I still hate that I should have loved you
But I do not hate you
I hate not the love, which was beautiful
But the loss of it, which was not
This is not a poem, even though it looks like one
These are my thoughts on a modicum of wine and a Pym's cup and the night and the buildings of the city talking to me about the forgetfulness of love and suffering, disjointed, and not in the least poetic
What I hate, fundamentally, is that there are so many people who come home and bury their head in the imperfect and often irritating neck that they can't get rid of and are loved, and are home
And that I was home, but I was not loved, not in the way that is home
And I am left with the night and the houses that speak to me, and are not home
And I am am theirs, and they are not mine
And that is me, in a nutshell.

Quote of the day:

(from the comments)

All religion, Rosenzweig argued, responds to man’s anxiety in the face of death (against which philosophy is like a child stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting, “I can’t hear you!”).

This, T., is why I wish I believed in God . . .

So I'm watching Good Times on TVLand. Okay, frankly it's a little dated, but it gives me that warm cozy feeling of sitting on my grandmother's living room floor with a plate of cookies in my lap and a glass of cold milk. All my memories of the place--all my memories of childhood--still come to me in the grainy textures and bleak like of seventies film, though they suddenly burst into violent eighties color sometime around puberty.

Anyway, this is the funny thing: there I am, smiling slightly at the wide lapels and President Ford jokes, when I find myself admiring Thelma's outfit. It really is very becoming. And then I realize I'm admiring it because I own an outfit almost exactly like it. I wore it to work two days ago.

Truly that which has been, will be again, and there is nothing new under the sun . . .

Sadly, sadly i will never write anything as prettyprettyimportantintellectual as a Booker Prize winner, or as TOTALLY EXCELLENT about them as this. (thank you god of hte machine which you can find on my blogroll if you're interested, which you should be.) I am supposed to be working. Instead, I am looking sadly out the windows that do not open. The air conditioning is broken, rattling like death in an old lady's throat. I think tonight I will finally eat some of the frozen fish sticks my mother bought by accident at Costco. But I will never finish them. No single girl could possibly eat five pounds of frozen fish sticks by herself.

Tuesday song lyric . . . again, from my short-lived band. In a month or so, we'll have exhausted that repertoire . . . or at least the bits of it I can remember.

She wakes up in tomorrow
With a string of yesterdays
She don't feel no sorrow
That ain't the game she plays
Oh, and she may love you
For a couple of days
But she will leave you
No matter what she says

Dusty Rose
She walks down the road alone
River run and cold wind moan
She won't be coming back
Any more

She's as fair as the evening sky
And just as hard to hold
Oh, boys, she may cry
Or she may be bold
But soon you'll watch those violet eyes
Turning you down cold
The younger that she gets, now
The more the game seems old

So play with her in the evening
But don't you get too close
She's got no time for grieving
And nothing to lose
So take to heart my warning boys
Before she puts on her walking shoes
'Cause there's a big old chorus
Singing Dusty Rose's blues

There's something stiff and self-conscious about peoples' claims that a piece of "literary" fiction made them laugh out loud. I never believe them; at best I suspect that they forced a laugh after a couple of re-readings revealed the passage was supposed to be funny. There is no real foundation for my skepticism, of course. Some people must genuinely find The Mill on the Floss hilarious. It's just that there's such an air about it . . . sophisticated, intellectual people are set apart by the fact that they can dig a belly laugh out of Ulysses, y'see.

It could just be jealousy, because I'm a literary philistine with a taste for trash (I still re-read my Anne of Green Gables books of a frosty winter afternoon). I'm a lazy reader, and it's hard to spur myself to do the coolie labour of reading big, hard works when the easy delights of PG Wodehouse and Dick Francis are beckoning from my bookshelf. Naturally I want everyone to be as lazy as I am, which means that if they say they really enjoy Gaddis--the way I enjoy Agatha Christie--they must be lying hypocrites.

But even if that is true (and I suspect it is), I must plead extenuating circumstances: the whiff of sanctimony that hovers around so many discussions of "important" books. Is it just me, or are there a lot of people who discuss books the way Victorian ladies used to discuss church: as a painful duty that ought to be enjoyed, but never is.

Of course, there are lots of ways to enjoy books, and I suppose that the way I enjoy them, getting swept up in a tsunami wave of language and story, is only one. But try as I might, I cannot but feel in my heart of hearts that it is the only one that really matters.

