Perhaps the cinnamon shop was the only mystery left in this world

We'll just pause the second crash for a moment to go back and think about the old woman who crashed into the big van earlier on. She's crashed into a van, she's waved away some ladies in white coats, but what no one knows, other than us, is that this is the last day of her life. And yet she's not going to play a bigger role in this novel than that, she's just going to float in the water, just like the novel's only little log. All she does is wave off some ladies n white coats and then: disappears from the story, which is quite symbolic, really, given that the day we meet her, this day, is the day that she dies. So what about this old lady? What about this old lady's entire life? What about the fact that she's taught French grammar at the University of Bergen ever since she got her degree, that she likes coffee with brown sugar, that she doesn't have children, that she's sharper than most people and that her specialty is the French imparfait tense, which can be translated as the "past continuous," and that she'll shortly have a fatal heart attack in a parking lot, possibly triggered by the stress of crashing into another car, and thus, forever, pass into the passé simple, the "simple past" tense? And what about what she was doing early this morning, not knowing that it would be the last time she's do it, those little, everyday things, like drying herself with a hand towel? What about the fact that the old lady, as she walked to her car to drive into town and find a lot that was slightly out of the way, which was where she was heading when she turned onto the road and hit a reversing van, what about the fact that she was thinking about something she'd dreamed during the night, something very strange: that she was at home in Ørsta and that is was December and dark and there was snow everywhere. And that she walked down the small pedestrian street with shops on either side, and everything was closed and there were Christmas stars in all the windows and plastic spruce garlands with yellow and red lights strung between the shops on either side. And these crisscrossed the street with their yellow and red lights as far as the eye could see, and she passed a shop she'd never noticed before, a small green storefront squeezed between the other stores, with a sign that said CINNAMON SHOP. And she went over to the window and looked in and saw that it was true, there was cinnamon everywhere. Cinnamon in small glass bottles in the window, cinnamon in small glass bottles and small paper bags on the shelves behind the counter. Cinnamon in kilo bags. Loose-weight cinnamon under the glass counter. How, she thought, does a shop like this survive? Don't people buy cinnamon in the supermarket? Where they can buy whatever else they might need, cookies, coffee, and bread, she thought in her dream as she stood in front of the window. How much cinnamon would you need in different forms and weights to make you go to the cinnamon shop to buy it? This is what the old lady was pondering, very much awake now as she headed to her car for her last drive in this life. What does one say, she wondered as she pulled her car keys out of her pocket, when one goes into a cinnamon shop? I'd like some cinnamon, please? Isn't that obvious? Or should you say: Do you have any cinnamon? Not, that would make a mockery of the cinnamon shop. The person standing behind the counter would give you a look that clearly said: Idiot. This is a cinnamon shop: of course we have cinnamon! Perhaps, for that reason, it was a silent shop, where there was no need to say anything other than please and thank you, which could be alternated, depending on which transaction was being made (handing over money) (handing over cinnamon) (accepting money) (accepting cinnamon)? The old woman didn't know, but she thought about the feeling she'd had in her dream as she walked away from the cinnamon shop that stood alone in the middle of the pedestrian street, in the December dark one evening in a dream, after closing time, with Christmas stars shining in every direction, and the cinnamon shop's green wooden facade gently illuminated by all the stars: perhaps the cinnamon shop was the only mystery left in this world, and thank goodness for that, thank goodness for the cinnamon shop, thank goodness that it was there, squeezed in between the multitude of other consumer stores, and only sold the one thing, cinnamon, and was so baffling, so utterly baffling, and yet at the same time totally banal and simple and obvious in its existence.

Yes, what about that? What about the fact that the old lady was thinking about all this before she died? And, taking a wider perspective, what about the role that such dreams play when you're going to die? What kind of existence could one say they'd had? They've existed, because they've been in someone's head. But they've never been shared with anyone else. They've existed, they were vibrant and vivid in their existence. What happens to the dreams on's had when one forgets them the minute after one's woken? What happens to the dreams one's had and never told to anyone because one dies before one gets the chance? Did they fly out of her, did she forget? Did they fly out of her like small butterflies when her heart crashed, when all that remained of her was a dream about an absurd cinnamon shop, something invisible that disappeared out of her body, along with herself? Sadly, we will never know the answer to these questions.

— from Wait, Blink, by Gunnhild Øyehaug

Who wants to fall? So much better to climb into love.

There's a review I read over a year ago about a book I'd never heard of that struck a chord. It had taken months from the time I'd dipped in a tentative toe to being fully immersed in online dating and recognizing its erotic potential. According to the LA Review of Books, Allegra Huston's Say My Name was about

a woman's emotional and physical reawakening after half a lifetime trapped within both a stale marriage and the limits of her own perception about who she is and what she ought to be.

So, relatable.

It's been retitled as A Stolen Summer; I don't understand the reason for the change — neither title is particularly fitting or evocative.

I read it in one sitting. Part of me wants to justify my guilty feeling of indulgence in this book. On some level I am dismissive of this novel — both the story and the manner of its telling. It's a love affair between a 48-year-old woman and the 29-year-old son of an old friend.

Here, Huston describes How To Write a Sex Scene, and demonstrates some smarts and humour about it. (There's also an excerpt.)

Sex is one of the great motivating factors of life on earth. Yet in the past, women writers couldn't describe it frankly without being considered "loose." (Some didn't mind, but they lived in Paris.) Men didn't dare write good sex out of fear that they might out themselves as being not very good at it. And thus the mark of quality literature became, not great sex scenes, but scenes of morose men drinking in bars.

The truth is: I wholly enjoyed the evening I spent with this book. Beyond a doubt it was compelling, and despite some quibbles, it's given me a great deal to think about. While I don't find it exactly enlightening, it's given me an outlook on how some women my age and some younger men approach their sexuality, and their life.

A few things strike me as unrealistic in this novel.

Eve is my age (a year younger actually) with a 24-year-old son. No one in my college-educated crowd got married and had children that young. People tend to "settle down" at an age slightly older than in generations past. So this scenario makes the book feel a little outdated, and a little incongruous with the otherwise instant-download and text-infused modern setting.

Micajah is a truly exceptional young man. Not so many men are attuned to the workings of the female body at the age of 30; it takes a great deal of enlightenment, and experience and confidence. Most don't even express an interest in learning till years later, when they somehow begin to see outside themselves. Younger men often turn to older women in the hopes of learning something.

"It's hard to explain."

"Try. I'm good at this kind of thing."

"What kind of thing?"

"Understanding baffling concepts that make no sense to anybody but the person who has them." He He places his finger in the crook of her elbow. "I already know you don't cheat."

"Actually, you know the complete opposite," she says slowly, feeling that she no longer knows herself.

"No. What you did — what we did — was absolutely true. That was you."

He's right. Looking back from the perspective of that rooftop, it's her life with Larry that was, in larger and larger proportion, a lie.

