This is whipstitch, a monthly record of what I’ve read, watched, & thought about.
Two weeks ago, regular potluck-style dinner parties made their return to my home in the spirit of the unseasonable & unreasonable. My co-host charred bun-sized Oscar Meyers on my back left burner and sliced up half of a head-sized watermelon. It took us a while to guess what one of the other guests had brought was indeed also watermelon, just fried (deliciously so). We toasted climate change with frozen margaritas in plastic cups and prayed for the low seventies to last. They didn’t. A week later I walked through snow flurries with my classic cold-induced Rudolph-esque nose. Such is life: waiting for the thaw, snot dripping from your face.
For these past few months, I’ve been wintering in some remote part of my brain where most feelings pass by unacknowledged. Not quite the palace of solitude, but something cozier. A cave. Perhaps as members of the mammal class, we all deserve a season to retreat, freeze, and shut down as the winds howl outside. But the works I’ve read or watched in the past month for this whipstitch all involve the inevitability of feeling. Feeling that chases you, overcomes you, and melts you in its heat. This is to say I’ve centered this edition somewhat around that “thaw”: sentiments turned to liquid, old tensions sloughing off. If you listen closely enough, you can hear the drip drip behind the shutters. One crocus has opened by the front gate.
Boredom remains. Nothing can be as surprising as boredom. You think each time that you’ve reached the end. But it’s not true. At the very end of boredom, there is always a new source of boredom. You can live off boredom. Sometimes I wake up and glimpse the night in a powerless flight with the too-corrosive whiteness of the coming day. Before the birdsong, a damp freshness enters the room, radiating from the sea, nearly stifling in its purity. Here, you cannot stay. Here, it’s the discovery of a new boredom. It comes from further off than yesterday. Hollowed out day by day.
I will shut myself in my palace of solitude with boredom to keep me company. Behind the frozen windows, my life will flow drop by drop, and I will save it for a long time, a long time. I say: tomorrow, because it’s always tomorrow I will enter into the Orders of Solitude, that I will have the air and manners of circumstance. For the moment, all I do is dream with the naivete of young girls.
In the middle section of The Easy Life, the narrator languishes—this is the precise point where languor and anguish meet, at the end of a summer marked by two deaths in quick succession. The translators’ note likens the structure of MD’s early novel to that of the sea: a wave building in tension, crashing, then dispersing in calm. Francine’s life on her family farm is tranquil enough to breed tragedy. It is the boredom of Les Bugues that encases her building desperation for something to happen. You could call her a pot-stirrer in the first portion, but it doesn’t take much action on her end for latent tensions to bubble over. She passively witnesses harm after harm, and then excuses herself to go lie around in a seaside hotel. In August, mired in that runoff brackish of drama and mundanity, rotting water— however uneventful, I find myself most attached to interludes like this one. There is no real consciensce-cleansing: instead only foamy lacunae, dreamy nothings, an empty setting where time passeslike an echo of my favorite portion of To The Lighthouse. I think maybe what MD captures best is the elusive sensation of aging ahead of oneself. In beginning of The Lover, a much older narrator declares I have a face laid waste. Francine begs to differ. We’re never so ravaged by the years behind us than the ones that lie ahead in uncertainty. They torture this story until she abandons them altogether, walking from the train back toward the farm: and where exactly I will be led through the days and the days, I don’t know. I could try to stop here in the rain and refuse to keep moving, but it would be useless. There is a place for me, a kind of place. The “easy life” is the one embark upon with abandonment.
In the wake of the wreck that killed her husband and daughter, Julie empties her house and flees. Every belonging discarded, her married suname resigned. Her impulse here is perhaps to be as blessed as the forgetful: she arrives in Paris with a small briefcase and demands to rent an empty apartment in a building with no children. She quickly spends her evenings making laps in a blue-lit pool, passes hours dozing on park benches with her face in the sun, orders affogatos while listening to a man play the same sad tune on a recorder from the street, all while sporting the one outfit that remains of her wardrobe. Avoiding all human interaction, she convinces herself that she can move about life touching nothing and no one: minding her business with near-cruel indifference. This is freedom-fantasy, Julie is nearly content in forced forgetting, of course until specters of the past catch up in hot pursuit.
Blue is about the inevitable trials of memory-denial. A boy who witnessed the crash dangles a silver necklace he’d found in the wreckage in Julie’s face. He returns this to her, along with her husband’s last words: simply the punchline of a joke he liked to tell. An old colleague and one-night-stand tracks her down and begs her complete Patrice’s unfinished concerto (she crams the sheet music into the compactor of a garbage truck in an early scene, but a wise assistant has already made copies). Finally, an image of her husband with a young woman surfaces on a television at a random strip bar, and Julie tracks the mistress down only to find her pregnant with his child. And so grief’s gravity pulls her back into its churn this way— she faces the music, and can neither wallow nor forget. In the end she chooses amnesty, and quietly leaves her former home to the mistress. The young woman looks her in the eyes and says, Patrice told me that you are good and generous. That's what you want to be. People can always count on you. Her old colleague tells her that he kept the mattress the two of them slept on together. There is no disappearing; her traces abide.
