100th post

Yesterday I was transcribing all my draft text messages from my phone, because I now have an iPhone and they'll be lost when I transfer my SIM. My dozens of draft messages hold:
Amusing snippets of conversation ("Wow. Well. That went from being normal to being... horrifically awkward.")
Things to look into ("thefictionalonline.com")
Lyrics from songs I hear and like ("still conversational. taking your life. left to hide. the things you do and the things you must. still gonna stay forever into dust.") Unsurprisingly, I've failed to track that one down. Update: HA!
Mainly, summaries or parts of dreams. ("Sewn into the mattress.")


I saw The Dark Knight again last night. I'd been trying to remember what it is the Joker says when Batman's beating him up in the interrogation scene. It's: "You have nothing. Nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength." I love that. The fury of being up against someone who values nothing.


I just went into the bathroom at work and looked at my face and I look dead. My skin is so pale it's gone way past any claims to alabaster or other fair-skinned niceties; I just look like a corpse. I'm averaging 3 hours of sleep a night. My diet is almost entirely liquid: coffee, orange juice, whiskey, with the odd bagel thrown in. I'm buying juice with calcium added to it because someone told me I'll get osteoporosis.


I dreamed of whales. This is most likely because I'm reading Moby Dick. (Also I dream of whales periodically anyway. Plus I'd been looking at my photos from Cape Cod.) I was standing high up, looking out on a huge bay or perhaps a loch. They were rising up, jaws distended, swallowing what seemed like acres of water. Or flipping about like giant dolphins.

Parklife

I took the day off today because I couldn't sleep last night. I worked a bit then went for a walk to McCarren Park. The only people in parks on weekdays are elderly, homeless, or sad. Parks attract sad people. There's always someone sitting on a bench crying. There was a girl near me, sobbing into her cellphone. When she hung up, I asked her if she was okay because ignoring her seemed cruel. She said yes. I said, "I come here to cry, too," which isn't true (I don't cry anywhere, least of all in parks) but I do go there when I feel shitty so it was half-true. She did the brave-smile-through-tears thing and offered me a cigarette then thanked me and left. Then an old woman came and sat next to me, like, right next to me, uncomfortably so. She smoked a cigarette then got up and walked round to the back of a bench, bent over in slow agony and picked up a dry, leafy fallen branch. Then she sat back down and proceeded to scratch her feet and lower legs with the branch. There was something pleasingly enterprising about this. Also something distressing. I was curled up like a pretzel (I stole that from Bukowski) and she was so creaky she couldn't reach to scratch her own legs. Then a film crew turned up and started filming a scene right next to us involving two men pushing prams and ramming them into each other and kind of fighting with the prams. On the third take, a guy passing the park on his bike, unaware that it wasn't real, went nuts at them, screaming, "There are babies in there you fucking idiots, you fucking freaks! What the fuck!" I suspect he went to call the police.

I cracked open a new unruled moleskine and some pencils. "I used to be bloody good at art," I said to myself, "Dan isn't the only Newby who can wield a stick of charcoal. Oh no." Turns out I was deeply, deeply incorrect. I'm strictly a woman of letters now.

All the better to eat you with, my dear

Another drawing from Dan. I love the moon in this. (Also, an update: the wolf in the trees. It was late when I posted this, but I'm still an idiot for missing it. The wolf. In the trees.)

Little Red Riding Hood. Mmm. It's the case with a lot of fairy tales, but the sexual undertones in that one are particularly disturbing, no? The girl in her scarlet outfit, alone in the woods, preyed upon by a wolf (surely the sexiest of all beasts), and a cross-dressing one at that. Gorgeous grown-up version Chanel made a few years ago. I want that cape.

Also

This is mesmerizing:

http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/07/a-visual-histor.html

(Thanks Ian.)

Snap happy

I returned to The Vortex yesterday and bought a few more books. I was looking, again, at the drawers full of photographs and wondering how they came to be there. There was a family album of a trip to Disneyland, wedding photographs, friends on nights out, a middle-aged couple at a party, laughing and holding each other. Most date from the 70s and 80s but some are older. Almost all photographs are poignant, I think, but even more so when they're apparently unwanted.


Afterwards I took my dad's camera for a spin around the Lower East Side and then back into Brooklyn. It was an odd day - grey skies, dead leaves everywhere, a flash of Autumn in late July.







