Possible to be Weary:NORA
Lost skate-key:
Have you put down your copy of Franny and Zooey yet? Remember Nora, exercise restraint with highlighter use; otherwise, others will suspect you of soft thinking. It’s been a long time, maybe I should slow down.
So my new place in NYC…there’s an orange wall. There are barking doggies on my answering machine to scare off the unwelcome and the shabby. Well, it’s all part of the installation that is my apartment. The doorman of Sara’s old building is a tiny Cuban man who changes out of his security uniform at the end of his shift into this incredible hat and suit ensemble. Anyway, Sara asked him if there was any discarded furniture in storage: ever since, we’ve been inundated with the sorriest collection of orphaned, wilting lamps, backless embarrassed chairs with only makeshift bungee-back to show for it, a little nightstand that used to be blue, and a wheeling TV stand that groans with old age on its rusted wheels. My posture is starting to show signs of influence.
The summer is here, although I still have two papers to write. It looks like I’m going to be here for most of it, since I have no money to go anywhere, and I’m two months behind on my rent. Plus, I’ve got that invigorating job as a copy-editor for Financial Investor. I’m feeling a little bit trapped in every way.
I blame Max and the long weekend visit to Paris. She insisted we spend the birthday together. She knows two things, maybe only two things about me: I’m confused about what I’m doing, and that I’ve been visited by the middle-age version of me with a pony-tail and a tropical print t-shirt, a sort of conscious Doonesbury character.
She picked me up at the airport armed with gifts – a bundle of gladiolas and a copy of Story of the Eye. Max hinted that the two of you have been trading notes (what are you up to). In the birthday card, she states (allow me to reproduce verbatim):
Happy Birthday, Simon.
Just try and enjoy yourself for once.
Bataille’s first novel was published under the pseudonym, Lord Auch, until the first posthumous edition in 1967. It tells the picaresque tale of the narrator’s wandering around Europe in the company of two girls, Simone and the fragile Marcelle, and a “fabulously rich Englishman” called Sir Edmund. The novel begins with the narrator lying on the floor masturbating to the sight of Simone on a bench just above his face, soaking her genitalia in a saucer of milk; it ends with the happy band (apart from the now dead Marcelle) delighting in the rape, torture, and murder of a priest in the sacristy of his church, where they defile the Host and play sexual games with the priest’s enucleated eye. A unique metonymic logic based on the resemblance between certain ovoid shapes (eggs, testicles, eyes) is the basis for the structure of the narrative.
Try and come of age, will ya?
Proust died today.
XX
Max
We went to the Banana Café to celebrate. I tried to order a gin tonic. In the end, it took two go-go boys to carry the monstrosity over to the table. To be shared, they said, in their best English. The billowing smoke from the dry ice support lent the fantasy some life; their smiles advertised I had a running start. The carafe was filled with sky blue foaminess, fit with pink swirl straws and umbrellas. I wanted to kill Max.
Max, where’s my drink? And the saucy minx replied, Dear Simon, maybe you should work on your French.
You know, whenever I’m with Max (and maybe you share my sentiment), matters get whittled down to perhaps the tenuous but terribly important difference between fortune and luck. I live too much with the latter, and I want to take this moment to swear against it in the way of a warning. Anyway, long story short, we shared it, straws and all. And from what I recall, I began tipping indiscriminately – in every sense of the word. Have you seen those Murakami super-flat paintings of little girls holding daggers? They remind me of Max.
Alright, I have a headache now.
Write me some sordid thing.
Simon