Back a few years ago, I had an awesome idea for stationery that was designed like Google except it was called Pmail (Paper Mail) instead of Gmail. Seriously, genius! I’ve seen things kind of like it but nothing so on-the-nose as this. Here’s the prototype:
Thanks to LB for input and her bro CR for design.
I, ____, heretofore referred to as CORRESPONDENT, have agreed to enter into a written correspondent with Itinerant Daughter, heretofore known as ID. Upon signing this contract, CORRESPONDENT agrees to the following stipulations:
3A. CORRESPONDENT agrees not to communicate displeasure with ID via silence or refusal to engage to written correspondence. CORRESPONDENT can only opt out of relationship and written engagement via a clear message (medium is the choice of CORRESPONDENT) indicating such.
In turn, ID agrees:
Signed and dated:
_______________ _________________
CORRESPONDENT ID
A little while ago, I actually started to read The Comments. Never for anything I write, ever, and admittedly sometimes I do it even if I know it will be an exercise in nurturing and then suppressing irritation, but a few times, the practice has yielded pretty awesome results. Once, I found a nun who lives in a cemetery, once, a secret Shaker community, and now, an international conspiracy mastermind!
This genius commented on a New York Times article, which is about a mixologist who basically made up a provenance for a cocktail. He claims to have… oh well, you’ll see:
Bill In The Desert La Quinta 16 hours ago
Dummy. You never reveal such a thing.
I created a myth and have seen it spread around the world. Sorry, but I will not reveal enough to identify it. However, it involved naming something. And, I tied it into the Latin version of an ancient myth. In the years since 1979, I have succeeded in getting it in print in academic publications as well as special interest magazines, newspapers and club newsletters. It is now buried in the archives of the Vatican library. Only six people are in on the whole hoax and I will never reveal the truth. I love it when it comes up in conversation and especially when a stranger has used the name and even cites the sources I planted.
Please tell me this is somehow related to the Jesus’s wife papyrus!
One of the funniest things I saw in one of the many museums we visited in our time away: this cheeky butt-grabbing angel in Lucas van Leyden’s triptych “The Last Judgment.”
Lower left hand corner (your left)
Close-up!
Sorry, sorry, sorry, I KNOW, but I was on vacation! And I’m sure there are some things I need to recount from that, but I’m about to hit the hay, so I figured I’d recycle a topic I meant to bring up a while back: dreaming! I think thinking about dreams is coming back into fashion again; in fact, I was semi-recently interviewed by a writer who is working on a book about the science of dreams. Does this mean the taboo against telling other people about your dreams will soon end?! Pity, because my dreams have gotten really boring in the past three years or so. Maybe this means I’m content? The horror!
Anyway, I was reminded of the dream thing because I stumbled across an old email exchange with my friend KC, in which we discussed starting a blog or something (?) in which we published people’s dreams. We even had a pitch and our own email address! I don’t remember the passwords, but I believe the address was dreamsdreamersdream@gmail.com. Catchy, no?
Turns out, someone at the New Yorker thought this was ripe for satire. The opening rejection note:
Dear Mr. Smith,
A dream in which you “do something nasty with a family member”—and particularly a “distant cousin,” which, frankly, we hear about all the time—in no way merits inclusion in our magazine, no matter how arousing you may have found it.
Please see the Frequently Recorded Dreams page on our Web site to determine whether your dream is worthy of submission.
Sincerely,
Donald Wembly
Submissions Editor
Dreams Quarterly
American Academy of Dreams
Perhaps even funnier than that, there IS actually an academic publication dedicated to the study of dreams, called Dreaming, published by the International Association for the Study of Dreams. I would consider becoming a research psychologist just to join the IASD!
Almost a year ago, I interviewed a woman who had spent fourteen years living as an Amish person in an Amish community in Ohio; when she left, she began painting scenes from her time there. The results were a little unpolished, a little creepy (inexplicably, because the scenes were very bucolic), and yet utterly beguiling. They reminded me of the work of Annie Pootoogook, a Canadian Inuit artist whose paintings of modern First Nations life (domestic abuse, food shopping, watching Dr. Phil–no accounting for taste) ring similar bells.
