the habit of being

Yesterday, I went to hear David Sedaris read at Barnes & Noble in Union Square. I have seen some pretty famous writers read there before - Michael (”Hot Stuff”) Cunningham, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Safran Foer - and there are always a lot of people. They’ve got about half the top floor devoted to seating for readings, maybe 200 chairs, and some roped-off standing room area too. I heard it would be really crowded and that I should try to get there early, but I had a lab meeting so that wasn’t an option. I figured I’d have to stand.

I did not figure I’d have to stand on the opposite side of the room, between two rows of Fiction and Literature, facing in the wrong direction. Actually seeing him was not even an option. They had loudspeakers, and orange arm bands were required to get into the hours-long line for a book signing. This was the literary equivalent of a rock concert.

He read a couple stories, including one that’s going to be in next week’s New Yorker, and made us all laugh. Afterwards, instead of normal boring author questions, people asked him things like “How are your French lessons going?”, “Who is your favorite band?” and “Does Hugh get to censor what you write about him?” The closest thing he got to a typical after-reading question was “How many unpublished stories do you have sitting around in your apartment?”

It turns out he has about 25 finished unpublished stories lying around, and many more unfinished ones or ones he’s given up on. He mentioned that someone keeps approaching him about his papers (the rights to them, I guess), which makes him really nervous, because he doesn’t want people to read these failed stories and know “how bad [he] sucks,” though that is exactly the sort of thing he’d want to find if *he* were the one going through an author’s papers.

Anyway, he was completely endearing and I wish he were my friend.

How often to writers actually achieve celebrity? Especially good ones?

Outside it was rainy and all the buildings seemed to be beige even though they all aren’t really. I had an umbrella but I didn’t have it up because I didn’t have gloves and having my hands in my pockets kept me warmer than the umbrella, which just turned inside-out with the wind. Even in my pocket my right hand was a little cold, because I had picked up a seven of spades from the sidewalk and it wasn’t dry.

After climbing the stairs to my apartment I went into the bath but didn’t wash because I wasn’t dirty. I just wanted to use the hot wet to get the cold wet off of me. There weren’t any bubbles and only a few stray hairs were floating in the bathwater. I had my book with me, which was A Moveable Feast. I liked this book very much because it was not really fiction and it was about writing and about living and about Paris. I liked it so much I couldn’t wait until I was back on the subway to finish it. I wanted to finish it somewhere quiet and alone.

I had the towel on the floor next to the tub so I could dry my fingers in case I had one hand in the water and one on the book and then needed to turn the page. The towel was pink. The towels all turned pink in the wash once, when one of them bled on the others. It’s been so long now that I don’t remember which one did the bleeding and which ones are really white and stained. I don’t remember which towels are mine and which ones are Jennifer’s either.

Jennifer lives with me and we’ve been friends a long time, and it was she who had given me this book to read. I had read another Hemingway a couple weeks ago and liked it a lot. I like Hemingway because he writes short books with short chapters with short sentences with short words. And also because one time someone compared my writing to his, which is very silly but no one had said I’d written like anyone famous and talented before, and it made me like Hemingway and made me like whomever had said it, though now I can’t even remember who that was.

I was in the tub with one foot on the faucet when I got to the very last sentence on the very last page of the book. Underneath it, written lightly in very thin pencil-line was:

Hi Jennifer
I Love you
Sharon

Sharon is my mother, and I would have known it was her even if she had not signed it, because her handwriting looks like mine except I bear down harder and my letters are skinnier and I would not have capitalized Love. To read this made the back of my throat get hot and then the back of my eyes get hot. I wished my mother had given this book to me instead of Jennifer. I had really liked it.

I realized then that my mother had probably sent this book to Jennifer when Jennifer had gone to study in Paris that summer. That was the same summer that I was lost on the Interstates with James. My mother could not send me books and write “I Love you” in the back of them because she did not know where I was. This would not have been the right book to give me then anyway. I had stopped really reading and Paris was an impossible thing to comprehend.

When I was in sixth grade, we had a school project where we had to ask our parents questions and then present the answers to the class. One of the questions was what is your favorite book. Most of the other girls’ mothers said the Bible. My mother said Light in August. I remember thinking it was such a pretty title.

I took a class on Southern literature once, just a couple-weeks-long section at the GA Governor’s Honors Program. We read some short stories, and watched a movie, where someone told us how Faulkner was a drunk asshole who lied nonstop and was mean to his wife.

Message: It doesn’t make one bit of a difference how fucked up and cruel you are when can write one (or two or three or four..) of the most amazing pieces of American literature ever DRUNK OFF YOUR ASS.

I started to read The Sound and the Fury two or three times as I was growing up. I stopped before I got out of the first chapter, and who could blame me?

I finally read the whole thing last weekend. I’m halfway through Light in August now.

I read this stuff like it’s what I’m made of. It’s like I’ve found my very flavor of misery in words. And maybe I couldn’t tell you why. Maybe I don’t even know. I didn’t think racism and misogyny and bad grammar had so much to do wih me. And maybe they don’t. There’s something though. I’ve never read anything that felt so real.