Even though this novel sets out out to turn common elements of the romance novel upside down, to do so it has to acknowledge them. So, while Eve is aware that this romance has no future, she has to consciously work at being OK with that. This is a broad generalization, I know, but it seems women think about love and romance in terms of forever instead of in the moment, they think about the future of things instead of the now. Huston and her protagonist are relatively smart about this, but it makes me sad that love isn't easier for more women. Maybe I'm just lucky to live among a more enlightened group of friends, and not among suburban Jersey housewives. We know we don't need a man to be fulfilled.

"We could stop and get takeout," he says.

This is the step that will bring her into the sunlight — as long as she's strong enough not to care how big the patch of sunlight is or how long it will last. She will be agreeing to premeditated sex with a man she barely knows, someone shockingly unsuitable who has already shredded her self-control — yet who makes her feel, wen she is with him, like herself, in a way she cannot recall ever feeling before.

She remembers her mother hanging out five children's worth of laundry on the clothesline in their backyard, the tired corners of her mouth weighing down her smile. What would she say? Eve is suddenly overcome by a longing that her mother could have taken a lover, seized even an hour purely for herself.

"Okay." She smiles. "Chinese."

Fate has given her a gift. In honor of her sacrificed, sacrificing mother, she will allow Micajah to break her heart.

(Even if it's short-lived, why does it have to be heartbreak?)

Is this an erotic novel? I don't think so. Yet it's suffused with something. It's never cheesy, it's mature, and still sexy.

One thing that drew me to this novel is that it features a musical instrument, a badly damaged, intricately carved viol d'amore. I would've loved to hear more about its history and restoration, but that would've been a very different novel.

Coincidentally, this week I read about a book of poems about walking and the poet talked about how love is about falling, it's a different motion and momentum. So this line from A Stolen Summer really stuck me:

Who wants to fall? So much better to climb into love.

"Man must not lie. Man has a small head."

He tossed the book away and turned over to lie on his back.

France was to blame. Yes, France was most definitely to blame. He was never like this at home.

[...] Here in Biarritz life was completely different — mad, fun, even a little seedy. Yes, that was the word: seedy. And there was the perpetual rush of the ocean. And the bracing air. And these stupid books. And the eternal waiting, the constant premonition of love...

Isolde, by Irina Odoevsteva, is a gem of a book, unexpected and a page-turner. Originally published in 1929, it is gut-wrenching and tragic. It's mostly about Liza, who is just fourteen years old at the novel's start. That summer in Biarritz, Cromwell falls in love with her, and christens her Isolde after the novel he's reading. She adores the attention, and her brother Nikolai is quick to recognize the opportunity to milk Cromwell for extravagant evenings at the casino and the use of his car. When they return to Paris, Liza's boyfriend Andrei joins in the excesses.

Liza and Kolya's mother, meanwhile, is mostly absent. She insists they call her Natasha, never Mama, as she presents herself as their aunt charged with the orphans' care. She is always on the lookout for a man to fund her lifestyle. One such lover is the hapless Bunny – married and irresponsible, driving his own family to the poorhouse for Natasha's sake. He has difficulty accepting that Natasha prefers another, and that she has no use for him with his money gone:

His desperation and pain had disappeared. He felt quiet, calm and light. He felt like it wasn't Fanny lying next to him, not his wife, but his grandmother, and they had wrapped themselves up in her chequered shawl. It smelt of cinnamon and onions. And it wasn't Fanny sighing and sobbing at his ear, but his grandmother teaching him in her monotone voice:

"Man must not lie. Man has a small head. He'll lie and then he'll forget what he's lied about. Not like a horse. A horse has a big head. A horse can lie if it wants to."

(Oh, the foolish men, who never consider the consequences.)

Even while Liza condemns her mother's behaviour, she emulates it. Sadly, Natasha begins to see Liza's youth and beauty as a threat. And she leaves with her lover for Nice, never to be seen again.

There's probably a thesis in here about women's age and sexuality — the women are grandmothers and asexual, or caretakers and asexual, or they are young, beautiful, and privileged and burgeoning with sexuality. We encounter Cromwell's mother only two or three times, but have a very clear picture of the kind of woman she is:

She got back into bed. As she pulled up the cover, her hand brushed her naked breast and immediately recoiled in disgust, as if she had touched a toad, so repulsive was her naked body to her.

About midway through the novel, we flash back to Liza's early childhood. I felt this section lagged a little. On the whole, Natasha's motivations are already quite clear; this background made me mildly more sympathetic toward her. But this section goes a long way toward explaining Liza's relationship with Russia and some of her actions later in the book.

Liza is itching to grow up, but she still longs to be mothered. How differently she might've fared if her mother had not abandoned her.

She reaches out a hand and plucks an apple from the fruit bowl.

She no longer has a heart in her breast. It's empty and silent there. Her heart is this red apple. This is it — her heart. It's sitting in the palm of her hand. It's exposed, it's beating, it flutters and it loves. It feels everything. She squeezes it with her fingers, and her heart feels pain. What should she do with it? What should she do with her heart?

She holds the apple out to Andrei.

"Eat this Andrei, it's a gift from me to you."

Andrei takes the apple indifferently, rubs it on his sleeve and then digs his strong white teeth into it, taking a big bite.

"This pain is going to be horrible," Liza thinks. "He's eating my heart." She clenches her fists to stifle a cry of pain. But it doesn't hurt at all. She looks at Andrei in surprise and watches his white teeth chomp on the apple. And it doesn't hurt at all. "It's not my heart. I'm just drunk. Drop it. Don't eat it, Andrei."

Andrei throws the apple core on the floor.

She doesn't love Cromwell, or his cousin. She doesn't know Russia enough to love her, but she loves the idea of Russia. I think she loves Andrei in a similar way, for what he represents. And Liza's heart is eaten alive.

"You know, Andrei, I keep thinking," she said slowly. "I keep thinking how difficult and dreary life must be if childhood is as good as it gets. And if it's all downhill from here, I don't want to grow up." She shook her head. "And, you know, I don't think I ever will."

"Nonsense, Liza. It's only because you're fourteen. Fourteen is the worst age. You'll be fifteen in March and it will all be much easier then."

She shook her head again.

"Oh, no, no. I don't believe that. It won't get any easier, or any better."

It doesn't get any better.

At the intersection of truth and wishful thinking

Then he'd gotten back up, and walked some more. For hours.

[...]

He only stopped when he'd met himself again. The Armand who'd been standing on the side of the quiet road, in the middle of nowhere, waiting. At the intersection of truth and wishful thinking.

I showed up at bookclub a couple years ago, for a book I hadn't entirely enjoyed. The usual bookclub host was out sick and couldn't make it — she'd asked one of the other bookstore employees to fill in, someone who hadn't read the book. One other reader showed up. It was a quiet evening at the shop, so the bookstore clerk on duty sat down and had a beer with us.