Someone read a part of One Two Three and wrote back to me describing it as, "like Irvine Welsh doing T.S. Eliot." This pleased me.

'Britain is an expensive and miserable place, say tourist chiefs' is my headline of the day, from The Times.

Prologue is right

Finally, finally. The relief is physical. It's a third person narrative, like the rest of the book, but I shifted the general perspective from the person knocking on the door to the person on the other side of it, and now it's working.

Met Andrew for brunch at a lovely place in the East Village with service so self-consciously bad (the waitress kept saying, "Oh... oh God. Oh I'm so sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me.") we couldn't be irritated, only amused. Went to Union Square, bought a couple of pictures from this man. Walked home (5 miles, I just worked out). Feel good today. Might go out tonight. Might stay in with a bottle of red wine and my rediscovered enthusiasm for One Two Three.

Compare and contrast with yesterday's post and tell me: am I bipolar?

Nudge nudge wink wink

There's a twitch in my right eye, a little heartbeat on the lower lid. I worry that strangers think I'm winking at them. This has been going on for a while and is presumably linked to fatigue. It's doing it now, pulsing constantly as I'm writing this, and it feels like there's something in there trying to get out.

I'm walking everywhere, sometimes for hours, usually carrying my laptop. My legs look and feel hard and sinewy. My thighs are skinny. My shoulders ache the whole time and I'm aware that I touch and massage them continually when I'm talking to people.

Bad week. Can't get this fucking prologue right, but can't leave it and write another part. I feel like a different species from everyone else, have no patience, even for the people I care about, apart from maybe one, and that's a detached temperance that borders on bovinity. It doesn't seem to come from me. Tonight, my roommate said to me, "Erin, you don't talk to us any more." I came into my room and shut the door.

Mmm. I'm starting this post without having much to say.

It's Dan's birthday today. I'm not sure I care for having a younger brother who's 24 and living in domestic bliss with his girlfriend.

Truly, I have nothing to say. Perhaps I should stop writing this.

Oh, I slept last night. I can't even remember trying, I just dived right into unconsciousness and woke only once through the night. Good. Also I saw Frank for a drink, or several, actually, and decided he'll be President one day. No, really. I think there's a good chance he will. Marcus will be his Leo, of course, complete with adjoining office, and he's agreed I can be his Toby. God, I love Toby, more than I love most real people.

Anniversary. Articles.

A little while ago, someone (an old high school friend I haven't spoken to for 10 years and who doubtless thinks I'm a jumped-up bitch now) invited me to join a preposterous facebook group that encouraged people to boycott particular petrol stations in the U.K. in a misguided effort to force down pump prices. I joined in order to write on the wall that the group was idiotic, then left it. The oil 'crisis' isn't a crisis; it's a bloody gift. We shouldn't be worrying about finding a way to lower prices, we should suck it up and find a way to manage our dependency. I liked this article on the subject.

Aaronovitch: not my favorite journalist, but I also liked this article about anti-American sentiments, based on his prediction that Obama, if he wins, will come in for the same sneering disapproval that almost all things U.S. come in for in the Anglo-French world. I find the attitude to America back home tiresome, particularly because, in my experience, the people who view it as some sort of cultural orphan are the ones who are least likely to engage with the supposedly superior European literature, art and politics that form the backbone of this casual superciliousness.


It's my parents' 30th wedding anniversary today. Thirty years, and they still take the day off work so they can spend it together, and I still catch them smooching in the kitchen.

Picture Dan drew

I want to write a book for children with him eventually. I wish I'd written down some of the utter madness we dreamed up when we were kids.

I'm certainly tired and probably emotional, but I miss my brothers horribly at the moment.

Walk, write, read, repeat.

My life would be a lot easier if I didn't find myself writing at 4 a.m. so regularly. I can't remember the last time I slept for more than four hours.

I've been writing the prologue to One Two Three this weekend. Today I went up to Connecticut and swam in the ocean. Yesterday I went into Manhattan to buy stuff then stood in a shop for about an hour, unable to think or function, attracting the suspicion of a security guard, then walked home over the Williamsburg Bridge and realized the only real reason I'd gone out was so I could do that walk back. I want to work somewhere in SoHo so I can do it every day. I stood at the midpoint for a while feeling sad (not bridge-jumpy suicidal, just mopey). A man told me I was beautiful. One of my favorite songs came on my iPod. It ends, "Now it's time to live, or turn to dust." I came home and Tom sent me his new story and it is so distressing and so beautiful that it actually made my heart ache, it actually made me feel sick.

