Ice in a Glass

The past is never a place you've been.

Sue Lyon in Lolita (1962) by Stanley Kubrick.

Some people appear pleased to see you. Every time you meet, you’re strangers at a party inside another party. These people like staying up all night talking and drinking. It’s something they just do, and the person they do it with doesn’t matter as much as at first you think. I’m okay with that. I think this is possibly a stage of life, or a stage of my life. As soon as an understanding like this arrives, the ground shifts under my feet. 

The women in the movies of Alfred Hitchcock are often the pursuers of easily seduced male beauties. Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief and Rear Window. Tippy Hedrin in The Birds. Eva Marie Saint in North By Northwest. Every moment of this movie is fun. Cary Grant in that gorgeous blue suit with his why are you talking like that British accent.

Five minutes after joining the women’s movement, I became tired of hammering away at everything that existed. What women said about men mattered to men zero, and the thoughts men had about everything else were a candle burning down. This was mistrust well placed.

I wake up early in order to live longer. I used to practice tap steps while waiting for trains. Everyone danced on subway platforms, and the sound was clean.

Start again. Hope for a better ending. Start again. Work backwards.

During the time I walked on Broadway so often I knew many of the people who slept outside, I would sometimes pass a man with flowing white hair. He would be singing to himself and would seem unaware of the scene whizzing past him. I wouldn’t stop him as I’d remember the excitement of the time I’d known him and the way people had impressed me at that age. We met in 1966, when I was 19, and back then he had curly dark hair and wrote articles for a trade newspaper devoted to scrap metal. Bruce and I did market research at this newspaper while we were in school. The man was older than us. He was a musician, and on weekends he performed in a cabaret. Lily Tomlin was performing there regularly, too, developing the characters she’d soon present on Laugh-in. The writer was carefree, and I was grateful to be swept into a world I found glamorous and grown up. He would hold little gatherings in his Hell’s Kitchen walk up. Actor friends would lean against his exposed brick walls, holding juice glasses of wine. I would have followed anyone into a theater and out the other side.

A few years ago, when I saw Breathless again, I admired the way Godard had made beautiful empty into a piece of jazz. I was reminded you shouldn’t go back to the summer camp where you spent your happiest days in childhood. The past is never a place you’ve been. The past looks innocent, no matter how bloody.

When Gardner was a young flyer in the Navy, he caught a stomach bug and stayed back from a mission in the South Pacific. That plane went down and all on board were killed. From then on, Gardner felt he was living on borrowed time. Once, in bed, a man propped himself on an elbow and slapped my face. No one had done that before. He paid for the taxi. It’s always a good time to leave Paradise.

Gardner Leaver as a naval cadet.

In Ireland, when I was twenty-one, the rain was either a fine mist or a drenching downpour. I got used to walking on lonely roads with a towel wrapped around my head. I was wearing one of those American raincoats cinched tight around the waist. I was wearing the worn jeans of a boy I’d met in London, and I was lying to the man I was married to.

The people who keep coming back, wanting a second chance, or a third or fourth chance, imagining they can charm their way back in, that’s me.

When John Kennedy was shot, I was seventeen and studying for exams in the Donnell Library on 53rd Street. There was whispering, and then we all filed out onto Fifth Avenue. I called my friend Gail from a pay phone and started walking toward her apartment on West End Avenue and 96th Street. She walked toward me, and we spent the next three days watching the president’s car moving slowly along a street in Dallas. Watching the president’s head thrown back forcefully. Watching Jackie in her pink suit climbing out of the back of the limousine. We watched the footage over and over, until we were different people. Then, over and over, we watched Jack Ruby moving suddenly out of shadows and shooting Lee Harvey Oswald as he was led handcuffed from jail. We didn't move from the TV, Gail, me, Gail's brother Stevie and Stevie's friend Sammy. In time, we laughed at the understanding that just as our lives were starting out everything we had so far understood as reality was collapsing.

As soon as a robot knows it’s a robot, it is no longer a robot. As soon as we recognize what we are, we are no longer the thing we’ve been. The fog is the dark bar where we fall in love.

