I know Jean-Dominique Bauby in the film version (but NOT the book version!) of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly says people who talk about their dreams are “bores,” but I just had to share with you: last night in my dream I was shopping at a bodega, and there were two women there wearing full burkas, and I told them how lucky I thought they were.
Goodnight.
The summer when I was twenty, I lived in a big old mansion on Riverside Drive in New York, in a room I had rented out from a friend. I was remarkably cut off from everything in the beginning of that season; the house’s thick walls and old carpeting were relics of a dead gilded age, and moving from that environment into the “real world” made me feel like a human prolepsis, not to mention I had lost my cell phone and broken my computer and had no television and very few people were living in the building at the time. My one source of entertainment for these particular three weeks was a) Tropic of Cancer and b) a stray CD given to this friend of mine by another friend’s boyfriend, who had very eclectic taste in music and went on to meet with some great success as the front man of a cheery, ironically (?) preppy indie band.
I can only remember two songs on the CD. One was 4 by Aphex Twin, and the other was a song by Kate Bush, the title of which I never knew UNTIL yesterday, when I managed to find it by Googling what I what was able to discern from the lyrics as “I don’t know why I’m crying” (a feat, if any of you listen to Kate Bush.) Though much of Kate Bush’s library is available on iTunes, this particular song, “Suspended in Gaffa,” is not. It is discordant and odd and haunting and energetic all at the same time. The lyrics are eerie…definitely contain some Biblical allusions that were always beyond me, or I’ve forgotten (aside from the camel and the eye and fitting through it thing. That one I got.) Below is the link. Enjoy!
“It Is So Nice For Me That You Are a Stranger Now”
“Lullaby for Marlon Brando”
“Thoughts Upon Watching Reruns of Sex dnd the City”
“This Can Be the Piece That Suffers”
“My Laundry List”
“The Teaspoon and Co.”
“What They Told Me About You Is True”
“Cemetery Drive-Bys”
“The Nonexistent Book”
“Tiny Baroque Villages”
“Overwhelming Radiation”
“Things I’ve Lost to Water”
“Template”
“Where Have You Gone, Madame Bovary?”
“Belvedere Palace, Circa Now”
“Bourgeoisie Horror”
“Ten Thousand Reasons Why I Hate the Continent of Africa In No Particular Order”
Audrey Hepburn in Charade
(from Charade, 1963, starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant)
I’m trying out a new technique to help me fall asleep. It’s called Reading Jung. So far, it’s working out pretty well.
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