I wake up to three men wheeling trash bins over the cobblestones. It’s Tuesday. The air is plush with the smell of freshly rattled garbage. I close my eyes again but the morning birds are at it now, squealing in the blue hour of dawn. They sound like Jordans on hardwood. Eva keeps a giant photo of fries and mayo framed in the bedroom as a reminder of home (Belgium). She’s there now and I’m in the kitchen taking a bite of her gluten-free bread, the taste of which is so poor it actually startles me. The great thing about reincarnation, she told me recently, is that we can meet again and again in our next lives.
I’m still catching up on magazines mailed to me while I was away over the winter. In a January issue of The New Yorker, Anna Holmes writes a perfect opening paragraph in her profile of the children’s book author Margaret Wise Brown:
Bruce Handy, in his 2017 book about children’s literature, “Wild Things,” confesses that he always imagined the writer Margaret Wise Brown to be a dowdy old lady “with an ample lap”—just like the matronly bunny from her classic story “Goodnight Moon,” who whispers “hush” as evening darkens a “great green room.” In fact, Brown was a seductive iconoclast with a Katharine Hepburn mane and a compulsion for ignoring the rules. Anointed by Life in 1946 as the “World’s Most Prolific Picture-Book Writer,” she burned through her money as quickly as she earned it, travelling to Europe on ocean liners and spending entire advances on Chrysler convertibles. Her friends called her “mercurial” and “mystical.” Though many of her picture books were populated with cute animals, she wore wolfskin jackets, had a fetish for fur, and hunted rabbits on weekends. Her romances were volatile: she was engaged to two men but never married, and she had a decade-long affair with a woman. At the age of forty-two, she died suddenly, in the South of France, after a clot cut off the blood supply to her brain.
Early in her career, before she was getting published, Brown told a former teacher that she “felt like a bunch of peas that weren’t cooked yet but are doing a lot of whirling about in the kettle.” Sometimes I worry about the prospect of whirling about my whole life but, when put like that, it seems better than being cooked.
Speaking of magazines, Real Review’s latest issue promises “a review of wallpaper as a metaphor for the postmodern condition.” How tedious, I think—so tedious I’m intrigued. I buy it. There’s something to appreciate about the leaps of faith some writers take in the service of populating highbrow literature. Gotta study the mental contortions. Eddie Blake. It’s a great name for a byline. Maybe that’s why I bought it. I read once that your name can influence all sorts of outcomes, from how much you’re paid to how you feel about yourself. I’ve wondered if it also impacts your likelihood to be read. There must be a reason half a Tao Lin cover is just the author’s name. Many people keep a list of what to call their baby; I keep one for pen names. “Bates Nittle” is on there for some reason.
A little later on I happened to notice a neighbour having lunch on his balcony. He keeps two empty bottles of Prosecco on the table to hold candles, which were burnt down to the rim. Without them, the bottles give a hell yeah, buddy quality to anything he’s doing out there—working, smoking, eating. At some point, a song started playing in my living room, Ludovico Einaudi’s ‘DNA’. I looked to the balcony again. The bottle energy fell away, expelled by the dignifying effect of this song on everything it touches, this sense of being alone together. “The genius of this piece is that it can evoke unthinkable pain as well as inexpressible joy,” per one YouTube comment. Put it on if you’re unsure how you feel. See what comes up. It’s like an emotional barometer. The longer I watched the man, the more I disappeared. I imagined him as the last person of our civilization, or the first of the next. I didn’t exist, evidently, except to fill his world with solitude. Call me Edward Hopper. Like I said, it’s a powerful song—can really furnish life a whole new way for a few moments.
That evening the whole sky was soaked orange as if the sun had spilled. Again I thought of my friend, the one who’d see this and say, This lighting fucks. She used to have an obscure job at the train station, by which I mean no one knew what she did there except leave at night with more money than she’d arrived. I was working at Hollister at the time and we’d take lunch together at one of those violent-bright food courts where everyone looks hungover whether they drank last night or not.
I’d arrive delirious from the dark and the noise and the fumes, probably saying something dumb, something like, “What if the Tower of Pisa is actually straight and it’s just the earth that’s leaning??” She’d hear me out a second and then start complaining about men. That was her thing, always. Men, she’d say, and then go off. The way she said the word sounded so much like a slur that it always took me a moment to realize she didn't actually say one. Ahead of her time. I haven’t seen her since except on Instagram, still complaining about men.
Actually, ‘DNA’—you know what that song reminds me of? It reminds me that we’re all just trying. It reminds me of these little figures Eva draws sometimes, half-formed gravity victims whirling about, saying a word weird here and there, pronouncing sleep “shleep,” for example, and extending themselves for something just out of reach.
I really enjoyed this. It was interesting to follow your thoughts and see how they connected.
I also really liked this line “... Without them, the bottles give a hell yeah, buddy quality to anything he’s doing out there...”