That other reader though. I want to say her name was Marion, it was — she was — of another era. She must've been seventy-something, elegantly grey, incongruously carrying a plastic shopping bag to haul some notes, a shawl. She couldn't possibly have ever worked, apart from arranging tea or some fundraising down at the club. She was visiting from Texas, and had a night in Montreal before embarking on her adventure. What better activity than attending a book club about a book she happened to have recently read. The book in question was short stories by Teffi, but that doesn't matter.

She drawled loud and slow, her head bobbing gently. And she told us she'd stopped in Montreal on her way to Three Pines. Of course she knew it was a fictional place; but she needed to see the village that inspired it. Marion was on her way to the Eastern Townships to meet Louise Penny, and to celebrate the launch of the latest instalment of the Inspector Gamache books. That would've been Glass Houses.

This is only the fifth book I've read of the series, now fifteen strong. But it's peopled by characters so familiar, in a place just down the road. They don't call these cozy mysteries for nothing.

Louise Penny is a frightfully astute observer of the human condition.

Men and women going about their lives. Apparently quite normal. On the outside. Their skin stretched across the void inside.

Glass Houses has two main narrative threads. The "present day" courtroom drama in a sweltering July, and the events of the previous November, including the murder for which someone is now standing trial. We don't know the nature of the crime, who the victim is or who the perpetrator, until we are quite a way into the book (some readers may find this frustrating).

As is typical of Penny, there's a healthy dose of real-life Quebec politics thrown in, this time a drug crisis, the organization of the drug's trafficking within Quebec and across international borders, and the failure of authorities to clamp down — all issues in the news in recent years.

At the core of the book is the concept of the cobrador, a debt collector who dresses like Darth Vader (or Death, or a plague doctor). Penny's version is a collector of moral debts. It turns out almost everyone believes the cobrador could be there for them.

Gamache and others have to decide if their job is to uphold the law or to do what's right. Gamache is Churchill allowing Coventry to be bombed, for the greater good.

And Lacoste remembered the advice given to Mossad agents. Advice Lacoste had found abhorrent, wrong on every level. Until it had been explained.

The instruction given the Israeli agents, if they met resistance during an assault, was kill the women first.

Because if a woman was ever driven so far as to pick up a weapon she would be the most committed, the least likely to ever give up.

Kill the women first.

Lacoste still hated the advice. The simplicity of it. The baldness. But she also hated that the philosophy behind it was almost certainly true.

To be honest, I thought Marion at bookclub was crazy. Maybe because I'm afraid of becoming her. But I haven't forgotten about her. In fact, I rather admire her. Why shouldn't I be like her, following the paths of my favourite imaginary people?

And let me admit now how much I loved to be enveloped in the world of Three Pines. I could stand to spend a little more time there. I'm going back to read the ones I've missed.

It wasn't really, he knew, about less fear. It was about more courage.

Sex short circuits all imaginative exchange

C: Ann thought it was a great project, more perverse than just having an affair. She thinks it'd make a good book! When Dick calls shall we tell him we're considering publication?

S: No. The murder hasn't happened yet. Desire's still unconsummated. Let the media wait.

It didn't occur to me when I started writing letters a year and a half ago, unsent, that I was working within an already established art form. In fact, I didn't think of art or work at all. It was therapy.

What makes it a letter and not a diary entry is intention and direction. I needed to say something to someone in particular. At first it was the recovering heroin addict ex-boyfriend. But as those feelings resolved themselves, I wrote to some version of myself. Finally the letters became stories I tell my (mostly) imaginary lover.

This is not quite how I Love Dick unfolds, but Chris Kraus has done something similar, projecting an impassioned love affair on a man she barely knows.

So. Highly relatable.

Chris and Sylvère, together some ten years, are dining with Dick, an academic acquaintance of Sylvère's, and they go back to Dick's place and drink some more, by which time Chris is totally crushing on Dick, and when she confides in Sylvère the next day, they begin writing letters to Dick that they never send. They create ménage à trois where none existed, and explore its outcomes, without any basis other than Chris's love (imaginary or real?) for Dick.

My coworker noticed it on my desk — she's read it — asked me how I liked it, but when I said relatable, she gave me a funny look.

I mean the imaginary love affair part. I have no idea what else this book has in store. Oh god, they joke about a murder, maybe that goes somewhere. I hope she doesn't think I plan murders.

Have Chris and I spent this past week in turmoil just to turn our lives into a text?

(Yes!)

On the car ride home I started reading Research Into Marriage, then underlining, footnoting and annotating all the passages that could relate to me and you. It's an exercise both adolescent (me!) and academic (you!) ... my first art object, which I'll give you as a present.

I want to go back to the beginning and annotate this book as it relates to my own imaginary love affair. So badly. Every bit that makes this book so relatable. I will make an offering of it.

I'm about halfway through this book when I start rereading, pencil in hand. I had been swept away by this book as a model of what I could do with my own writing; I want to slow down to better understand it. On rereading, this book is not what I was experiencing at all. The text was merely, magically, a trigger for my own interior experience, but already it's not a story I recognize, it's telling a different story from the one I thought I was reading. Those lines of insight I thought would stay with me, the passages I wanted to mark when no pencil was in reach — I can't find them anymore.

There's a comment about Schoenberg and I remember the lovely novel I read last winter that I never got round to writing about.

I Love Dick. I Love Dick. I Love ... (I need to make this book my own.) I Love Marc. Making My Marc. Making My Mark. (That's not clever, it's cheesy.)

[How would he react to having his name changed? I don't think he'd like it, it's no longer the truth. Maybe he'd rather remain anonymous. Of course, him being imaginary, I don't even have to tell him, he'd never find out about this. I'll tell him. Of course I'll tell him. I tell him everything. That's almost the fucking point. Does he know that he's now an art experience? Maybe I've always subconsciously known that that's what he was meant to be, what we were meant to be. He has no agency of his own, only that which I bestow upon him. I create him.]

And then Chris went alone into her room and wrote a letter, thinking she would send it, about sex and love. She was all confused about wanting to have sex, sensing that at this point if she slept with Dick the whole thing would be over. THE — UNEXAMINED — LIFE — IS NOT — WORTH — LIVING flashed the titles of a Ken Kobland film against the backbeat of a carfuck 1950s song. "As soon as sex takes place, we fall," she wrote, thinking, knowing from experience, that sex short circuits all imaginative exchange. The two together get too scary. So she wrote some more about Henry James. Although she really wanted both. "Is there a way," she wrote in closing, "to dignify sex, make it as complicated as we are, to make it not grotesque?"

And this makes me sad because it becomes clear to me that she does not understand sex the way I do, it is complicated and not grotesque and it is entirely cerebral, my imaginary lover and I agree that creative juices and sexual juices flow into each other, the nature of exchange need not be verbal, it becomes something else.

Slightly deranged scrutiny

I'm not sure why I decided to read Mary Karr's The Liar's Club — tragically depressing memoir is not my go-to genre. Of course, I knew about it, and it must've been recently impressed upon me that this was the mother of my generation's memoirs. And what the hell, all reading is research.