Anyway, the reason I write about this is that a couple of weeks ago I found myself telling someone I like, and haven't seen in a while, that I am "doing" Orwell's collected four-volume writings. Immediately I thought--and said--how awful that sounded. And then today, while waiting for a meeting to start, I dipped my nose into my Dorothy Parker's complete stories, and laughed aloud.

"What are you reading?" said one of the IT people.

"Dorothy Parker", I answered, and held up the book for her to see.

"Is she good?" she asked. "I've never read her."

I read her the passage that had made me laugh.

Sighing, Mrs. Weldon turned her attention to a bowl of daffodils, slightly past their first freshness. There was nothbing to be done there; the omniscient Delia had refreshed them with clear water, had clipped their stems, and removed their more passe sisters. Still Mrs. Weldon bent over them pulling them gently about.

She liked to think of herself as one for whom flowers would thrive, who must always have blossoms about her, if she would be truly happy. When her living-room flowers died, she almost never forgot to stop in at the florist's, the next day, and get a fresh bunch. She told people, in little bursts of confidence, that she loved flowers. There was something almost apologetic in her way of uttering her tender avowal, as if she would beg her listeners not to consider her too bizarre in her taste. It seemd rather as though she expected the hearer to fall back, startled, at her words, crying, "Not really! Well, what are we coming to?"

She looked as if she would like to laugh, if only she could see something . . . anything . . . in it to laugh about. She settled for a half-hearted smile.

Tuesday Song Lyric . . . from my short-lived band. I wore a miniskirt and a velvet ribbon around my throat, and my hair hung all the way to my butt in perfect little ringlets. I wasn't a very good singer, though.

She wakes up
At 9 am
Lights herself a cigarette
She's got no particular reason
To get out of bed
Again

Ohhhhh, don't you walk away
Don't you leave me standing here
Again
Ohhhh, don't you walk away
There's a change coming . . . down the road

She goes down to the corner store
Buys herself a cup of coffee there
Goes and stands on the street awhile
Waiting
For something to happen

She goes to work in the daytime
Puts in her time okay
She doesn't speak much to anyone there
She's got nothing
Much to say

She goes home in the evening time
Lights herself a cigarette
Watches the sky wind down to nothing left
Goes to sleep . . . alone . . . again

As you can see, the lyricist (the artist formerly known as me) had not much command of meter or rhyme. Or, for that matter, sense. All we really had going for us was existential angst . . . and what I occasionally think of as uncanny prescience.

The dog is barking. I must feed and walk him.

The other day I was saying . . . to someone else, I think, but maybe just to myself . . . how now that there's a little autumn tang in the air, I want to watch a football game . . . mud flying and limbs tangling and girls jumping up and down and shouting with their red, red scarves blowing against the frosty sky. I don't want to watch a professional football game; I want to watch a school game, full of friends and surreptitious beer and a healthy, innocent desire to crush the other team like bugs.

So tonight I come home and I'm tired and more than a little blue (it has been one of those days, you understand), and in between watching the playoffs I find myself watching Friday Night Lights, which is a new series about . . . a high school football team in Texas. Now, I went to a little school, with a little football team; we didn't even have cheerleaders. This is not exactly the kind of football I was thinking of. Apparently in Texas, high school football games involve coaches with headsets, and cheerleaders and marching bands, and they are televised. The captains marching forward across the field towards each other for the coin toss look like large and well padded alien invaders.

This is not the point. The point is that the show stars Kyle Chandler, who used to star in Homefront, a short-lived series about a fictional factory town in Ohio right after World War II. It was on when I was in college, and though we didn't actually get anything you would call "reception" in my dorm . . .

[yes, children, she whispered, in those days we didn't have cable]

. . . I huddled over my roommate's 13-inch television every Tuesday night, listening to the hissing soundtrack and trying to make out the moving figures, which are only dim white shades floating through a thick haze of static.

I loved that show. It was a technicolor fantasy world that wasn't quite true to its time, or any time. Its characters didn't belong anywhere except in the tidied up imaginations of screenwriters who could neither bear to let their creations wear the prejudices of their time, nor import a new and improved set of values from the future for them. No one was very bad, not even the snotty rich people who owned the factory. And the characters that were too good to be believed were at least dimwitted or homely.

And there was Kyle Chandler playing Jeff, the naive, handsome, and adorably clean-cut baseball player. Now he's playing a handsome, still somewhat adorable football coach. Clearly, he's found some sort of a niche.

But that's not the point either. Humor me. I'm blue.

The point is that Kyle Chandler isn't as cute as he used to be. The features that were clean-cut and boyish at 25 have coarsened at 40, and he has bags under his eyes.