I don’t like literary criticism. I don’t ever know what to say. I do know that I feel like I’m on the verge of having a nervous breakdown because of a book.

I’ve read a lot of books, and I’ve never had any of them get into me quite like this.. get into my dreams. It’s scary.

I’ve just about read this week’s whole New Yorker, which I swiped from the landlord’s mail pile before my English major of a roommate could get at it. If I do read it all, it’ll be a first probably, even though I’ve had literary pretensions my whole life, lived in Manhattan, and even had a copy in the mailbox every week back in Statesboro, GA (the anti-New York). My mother also read the Times for years before she ever set foot in the City, a moment I suspect she treasured even more than I did. I only had to spend 18 years in Georgia before I got to go there. She had to spend four decades and raise me with the right sensibilities.

Incidentally, I’m spending four days there next week, and lay in bed for an hour trying to remember the names of the streets I used to walk on in the Village. This time, I’ll stay in a friend’s dorm room at Columbia.

College interviews are possible. Expensive yoga classes are definite. I need to pick up some special hairclips for my mother. I need to go to my favorite Japanese bookstore, my favorite falafel joint. I need to get a fake ID.

. . .

After you’ve realized the literary quality of your own life and the limitations therein, what is next?

We tried to hang the mirror and failed. Then, we watched the film based on Henry and June, and maybe I thought it would teach him something about me, like when I told him to read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is like I have my own little canon which I hope might explain me somehow better than I can; beyond my own mass of writings, there are certain books I feel need to be read by people who are close to me. (To know what moves me is to know me. I see beauty therefore I am?) There are certain movies I’ve watched with all my lovers. (There is that poem, and how I thought it was ours but really it is mine. Funny how easily the joint experiences and metaphors become individual after the separation.) He said I want you badly and we had sex on the couch. I’ve been wearing these shells around my wrist from Harvard Square; there is an old message in my voice mail I haven’t yet deleted, from a noisy New York street. I try to tell him things sometimes, but he finds me mostly quiet. I rage silently at the prospect of being written off as less than what I am, which is of course inevitable. Sometimes it bothers me terribly that he has not scrambled to read every word of mine he has access to - any morsel that may may hold another key to how I think, how I feel, my history. These are the things I most want to be wanted. I brought blackberries and dark chocolate wafers. I refilled the ice trays; they were empty. I cried for some silly reason and he felt guilty. We went to work in the morning.

. . .

I read The Life of an Amorous Woman by Ihara Saikaku and I slept right through the party I was supposed to go to last night. All as well; I feared for my chances of getting home. I held a friend’s not quite day-old baby in the hospital. She squeaked a little but didn’t cry, opened and closed her little mouth, was beautiful and smelled good. I got an invitation to another friend’s wedding reception in the mail, on nice paper with elegant calligraphy. I spent almost as much money on food last month as I did on my rent. Granted, my rent is pretty cheap, but so is my pay, and I need to stop eating out so much. I stepped on a nail in the big house, and silenced a beeping alarm. I dreamt I was back at NYU. It’s been a year and a half.

There’s already a pen on the table when I get there, dumping five thin books of poetry, a pita, and some expensive tea. First I read Yeats, then Marilyn Hacker. I always save Cummings for last. Maybe I won’t get that far this time; maybe I won’t need that much help.

I’m gonna write, I tell myself, I know it. And, despite myself, I’m probably gonna to write about you. Maybe I’d rather write about a tree or a curtain, but I’m probably gonna to write about you. Your thighs are thick and your hands are small; you’ll just have to forgive me for writing about you. You won’t be the first and you won’t be the last, and you’ll have to forgive that too. (I can’t help it.)

. . .

Over a slim volume, in the first house past the trees, you tell me about a girl you knew - a girl you liked and who liked you. You introduced her to an artist and he dated her a couple years. It made you kindof sad. He cheated on her with a poet; you were sorry. And there, in my hands, the poet’s book, dedicated in italics to the artist, the very first poem about their cheating. The story makes the text feel so surreal, and the strange thing isn’t so much that you knew a girl who won a prize and published a book - talked to her, ate lunch with her - but that she, the Author, was only a small character; it was the other girl you liked.

Reading the poems, I understand the artist boy; I would have cheated too.

(Oh, that someday someone might hold a sheet of worded paper between two fingers and say of me “I knew her.”)

. . .

Things to remember: a cat named Kitties, Christina’s World, so many cups of hot herbal tea, too much sangria(!), the Greek cafe, the serpentine walls, fat un-centered cucumber rolls with too much seaweed, Lot of Her Sister, a computer named Feynman, the academical village, music by Morphine, Russian coasters, The Idiot’s Guide to Dating, a poem on an index card on a green dental floss string, a 175 gram frisbee, legal pads full of impressive-looking math, Father’s Day, a lottery ticket, Fresca, September 11th poem, No Commitment, pistachio ice cream, rerouted letters, a square puzzle, artists who work at Radio Shack, Bonnard, Derrida, an orange-haired girl in a mural, it’s Still More Happy than Sad.

Aftons are few and far between, but even my body is a poor substitute for Bjork’s voice.