Pootoogook drowned tragically last month at the age of forty-seven. Some salient facts: her mother was an artist, and Pootoogook met with some early career success (a prestigious show at Documenta 12, a hefty grant). After her death, a Canadian police officer made heinous comments about Inuit peoples (basically, they prefer to drink rather than contribute so why should we investigate her death?) on an online message board. I hope he was fired. You can learn more about Pootogook here (among other places). I considered writing about her for a moment, but then I realized I didn’t have much to say other than “more people should know about her.”
Do you remember that baby naming book from the eighties and nineties (they released updated editions because it was quite popular) called Beyond Jennifer and Jason? I was obsessed with it when I was a kid; whenever someone we knew was pregnant and they’d whip out that book, I’d get all excited. I don’t know, I just like names! Anyway, a few years ago I nabbed an old copy––I don’t remember how, either from a box of free books on the street or I stole it from someone––and I kept it around as a kind of funny gag and also if I needed help creating a pseudonym. The other day I idly took it off the shelf and was flipping through it, and then my husband saw it (what the fuck is this?!) and was looking through later, and came across a section called “Wimpy Names.” So already this is feeling embarrassingly Dated, because can you imagine an author including that in a name book now? But it gets better. There’s a subsection of Wimpy Names that reads: “A wimpy name does not necessarily a wimpy boy make…. Maybe these guys become supermacho in reaction to their anemic names, or maybe they would have overdeveloped biceps even if their names were Brawley or Flint. Here, a list of famous tough guys with anything but tough names.” And it goes on to list Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charlton Heston, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvester Stallone, and, among others,… Bruce Jenner.
I know it’s kind of obvious but I love the aesthetic of Bar Luce. I’m going to Milan in a few weeks and maybe I’ll the guts to steal me a little one of these!
Shit, it’s been a while. Since I last posted, Elena Ferrante’s been unmasked, Kim Kardashian’s been robbed, and Brangelina has been pronounced dead on arrival (little airplane joke there). When I came to look at the date of my last post just now, I felt so guilty that I decided I simply must put something up now. But the problem is I don’t have a ton to say. Well, here’s one thing: everyone knows I’m something of a contrarian, right? Maybe this was a personality trait that excited me in the past, but in recent years, it’s proven more annoying than anything else. If only I could get on board the zeitgeist train, I could write anodyne personal essays about ending the stigma (surrounding anything) and not worry that I’m harsh!
I don’t know if that’s going to happen anytime soon, though. In the meantime, I’ll just have to find a little joy in reading negative reviews of books everyone else in the world adored. Case in point: a review of When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanathi in the London Review of Books. WBBA was gushed over by basically every literary critic and human in the United States, but writer Thomas Laqueur was meh on the whole thing.
“It’s time to confess the obvious: I wasn’t deeply moved by this book. But it isn’t easy to explain why. the first thing that comes to mind is that I find the author pompous, and, whether a true or a faux naif, egomaniacally self-conscious in his search for meaning… A larger problem is that Kalanathi isn’t very good at writing. Having done so little of it, why should he be? As Julian Barnes wrote in his introduction to Daudet’s memoir, dying doesn’t make someone a better writer, or a worse one for that matter.”
This made a lot of sense to me because of my longstanding aversion to our immediate embrace of suffering narrators (because pain doesn’t make you smarter, necessarily, but it does mean people feel less justified in critiquing you, even when that criticism is deserved, which results in a lot of thoughtless applause). But it also reminded me of the extended period of time I spent in my mid-twenties working with someone terminally ill (who is now deceased), I was always half-anticipating a big life epiphany, courtesy of the Sick Person, every day, but most of the time it was just the usual drudgery and the Sick Person remained their flawed, human self, right up to the very end.
I’ve been meaning to post this photo for a long time. Inside of a phone booth, on the walk from my house to our synagogue, is written an ad for a prostitute I have no doubt is very popular. Who is she? SLIGHTLY SAUCY SARA. Because for obvious reasons, we like our whores only slightly saucy.
