This Saturday I will be performing in the Mad Love Circus:

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And in August, I am assisting with a show:


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Brevity Theatre, a brand new company of University of Chicago students and alumni, proudly announces their first opening. BEST LAID PLANS: A Night of One-Acts by Shepard and Inge is composed of two of the famed playwrights’ lesser known works: ICARUS’ MOTHER, written by SAM SHEPARD and directed by WILL BISHOP and MARGARET’S BED by WILLIAM INGE and directed by AMANDA FINK. BEST LAID PLANS runs August 1 (8pm), 2 (9:30pm), 4 (9:30), and 8th (8pm) at Gorilla Tango Theatre, 1919 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago 60647. Tickets are $10, to purchase tickets call 7730598-4549 or visit www.gorillatango.com.

In other news: my job starts in two weeks, and I am trying to figure out what all I need to figure out before that happens. Oh hey, life.

I Write Like: Check what famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them to those of the famous writers.

It’s an interesting idea, but I am quite frustrated by the lack of transparency here. I want to know what their list of writers is! (Ones I know are in there include Austen, Poe, Vonnegut, Palahniuk, Atwood, Nabokov, Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Wilde.) And I want to know how it “works”. I put in a poem I had written while in Russia that refers to Nabokov directly, and of course he popped up, but is it because of the direct reference, or because of the style, or the references to Russia and butterflies? I don’t know. I also don’t know how useful it is, but it is certainly a fun thing to play around with, especially in noticing stylistic differences between different pieces of my own writing.

* The Doc-Ock Martens are making a comeback, so any suggestions of 90s jams we might want to cover are totally welcome.

This kind of awful nonsense makes me furious. And is part of why I’ve always kept it fairly easy to find some of my less savory writing on the internet. Hell, within the first page or two of posts on my blog there are scraps of a fiction piece that includes a drunken lesbian sex scene and drug references and lots of swearing.

I went to a job interview yesterday, and should be hearing back soon. It is a job I would love to have— pleasant, intelligent, interesting people; work that is neither back-breaking nor totally without demands. Fingers crossed. But the job search process always makes me think about this kind of thing. Of course there is an element of… not deceit, but the adoption of particular demeanors. You are of course not the exact same person at work as you are elsewhere. But the fact is, I sometimes write about sex, on the internet and elsewhere (hell, I’ve been naked in the New York Times), and any job that would fire me for doing so is a job I do not want– or at least one in which I would not last very long.

Point: over-reachingly sex-negative work environments make me super pissed. Yikes.

Sid:
yeah
i find it sort of strange that i am pretty comfortable with the fact that a lot of super personal shit i’ve written is on the internet somewhere

yeah
i’m usually pretty okay with it too
but something about it is really unsettling
in the abstract
it can create really weird dynamics
in the real world

for sure
like every once in a while someone i know
but like, am not super tight with
will sort of sheepishly be like
hey
i read something of yourss
and it was really beautiful/moving/intense/familiar or whatever
and it makes me feel good but it is also super weird

yeah

now i have a really intense urge to blog this conversation
OH NO

hahahahahaha
the singularity
we have reached it
abandon ship

are we the rats
or the captains
or the orchestra

who knows

i’m going to blog this
if that’s cool

totally

it’s weird how much of what i write is about or entangled with a feeling of guilt about not writing
like, it makes me feel a little better to post something dumb, just because there are some words there that weren’t before
so, dumb things happen sometimes, oops.

no i get it
feeling bad about not writing
can be super overwhelming
so then you either don’t write
or write about how you can’t write
or write something totally silly / irrelevant

exactly

Note: some 4th-related delight currently up on http://ghostmodernism.tumblr.com/.

More images from 328 here on flickr.

Even now I see myself a child– my small hands empty,
my teeth coated in the acid of panic.

I see in the tender skin beside my eyes the look of a woman
who has made her life harder than it ever was.

Cruel words crawl out of my mouth, drill into the cheekbones of loved ones,
worm inside the meat of confidence; I hail myself a constant attack

When did it become my way of addressing the world,
the harsh voice I used against my mother?