A bird was perched on a curtain rod in the bedroom of a friend. She said, “It’s an English sparrow.” It looked sad. My friend was proud of her cat for not eating the bird. She said, “What’s the plan?” I said, “I’ll get a towel around it and carry it out.” We weren’t wearing much. I coaxed the bird from its perch, and it flew around. My friend screamed and hit the floor, covering her head. I said, “What are you afraid of?” She said, “I’m afraid you’ll hurt it.” I said, “I won’t hurt it.” She said, “You really can’t be sure.”

Recently, when I read a piece about Lolita, I didn't remember the book ends with Lolita dying at 17, after giving birth to a dead baby girl in an Alaska backwater. Humbert, in prison, is going to be dead soon. Lolita must be tossed into the volcano as well? With no one left to imagine her?

I met a woman who said, “I lost 70 pounds.” She was wearing gold sneakers and a dress with pink birds on it. She said, “I was depressed for ten years and wore yoga pants every day. One morning, I was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, and I decided to walk twelve miles. Then I decided to walk twelve miles every day.” Joan Didion said: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”

One afternoon when I was five, my mother and I were leaving the circus when I saw a woman take a glittery doll from her child and throw it in the trash. I cried. My mother said, “Why are you crying? It’s not happening to you.” I said, “Mirror neurons.” I said no such thing, and right now I’m trying to imagine the boredom my mother must have felt doing this thing and that thing for a child she felt attached to by the thinnest thread.

Some time ago, I decided to stay quiet when I was worried about a relationship. I wanted to see what the other person would do. This has proved worthless because most people do nothing, and then more nothing happens, and you age, sicken, and die, and the lights dim, and the waters recede, and you hope there will be enough air and water for the people who are now children to continue after you, and then you die again.

I was good to my dog because I loved him. He was good to me because it was his nature.

One day I dreamed a wolf gave me a tooth from his mouth. I was three and didn’t know dreams weren’t real. One day in Switzerland, I woke up in a room where all I could see through the windows were clouds. I wasn’t sure I was alive. My sister told me dreams weren’t real. You have to take someone’s word for that at first. The space where you have to take someone’s word for what’s real is the same as waking up in clouds. You have to wait for the mist to melt. Who wants to wait for anything? The times I have woken up and asked myself where am I, that is pleasurable, even when the answer isn’t immediate. That combination of not knowing and awakeness is writing.

Thank you Lit Hub and Brittany Allen for including Everything is Personal in this roundup of notable publications.

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Industry

Sagar Radia as Richi Ramdani in Industry.

I met a woman with a gambling addiction. She told me the games she played and the risks she took. I wanted more details about how gambling made her feel and why she chose her games. I didn't press. We were strangers. Even if she'd answered questions I might have asked, it would have been a dialogue that has no name.

Last night, Industry—season 3 episode 4—belonged, to Richi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), the market maker on the CPS desk of the private bank Pierpoint. Richi executes the trades the other brokers organize.

His job is a massive gamble, involving millions of pounds in a climb or a fall. In addition, he gambles at roulette, and he's massively in debt. He's massively coked up, and massively internet porned up, and massively sex clubbed up. He's massively nasty and male clueless sneering toward his coworkers, and he's gone off sex with his wife because she's given birth to their child.

A daughter of white English patrician whatever, she won't play the girl in an Angry Young Man script. Yeah, her. Richi is massively awful and his predicament, involving dangerous loan sharks, is massively doomed, and of course we root for him. I root for any gambler pushing stacks of chips into the freezing and burning unknown.

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In the last Zoom conversation (on August 24), we talked about transforming abstract nouns into scenes and images. Abstract nouns such as forgiveness, wellness, anger, beauty, wisdom, justice, freedom, independence, honor, etc. summarize an internal response the narrator is having. They don't show the reader something the reader can sense and enter independently.

To change this, you can think of an abstract noun in your mind and immediately see what arises concretely as a response to the noun. Today’s example is: "I feel ambivalent about you." A way to transform this is, "I want a trap door to open in the floor so I can drop through it, and I want to be you."

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Prompty People

Try using a non narrative art form to prompt narrative. Bach's Brandenberg concerto no. 6 starts in the middle of a thought that isn't a thought, a rush of strings without beginning or end. I was listening to it today, and I thought, that's the way to do it, no clearing of the throat, no tapping the podium, no tuning the instruments (not that there's anything wrong with Beethoven's 9th Symphony), just follow your brain heart and let it lead you.

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