i prefer, to a calculated fault, the thing that is supposedly not the better thing. i feel sorry for assholes, Christmas trees, and panhandlers. Commercials make me cry. i enjoy other people’s smoke, can’t let go of taped-up shoes, rig my sunglasses with paper clips, and cherish articles of clothing that have earned their holes. i prefer Manhattan Ave to Bedford, school to home, eating at the bar to a table, humor to comfort. i encourage unfinished business and jeans. Uncorrected proofs. Marx. Laundromats. Trannies. Grey hair. Snacks. Jittery diesels. Dirty stories. Rain. Skipping breakfast. Old people. Adolescents. Houseplants. i buy boiled eggs. i think Stockholm syndrome is kind of romantic. i know this is a list of cliches. Sometimes i don’t care.
One of my Florida apartments was in a carriage house in the backyard of one of the Medievalists at my University. Once, just after an actually devastating hurricane, i had to go into the big house for something. For some reason i was without a chaperone. Maybe the back door was open and i’d wandered in, desperate to find someone? Regardless, i found myself alone, walking through a beautiful but quite lived-in house. It was the sort of place i might usually go for, but then i hit the scary room. The walls were lined with ningyo, Japanese dolls, and they were unkempt, almost rotten, and in such a large quantity that the space disturbed me. i imagine myself walking backwards out of the room and scampering back into my own private attic. This is not the kind of preservation i collect.
In Be Here to Love Me (2004), there is an interview with Townes Van Zandt’s son that has haunted me for years. Looking clueless and sweet, the son mentions that they only ever bought groceries at convenience stores. When i saw the film, i was fresh out of leaving someone i really, really hadn’t wanted to leave. My ex only ever shopped at the convenience store up the street. Beer and crackers, mostly. Watching the kid mention this detail casually but bringing it up because he knew it was a big deal kind of…scared me. A tiny thing that hints at walls of disturbance. i thought about him walking up the sidewalk to the store, a gesture that seemed gigantically immediate, driven, and short term, and i couldn’t stop crying for a while.
“Mostly Middle,” Michael Hofmann’s review of a new collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry in the London Review of Books, 8 September 2011, locates her skill as a poet who only hints at the crazy: “It is in rare, late poems that Bishop permits herself not a long look so much as a brief glance at the worst: ‘A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift’ (‘Five Flights Up’) or in ‘One Art’ (a poem so stifled in its compressed clamour I’ve never cared for it): ‘It’s evident/the art of losing’s not too hard to master/though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.’ ” Compressed clamour. The art of losing. Yesss. i’m not arguing for indiscriminate abandonment here. i’m looking for places where people found a way to do it constructively and carefully because it had to be done.
Cheesy, great Voices and Visions (1988) clip:
noVacancy 