“What is nothing?” I ask.
“Nothing is when you are given a very small portion of ice cream by an adult, and you look at the plate and at the adult and you ask for more and the adult says you have a huge portion and you say, ‘That’s it? That’s nothing.’ And that is nothing,” says Lulu.
Hey Willy, See the Pyramids by Maira Kalman
Walking down 57th Street, passing some of the fanciest stores in New York City, I see an old married couple. The wife is peering in the windows at David Yurman.
Wife: I think it would be fun, don’t you?
Husband: I don’t have a choice. Whatever you like, I like.
Wife: WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU DON’T––
Husband: WHATEVER YOU LIKE, I LIKE.
Do you ever read something or hear some story or encounter something and think to yourself, “Ah, my people are out there!”? Kind of how I felt discovering Tony Hoagland.
Hard Rain
After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood: there’s nothing
we can’t pluck the stinger from,
nothing we can’t turn into a soft-drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people
quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.
“You can’t keep beating yourself up, Billy,”
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,
“about all those people you killed—
You just have to be the best person you can be,
one day at a time—”
And everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.
Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood—
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
Signed, America.
I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,
but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth—
whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.
Sorry! I want to use this material elsewhere!
Okay so I know Christopher Hitchens made a fairly compelling case against Mother Teresa, but I really do like this anecdote about her and I feel the same:
Once, on New Year’s Eve, a reporter asked Mother (now Saint) Teresa of Calcutta, “If you could change one thing in the world this New Year, what would it be?” Her reply: “myself.”
Amen, Teresa, Amen. Gmar chatima tova, everyone!
Amended for absence of any doubt: If I could change anything about the world this year it would be myself, NOT Mother/Saint Teresa.
I’ve been wanting for ages to make a prototype for a cover of my magazine, Ruin Porn, which will be a high-end glossy for those of us who love abandoned buildings, architectural decay, and eerie interiors. Unfortunately for us all, my Photoshop skills are zilch. So I’ve done this, which is kiiiinda close but a) the font of the contents isn’t perfect and b) I want the background to be Baker-Miller/Millennial Pink or another shade of pink TBD, which feels like it SHOULD be easy to accomplish but is… not.
By the way if anyone wants to team up with me and make this magazine, I would toooootally do it. I’m leaning toward it being a biannual journal but I’ll sign on for a quarterly if my financial backers absolutely insist.
By the way, in case you can’t read it, the features in this issue are: The Abandoned Villas of Italy by Photographer Thomas Jorian, The Stalkers of Pripyat, Ukraine, and A Visit to Poveglio Island.
A few years ago, I wrote about how Tennessee Williams’s brother refused to honor his last wish to be buried at sea. This week, while reading Assia Wevill’s biography, I learned that Ted Hughes also refused to honor her wish to be buried in a small country cemetery in England, and for her epitaph to read, “Here lies a lover of unreason and an exile.” But of course Hughes the SCOUNDREL had her cremated. Okay, so he did apparently spread them in a churchyard in Kent somewhere, but that isn’t good enough! Since there is no body to be recovered here, I suggest we erect a gravestone as a memorial. If I were a conceptual artist I would do this.
I know it’s cliched to hate Ted Hughes but I do, I really do.
This post brought to you by someone who one night this week downed a glass of port and cried copiously about the untimely end of Shura Wevill-Hughes.
“War and violence, it has been said, are as old as mankind. The vision of peace is perhaps as old as civilization. Since the most ancient times, as techniques of mass killing have mounted from the sling and the spear to the cannon, Gatling gun and the supersonic missiles outfitted to kill whole cities, there have been voices counseling an alternative way. These are the voices of the pacifist conscience––seldom heeded, yet perennially posing a choice for each generation. Historically, it was usually in turbulent times that men’s thoughts turned most to peace, and such a time is the present.
“The terms in which the choice is set before us today are by no means simple and easy. The use of violence in the resolution of differences has implications which were never more frightening. Total destruction is now a practical possibility. We have two objects: we must find adequate ways of making peace and we must learn to achieve social goals without resorting to violence.”
~The Pacifist Conscience by Peter Mayer
I’m having one of those days when I’m obsessing over the fact that everyone seems so careless and self-centered––and I have those days a lot, which says more about me than it does about people––so I keep trying to do the whole “this is water” thing. You know, the David Foster Wallace speech? Where he talks about how you shouldn’t assume people acting like dicks are dicks because they could be dealing with something way worse than you are? Herewith, a (long) bit of the stuff I’m talking about:
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.
But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
So of course, today while I was trying to convince myself not to burn down the whole damn thing and doing my “this is water” TM mantra thing, all of a sudden it occurred to me: what if some of these people really are just dicks? Or what if they’re not, they’re just normal people, but their lives are actually easier than mine and therefore they should be all “this is water”-ing me? Am I still supposed to give everyone a pass for not holding the door of the bodega open for me while I try to wheel out my mammoth baby buggy with my toddler yelling inside MOMMY, MELON and my baby strapped to my chest starting to wake up and root around to suction on to me like a hungry barnacle? Or is that millennial on her iPhone really just a lazy POS who didn’t see me struggling because she was texting about Kylie Kardashian’s lip balm?
I have an idea for the dystopic disruptors out there (I know there are a lot of you!): make some kind of program or app or something, that gives everyone a privilege rating, so that if you come into contact with someone who treats you poorly, you can just look up their number (or see it in your eyeballs or whatever Google is up to these days) and then you’ll know if you should forgive them or street fight them (or, let’s be real, just curse them in your mind).
In the words of Ken Jennings: BOOM, I just made a Black Mirror.
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