The Blue Room

Went to Powell’s for the first time since elementary school yesterday; (with Julien, almost a floor for military history - you can imagine) It was beautiful etc., etc. and I spent almost twice the maximum I had mentally allowed myself. (“Mentally” implies a little more responsibility on my part than there actually was: also almost twice the amount I transferred to my checking account from savings.) Over the course of my visit, I picked up and put back many times more volumes than I actually took home in the end… my decisions weren’t too difficult when I reminded myself that I really shouldn’t waste the trip by purchasing...

...anything I could find in Olympia.
Goodbye, James Baldwin

…or anything I might never actually make myself read.
Au revoir, Paradise Lost

…or anything by/about an author of whose work I already have plenty.
Maybe later, weird book about Sylvia Plath that includes some creepily crude paper-doll looking… sketches? watercolors? I didn’t look too long.

…or anything strangely comforting, but inexcusably uncool.
Not in public, MLA Handbook*

…or anything interesting and probably helpful but that everyone else enrolled in “Monstrous Possibility” would be too good for, thus turning it into a vaguely shameful secret.
Ciao, dictionary of literary criticism or theory or something terms*

So my final armful was composed of some small press publications, The Divine Comedy^, and a collection of work by contemporary Northwest poets. The other half§ of my total purchase was a first edition of William Stafford poetry. Part of me knows that trying to fill the hole left by the unattainable Places Where There Aren’t Any People is unhealthy, but the bigger part of me took the owl on the cover as a sign we were each other’s destiny.

The only book I have finished so far (I write that as though it is not also the only book I have started so far) is Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz. With the wall of spines and yellow papered/red inked employee recommendations in front of me, shouting at me in colors and clamoring for attention, I could only “flip through it” so well. But it struck me as a combination of two of my favorite things I have ever read ever ever: It seemed to have the Jose Saramago’s perspective in All the Names, which pushes a loving glow out of his portrait of loneliness and a tedious job with its menial work (and the loneliness of menial work, and the menial work of being lonely) and suspends it in this sort of golden allegorical wisdom. On the other hand, the language seemed stark and simple and played with, à la Will “Life is a word game”© Eno – with all the modern existential angst that kind of writing implies.

It actually did have the elements I predicted, but at Lutz’s hand they were weaker. He seemed kind of like a watered down Rick Moody (as in, it had gross physical stuff that was less vividly/musically described than Moody, but was also less gratuitous/meaningless than Palahniukª) The bored, fatalistic sex between strangers that pervaded throughout sort of reminded me of Miranda July’s similarly lustless Nobody Belongs Here More than You. I was certainly right about the Eno-ish wordplay, but taking common language and presenting it in a new way is much more important when the new way hits on a tender, shared nerve and becomes what language is at its best: something we all have preciously in common. Unfortunately for Lutz, he seems to think that the universal human condition is lovelessness, bad skin, a boring job, feeling somehow cosmically wronged by living with as many neighbors as apartment complexes provide and resignation, resignation, resignation. It’s not a bad book – it’s just that if Gary invited me to be his friend I would have to decline. Certain parts I did enjoy, sometimes for their accuracy and occasionally for their prettiness, rarely for their truth.

Accuracy: an articulation of my shy person’s distrust of non-shy people:
“People driven from themselves are always the ones you see the most of. They make themselves aggressively public.”

Prettiness: girls’ names, violet ink, the word “dwell”
“The name of the checkout girl would get printed in pale-violet ink at the bottom of the receipt. The receipts accumulated in my pocket. I would reach into it for my keys and feel the girls feel the sudden extra weight on themselves. People could tell when they were being dwelled upon.”

Truth: Yes?
“I kept my mouth closed and my lips still while I played everything wrong by heart.”

Well there it is. I’m hella blogging. Writing about reading semi-publicly. Hold my hand, Tara? Solidarity buddy? The last five weeks of my spring quarter are going to involve intensive peer review of my work, so I’m writing away and not even reminding myself how few people read this. I’m trying to be braver by 20. Trying not to keep my mouth closed and my lips still while I play everything wrong by heart.

The End.

(I think the excessive and compulsive nature of my footnote employment pushes it over the line from "quirky" into "disordered" territory.)

*Also categorized under the equally excluding, Anything I Could Ask My Dad to Buy for Me

^I remember my Paradise Lost reasoning too… but A) It is more readable B) It was a used, cheap hardcover in pretty good condition. And, last but least least, C) a painfully shy, directionless and possibly depressed medical student (whose parents were tearfully begging him to remain that third item) at a Christmas party made an effort to talk to me next to the hors d'oeuvres precisely because he knew from those same beggar parents that I was an English-ish major, as he was becoming increasingly interested in the subject. Apparently he was reading Shakespeare and Dante’s Inferno (“Oh, is that all?” Med students, man…) He liked my wishbone necklace and would later tell his parents he thought I was “stunning”. Had I ever been described as such previously, or would I ever be described as such in the future, I’d acknowledge that he had probably been looking at me through some kind of alcohol goggles and disregard it. But I never have and I probably never will, so I am acknowledging the goggles but keeping the compliment and reading Dante’s Inferno to have one thing besides that party in common with Ben, who made me feel like not an awkward blushing blob for a little while.

§In weight and in cost

© A line from one of his plays, The Flu Season

ª You know it’s true.