But the really weird thing is that for a moment, as I was looking at him, and trying to pick out the boyish figure of yesteryear among the shifted planes of his face, it was like I could see the whole process of turning from a handsome young actor into Paul Newman . . . as if I could peek into the future at the eventual Kyle Chandler, his skin deformed and collapsed into a tragic caricature of the boy. And myself, she who used to be the beautiful Samantha Yeager, looking wistfully at photographs of a young actor and wishing that I was back in my dorm room, leaning against the cinderblock wall with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, peering through into the mist of a tiny screen.

I love this man:

In "The Hungering Dark," Frederick Buechner writes:

"I suspect that the truth of it is simply that we are alive when, instead of killing time, we take time. When in the midst of our tearing around in our busy-ness trying to do something, we stop once in a while and just let ourselves be something, be who we are. When by unclenching our fists, we give life a chance to do something with us. When we take the little piece of time that we have in this world and pay attention to what it is telling us, not just to what it is telling us about the beauty of the sun as it sets, God knows, but to what it is telling us about all the wildness and strangeness and pain of things, the tears of things . . . as well as the joy of things."

So what is life speaking to you? I don't know about you, but when I listen -- truly listen -- what I hear is frightening and exhilarating, and when I don't just resume my shuffle along the sidewalk, pretending I didn't hear a thing, all the world is changed. Listening, and knowing what we give up when we choose this job and that pleasure, is a terrifying venture. What I'm learning, though, is that the alternative is far worse. So stop waiting for something, because what we all wait for is the grave, and immediately before and after it, an accounting for the time we were given.

If I had a blogroll, he'd be on it.

Yes, I'm a sucker for that muscular Christian, inspirational "be today!" sort of thing. But only if it's done well. After all, if you can hold the interest of lil ol' atheist me, you must be onto something.

I'm afraid that my readers (all three of you) are going to have to suffer with Orwellmania just a little bit longer.

First, something from an essay that I found on Theodore Adorno and George Orwell via Mr. Orwell's wikipedia entry:

Fragmentary and nonsequential, solemn and simultaneously offhand, each fragment circles briefly around a theme. Some of the book's most celebrated formulations are defiantly paradoxical: "In psychoanalysis, nothing is true except the exaggerations." Others issue in wild generalizations: "Normality is death." Still other passages combine a knowing allusiveness (for example, to Hegel's famous dictum that Napoleon was the world spirit on horseback) with a simple image ("Hitler's robot bombs," the pilotless V-1 and V-2 missiles that killed thousands of people in London) to insinuate, in a few elliptical words, a considered view about abstract philosophical matters: "'I have seen the world spirit,' not on horseback, but on wings and without a head, and that refutes, at the same stroke, Hegel's philosophy of history."

The words have such a lovely portentous sound: "in psychoanalysis, nothing is true except the exaggerations." How deep! How clever! People like me, the impressionable liberal arts graduates of the world, have such a pronounced tendency to assume that things that sound so wonderful must also be true. We take sparkling epigrams for nuggets of real wisdom.

But when you tried to grab hold of the meaning of all these tenderly constructed aphorisms, they evaporate in your hands. If you say to yourself, "wery witty, but is what he says actually true?"--the whole thing falls apart like cotton candy, and the writing starts to look more like glorified cocktail party chatter than revolutionary thought. Almost nothing about Freud was true, and least of all his follower's wild claims for their pseudoscience. This is all very entertaining, a sort of intellectual Rubix cube that you can keep turning around in your head as you read. But it is not really enlightening.

(I should say that I have not read much Adorno, and that very long ago, and so perhaps he is much better than this sample makes out. But the phenomenon does exist with other writers, anyway.)

I used to be opposed to writing that was difficult on the grounds that it was a needless display of the author's ego, a form of pseudo-mental masturbation that ultimately gratified no one but the writer. Looking back, my stance seems like one part truth, one part misplaced proletarian anti-intellectualism, and one part reluctance to undertake the coolie labour required to enjoy Joyce or Eliot. (I will not give you Spenser. I don't care what you say.) Now that I have experienced the joy of cresting that mountain and arriving at a place where you can, say, laugh out loud at Tale of a Tub, I take all of it . . . well, most of it . . . back. But what one can still say is that once complexity began to be admired for its own sake--once people began to assume that it must be the sign of a very fine and brilliant mind--it became a hiding place for all sorts of gross intellectual sins. Many of them are still sheltering unnoticed among the gargoyles, as the onlookers congratulated each other on the difficulties of building such an intricate edifice.