Queen of Earth + Persona + the Slender Man Trials + proxies/doppelgangers + STIMing + triangles + Elena Ferrante + The Shining + the trailer (and only for the trailer!) for The Holy Mountain + Philip Roth + Rapid Eye Movement Therapy = Epic Thinkpiece
Archive for the ‘Lists’ Category
Equations
August 26, 2015The Living Museum
August 4, 2015Last summer, a friend and I went to visit the Living Museum, a decrepit building used as permanent art studios for current and former residents of Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens. Anyone can go visit, but you have to call for an appointment beforehand, so the doctor knows you’re coming, but when we got there, the doctor––who had a German name––seemed very blase about our presence. I wondered if I weren’t in my own personal version of Don’t Look in the Basement. There were a few vacant-eyed smokers sitting in an entryway and a cat slinking about; big fans moved the sweltering air around the room in whorls. Most of the art was weird and mediocre––outsider art, in my opinion, is so much more often miss than hit––but we found a very unexpected way to amuse ourselves: upstairs were a few empty studios and a number of file cabinets full of medical records and patient journals. Naturally we flipped through some, and each took a patient log home with us. Mine is the “work order log” of a James M. (patient confidentiality, people) who used this notebook from late May to early June of 1991. His handwriting is decent but not frighteningly neat like a serial killer’s, which is a good sign. On May 23, 1991, his notes from the “community” meeting were as follows:
(1) 9:20 Everybody sleeping. Wake up guys!
(2) M. wants to be transferred to another ward because he can’t even have beer on the MICA ward.
(3) L. wants to be transferred to a coed ward for sex.
(4) B: explains purpose of MICA.
(5) Discussion of coed vs. male wards.
(6) A. wants to go to a “nice ward” in building 73.
(7) Discussion of sociopathy
(8) A. about d/c plans, about relapse.
From a quick flip-through, it appears that the men had a number of discussions about sociopathy those three weeks.
Below, one of the funnier, if not finer, pieces of art at the Museum.
Alas!
Old Uzbek Words for Crying; Programming Note
July 1, 2015In Old Uzbek, there are ONE HUNDRED words for crying! Here are some:
Wanting to cry and not being able to
Being caused to sob by something
Loudly crying like thunder in the clouds
In gasps
Weeping inwardly or secretly
Ceaselessly in a high voice
In hiccups
While uttering the sound “hay hay”
I’ll be gone for a bit because I’m going on my HONEYMOON. Peace out suckers!
My Favorite Blurbs
June 28, 2015My most favorite reviews of my writing:
“Intelligent but grim” ~ Publishers’ Weekly
“Surprisingly non-douchey” ~AL, The New Yorker
What’s in a Name?
June 22, 2015The story of a small portion of my life is included in a book that is scheduled to come out in the next year or so (I think.) When I wrote it, I used my real name, with the understanding that the editor would replace it with a pseudonym later on. So when I got the chapter back for proof, I saw that my name was… Frances. Frances! I was on the one hand a bit disturbed, because to me Frances sounds dowdy, but on the other hand enormously flattered, because I thought immediately of course of the way-ahead-of-her-time Frances Farmer, and who doesn’t want to be compared with a woman who wrote an essay at age seventeen titled “God Dies?” I mean, honestly. So maybe rather than dowdy, the editor envisioned me as a moody beauty? Below are a few other cool ladies named Frances, the first one named after the aforementioned cool lady named Frances.
Frances Bean Cobain
Frances of Rome, Italian Saint and mystic (again, just. like. me.) who wanted to be a nun at eleven but whose parents forced her to marry at twelve. She had a good marriage, founded a religious order, and turned her home into a hospital during a time of war, among other good deeds.
a whole bunch of duchesses and countesses
Frances “Scotty” Fitzgerald, only child of F. Scott and Zelda, poor thing
Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of The Secret Garden, which was porn for smart little girls like me
Frances “Franny” Glass (J. D. Salinger character)
Frances “Baby” Housman (“Nobody puts Baby in the corner!”)
