Tag. You’re It
September 13, 2007
Filed in: The Home Front, The Middle Ages
UPDATE: As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, this weekend was transfigurative. Friday I was a girl who hated yard sales because she was an insecure snob. Tonight I am a woman who hates yard sales because they suck. Never again, dear readers. Never. Again.
Related: anbody interested in four stainless steel forks tied with a ribbon? A 10-gallon trash bag filled with yarn? a nice chunk of linoleum? a pair of Girbaud jeans from 1986? . . .
In a few days’ time I will participate in a ritual that millions and millions of Americans love but that I dread, disdain and despise.
I speak not of an uncomfortable medical test for those over 50, nor of a trip to the mall on the day after Thanksgiving, but of the all-hallowed yard sale. Also known as a tag sale. Garage sale. Attic sale. Junk. Moving. Whatevs.
The very phrase “yard sale” brings out some ugly, ugly traits in me that I’d rather not acknowledge. One: intense snobbism. Two: intense insecurity.
On the One hand, to me there is literally almost nothing worse than picking over tables of other people’s junk, despondently priced with tiny little stickers that fall off. When it’s low-end stuff, it’s depressing. When it’s high end, well, insert my standard (insufferable, judgmental) rant about rampant U.S. consumerism blah blah blah.
On the Two hand, what if I drag our crap out onto the lawn and nobody comes? Or they all come and nobody wants it? I’m afraid of being dissed by the very bargain hunters I admit to disdaining. I want them to love my junk, I want them to make me an offer, and then I want them to drive it away from my house. Is that so much to ask of an uncaring, pennywise public?
In our old neighborhood, the problem of accumulating goods was beautifully and simply solved. Two or three oldish guys used to cruise the neighborhoods very early on trash day and pick up any usable bits. It was recycling at its finest, and I passed along a ton of good things that way.
Here in Swellville, though, we are low on the economic totem pole, and our used belongings are not worthy of median-income standards. Plus anybody driving any type of truck aimlessly up and down the pretty streets at dawn would be swiftly detained by the cops, who’re a bit underemployed in the having-to-deal-with-vicious-criminals department. (And God help them if any potential trash pickers are of a color other than Mayflower White.)
So now we’ve got a seven-year surfeit. I’ve been working like a dog day and night cleaning and assembling it all, and one way or another it’s all going out that door on Saturday. If you need me, I’ll be there, clutching my Dunkie’s coffee cup in terror.
Oh, and just so you know: the forecast is for rain.
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LOL Stands for “Labor of Love,” Right?
September 10, 2007
Filed in: The Way We Live Now
The Fall 07 Brain,Child is out and about in the world, meaning in print and now online. Yay.
I wrote an essay for the very first issue, back in I think it was 1902, when my ovaries were still wearing miniskirts and tank tops. Since then, I’ve been very, very slowly reeled in, till this last issue, in which I am listed as a contributing editor and for which I did the most I’ve ever done, editing-wise and writing-wise, for a single issue.
It’s enormously daunting and enormously satisfying. It’s like making Thanksgiving dinner four times a year, instead of just the once. Halfway through, you’ve been reduced to slopping things about and muttering to yourself, “who the f*ck invented this meal, anyhow? Sadists? Sadist pilgrims? Sadist natives? Who is to blame, I must know! You can’t carve a turkey and mash potatoes and candy yams and make lumpless gravy all at the same exact moment. It can’t be done.”
But somehow it’s all finally spread out on the table before you, a feast to feed people’s souls, and all the muttery-ness drains out of you and you feel happy and fulfilled.
So too with Brain,Child, only minus the yams. (I hate candied yams; isn’t that the very definition of gilding the lily?) It’s spread out at last before everyone—and even if some of the guests are a tad disgruntled with the menu (I’m talking to you, anti-circumcisionists! Remember your table manners, ladies)—to this cook, one of just many, it’s a wondrous thing. Dig in.
