He said, what would you like me to write?

Write about the sound a martini makes when it strike the ice. Write about the languor of tulips when you were a gardener at Manhattan Plaza. Write about wood as the "form-inspiring, deeply human material" and how you once loved a tree surgeon. Write about what blue smells like, how long it stayed, what moved it. Like Anne Carson said, beauty spins and the mind moves. Spin for me.

Star Wars

Camera shows different parts of the spaceship breaking off and exploding.

Camera pans into ship, to show Obiwan Kenobi, Artoo (I guess that should be R2, but that looks wrong) and Anakin Skywalker standing in the lobby of the ship. Panic all around them.

Anakin (gravely): I think the elevator's not working.

Camera pans out to more parts of the ship exploding and the world generally falling apart.

Mm

So I turned 25 a few days back.

Which sounds old, doesn't it? Old enough to know better, at any rate. Consider the rest of it said.

The problem

Or one of them, is that I don't think you are able or willing to hold me, if I were able or willing to attempt the experiment. I think of Virginia Woolf, if it was Virginia Woolf, talking about the heady wine of intelligent conversation and the close contact of a naked mind. I'm afraid of too many things, and not all of them unfounded. The physicality of your words. The evanescence of your presence. The real origin of my desire. Dorothy Sayers to John Cournos [somewhere on Minz's blog]: Ask any questions you like - I can't imagine the question I would not readily and frankly answer. But for Christ's sake, no generalities. Good God! Do you think I'm unsexed? What do we have to say to each other? I suppose there's a certain brute honesty to all this; we don't pretend to be anything more to each other, or to ask anything more of each other than the barest minimum without which this could not exist. But there's asking, and there's asking. We've come too far for me to give this up easily, or to open myself to it easily. (I can't speak for you.) Am I really immortal, does the sun care, when you leave will you give me back the words? Ask me for something I can bear to give.

Future employment/housing prospects

At lunch with WN on Saturday:

Me: [bitching about some office conversation where we talked about who was doing well was moving where was going out with whom] Every time we have a conversation like we had that day, I think I have to leave before it makes me even bitchier.
WN: You'd probably get the same experience in any MNC.
Me: But not in the cardboard box on the street corner that is going to be my home.

Oh did I tell you about the customs guy at Newark when I flew into the States?

Passport-stamping guy: [flipping through my passport and seeing my old US visa] What did you study here?
Me: Political science.
PSG: Wasn't that a mistake?
Me: Um.
PSG: I have a degree in political science too.

And the passport guy at JFK one of the times I flew in while I was still at Columbia told me he had a masters in international relations.

Kids these days

My brother is reading something scientific and incomprehensible and chatting on MSN at the same time.

Me: Are you doing homework or reading your own stuff?
Him: My own stuff. I don't do homework.
Me: I see. Sorry to have made that assumption.
Him: My teachers have all come to terms with it.
Me: Even your GP teacher?
Him: Oh, no-one does GP homework, so it's ok.

What are kids coming to these days?

Reading your mind

"Damage to the right frontal lobe, for example, sometimes led to a heightened interest in high cuisine, a condition dubbed gourmand syndrome. (One European political journalist, upon recovering from a stroke affecting this part of the brain, profited from the misfortune by becoming a food columnist.)" From Of Two Minds.

Strawberry Jam

Confession

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman's body.
Also, well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress's neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognize greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I know what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud.
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

- Czeslaw Milosz

On re-reading Francis Spufford

I find Julian Barnes' description of an adolescent: "a creature part willing, part consenting, part chosen for."

What is needed

Anthropologist Joel Sherzer on the Kuna gathering house (the Kuna live on the San Blas islands around Panama): “A talking place, a chanting place, an angry place, a serious place, and a joking place.”

Strawberries/ice-cream

Diane Arbus on "the Mad Man from Massachusetts" (she photographed him for a magazine article on eccentrics): "He is said to have once stolen a box of strawberries, taken it to a police station and invited the police to go out and steal a box of ice-cream so they could all have some dessert."

Shall we attempt to be assaulted by cakes next week?

thank you note

Diane Arbus's note to Lisette Model (Model was her photography teacher and on this particular occasion had written Arbus a letter of recommendation for the Guggenheim Fellowship):

"Dear Lisette, my father told me to thank you but your eloquence is your own and your friendship is mine so I cannot. But I want to see you."

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can we go out?