But it is good — compelling and funny and full of quirky characters and attitude. Karr wasn't just born into a memoir, she finely crafted one. It's dark and disturbing and lovely.

Read it.

Karr's a poet, and I wondered that I wasn't finding more quotable passages, but I know that poetry isn't about a choice word, it's a rhythm, it's the timing of a punchline and a punch to the gut. It turns on a dime from charming dietary quirks to alcohol-fueled danger, from naive neighbourhood antics to sexual abuse. This is not an easy book.

What's magical about The Liar's Club is that despite her traumatic childhood, there's a whole lot of love, and something like awe for the parents who neglected her and failed her in so many ways.

Much later, when Mother could be brought to talk about her own childhood, she told stories about how peculiar her mother's habits had been. Grandma Moore didn't sound like such a religious fanatic back then. She just seemed like a fanatic in general. For instance, she had once sent away for a detective-training kit from a magazine. The plan was for her and Mother to spy on their neighbors — this, back when the Lubbock population still fit into three digits. According to Mother, this surveillance went on for weeks. Grandma would stirrup Mother up to the parson's curtained windows — and not because of any suspected adultery of flagrant sinning, but to find out whether his wife did her cakes from scratch or not. She kept the answers to these kinds of questions in an alphabetized log of prominent families. She would also zero in on some particular person who troubled her and keep track of all his comings and goings for weeks on end. She knew the procedure for taking fingerprints and kept Mother's on a recipe card, in case she was ever kidnapped. Grandma even began to collect little forensic envelops of hair and dust that she found on people's furniture when she visited them. Mother said that for the better part of a year, they'd be taking tea at some lady's house, when her mother would suddenly sneak an envelope with something like a dustball in it into the pocket of her pinafore. Whatever became of this evidence Mother couldn't say. The whole detective-training deal got dropped as abruptly as it had been undertaken.

When Grandma came to our house, she brought with her that same kind of slightly deranged scrutiny.

In her introduction to the 10th anniversary edition, Mary Karr observes, "a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it." I've this summer had occasion several times over to corroborate this.

I love this story about Grandma and her spy kit because I read it while visiting relatives this summer, and my crazy aunt (by marriage) pulled out her shoebox of quartered recipe cards, on which she had jotted down everything she knew about us. Which wasn't much and was slightly wrong and oddly selective. For example, she had my ex listed as an accountant (not quite, but maybe if you squinted), and she didn't have a clue what I did for a living. So I know people, even family, do strange things for unaccountable reasons.

And Karr's family gets up to some crazy shit.

The Liar's Club is how she referred to her father's coterie — blue collar workers who drank together at the Legion and told outlandish tales. Her trips with Daddy to the Legion trailed off at puberty. She returns once when she's home from college.

Something about the Legion clarified who I was, made me solid inside, like when you twist the binocular lens to the perfect depth and the figure you're looking at gets definite. Maybe I just liked holding a place in such a male realm.

It's a peculiar thing to title this book, because it's her mother (in my view) who leads the book; with so many secrets, her mother is the biggest liar of them all.

You can read Lena Dunham's foreword to the 20th-anniversary edition at The Paris Review.

See "They're Liars, and That's Just the Least of Their Problems," by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times.

The weight of absence

"Melancholia, as you call it, germinates in the mind, but blossoms in the body."

The Therapist by Nial Giacomelli is a slim novel with weighty aspirations. It's wholly atmospheric and a little strange.

I didn't enjoy this book much, and most of that's on me. It covers depressing subject matter, the kind of emotional drama that just isn't my jam. It's about grief, a couple dealing with grief, and I think I can just leave it at that so as not to spoil anything for you. I have yet to read a book that takes on grieving as a theme in a way that resonates meaningfully with me.

We sit beneath a painting of the sea and talk about the weight of absence. How after the accident we had both begun to see the body of our own grief. We had watched as it was born, fusing bone and knitting skin. How over the course of several weeks it had come together in the shape not of a man, but of a boy. And how gradually it had taken residence in the house, bringing with it a furious anger.

I didn't like the narrator. He comes across as a selfish asshole husband. Now, this is kind of the point, as it's very much tied up in the blame that is thrown around the guilt everyone denies or wallows in. But the aha moment came too late for me to care — I deeply loathed the asshole for being in his marriage in the way that he was and didn't give a shit about his redemption. I put this one on the author — maybe it's a question of the timing of certain revelations of the narrator's character. Maybe this is a woman's reading of his character, but I disliked him too much, too early. That is, I can appreciate what the author was trying to do with this character, but it didn't work for me.

She suffered stress headaches, much like she had as a teenager, migraines that would blossom like cactus flowers in the depths of her eye sockets. She was struck by a terrible malaise that kept her bedridden. And though I knew only stories of her youth, I was forced to watch helplessly as the wounds of her depression reopened across the geography of her body.

While grief takes up residence in their bodies, a plague is ravaging America. People are becoming transparent, until they disappear. They become one with the dead before them. Our couple lives in terror of the disease encroaching on their own remote territory. I would've preferred to focus on that epic apocalypse, or on the neighbours (the kind of Joneses you want to keep up with, despite them having their own deep troubles) rather than the intimate one. (But there's a point in here too about grief and how intensely private it is; it refuses sometimes to let the world in, it can't be fixed from the outside.)

By day we explore the geography of the continent and at night we explore the geography of each other. Two shapes that come together as one.

The metaphor was crafted to death. The words "body" and "bodies" occur more than 100 times in this 125-page story. Body-related imagery combined with geographical references abounds.

An infographic appears showing landmass consumed by an acreage of growing red dots. It looks like an X-ray, an organ riddled with tumours.

Taken individually, many of these sentences are stunning, but the whole of them felt overwritten and tiresome.

They walk like a chain gang into a makeshift compound, a shanty town of relief tents that look like white pustules against the landscape.

Shame on me, but life et cetera, and I skimmed through the final pages. Something about the incorporeality of love and what love can then embody. The resolution is not entirely clear to me, nor do I understand the nature of the eponymous therapist.

that was love but I kept on traveling

we don't do much ourselves
but fuck and think
of the haunting Métro
and the ones who didn't show up there
while we were waiting to become part of our century

I don't know why I picked up Lunch Poems a couple months ago
I was feeling the need for poetry I guess
but why Frank O'Hara, I don't know, I thought I'd had enough of him.

