skewered orange slices and referred to, in earnest, as “san penguinino.”

friday.

always looking forward!

i’m leaving again, this time to texas and for ten days.

(“Betty”, oil on canvas, Gerhard Richter, 1988)

wednesday.

i went to mexico. i did not take any pictures. i did get food poisoning, witness michael officiate a wedding, and watch europeans in metallic speedos play a heated beach volleyball match. win some, lose some.

wednesday.

“Highsmith loved woodworking tools and made several pieces of furniture. She kept pet snails; she worked without stopping.”

 

weirdest transition. but please do read up on  Patricia Highsmith.

tuesday.

near my office, there is a regular who sits outside the bed, bath and beyond on the corner of 19th. i look forward to seeing her every morning: she wears these white stretch pants and has the best bob haircut and a kind face, and i like to think that she isn’t homeless, but rather just this old neighborhood watchdog keeping tabs on the east corner of chelsea. this morning i saw her, staring at the ground, screaming and cursing at an empty splenda packet, and i had to reassess some things.

monday.

staff picks:

Leah Finnegan / Brooklyn, NY

Sometimes I really hate music. It’s just so… noisy. And so much of it is so… bad. There’s only so many times I can listen to my favorite songs, Handel’s Passacaglia and “Bad Fog of Loneliness” performed live by Neil Young at Massey Hall, before my ears need a prolonged recess. Alas, my subway commute is long and filled with the cadences of inelegant mastication. So I have to listen to dreadful music.

My semi-secret salvation is the musical. Ever since my stirring performance as “Little Native American Girl” in the Deerfield Children’s Theater’s production of The Will Rogers Follies, I have enjoyed a story told to music. I still get choked up when I see large numbers of people in character shoes dancing together or hear an exquisite vibrato singing about personal turmoil.

Over time my taste in musical theater has become more refined (though I still enjoy a very intense relationship with Les Miserables). Recently I’ve been into Jason Robert Brown’sParade. Set in Georgia in 1913, the musical is about the trial of Leo Frank, a Brooklyn Jew transplant accused of raping and murdering a local 13-year-old (good group dance material, right?! I can only imagine the kickline). Anyway, the trial is a big hullabaloo and Frank ends up getting kidnapped and hanged from an oak tree. Parade covers a slough of interesting topics — the post-Civil War South, Jews in the South, women in the South, race relations in the South and prison — ALL SET TO MUSIC. It’s amazing, beautiful, weird, sad and educational, just like life. Highly recommended for the readers of leighpatterson.wordpress.com. A+++

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NodZ52XNhQ (Disclaimer: London version. Not nearly as good as the NY version.)

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‘staff picks’ is where is where i feature things that interest other people. earlier: here.