O hands, subjects of ascription, always my hand or your hand.
Ascriptive hands, show us what it is to feel.
Is feeling what we do on the outside or on the inside.
Is feeling what we do from the outside from the inside.
Is it what we do to the outside from the inside. Is feeling what we do.
Is feeling what we do when we do the feeling.
It was the coldest day of the year when I happened to arrive at the poet’s discussion of his bookat the same time as him. I’d unwittingly walked behind him for a few blocks down Greenpoint avenue and apologized for being early at the door when he half-turned in my direction. For some reason, he shook my hand, and we walked up the stairs to the n+1 office in perfect silence. I entered the room in a coat I borrowed from someone without permission, split a pilsner with a stranger with the $5 of cash we had between us, and mischose a red-cushioned chair in the second row that made it impossible to sit straight up. Even in my abject little hunch, I steadied on the sure voice of the poet, glancing between him and my lap, because it felt necessary to read along in order to catch the wordplay. Every turn of phrase involves a careful insistence from language, translation over translation— an English word is pulled open, flipped inside-out, parsed for associations in sound and meaning. Artfully leads to artillery. Tank you for coming. Come again. Words tumble down registers in staccato thuds, a slapstick rhythm that makes it impossible not to giggle when we hear them aloud. These aren’t real sonnets, everyone kept joking, and the poet claimed the fourteen-ish line structure as his crutch. Not a crutch, corrected his interlocutor who sat in the chair across from him, but scaffolding. I emerged back into the cold with an aching spine. My breath pushing inside of me, then outside of me, materialized briefly before my eyes.
The claustrophobia of this chic 1960s Greenwich village apartment is only alleviated by the light shifting through the left window. Time is kept by barred sun rays, the razoring of cars passing by, purple illuminations of dusk. The main character, Sidney, moves frenetically between purposes in this room. He begins by hauling in crates filled with glasses from his shuttered not-nightclub, to sketching out a design for a doomed newspaper, to directing organizers to help elect a local reform politician, all the while surrounded by a dissonant chorus of support and dissaproval. Although his wife Iris is possessed by the same urgency to make something of herself, the two face off in constant antagonism— raging their way through their Bohemian boredom, intermittently peeling off clothes and screaming at one anther until they get one another to either do a dance or slam a door. Precarity and uncertainty remain in forever cycle during their domestic spats, a feverish dread that some unrealized dream will finally rupture. All I know is that, from now on, I just want something to happen in my life—I don’t much care what— just something, Iris says to Sidney before storming out in Act Two to pursue a television opportunity, leaving the room to the ensuing chaos. Something does happen: a drug-infused absurdist orgy through rollicking records and hypnotic neons. This ends in a death, witnessed only by the audience.
In this room, what goes around comes around. The tragedy, in some ways, repeats the one referenced in the beginning: the overdose of a seventeen year-old “junkie” in the neighborhood. Sidney’s first monologue involves him instructing his newspaper-recruit Alton not to write about this, declaring that any emotion that wavers in the direction of a cause won’t sell. Don’t venerate, don’t celebrate, don’t hallow what you take to be the human spirit. Yet sentiment and stance suddenly come back into style for Sidney in the play’s exodus, when he declares in the corrupt politician’s face that his paper will take a passionate position against him. You’re right,I am a fool— a fool who believes that death is waste and love is sweet, and that the earth turns and men change every day, and that rivers run, and that people wanna be better than they are, and that flowers smell good and that I hurt terribly today, and that hurt is desperation and desperation is energy—and energy can move things… This very veneration he swore against transforms the melodrama of emotional thaw. Before the curtain drops, he encourages Iris to weep. That is the first thing: to let ourselves feel again. And the stage tears flow.
SHOUTS
⌿ Total Eclipse, by Annie Dillard: a canonical essay from the vault that Maddie recommended to me. I’d never read it, and truly nothing could have prepared me for the rapture of my first time, not unlike when I stumbled across another cosmic classic so many years ago.
⌿ Against All Logic, by my friend Chiara for her stack “aesthetics of surplus.” A brilliant thought experiment on the oddities of nonexchangeable commodities, considering every little object we pass between hands with both poetic and theoretic flair.
⌿ The Dream of Forgetfulness, by Gavin Francis for NYRB. I’ve never before associated the nightly obliteration of memory with anything but anxiety until reading this article, which posits forgetting as a psychological necessity. Perhaps Francine’s words in The Easy Life hold purchase: Once you lose the ability to forget, you are deprived of a certain life.
& OTHER MURMURS
Sharing my critical acclaim this month for:
⌿ The East 10th Street Turkish Baths. My first recommendation for anyone who happens to find themselves in Manhattan, whether newly moved or just visiting, because there’s truly nowhere else you’d have the opportunity to watch nearly-naked strangers get violently beaten with bundles of oak leaves while sweating off the week’s worries. Pairs best with cold weather and pierogies from Veselka.