Maybe someone recently referenced him in a clever way, but I don't remember so I guess it doesn't matter
maybe I thought of him because I am working alongside a Frank these days
suddenly everyone is Frank without being frank

or I wanted something to read over lunch
they were written over lunch, shouldn't they best be read then too

I should write at lunch, only they wouldn't be poems exactly, and probably not at lunch either
lunch here is far too social for quiet time of any kind
unless I leave the confines of the office and why would I forsake the catered lunch

I could write breakfast musings, or mid-afternoon caffeine-craving ramblings.
Could I craft a collection of something that reflected my daily life and the passage of time (not unlike, say, blog entries)?
I'm writing this on my phone, in the metro, on my way to work. Maybe this is the time
for writing — I will need to strengthen my fingers

anyway, I'd been reading a poem from time to time and then I let this volume drop
until I was in San Francisco last week, my company has an office there, I'd never been, and
with a free afternoon I wandered over to City Lights

upstairs on the wall of beat poets and (essentially) no women was this very same
volume I stared at it a long time thinking about why there were no women when
suddenly someone said hello and it took a second to realize they were saying
hello to me I looked up and there was Frank from the office
saying hello to me, fancy running into you here on a free afternoon in San Francisco

there you have it so now the Lunch Poems have been my commute poems, morning and evening poems,
start-my-workday poems, metro poems, riding-through-a-slice-of-city poems

I'm not sure how much I actually like the poems.
Most of them just hum along describing the city and referencing whatever might be going on in Frank's
little head, or his personal life at any rate.

I wonder how much time he put into them or did they just spill out, they certainly don't feel crafted as if
any crafting must've been in fine-tuning his thoughts rather than wordsmithing the expression of them, nary a care
for whether the reader can decipher the riddle of his lunch hour.

Though I suppose if I were to write my commute-time musings even though they might mainly be about sex and dating
they still would be sprinkled with the books I'm reading and that woman on the park bench
loudly breaking up with her boyfriend over the phone and the imagined lives of buskers in the metro.

And what's the deal with Kenneth Koch's mother, does she really only appear once? she feels so present

Very few of the poems speak to me as a whole but every now and
then a line just guts me, and I think there must be more
to the poem as a whole so I reread it but no, there's nothing
more, just that line, maybe that's enough.

I was trying to explain to a friend (well, he's more imaginary than friend) that the best
poems arouse me sexually, that line you feel deep in your belly when you think a man's going to kiss
you and you want, really want, this man to kiss you, that's what a good poem is like.

But maybe I read poetry the wrong way.

How about:

Is this love, now that the first love
Has finally died, where there were no impossibilities?

and I explain to my virtual lover that it has nothing to do with love it's about
the (erotic) tension between possibility and impossibility and hell yes that turns me on

imagine seeing the world always in the rosy
afterglow of sex or with the flushed anticipation
of someone touching you, it's a good poem if it
whispers in my ear or grazes my nipple

(Maybe now he thinks I'm crazy. I don't think the word
love has ever transpired between us, that might
be awkward, our relationship is purely physical,
in an entirely non-physical way.)

and then in Harbin I knew
how to behave it was glorious that
was love sneaking up on me through the snow
and I felt it was because of all
the postcards and the smiles and kisses and the grunts
that was love but I kept on traveling

— August 16, 2019; 9:43 am

"People in hell want ice water."

Blue had bought Lecia and me each a doll, curly-headed, near as tall as ourselves. Lecia's was blond, mine black-headed. Under the sedan's dome light, mine stared from its box on the wide back seat with an indifference bold enough to edge over into insult. A copper wire garroted her head in place. Her wrists and feet were likewise strapped down. Highway lights started streaking over the cellophane mask above her perfect features. She gazed out sullen. Her cold blue eyes announced that she wanted some other girl, not me. Well, I wanted my very own mother, and I'd have told her so, too, if the thought didn't put a lump in my throat. Instead I told her — out loud, I guess — "People in hell want ice water." Daddy said, "Say what?" And I told him I'd kill for a glass of ice water.

— from The Liars' Club, by Mary Karr.

To awaken my sleeping soul

Often people even say: "There's a plot for one of your novels," as if I went around in search of plots for novels and not in search of myself. If I write it's in order to remember, to awaken my sleeping soul, to stir up my mind and discover its secret pathways. Most of my stories are fragments of my soul's memory, not inventions.

— from Empty Words, by Mario Levrero.

It's a strange little novel. The narrator embarks on a journey of graphological self-therapy. If he improves his handwriting, it will improve his character. Although, it's not entirely clear what needs bettering.

And it's important for him in his therapy to separate the form the content. He must focus on the form, on shaping the letters. But he can't do it. So his daily exercises tell us a great deal about his living circumstances, the upcoming house move, and especially the dog. He produces the occasional profound insight, but all to the detriment of his handwriting.

Today I failed in my grand plans to start living more healthily, with less time spent on things like reading and using the computer, precisely because of an irresistible urge to use the computer. There's always some idea I want to try out, or some mystery that needs solving once and for all. I think the computer is taking the place of my Unconscious as a field of investigation. I went as far as I could with my investigations into my Unconscious, and the by-product of those investigations is the literature I've written (although literature was also a tool I used in those investigations, in some cases at least).

To be honest, the world of the computer is very similar to the world of the Unconscious, with lots of hidden elements and a language to decipher. I probably feel like there's nowhere left to go when it comes to investigating my Unconscious; the computer also involves much less risk, or risk of a different kind.

The strangest thing about all this is the value I ascribe to investigating something that is, quite definitely, of no use to me whatsoever. And yet I clearly do see it as immensely valuable, as if there were vitally important clues hidden in the workings of the machine.

About halfway through, it becomes clear to me that the narrator is crazy. I'm not sure if he's been crazy all along or whether the graphological therapy is drawing it out of him.

The entries are dated, and there are gaps of days and later even months. What happened in the intervening time? It becomes clear that several significant life events have transpired off-screen. Our narrator prefers to leave them swirling in his unconscious than to commit a record of them to paper.

The exercises are less regular over time. But when he finally attacks them in earnest, the content is crushed out of the words he produces, to become merely vocabulary lists — no, that gives the words too much weight; they are strings of letters. We see him cross out and rewrite misshapen words. We see him unravel.

Empty Words started out as a pretentious and directionless, though mildly entertaining, exercise (and I mean the "novel," not the graphological therapy), but it turned out to be much darker, more provocative.

And so I decide to go on hoping, and every new hope exhausts me a little more, sucks a little more life from me, and dismantles my remaining self-esteem, until the only thing I have left is the pointless lucidity with which I passively observe the way I'm going under once and for all.

The date — 26 possible outcomes

He lives in Germany (he says), but will be here on business this week. We've been messaging for over a year, but we've never met face to face. There are too many ways this could turn out.

1. He cancels his trip at the last minute. (Like last time.)

2. There never was a scheduled trip.

3. He lets me know he's arrived as scheduled and gives me his room number. I grab a cab and am stuck in traffic for two and a half hours. Even though we're messaging all the while, at some point he stops responding, succumbing to jetlag I assume. I finally arrive but when I knock on the door, there's no answer. He is dead from a heart attack on the other side of the door and I will never know.