—

from an unsent letter, dated January 22, 2008, Paris:

[...] I’ve been thinking lately about how, for me, memory is (usually, sometimes, often) a function of shame– or feeling guilt, I’m unsure. But yeah, this has been troubling me. I have a hard time sleeping nights, and staying out of bed all day. I’m writing this in bed at 5 pm, Paris time. It’s beautiful outside and I’ll make it there eventually, but right now I’m exhausted and want nothing more than to be slowfucked in a bathtub.

Paris is an interesting city.

Strange to see lively streets covered in semi-recognizable tongues at 4 in the morning.
I wish I could draw the whole city for you, covered in memory and dog shit and my bad french and drunk musicians and my shaking hands’ failed writing.

Being so displaced, it is difficult to ["acknowledge" is crossed out] comprehend the reality of past eras of my life. Not only: was I really so cruel, or young, or unaware? but also: were those people, whom I loved so hard or fought so bitterly, were they true? did they happen, or was that a book I read?

You don’t ever get to be a book I read, promise. I’m falling asleep with these pages beside me, nearing on my pillows and my arms. The sheets here are starch white, but one wall is blue and my blankets too–and orange and maroon.

I sometimes feel like I’m squatting outside some small and broken building, and I know there is something beautiful and true inside, that will cure my loneliness but not my insanity, or my restlessness but not my loneliness, or something equally vague, but I’m too afraid to look in. Or worse? too lazy, weak, tired, stupid. But sometimes that simile is useless and I just want someone to understand some small fraction of what I maybe mean, which is hard even when you use the same dictionary. But I think you understand me sometimes, and I think sometimes I understand you. Then again, I’m always hungry, because I have forgotten so much. [“I hope” is crossed out] I think sometimes–we can be two pitchers, pouring back and forth, empty and full, and neither, and both.

—

It’s sort of embarrassing to me, I guess, how much of all the words I’ve been sifting through have been about the way I use men (and the occasional women) to feed my ego, or as some kind of comfort, some kind of levee. The word “bed” appears many times.

my full bed not full
cries across town
begging to be fed

a night of two bodies sleeping
this is what this bed was made for
and what joy is there
like that of serving one’s purpose?

Something in a similar vein, a little more recent:

When I hear that someone I know has died, there is the urge to cry, of course, to sob snottily in the fetal position in my bed, to wallow in it. This is, in part, of course because I am trying to convince myself that death is real. And then there is the part of me that just wants to fuck. Wants to find the body of someone I care about and cling to it, to bring myself as close to someone else as physics will allow, to grind my body into another’s, the body of someone I would kill for, and breathe and sweat and scream and prove that I am somehow still living.

A girl I’d known since I was maybe five years old, a girl four days younger than me, died of a heart attack last week. My heart goes out to her friends and family.

The world is a strange place.

I will confess to a fantasy in which everything somehow becomes easy: I make things, and everything else simply falls into place. Somehow the art itself does not turn on me, vicious, burdensome. How often I have thought, ‘if I had nothing to do but art, how amazing it would be.’ [What have I been doing these past few months? Unemployed and interstitial, art has been, aside from survival, my only job. And what have I done?] But, hell, I’ve got time.

Sometimes I dream about exhausted women, cooking dinner with red hands, unwritten novels plump hanging in them like rotten fruit. To plead that life gets in the way of art, that is to step on their necks, these women, these women.

I feel myself in the kind of place where I think: WHAT IF I have cancer of the throat and don’t know yet, I am dying right now– obviously this takes some time, but not that much time– what would I be doing differently? I would quit my job, try to write, feel torn about where to spend my time and who to spend it with.

Sometimes my own self-indulgent nature horrifies me. What, I think, have I built a personality around first-world problems, promiscuous behavior, and mediocre art? I must learn to forgive myself, because the oscillation between pettiness and shame yields little. Anyway.

An unsent postcard. On one side is printed a drawing of Nabokov’s childhood home in St. Petersburg. on the other, written in blue ink:

Nabokov’s youthful house:

Pencils and glasses underglass

Hand-drawn butterflies

the original wood paneling

two stained glass windows

on the stairs

Not far from where Akhmatova

lived, waited for her men

who never came back

The weather in Russia is miserable

and they sell ice cream

on every street.