There are a few more who look like they’d be worth mentioning, but I’m on a train while writing this and getting a little naush.
Lottery Winnings
May 6, 2015A few years ago, we got lottery tickets at work as Christmas gifts, and I was really convinced for a bit there that I Was going to win the lottery. Herewith, what I planned to do with my earnings (and my former coworker’s list, because #2 is really funny):
1. Donate to the Help WOD Quit His Job fund.
2. Pay off my student loan –– in one fell swoop
3. Dry clean all my fancy clothes
4. Buy tickets for upcoming trips I would like to take –– to Utah in January and Miami in February (other locations tbd)
5. Get a cleaning lady to come to my house on the regs
6. Pay the $15 I owe to my roommate for spotting me for laundry one day
7. Buy a new apartment, maybe?
8. Take boyfriend to India or something –– on a trip to some place he’d like to go
9. Get all my random pictures framed
10. Buy this rug
WOD’s list:
1. Charitable donation to ID, obvi.
2. Quit my job and buy 2 bulldogs, named Steve McQueen and Ted, and hang out with them like all goddamn day.
3. Buy a sweet-ass house in some place that isn’t NY. Maybe Cali or Texas. Said house will have a pool and a bowling alley and a movie theater. Unless that gets too expensive. So maybe it won’t have all that stuff.
4. A metric shit-ton of records.
A List, by Ludwig Wittgenstein
April 6, 2015“What do I know about God and the purpose of life?”
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.
I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless.
I can only make myself independent of the world––and so in a certain sense master it–-by renouncing any influence on happenings.
Snail Mail Letters I’ve Written and Sent in the Past Month
March 30, 20151. To Fran Lebowitz, via her speaking agency, asking if she’d consider chaffeuring me and my husband from our wedding ceremony to the reception in her vintage checkered cab
2. Suzanne Lipschutz, to see if she’d be willing to sell one of her armadillo lamps now that she is downsizing.
3. Shannon Conley, a convert to Islam who was arrested trying to go to Syria to join ISIS, to see if she’d let me interview her
4. Netflix, to apologize for sending a movie back so late (because I lost it)
5. Annie Dillard’s agent, in hopes that he will inform me when she has a new book coming out
6. Author Joanne Greenberg, just to say ‘sup
In other news, I’m having this problem in which the cover of this biography I’m reading of Wittgenstein looks a lot (to me) like Catherine Keener’s portrait of Kramer from Seinfeld. And so I giggle whenever I open the book, but Wittgenstein is NO LAUGHING MATTER.
THE KRAMER
Reasons Why I Think Meghan Daum and I Could Be Friends
March 16, 2015For the record, this list is a FRACTION of the length it could have been, based solely on reading The Unspeakable.
1. We both pepper our speech with Yiddishisms
2. We both would like to live at Downton Abbey (although are slightly worried we’d be awkward around the servants)
3. We both eat to live, rather than live to eat
4. We both have an anti-sentimental streak that occasionally borders on political incorrectness
5. We both believe that “excellence comes not from overcoming limitations but from embracing them.”
6. We both immediately give up when we find something difficult (and are embarrassed about this habit)
7. We both desired to do the Bohemian NYC struggling writer thing even though we knew it was a cliche
8. We both dated mostly to “collect experiences”
9. We are both mildly disdainful of Lori Gottlieb
10. Neither of us ever learned how to properly chop an onion
The “Lame-stream Media”
February 24, 2015ID:
AL: I just threw up on this email.
ID: You’ve been doing it wrong this whole time. And you know what that means? Your love is a MISTAKE.
AL: I’ve been caressing at 1.33 inches per second! I feel like such a failure.
ID: Rightly so! Other things you are doing incorrectly: tying your shoes, making pasta, playing rock-paper-scissors. I could go on, but I don’t have all afternoon.
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