4. He lets me know he's arrived as scheduled and gives me his room number. I grab a cab and am stuck in traffic for two and a half hours. Even though we're messaging all the while, at some point he stops responding. I finally arrive but when I knock on the door, there's no answer. I turn around and go home. He messages me days later and sweeps it away as a misunderstanding. I eventually learn that he found the company of other women in the bar. We continue our correspondence as ever.

5. He lets me know he's arrived as scheduled and gives me his room number. As I’m packing up at work, I receive word that Helena has had an accident and is in hospital. I rush to her bedside, and remain there for days. She's going to be fine. But he and I – we failed to meet this time. We continue our correspondence as ever.

6. As I'm packing up at work, I receive word that Helena has had an accident and is in hospital. Tragic things unfold. I am plagued by guilt and I never write to him again. I cannot erase him from my mind, but I blame him.

7. He lets me know he's arrived as scheduled and gives me his room number. On my way to catch the bus, there's an incident on the bridge crossing the canal. I am required to give a statement to the police. Amid the chaos, my purse — with my phone and credit card — is lost in the water. I return home well after dark. I message as soon as I can, and we set a new date for the following day, but due to his work obligations, it never materializes. We continue our correspondence as ever.

8. On my way to catch the bus, I am struck by a car. I come out of the coma in early 2020. Somehow, he seems less important.

9. I come out of the coma in early 2020. Somehow, he seems more important. I become obsessed with living life to the fullest. I'm not sure how to approach him after all this time. I move to Germany and once I am settled, I resume a correspondence with him, but he is cold and more distant than ever.

10. He lets me know he's arrived as scheduled and gives me his room number. On my way to catch the bus, any one of an infinite number of random acts of violence or of God prevents us from meeting. We continue our correspondence as ever.

11. On my way to the catch the bus, any one of an infinite number of random acts of violence or of God brings my life to an end. He will never know.

12. He lets me know he's arrived as scheduled and gives me his room number. I make my way to his hotel, to his room, and I knock. He opens the door. He is not what he presented himself to be. He is old and lecherous. I don’t know what to do.

13. I knock. He opens the door. He is not what he presented himself to be. He is a cave-dwelling troll. A recluse genius who lives in deep Quebec. It has taken him a year to find the courage to travel to the city. He touches me tentatively and it stirs my sympathy. The room is charged with erotic energy and we have an immensely satisfying and honest evening. We never contact each other again.

14. I knock. He opens the door. We smile at each other. We try to kiss but start laughing uncontrollably. We drink. We barely touch. It feels wrong and awkward. I drink too much, I am sick from nerves. He passes out. I leave. We never hear from each other again.

15. I knock. He opens the door. We smile at each other. He pulls me inside. He lifts his fingers to graze my face, gently pulls my hair, tilting my head as he kisses my shoulder, tongues my neck up to my ear. He whispers to me in German, it sounds dirty.

16. I knock. He opens the door. He looks me up and down, and closes the door, leaving me standing in the hall. I knock again. He doesn’t respond. I walk away.

17. I knock. He opens the door. He pulls me inside, closing the door behind me. He has invited two of his colleagues to join us.

18. I knock. He opens the door and pulls me inside. He throws me onto the bed and ties me down. He violently rapes me and sodomizes me. I'm not sure if I like it.

19. I knock. He opens the door and pulls me inside. We kiss. We kiss. We kiss.

20. I knock. He opens the door and pulls me inside. He politely invites me inside and asks me about my day. I honestly tell him how shitty it was. Not shitty — hard. No, not hard — challenging. I pour myself a drink and admit how out of my depth I feel at work. I throw myself on the bed; I curl up and break down. He strokes my hair and tells me it’ll be ok.

21. I knock. He opens the door and pulls me inside. We kiss. We talk. He tells me he is married, unhappily, and he is cheating on his wife. I have an ethical crisis and walk away.

22. I knock. He opens the door and pulls me inside. When I leave after midnight, we agree to a repeat rendezvous the next day. After returning home to Germany, he realizes he cannot live without me — I am his sexual obsession. He returns to Montreal regularly. He sabotages his career, his finances, to be with me. He bores me. I am bored.

23. I knock. He opens the door. He is not what he presented himself to be. He is a local writer who has created a persona to explore the psychology of online dating and sexuality. We talk for hours, there is so much to say, and we fuck like crazy. We can't get enough of each other. We buy a condo together, in the heritage building on Marquette, and he inspires me to be more disciplined about my writing. I strike a deal with Random House for three novels and finally decide to leave my job. He is jealous of my success as a writer and is drinking far too heavily. I kick him out.

24. I knock. He opens the door and pulls me inside. We fuck. No one ever made me cum like this before. We continue our correspondence, but I cannot bear to be so far from him. Within a year, I transfer to the Copenhagen office. We see each other most weekends. I feel sexually sated. But Anders at the office woos me and we plan our retirement together. Marc is disappointed and goes back to his ex. Anders and I move to Reykjavik, and I write a novel.

25. I knock. No answer.

26. I knock. He opens the door and pulls me inside. This changes everything. I don't know how yet, but this changes everything.

Self-observation rots the human soul

Each of them had his own special relationship to mirrors. The one suffering from a broken heart could gaze at his reflection for many long hours. He did so when he thought he was alone, but sometimes I, Grandmother, or one of the other waiters might chance upon him.

"Are you staring yourself in the mirror again?" Grandmother once asked.

"No, I'm not staring at myself in the mirror, " the waiter replied.

"What are you doing, then?" asked Grandmother.

"I'm looking for something of myself that I think has gone missing," came his reply.

One of the other waiters thought that mirrors were dangerous objects, for they were one of the places where demons were housed. When a person stood in front of a mirror she opened herself to her own reflections, and that's when the demon slunk inside her. From there, it would cultivate the West's worst characteristics inside that person: egoism and self-centeredness. The person reflected would then be heading slowly but surely toward a painful and entirely self-fulfilling demise. Like rust corrodes iron, self-observation rots the human soul, the waiter would say, and one wondered which books he'd read that made him say such a thing.

The third waiter had more of a political angle. He was of the opinion that mirrors were spies. He said that in all societies there was an evaluating authority, and nowhere was it as well developed as in wealthy countries — where people had been taught to observe themselves. Mirrors constituted one such evaluating authority, and there was no need for enforcement, for people subjected themselves to this evaluation of their own free will and even enthusiastically. Several times a day, you'd measure yourself in front of the evaluating authority, suspending yourself dutifully, of your own accord, and you'd do it gladly. And if your reflection did not elate you, as it almost never did, you didn't give up, you set to work on a plan to become exactly what was expected of you.

"Keeping people in check is as easy as hanging mirrors everywhere, because there is nothing stricter," said the waiter, "than the way you gaze at yourself."

— from The Polyglot Lovers, by Lina Wolff.

Freedom is a bottomless abyss

I feel compelled to put closure on this book (possibly on this year of love) — My Year of Love, by Paul Nizon. Published in 1981, it has the feel of sexual memoirs from an earlier era, but no, Nizon represents a very unevolved male attitude of the 1970s. I damn near hated it, it bored me so much.

