[tumblr edition]
A prayer to Our Lady Joan
Joan, our lady of the incisive observant pen, pray for me.
I want to be an observer like you, but it’s so, so hard. It used to be kind of easy, before I was living life at any level. Now I’m either out of practice, or things are perhaps less new to me than they used to be, or I’ve just got too much other shit on my mind.
Were you somehow immune to these forces, Joan? Did your mind never succumb to the entropy of contentment? And if not, were you happy? Were you at least not regretful of having taken on opposing roles that demanded your nature be two separate things–coldly observant and warmly humane?
Or did you find it easy to compartmentalize when occasion called?
As for me, I have become lazy or else found my powers lacking. Playing an active role in the world I inhabit has made my life happier and more dynamic, but it has made me less devoted and punctilious an observer.
The impressions have not left me. When I decided to, I found I was able to tap back into the habit again. But catching them all is so difficult. They show up while I’m doing other things, like washing dishes or taking a shower. (The sound of water helps, though alas, sitting beside water with no other task at hand but to observe and writer has so far been mostly useless.) I receive these impressions with both immense gratitude for their visitation and resignation at how quickly, in the time it takes me to extricate myself from the task, they will evaporate, leaving me to scratch out clumsy sketches of the vanishing imagery left in my head.
For that matter, there are so many of them. Even when I steel myself for the crazy task of commanding them to appear, I can’t make up my mind which to focus on. How do you know which impressions, which themes, are the important ones for you that day? How do you know what to keep a lookout for? (Because surely no one, not even you, has the strength to hang onto everything your creative mind attracts.)
It’s so easy to hang it up on time and place. You lived and worked within the late 1960s and 70s, in the cities, among the musicians and the politicians and the celebrity criminals. Your work was cut out for you. Here in the rare and isolated north, mine is mine to invent. Maybe sometime an obvious assignation (no offense) will find me. But for now, I’ve got to decide which stories are worth telling. And it takes a long fucking time to discover that, without some preconceived idea serving as my northstar.
I don’t want to complain. The last thing I want to do is sigh and give up. I just want your advice, your help. How did you know what to write for that “Prix de Paris?” How did you find your way from precocious moralistic essays to the New Journalism you helped pioneer? How did you convince the tastemakers and the publishers that you knew what you were doing and were the one to do it for them? How did you convince the world that your observations were what they needed?
Hey you in there,
In case you’ve forgotten, you love writing. Nothing about that has changed. You love it so much that even when you hate what you’re working on, you can get lost in it for hours. You also are good at it. You make pedantic shit sound interesting and deep. Not everyone can do that.
Thread
The crack across
My screen affords
Pleasure inex-
plicable, the
way the angry
tears felt when, hard
and clean, they hung
for a sharp mo-
ment before the
wind swept them off
my face. This thread
of thin, causeless
imperfection
across the glass
confirms my choked
unspoken rage
at compulsive
optimism
forced upon me,
as if love could
not admit of
or contain
despair.
I showed up at the farm for my first day of work in old jeans and a grey hoodie, half zipped up because even with the constant southern California sun, the ocean wind rolling across the fields puts a chill into your bones. My disheveled appearance was the product of careful crafting–not only which to pair with which jeans, but especially crafting my hair–my brand identity at that time in my life–into a symmetrical sphere around my cranium, finished with an artful swoop that just grazed my right eyebrow.
My boss, Lucila, who owned the farm, met me at the loading dock. The truck was bigger than I’d anticipated–I couldn’t imagine driving it, let alone parking it on Newport Avenue amid the farmers market setup squeeze.
But she assured me that I wouldn’t be alone that day. The erstwhile market attendant would be training me for the next three weeks before I took over the market stall on my own. I wasn’t thrilled about this–part of the draw for this job was the ability to do things my way.
As if on cue, Kristen stepped out from the truck’s cabin, where she’d been loading the tarps and the tables. She was wearing old jeans, a grey hoodie half zipped up, and her hair fell into a symmetrical sphere around her cranium, with an artful swoop that just grazed her right eyebrow.
We stood there, on either side of Lucila, looking at each other.