Itchy. The present.

I have no idea why people like Summer. I suppose I'm just too susceptible to sun damage to embrace it fully.

There's a mosquito living under my desk at work, I think. It's amusingly meticulous with its bites. I have perfectly symmetrical, enraged red lumps on the front and back of each knee and the inside of each calf and thigh. Enjoyable.

After a week of not writing due to other obligations, I'm going through my old notebooks and typing up everything I might want to use. I found a graph I plotted out in a bar on Wednesday night, mapping my companions on an x-axis of 'Having a good time tonight' against a y-axis of 'Being responsible tomorrow' while I tried to explain my job to someone. Fairly entertaining. Also found this passage from Kierkegaard. I've been in a state of constant anxiety for several months, and this speaks to me more now than it did when I copied it down in January:

"Anxiety is the organ through which the subject appropriates sorrow and assimilates it. Anxiety is the energy of the movement by which sorrow bores its way into the heart. As a passionate, erotic glance desires its object, anxiety looks at sorrow in order to desire it. But anxiety contains something extra which makes it cling even more strongly to its object, for it both loves and fears it. Anxiety in this sense is a genuinely tragic category, and this is where the old saying 'quern deus vult perdere, primum dementat' [whom God would destroy, He first makes mad] comes properly into its own... Anxiety, furthermore, always involves a reflection upon time, for I cannot be anxious about the present, only about the past or the future; but the past and future, holding onto each other so tight that the present vanishes, are reflective phenomena."

This, in turn, made me think about that part in 'Four Quartets':

"...Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives - unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation - not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past."

Sometimes I read that poem and it makes no sense to me at all and is merely pleasing. Other times I read it and I feel I understand what he means by every single word. I should probably just stop worrying about this and get on with my writing.

Five stars

Just got in from seeing Batman at the Imax. Oooooh. People were so pumped they were applauding the trailers. Then they applauded the beginning of the movie. They applauded Ledger's first proper scene. (The line, "No, I'm not" when someone says he's crazy was my favourite line in the movie.) They applauded the really great stunts and deaths and one-liners, and the ending, and they waited to applaud Ledger's name in the credits, too.

I haven't posted all week because it's been a frenetic one both at work and socially and there's been nothing much to say about either of those things.

Great article on Milton

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/happy-birthday-milton/index.html?8dpc

What he says about undergraduates and Milton is absolutely true, or was in my case, anyway. I read it because I was expected to, and because I'm interested in theology. I ended up being transfixed by it.

Hipsters. Fauns.

Today I went to the opening party for some magazine. It was so eyewateringly hipstery, I thought the universe would implode around us into a black hole of 80s sneakers, hair product and slogan t-shirts. I hate slogan tees, apart from this one:



Then we went to see Hellboy II. It's no exaggeration to say it's the worst film I've ever seen, and I saw The Brady Bunch Movie.

Mel upset me tonight by saying that Mr. Tumnus from the Narnia stories is clearly hot for Lucy. I've had a huge crush on Mr. Tumnus since I first read The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe when I was - I don't know, six? This was amplified when James McAvoy played him in the film. A friend and I wept with laughter while watching that film on a plane, dreaming up various sexual scenarios with a faun. ("Imagine the clatter of hooves on the headboard...", "Mr. Tumnus, you are naughty," etc.) Anyway, Mel's trying to quell my fire for him, and I won't let her.

Beyond exhausted

If I don't sleep tonight, I'll go mad. Pouring my little reserve of energy into writing. I should show it to some more people soon.

Noticed there are a lot of windows in One Two Three. Lots of people standing behind them. I don't know where this came from. It just keeps happening. There are multiple scenes featuring a character stood behind a window looking at something he or she can't have. I think I need to find out how glass is made and get that into the story somehow. When Tim was here and we were in the car, he made the incisive observation, "Glass is fucking amazing. I mean, just think about it." Quite soon afterwards - I've just remembered this - he said, " I was reminiscing the other day about the time I accidentally kissed your mother on the lips."

Black Books

It was genius:

For my big bro

In lieu of actually calling him, I shall acknowledge him through the medium of blog.