⌿ Almond croissants from L’Appartment 4F. This was the pastry to make me relapse into my craze after months of remission, but unfortunately every croissant I’ve eaten since has paled in comparison to the ones from this adorable Brooklyn Heights bakery. They might just be the closest you’ll get to perfection in the western hemisphere. Pairs well with healthy snobbery and a stroll on the promenade.
⌿ The word “kitsch.” I recently spoke to someone at a party who used it as a descriptor no less than seven times across conversations. Delightful to say aloud. Calls to mind one of my favorite albums of all time and other semi-ironic aesthetic inclinations for the past year. Pairs well with another longtime favorite, “gauche.”
⌿ Zyrtec-D. A splurge for the sinuses for when you’re in need of the harder stuff. Waving the little card at the Duane Reade pharmacy counter makes me feel rather VIP and in the know while I practice my best I Am Not Making Crystal Meth pout. Pairs well with coworkers who give you a withering look every time you sneeze.
⌿ Dark navy wide pants. Don’t know why I’m recommending something from MUJI again, but I’ve found myself attached to this arbitrary pair of pants I bought on impulse after stopping in for a pack of toothbrushes. Like the rest of the clothes offered there, they strike me as very lax and Momcore, an excellent staple for anyone who struggles to buy or wear pants generally. Pairs well with a cream-colored knit sweater for neighborhood brunch.
⌿ Informal workshopping. You’ve long been shy to share work with people you know and love, even if you value their opinion above all else. Now that you’re actually writing again you’re more aware of what you could stand to improve. But why drop hundreds for a writing class with a bunch of retirees at 92Y when you could just enlist your friends for regular mutual feedback sessions? We all need some discipline, but a little more laughter doesn’t hurt. Pairs well with cheap beer and commiseration.
⌿ Monday morning crosswords. I’m not often one to give relationship advice, but if you struggle as I do to find adequate time with a lover who keeps a drastically different schedule, finding something as regular and mundane as a crossword puzzle might be the perfect way to begin your shared day off. Pairs well with a big French press and being a little too stupid for the Sunday puzzle.
⌿ Chet Baker’s latest live release. “Chet Baker Sings” is the quintessential thing to listen to when you’re walking around the city during a seasonal change and trying to feel upbeat, dreamy, romantic all at once. This newer Live in Paris trio of tracks was what I listened to all day on Valentine’s Day. Pairs well with pink dusk and snow showers.
⌿ La Croix. Sorry, I know. I’m aware that this unpronounceable beverage had its moment, and the moment passed— for me, it brings up memories of the wooden “gather” sign my Mother once kept on the wall over her laundry room, fade-heavy VSCO cam filters of the later 20’teens. I’m not even fond of sparkling water, but I was moved to purchase two giant boxes of the classic pamplemousse on discount last week. I now have between 2 and 7 on a day off and it’s been a perfect way of psyopping myself into drinking enough water while battling the common cold. Pairs well with an oral fixation and manifesting suburban summatime (see also: watermelon, lemonade).
⌿ Abbreviated dream journaling. From Morning Pages to Ambien tweets, there’s definitely something to penning whatever comes out of your brain in the haze of half-sleep. Trying to remember the plots or details of my dreams feels a bit like a Sisyphean task, but I’ve been typewriting down just one phrase when I wake up in the morning, whatever sentence happens to linger as I open my eyes. Pairs well with the particularly inventive language of afternoon naps (so far I’ve made up words like enneagrammatic and merlude).
DESIRE OF THE WEEK: PATIENCE
The insects, like myself, have no patience for fast things, wrote my nineteen-year-old self in a poem about the millipede-infested nursery in Georgia I don’t actually remember. I recall being pleased with the thought of myself as someone who grew bored during action movies. I had a tenderness for torpor. Give me a minute. Give me an hour, give me a year. I don’t know when I fell into the habit of rushing every routine. A stopwatch beeps the moment I throw aside the covers. Notifications flood my screens. I fumble through tasks in the hasty haze of productivity, which really means cramming as many chores and meetings into a day so that it might pass me by sooner. I hurry through breaths in obligatory yoga, only savoring the seconds shaved off of a commute. My patience with myself is worn to tatters. When I daydream, I daydream about the time I feel I have so little of. The new job, the warm weather I needed like yesterday. My urgency only breeds more impatience. I have no more tolerance for my own tumult. Boredom erodes, revealing more boredom. I’d forgotten the last line of that poem until I returned to it today: those humid creatures still roosted in the grooves of the nursery / bored of our chaos.
When we feel smothered by the world, we demand its patience. I’m still not sure how to ask for more time to respond, to fulfill, to arrive ready, to get over myself. Last chance! ENDING SOON looms in the subject headers of unread emails. I can’t afford more time, but I recognize the need to slow down and stop pacing through the reception room of every hour. Your name will be called. Spring will come. The pot will boil. In the meantime, there is pleasure in waiting.
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Love this selection ❤️❤️❤️