Letter #27

Exquisite reality

Hello old friends. I kept sitting down to write to you — about a summer of fits and starts, negotiations with past selves, revelations that arise while floating in different bodies of water up and down the coast— but things just keep ... sort of… happening.

War, flood, famine, disease, and the tyrannical reign of the patriarchy — it’s hard, because everyday there’s something going on, but — there’s just more and more. Every time. So I just — every day. Hard to comprehend a time when we weren’t confronted with the detritus of civilization on a near-constant basis.

Don’t you wish you could take a train to Analog World? It would have to be a train, with a shiny bar car and the glamorous lug of steel. It takes you to stay in pre-fab midcentury homes and the view looks like, I dunno, Sausalito. Somewhere the sunlight filters through tall trees and collects in pools of white gold on the surface of the ocean. There’s a record store there, and a library. You check out books from a clerk that sits at a polished maple desk, and sign them out in cursive. You spend your days hiking, reading, swimming, looking at art. It’s quiet. You call your neighbors up on a rotary phone and conclude your conversation with the satisfying clack of the receiver settling into its cradle.

Pornographic, really. And the thing that would make it most holy would be to never speak of it, record it, advertise it, or derive profit from it. A piece of public utility for our hyperconnected, crumbling, globalized society.

Although it’s much more likely it would be an enterprise, after one brave woman stands up to big USB and says — no more! I refuse to have all of these chargers in my house ! — and bulldozes over a natural habitat to create AnalogWorld, designed to clear our minds and sniff the sea air, like the Victorians did for female hysteria but for weaning off of our anesthetic Internet. And at the end of it you’re given some beautiful film stills of your time there in the dollhouse, with an accompanying digital file and a rewards system for multiple visits, kept track with an app designed to look like a student ID card from 1975.

Lol. So sorry I’m like this!

I know two things you can always do to feel better are find some nature to breathe in and read a book, my preferred ways of coping with this strange extended season of our lives. Just remember: Last week was tomorrow. No one even needs. But sometimes … every day. And though it may not feel like it lately, we’re already living in analog world, right now, our most exquisite reality.

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Innovations, “Seabird”

Cleansing the room with a little yacht rock number that came on while I was anxiously awaiting for a date to arrive at the bar, slow flecks of disco light filtering through the facets of the candle that lit up my book as I half read it, half tried to look appealing, and I thought, hey, this will be fine, this will all be just fine.

Vernon Subutex volumes 1-3 by Virginie Despentes

There are very few things in contemporary culture that remain underrated or under-hyped enough to be good. (Apologies to the cool writer girl I follow on Twitter who introduced me to these books, I’m blowing up the spot.) With that said, I will trust you with this introduction and do what you will with it.

Vernon Subutex himself is a down and out former record store owner whose unemployment has run dry; he’s been evicted, and relies on a string of characters from his past in the music industry to help him out. His possession of one piece of collateral, some final taped confessions from the recently deceased rock star Alex Bleach, starts a chain of events that accumulates a wide-ranging cast of characters: a reprehensible film producer, a lesbian hacker who goes by The Hyena, the devout Muslim daughter of deceased porn star Vodka Satana, a handful of neo-fascists and skinheads, a bunch of disappointed ex-girlfriends and current wives, and a homeless community that includes a secret lottery winner and a beguiling, monstrous woman named Olga and her dog, Attila-the-Fun. Among so many others.

Brutal, clueless, vain, cunning, violent, heartbroken, and searching, they are all drawn to the nostalgia that Vernon represents, along with the music and dancing that provide them the release that they crave. In their midst Vernon plods through the streets of Paris, increasingly disoriented and dissociative as his options whittle down and the city’s various tragedies and disasters grow larger and more frequent. The effect for the reader is like reading a headline about a mass shooting right before you walk into a birthday party. Shell-shocked, disturbed, there aren’t many options but to keep it moving and enter the smiling crowd of friends and strangers.

Saving Sex and the City 3

If Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha are your version of the Marvel Universe — if you’ve ever felt glee from an in-depth conversation discussing Carrie’s narcissism with a stranger. If you’re a Miranda sun, Charlotte moon, Samantha rising. If something about that theme song unlocks your reptilian adolescent self. If you turn on season three when you’re sick, you will enjoy this podcast with host Lara Marie Schoenhals in which she and a weekly guest come up with a plot on the spot for the already-disappointing And Just Like That SATC sequel extravaganza. Sample plot lines from different episodes include: Miranda and Steve are slumlords. Samantha is accused of grooming several 39 year old men. Carrie hires a Single White Female-esque assistant played by Sydney Sweeney. Charlotte and Harry open up their relationship. This is a fun game we can all play!!!

Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon

Pleasantly drunk on a single IPA riding the ten P.M. Metro North train to Connecticut is the best possible setting in which to read lesbian erotica from 1957. The sidelong looks in the library! The sorority sister back massages! The queer, queer feeling that your life is about to change! Oh, darling, it’s all just so overwhelming.

Joan Didion’s house in Malibu, for a treat

Animal by Lisa Taddeo

Joan, the protagonist, carries the auspices of her name with a fraught grace. She doesn’t hear voices, but by the end of the book, her divine mission becomes clear: retribution. The resemblance to another holy Joan, circa Play It As It Lays Didion, is so evident to me: escaping tragedy in New York only to experience a sun-dappled, Los Angeles descent into madness when the accumulation of grief is just too much to bear. But the Joan of Animal is pulpier and more vulgar than Didion would ever be: in the very first paragraph, a married former lover kills himself in front of her, and the body count only compounds from there.

Joan is intense as the embodiment of the psychological and physical trauma inflicted by men onto women, which has catalyzed into her surging, ever-present anger. She trusts no one; she doesn’t expect to. Every interaction with another person is a microcosm of the great power imbalance that no woman signs up for, but must become an expert in.

One of my greatest furies was the way men treated me like I would not merely endure their filth but endorse it.

…Men will use you unless you use them first […] sometimes men must be punished because women are important pain from the moment they are born until the moment they die.

I believe all men have a rapist within them, just dying to get out.

The amount of trauma that Joan has experienced is perverse in a way that might be ridiculous if not for its plausibility —the unsurprising thing about the way Joan’s story plays out is not the extent of the abuses she’s suffered but that she has decided to do something about it. We are seduced into believing in her mission through her unassailable style and oscillating self-possession, a jaguar on the prowl for the answers to her life’s greatest failures. A rote dedication to beauty and pleasure is one of the only things she can confidently possess amidst a lifetime of pain, and it’s enthralling to be alongside her observing the duplicitous men and stunning women that populate the postcard backdrops of Poconos resorts, Montana skies, Wall Street restaurants and the jagged ravines of Laurel Canyon.

Joan scans every landscape for a whiff of the predator, having decided that she is done being prey. She’s out for blood, and anyone who’s ever been a woman knows why.

William Eggleston’s photographs of Big Star

Certain colors come together like the words in a prayer uttered by a true believer. Certain long-gone feelings can be summoned by a specific opening warble and its accompanying strings. And certain combinations of people are a reminder that the exact right confluence of things can happen, and have before, and doesn’t that mean that they will again? At the very least, isn’t the simple fact that you can witness it just so amazing.

Waving a lavender silk handkerchief from the train platform,

Delighter