And yet. I am reminded of it most mornings. I wake up enveloped in a greenish haze of light, much like one Nizon described. Of course, I'm unable to track down this specific passage, I wonder if I imagined it. Or I read something he wrote about curtains while I was half asleep, and I later reshaped it into the sheers billowing around me, I see the trees through this mesh of silver.

I thought he was writing about the prefect writing space, but as this passage doesn't exist, I must accept that this is some expression of my subconscious attitude to the space and light I live in.

This novel is about a man trying to write, and while he sits at his desk he watches the old man in the apartment across the courtyard feeding the doves on his windowsill. So he writes about the dove man, and the dove man's wife, and his mother, and the tenants in his building (other writers), and the landlady, and his dead aunt, and his dalliances with women, past and present.

I like the confidential aspect of such relationships, which by the way are very casual, very lightweight. I like the complicated solidarity, because here, where everything is influenced by venality, the extras, the little votes of confidence, do have the nature of beautifully shining kindness. I've always had this special relationship to so-called loose women, this offhand relationship that also incorporates closeness.

He leaves out the transactional element of his dealings with prostitutes. He extols these relationships for their simple, casual nature and for their kindness, and I feel, momentarily, that I can relate, I appreciate the beauty of such a contact — to have a lover, no strings, it is the ultimate, intimate, kindness we bestow on each other. But it never once occurs to him that he has paid for this experience, that it might be less than authentic.

This troubles me immensely. Not that he frequents prostitutes (though that is problematic), but that he seems incapable of noticing the difference between these relationships.

He even argues that there's more sincerity in one that is transactional, no false promises or expectations to manipulate, whereas taking a girl to dinner or a movie he would feel he was buying her attentions.

We gradually learn about the marriage he broke for the sake of an encounter with another woman, and so he left for Paris where he might experience true love, by which he really means sexual freedom.

I kept a lookout for her from behind the mask of my sunglasses, I didn't even really know if I liked her, I couldn't ask myself that question, because I was dependent on our being in love, dependent on this atmospheres as if it were a drug, that's why I was dependent on her, whether I wanted to be or not. I couldn't be without either. That's why I wore the sunglasses.

[...]

I only wanted to experience LOVE with her and excluded her as a person.

For all the women in this book, none of them are people, not even (especially) his wife. No one exists except in relation to his male ego.

But he arrives at a conclusion I came to myself about a year ago. Love isn't what happens between two people; it's what happens in one's own mind. It is a completely solitary state of being, and the person beside you is almost completely irrelevant.

Passages from this book are achingly insightful and poignant, but it's all infuriatingly male and so much self-pitying, solipsistic bullshit.

Write something or pull it to shore, that is, put it on paper, otherwise you'll get sick in this freedom, it's unlimited, I would never have believed that freedom could be form of captivity, freedom can be like a primeval forest or like the ocean, you can drown in it or disappear and never, never ever find your way out again. How can I make it to shore in this freedom, or how can I enjoy it? I have to parcel it out for myself, plant something in it, cultivate it, I have to change it, at least a little, into an occupation, freedom is a bottomless abyss when it present itself in this totalitarian form.

Subtler, almost invisible

Sometimes, as if carelessly, Michel's and Louise's looks met. The warned each other not to stay too long. In fact, their eyes touched, as lightly as birds, while an expression of almost childish contentment spread across the Rumanian's face as he hurriedly bent over his plate.

The change on the young girl's face was subtler, almost invisible; it wasn't joy. There was no sparkle in it, it was more like a look of serenity and satisfaction.

It was as though she had matured, as though she suddenly felt a great potential richness inside her.

I'd almost forgotten how much I love Simenon. My reading of late has felt pretty blah; maybe that throws Simenon into relief. I love Simenon!

I loved Account Unsettled! I love that I found this book in Prague! I love that it's my daughter who pulled me into this shop for some inexplicable reason! I love this book's funky smell! I love its atrocious cover!

The cover — the description in combination with the illustration — might lead you to believe that this book is about a crime of passion with a woman at its source. But there is no passion in this crime; it's very cold. And the woman has nothing to do with it.

This 1953 novel is one of Simenon's romans durs and does not feature Maigret. It opens in Liège, and then quite unexpectedly shifts in time and space to Arizona some decades later. From the claustrophobia of a house marked by hunger and chills to the gluttonous emptiness of resort in a vast sweaty desert. A study in contrasts.

Page after page we have been waiting for Elie, a poor, ugly Polish-Lithuanian Jew pursuing a doctorate in mathematics, to gun down Michel, the handsome, charming, womanizing Jewish Rumanian of means.

It's not a matter of jealousy, it's justice, Elie convinces himself. But did Michel even ever give him a second thought?

Honest

Today we arrived in Prague. We made our way from the airport to downtown via public transport. We found our hotel.

The only mission for this first day, apart from getting ourselves fed and hydrated and libated, was to soak up some atmosphere and track down a copy of Honest Guide Prague. Which we did! And we also almost got lost! Twice! I'd say the day is a success.

It was weeks after I'd booked the flights that Helena remembered to tell me about this YouTuber she follows. I'm not sure we ever would've made it out of the airport without him. The videos are a treasure trove. And now the team has released a book in time for our trip.

It's full of great advice like:

You can't judge a book by its cover, and you can't understand a building unless you go inside.

I'd just like to take a moment to geek out over this binding! (Coptic stitch? Waxed!)

A kind of flood of the flesh

I leaned over and kissed him. Ruben's lips parted, barely, but then he pushed me away.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I saw a film once," he said. "In Italian. A woman says to a man: Sodomizzami. Sodomize me. And he wanted nothing more, he'd dreamed about it forever, but he doesn't understand what she's saying. He's too uneducated. He doesn't understand, do you understand?"

We looked at each other, the two of us chuckling. I thought that maybe this was what is was like when intellectual people went to bed. Elegant and stiff, like someone with good posture eating mussels with a knife and fork, discussing film and quoting things in different languages even though you know you're facing ruin, a flood that is about to roll in and ravage everything all at once, a kind of flood of the flesh. This whole situation had lost its charm.

— from The Polyglot Lovers, by Lina Wolff.

Used her up

I feel somewhat blocked lately, in writing and reading. I tell myself it's because I'm busy with work, I'm still adjusting to my (no-longer-so-new) job, basking in the joy of work that is wholly engaging. But I don't want to be that person — I know there's more to life than work. I tell myself I'm living a balanced life, but neither am I being particularly social; I'm not dating much, it just doesn't seem worth the effort at the moment.

So I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm tempted to explain that it's not you, novels, it's me — it's not the right time and place for us. But rationalizing it, taking the blame, actually makes me angry, it's such bullshit. Why should it be my fault? One novel I'm working through is fascinating really, but just so damn big — it weighs on me — and I can't be bothered to carry it on my commute. The other novel I finally finished, but it was plodding — I didn't even have the strength of character to dump it.