My first impression was fuck. her. I was thinking it even as we shook hands and smiled. I continued thinking it as I loaded crates of vegetables under her guidance. I tried to mask it as I made small talk, asking her how long she’d been working for the farm, where she’d gone to school, what her plans were after this. She told me she was going to travel, return to southeast Asia where she’d spent time in the past, maybe go to Europe afterward. Fuck. her. I continued to think, because the only thing more brand identity than my hair was my intrepidity.
But something shifted between the loading and leaving for the market. I strapped in my seat belt in the passenger seat as she leapt up on the other side. Looking at her face in profile as she shifted the sticky gears, I suddenly found the fuck. her. gone from inner dialogue, replaced by something quite unexpected.
The truck was rumbling down the dirt path to the highway when I suddenly asked,
“So was it weird to find out that you’d be training your twin today?”
She looked at me, a slight ripple in her equanimity. Then a smile broke out on her face.
“Yeah–I was like, Who’s this girl?’”
That was the first time. The second time was three years later, though it felt (and still feels) like eons lie between life as a farmhand in San Diego and life as a nomadic journalist who, in 2013, ended up in Bedford, New Hampshire.
I don’t even remember now how I found Elizabeth’s blog. Maybe she liked something of mine on social media? Maybe I stumbled across her work while searching for an image? Whatever it was, I wound up wasting an hour or two reading her blog, studying her photographs and, finally, examining her “About” page’s blurry profile photo. Everyone told me I couldn’t have a blurry profile photo, which immediately poisoned me against her. Why did she do it when I couldn’t?
But something changed between that bitchy judgment and the end of her byline, where she mentioned that she was currently in New Hampshire. The term “nomadic” was still tumbling around my brain like a rock in my shoe when I suddenly emailed her and asked if she’d like to meet up.
She said yes, and we did, and her hair fell in a symmetrical sphere around her cranium, finished with an artful swoop that just grazed her right eyebrow. But it only bothered me a little, that time–I was already succumbing to that feeling, still unfamiliar enough to be unexpected.
I was always really good at playing alone. It didn’t make me not want to play with other kids, but it was kind of indifferent to me. I don’t remember when I decided I was different from girls, or that I liked boys better, or that doing things alone was preferable above all. I don’t remember what even led to these conclusions.
It’s amazing how different you become when you decide that’s what you are.
I’m not sure when it reversed on me–when my indifference to friends became a conviction of my inability to have them.
Last weekend, I drove five hours to meet up with two female coworkers…one of whom happens to be Elizabeth…for dinner and drinks. It’s hard to describe, let alone explain, how excited I was about it.
I spent half the drive imagining what we’d talk about, and the other half trying to figure out what has changed. Where the competitive streak went, whence it came in the first place, why I get excited by commonalities instead of alienated by them.
Is it because I’ve stopped judging myself?
Is it because I’ve achieved the respect I crave?
Is it because I’ve learned to self-identify through more than my hairstyle, profession and peripateticism?
It felt so. good. to talk my face off with these women about books and work and backstories. I could feel my brain expanding like a bike tube, my heart a gratitude-powered piston pinging between respect and validation.
Friends. The word still feels strange on my lips.
It will never get easier.
You are not getting younger.
The lake doesn’t get warmer.
Today is perfect.
I don’t care. Almost.
I was tempted to start this with a caveat, but fuck it.
Calligraphy Stools.
I love to see type or lettering is used as decoration, simply for its own beauty but even more so when it’s functional. I’ve previously written about Type Tables, Concept Furniture and Type Architecture, and now, another inventive blend of form and function, Calligraphy Stools.
The above works are by Beirut based designer, Iyad Naja. Most recently he produced the calligraphy stools (the top five images above) for for Dubai design week, last month. The decorative top half is created from abstracted calligraphic forms that have been sculpted into a continuous ring. These have been cast into three types of metal and interwoven with a concrete base. There’s several other script inspired pieces over on Facebook.
Yasss
(Source: designboom.com, via typeworship)
The smell. This smell. I remember it and I don’t know why.
It appears that I’m a battler by nature. Even when I don’t want to, something in me looks for things to fight, fix, puzzle over. I should have been born in some medieval Celtic village, where I’d be justified in this constant state of teeth-gritted tension. I’m not built to enjoy a life of abundance and privilege, only to snarl and claw my way to achieving it.