I spent the weekend going through boxes in my parents’ basement, all of them filled with childhood books. I was feeling ruthless and exacting as I did this, because I need that space to store more recent and necessary things. And furthermore, I had enough books stored there to open a Young Adult library (which I absolutely would do if I wasn’t in the process of moving kind of far away) none of which are being rediscovered by today’s youth while they’re packed away in the basement.

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Vadul Lat

I was at an art museum in Krakow sometime in the middle of last month when I walked into a room so filled with smoke that I couldn’t see a few inches in front of me. At some point the smoke began to clear so that I could tell I was in a big, empty, white room, where at intervals a neon sign read I TY MOZESZ ZNALEZC WYJSCIE, and then disappeared.

In Constanta, Romania, a week before, my friend and I had found ourselves walking in circles in a shopping mall, when I realized I knew the words to ask for the exit.

And before that, in an outpost past the Bucharest dumpsite called Vadul Lat, we’d sat on the train tracks for hours in the dark unsure of whether or not the last train was coming. Meanwhile, a kid from across the field behind us played some gypsy-techno song over and over from his cell phone.

In all these places most of the words we learned were for “thank you,” or “good bye.”

So mainly I’ve been surrounded by everything I didn’t know or couldn’t envision, by things that were much warmer or more evil than I could have made up. And now that I am back and remembering myself as a writer, I’m in an in-between state of waiting for some distance that will make these sounds and sights and feelings clarify and connect.

How much distance do you need from experience before it can be handled as art?

While we wait: some images. Maybe you all will sort them and pair them in a way I couldn’t.

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tombstones/how we speak for the dead: Read more »

Riding an unfamiliar bike is kind of like borrowing someone’s shoes that have been worn in specifically to their feet, but you can’t complain about it because if it weren’t for the ill-fitting shoes you’d be barefoot and cut.

The chain on this bike is so rusty that it screeches and clicks and grinds as I pedal so that everyone on the sidewalk turns to stare. This is embarrassing while it’s happening but it might also prevent me from sneaking up on someone. Read more »

Sneaking up on the dead: Time of th Gypsies, 1988

I had planned to go check out one of the Brooklyn Bridge Park movies with my friend Maryanna this week, but when I checked the schedule I saw that they were playing Brokeback Mountain–one of my least favorite movies of all time. Usually when I tell people how much I don’t like this movie they look at me with horror and distrust.

I agree that Brokeback Mountain is visually beautiful and the acting is great and the subject matter is important and maybe even groundbreaking–but all that isn’t enough because the movie plays one brutal, mournful, high-pitch the whole time, without acknowledging any layers, variance or contradiction of feeling. No matter how hopeless or terrifying artistic subject matter is, I never believe that it’s truthful to force and force and force the despair of it all on your audience for the duration of the piece–which I believe this movie does. That type of subject matter can speak for itself. It needs to be left to breathe once in a while. Read more »

tichy

what do you say when asked what you write about? Read more »

In January, Sam posted some words about Patti Smith and her memoir, Just Kids. I finished the book last night and will say that it belongs among the top five or ten most important books of my life to date.

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Some of the most legendary elements of theater history are the tales of full-scale riots that erupted at performances. At a certain period of time in Paris, it seemed that a riot at a premiere was commonplace– Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and Maeterlink’s Pelleas and Melisande are just a few of the avant-garde classics that I can think of that resulted in chaos. Before that, in New York, the 1849 Astor Place Riot killed something like 25 people.

And though in theory I understand that theater filled the role that movies, TV, widely broadcast sports games, etc. fill for us today–namely, I suppose, a mix of entertainment, community, and catharsis–it has always nevertheless been difficult for me to picture these riots as the result of what was happening on stage. It is difficult for me to imagine ordinary people walking in off the street and caring, in some engaged, personal, and critical manner, about the artistic expression of a playwright and a handful of performers and technicians. In spite of all I know about the content of these plays and the status quo at the time they were performed, in spite of everything I know about what these artists were trying to break at the time, I can’t quite make the jump in my mind from a houseful of stiff, quietly scandalized theater-goers to a houseful of enraged, destroying, trampling theater-goers (never mind the tomatoes). In fact I have difficulty not picturing them all yawning and discreetly checking their phones before drifting to sleep upright in their red velvet seats. Read more »

This is what a plague doctor looked like.

Much has been made of the connection between artists and mental illness, but I’ve often wondered if physical ailments aren’t overlooked in that regard. Many artists who were being treated (or attempting to self-medicate) for chronic physical conditions ended up with mental illness as a result of their medications: Antonin Artaud was given opium to medicate the effects of childhood meningitis and prolonged neuralgia, a painful disorder of the nervous system, as well as depression. Ian Curtis’s depression and eventual suicide was likely at least partially the result of the epilepsy medication he was taking. Kurt Cobain famously dealt with chronic acute stomach pain, which I assume was temporarily lessened by his drug use. And Frida Kahlo lived with severe pain her whole life as the result of a bus accident, and earlier still, childhood polio. Those are just a few of the examples I can think of.

I’ve paid attention to these facts throughout the years because I’ve also had severe chronic pain since I was thirteen: a rare, nameless auto-immune disease that causes extreme inflammation in the back of my eyes, producing a type of pain that I imagine feels something like a very bad migraine concentrated in one or the other of my eyes, often spreading to other parts of my face if left too long untreated. I won’t go into my endless medical history with this condition here, but I have been wondering for a long time about how dealing not only with acute pain, but also strong, addictive medications, uncountable doctors’ visits, seemingly tortuous procedures, etc., have affected who I am as a writer and otherwise inclined-to-make-things type of person.

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My favorite student ever.