Craig loves We Are Scientists, and sent me this link to them playing at Glastonbury last week. It's a very jolly song. Their website is famously pretty funny. The advice section is the best bit. A girl called Brandi asks how to get a date for prom. The incredibly lengthy range of options they give her includes:

Get a guy's number and call him up -- make it night, like around 4 in the morning. When he gets on the phone be like, "We have your sister." Disguise your voice with one of those voice disguisers (you can get them at any supermarket). Have the thing make your voice super-deep. Be all, "Unless you do exactly as we say, we will begin cutting off parts and stop when there's nothing big enough to cut off without the risk of cutting our finger by trying to hold the part that we're trying to cut the other part off of." Then put his sister on the phone and electrocute her or stomp her or something to make her cry out in pain. At this point the guy will probably yell something like "OKAY OKAY!! I'LL DO WHATEVER YOU WANT!! OH GOD!! OH JESUS JUST PLEASE DON'T HURT HER!!" When you hear those words, that means you're going to prom. Take a second to congratulate yourself in your head.



I'm writing, writing, writing. Not sleeping.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

This'll be long. I can feel it. Sorry.

Friday’s fireworks were spectacular. I guess in a country that’s big into itself and big into putting on a show, it’d be safe to assume 4th July would be pretty good, but I was overwhelmed. I have a lot of heart for America, to an almost sappy degree. That scene in Amelie at the beginning(that’s not the scene I'm talking about - I couldn't find it - but I linked it because it’s the best part of the soundtrack), when she says she likes to turn round in cinemas to look at all the faces – I like doing that at fireworks displays.

One of my friends broke up with her boyfriend in a pleasingly dramatic fashion just as the fireworks went off, then came to my house drunk and started a fight with the guy who keeps a tediously excitable guard dog in his workshop (or whatever it is... why does he need a guard dog anyway... what’s he doing in there?) opposite our apartment. He was rude to her, so I got involved, which was probably - no, assuredly - ill-advised. I think he threatened to burn our building down at one point. He certainly instructed me to go fuck myself, which I can’t remember anyone saying to me before, so that was novel. He was screaming that we’d never even come to say hello to him and now we were having a go at him, and we should all just go back to Manhattan, and he’d lived here 30 years, etc. He was really, really offended. One of his friends joined him at one point and threw some pretty hilarious gangster chat up at us, including a threat of throat-slitting. Us or the dog, which by this point was going insane? I’m not sure. Overreaction aside, he was right to berate us for being snooty and uncivilized: our neighborhood has been gracious and friendly, and probably what bothered me most is that I equate myself with the dude in the workshop, not with the girl hanging out of her factory conversion window yelling at him. Against the advice of Alby and Davide, who are staying away from the windows for fear of being shot, I’ll probably try to find him this week and apologize. I fear the dog, though.

Anyway. Saturday I saw Tom and we agreed to do a show and tell of our recent writing. He read me a new short story he wrote, or the fragments of it. He’s staggeringly talented. He’s also the first person I’ve shown anything to, but there's no point showing it to my mother, is there? I need someone who writes and who'll be highly judgmental. I sat on his bed for ages, trying to avoid reading it to him, then I did and I was glad. He was full of praise and encouragement and helpful criticism which I argued with in a petulant manner, then saw the sense in. I felt huge waves of relief and a little rivulet of self-belief and a lot of motivation. Wrote until 4 a.m. and what I wrote was good, I think.

Yesterday, following a flash of total insanity, I accompanied the boys to the new Brooklyn Ikea. I bought a little table, which is now in the corner of my room making me happy with its roundness and whiteness. On the way back, I found a vegan restaurant. The food was so good I made appreciative little “mmm” noises when I ate it, even though I was alone, then felt rather silly.

I’m really thin, I think. I don’t know. People keep saying I am and my clothes are all big on me but I feel the same. Do I have body dysmorphia?

Best part of Ikea - journey and queueing allowed me to read the whole of Ham On Rye. I gorged on it, in fact; ignored my friends. I’ve waffled enough today so I’ll talk about that another time.

Independence Day tomorrow

Shall I wear black? Drape myself in a Union Jack? Or get drunk on my roof deck and watch the fireworks?

I love this song. I doubt there's anything sweeter in existence. I like that first line: "You can never really start from the start. The ending begins inside of your heart," not because I agree with it, but because I hope I never do.