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On the Road, In Your Face
September 05, 2007
Filed in: The Way We Live Now
Speaking of 50ths, On the Road was published 50 years ago today. There have been about 2 bazillion words already published on the subject of the anniversary, so I’ll try to keep my remarks brief and personal.
Like many, many other readers of On the Road, maybe all of them?, I fell in love with Kerouac’s rushing prose at a young and impressionable age. Mostly I loved On the Road because I was hanging out at the time with my wild, wild friend T, who was totally Dean Moriarty for the 1980s, complete with the requisite party-drug habits, late-night drives with the headlights off, brushes with the cops, binge drinking, etc. etc.
Then it all died for me. My college advisor talked me into a senior honors project, and, fool that I was, I insisted on writing about Kerouac. By the end of the semester, I was well and truly convinced the man was a hack and a fraud and overrated in the extreme. To be fair, I felt the same way about both my advisor and myself. The three of us parted ways, forevermore I thought.
But now, lo these many years hence, I do suddenly have a hankering to read On the Road again, partly because I’m planning a couple of road trips myself, as readers of this blog might already be aware, but partly because of this excellent review by Luc Sante of the original, unedited manuscript that was in the NYT book review a few weeks back.
Maybe today somewhere in upstate New York my unnamed advisor will read that it’s OTR‘s anniversary, and he’ll pause and think, God, remember that whiny student who wrote the world’s worst paper on Kerouac? I wonder whatever happened to her.
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American Landscape #55
August 31, 2007
Filed in: The Way We Live Now
I don’t have a book yet, because I don’t have a book contract, because I haven’t written the freaking proposal, but never mind any of those petty details: I have a cover for The 50th State!
Take a look at this. [pauses]
Isn’t it beautiful? Haunting and sad and wistful? I love it. It’s by Jason Brockert. I first saw it on a postcard that came in the mail from the Copley Society of Art, and even across the kitchen, buried under our usual pile of junk, it spoke right to me. It’s the houses, those shining little houses all lined up so optimistically across the top edge. So sweet and sad.
One of the things I’m trying to do with this 50th State project is try to stop hating so much on America, on the parts of America that I, well, hate. Malls, parking lots, the endless buying of crap, cars, the paving over of all the small, private wild places. From Jason’s work, especially the other paintings in this series, which are a lot darker and (to me, anyhow) somehow angrier, and from his bio, it’s pretty clear he’s thinking along the same lines.
But why I’m so drawn to this painting in particular is its hopefulness. Those bright, neat houses looking expectantly forward in their old-fashioned, stalwart way, not a Levittown but a small, modest community with its upright family homes lined up properly along the edge of a field. That field’s been turned into a nasty, generic parking lot, true, but the houses still keep their bones proper and erect.
Anyhow, Jason and I exchanged a round of email (which means in Internet-land that we are now buddies). He very politely expressed interest in my book, and I very solemnly told him I was planning on buying American Landscape #55 just as soon as I gather together $3,700. But if you get there first, feel free to buy it—I’m sure that would make Jason happy—just promise I can come over and have a look now and then, okay?
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Despairful
August 27, 2007
Filed in: The Way We Live Now
Did you read the front-page story in the Times yesterday about the pollution in China? Yeah, me neither. I couldn’t bear it. I read the hed and decks and picture captions, and then squinted here and there at a paragraph or two. But it’s really too awful a story to swallow all at once. Or maybe even ever.
Yesterday was chore day, cleaning and shopping, and all day I banged around angrily as I went about my business. All the little crap I do--the endless recycling and the cold-water wash and dragging the reusable canvas bags to the grocery store and shelling out extra money for ugly brown recycled napkins--it’s all bullshit. Every single human in the United States could do likewise (and certainly they don’t) and it wouldn’t matter a drop next to what’s going on in China.
It’s enough to make you chew the paint off your toxic Thomas.