Two things I hate, analogous
1. The squeak of hands in overwashed hair
2. Fingernails digging a sticker off paperback
Elliott W. David
INTERVIEWS AND SUCH
Index
Madeline Kahn, I swoon for you
I lost a part of me in a time I never lived in
voluntary rupturing. sign me up.
Drinking coffee and reading in a place that’s not my apartment is something I often confuse with “doing work”. Which I sort of am, working. On my central nervous system with caffeine, and my reading muscles with someone else’s words. I did this today after an hour of laying in the park, which is called Thompson or Thompkins—I can never get that right, despite having lived blocks away from it for several years, and to look it up now would be to cheat; same goes with Nicholson Cage, whom I can’t help but call that: Nicholson. Though I know that’s wrong. I also cannot pronounce the word “Marlboro” without great difficulty, like I’m trying to swallow the inside of my own mouth. The point is: that park always smells like piss.
In the coffee shop, a probably-piss-smell-adopted I work. A few tables in front of me, a coxcomb-red-headed indie rockstress eats a sandwich made with black bread the color of molasses or no morals, and sprouts that sparsely sprout out around its sandwich mouth like a pre-pubescent mustache. She talks with her male friend, who sports an effete bob and a blue and white striped nautical shirt, looking exactly as he should look. (There’s a tangent here that ends with: “and that’s how I discovered I had Russian blood”; another time.) The two of them talk about whatever they talk about, probably something they talk about every time they see each other, something they’re both comfortable with, happy not to acknowledge the rehashed topic or that this itself is just another rehearsal for next time. But for me, their conversation murmurs with a perfect music of non-words into the other ambient sounds: spoons clanging as they’re returned to their spoon homes; a nail-and-board type of southern hymn playing over the speakers, disassociating the shop’s proprietors with their likely suburban upbringings; the cracked heritage of these wooden chairs, restless and swollen with anxiety on the uneven floorboards; the anti-sound of the sentences I’m reading elbowing out the other thoughts in my brain.
Then, I let loose a single gut-shot laugh that surprises even me. A reference in the book to parmesan cheese that wouldn’t be funny unless you’d been living with the voice. And it punches the air and kills the couple’s conversation like they’d been doused with a bucket of cold stares. I fall out of my book world and into the cavity of silence created by my abrupt, hollow thud of a jolted laugh. And we sit there in it for a moment, stunned, all of us, together, only not at all.
All I want is a room with no windows and someone outside to work the lock who doesn’t speak english but might understand my body language if only I found the courage to say something Inside my room I read a story that started Every hero dies And ended right there in the blank space where a period should be two dimensional endless white smudgeless a miscarried ellipsis but doesn’t make the thing any less true only floating Someone calls whose voice I don’t recognize and just says Hi. What did you do all day? I breathed, I say. I’m doing it right now. No you’re not, she says. And she’s right. She always is. She says you think you know everything, don’t you. And I say no. I just think I know this, because I do. Come and see me, she says. So I start walking, and whenever I get wherever I go I’ll say sorry I’m late, my instincts were wrong And the positivity of the graffiti on the walls makes me skeptical and loathsome of here inside: the acme of stench outside: a culture of grimacing I want to be in the tubes that pretend to tie them both together but is really just the perfect hiding place I say I have to leave, I’m going to take the road less traveled by because I don’t want to be around people right now or women with the dependence of picture frames who need something inside them to define what they are come inside my shiny glass box and lets let everyone see us On the subway platform a man holds a sign that says “Sins are clusters of amino acids in the retina of the eye” And I’m envious of his penmanship a renewed man otherwise overdue a yellowed, obsolete page in the encyclopedia of rot and the train finally comes, screaming entropic metal a string section set on dirty green alchemical fire begging for more rust and sparks and bows this will be my year of music
In my dreams, sometimes there is no gravity, and space is two dimensional and/or everything. No astrology or aroma. Sometimes there are voice overs. And sometimes I can’t tell the difference between inside and outside, night and just-dark, naked and not naked.
zoom out
zoom out
zoom out
zoom out
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zoom out
there
now it’s pointless
A speedy day. Waves of inarticulate ambivalence and fierce, arbitrary yearnings. I’ve eaten almost all of the inside of my own mouth.
intuitional skin shedding
Becca F's Review of the Mid-Manhattan Library, dated 12/2/2009:
"An updated haiku for the library:
Woman shaving her
head in the bathroom hair all
over. You scared me.”
A room is at its most ripe when rotten: decayed parlors, their once bold colors long since lured away by the call of entropy; ballrooms with busted up floorboards and shattered chandeliers; the black tongue of a dead fireplace hanging from its dirty mouth. If rust never sleeps, then whose dream is this?
tonight on the street I heard a sound that sounded like someone saying my name
"Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden."
I like to soundtrack my novels. I pick an album and listen to it and only it each time I open the book. It sort of cauterizes the experience in my mind—not just the narrative or the music, but the sensation of absorption, layered in sound and story. Then, whenever I return either to the music or the novel, I can feel the other like a ghost limb, like something now gone that was once a very real part of me. Synesthesia moonshine, home brewed.
This week:
Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice + Arvo Part’s Tabula Rasa. (Done despite the fact that Mann’s Aschenbach was in part based on Mahler.)
And so a parenthesis was necessary, a bit of impromptu existence, some loafing, an exotic atmosphere and an influx of new blood…
- Thomas Mann