My reading life and my dating life are somehow merged over the last year. I am for the most part attracted to books about sex and love and joy. Because I think they will help me process the sex and love and joy in my life. But sometimes they confuse me.

Maybe sometimes I confuse them. Sometimes I date the books and read the people, and I'm not sure I'm doing either the right way. (I should've dropped the book, not the guy.) Sometimes I challenge myself in the wrong ways.

Maybe I'm just tired and need a break.

**********

The bookstore emailed about the next bookclub meeting, but with only a week's notice, and by the time I got my hands on a copy of the book, I only had four and a half days to read it. I made it halfway in time for the discussion (but yes, I read it through to the end in the ensuing days).

I was grateful for the push to read something I wouldn't ordinarily pick up of my own accord: An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon.

It's science fiction of the generation ship variety. The ships decks reinforce the caste system; the ship is powered by slaves. The protagonist is queer and neuroatypical; Aster is also a healer.

Despite some serious social criticism and horrific violence, it's a story brimming with loving relationships beautifully described.

Aster said sister because she knew sisters could not choose to unsister themselves when their lives diverged dramatically. Friends who hated each other were no longer friends. Sisters who hated each other remained sisters, despite long silences, feuds, and deliberate misunderstandings.

The science behind the predicament of the ship is a little shaky, but this is a very rich novel in all other aspects.

Mostly it's a commentary on racism, with violence against women that's hard to stomach. One character, fathered by a lieutenant, passes as white and so he managed to climb to the position of Surgeon General and thus has privileged access to areas, people, and knowledge. But we see other characters slip between levels, whether it's using off-limit passageways, networks of family and nannying arrangements, or (essentially) black-market means.

The novel presents a very fluid perspective of gender, while integrating issues of mental illness and exploring how knowledge and history are preserved. The ship is also developing its own myths (a deep-seated sense of sin) and evolving languages on different decks.

One of the aspects I found most interesting is that while this is ostensibly occurring in the future, the ship society seem so backward. It leads me to speculate on how and why that might happen.

An Unkindness of Ghosts is very easy to read in the sense that the writing style is breezy, but it is very difficult to read for the harsh realities of its characters' living conditions. This clash woke up all my reading sensibilities.

It had the magical effect of taking me out of myself (even if it took me to some very grim places), when these days I tend to ask books to take me deeper into myself.

The bigness of her earlier mannishness was nowhere now. Short-lived. All that was left were taunts, and crack of Scar's knee, and the past swooping in, an unkindness of ghosts. Her old life had possessed her, strengthening her, but like everything, used her up and then was done.

The erotic sense of simply being alive

I think that in my case the erotic awareness of life, or, rather, its awakening coincided with the awakening of my urge to write; the two occurred simultaneously in a wave of sensuality, in a corresponding confusion of my senses.

[...]

I think it was the erotic sense of simply being alive that enticed and directed me into daydreaming. It's a preliminary stage of visualization, imagination, and has to do with the creation of another, second reality, another life — and yet, early on, I was more than a little ashamed of the inwardness that gave rise to this other reality.

— from My Year of Love, by Paul Nizon.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It both bores me and fascinates me. I find the narrator repulsive for reasons I have difficulty pinpointing, but also highly relatable.

I need to write more. Why am I not writing?

She said it apodictically

Apodicticity

She said it apodictically, without directly addressing anyone, so that one was faced with the alternative of either saying nothing, of ignoring the remark and going past her without saying a word, or of taking up the topic, and it made me angry every time.

If you perceive that I have adopted an apodictic tone, it is because I am so taken with this word (new to me) and must orchestrate circumstances such that I may use it, not because I have taken a stance of apodicticity as if it were a moral imperative.

It sparks in me a new interest in the novel I earlier in the day proclaimed to be boring. When I came across My Year of Love, by Paul Nizon, in the shop last autumn, it seemed a literary imperative that I read it, and understand it. It would be the perfect male counterpoint to the emotional landscape backgrounding my own year of love experienced from my decidedly female perspective. It could offer a steady Swiss neutrality, something reasonable and potentially bland (wholly unlike my Swiss lover).

I've been reading it for days, but it seems I was merely turning the pages. Now this word has turned me around, it has me turning back the pages to find a city of certainties kept secret from me.

The possibility of joy

I went out into the undimmed, Katherine-Mortenhoe-dancing-down-the-street-morning.

Spring. That day spring was special. Not just a matter of cuckoos and poetic crocuses. That day spring was special, an affair in the blood that even the largest city could not arrest, a process that enlarged one's perceptions till even oneself could be almost beautiful. In March the sun may shine and the air may be balmy, but without April in the blood this lightheartedness never catches fire. The building may purr, but the body knows better. It wears its ugly winter, summer, autumn skin and, as in all these seasons, knows no other. Only in spring is the flesh new, and the spirit incorruptible. Which made, I thought on that sweetly sad, sadly sweet, Katherine Mortenhoe morning, the spring the only bearable time for dying.

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, by D.G. Compton, skewered me.

I wept. I wept for my pathetic self. I wept for my wasted years. I wept for the children I wanted but didn't have. I wept for the novel I haven't written. I wept in self-pity. I raged against the man who cheated me of fertile years, and cheats me still of the private moments he's made it near impossible for me to find. I raged against the days that fall away.

I wept for humanity, that we are so embarrassed, ashamed, afraid to ask for what we want, what we need from each other. That it is so difficult to show kindness. That we don't know what kindness is.

I once fell in love with a man who lived so much in the present he couldn't remember yesterday and made no plan for tomorrow. I accused him of being digital. Discontinuous.

In Katherine's case, it's illness. She is dying of information overload — a breakdown of the neural circuits having exceeded their limits. It's accompanied by psychological phenomena, neural spasm and nausea best described as outrage. She becomes first by choice and then as a consequence of disease "free of context."

In D. G. Compton, Authenticity, and Privacy in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Anna E. Clark writes:

In a nod to Mortenhoe's title, Roddie says at one point that people are only true when they're "continuous" — when, that is, they're made up of things — names, desires, traits — that endure from one moment to the next. Roddie initially believes that these continuous qualities inhere in the person herself, but by Mortenhoe's conclusion we are left with the feeling that they belong not to us but to others. They are the products of the ways we're seen, the ways we're documented.

When do you cease to exist? When do you cease to exist for others? What would you do if you knew you had only a month to live? Would you live your same life? With the same people? Go to the same job? Would you sign a TV contract for a reality show? ("Certainly human behavior has changed since the coming of TV behavior.") Would you go off-grid? How exactly would you do that?

Seven hours remained. I suppose seven hours do not sound all that terrible. Neither, really, do four hundred and twenty minutes. But I counted them, every one. And they're more than enough when all your life has is an ambition you've seen through, a hope you dare not examine, and a direction you'd rather not guess. They're enough to make possibilities of joy seem, to say the least, a bit ridiculous.

Katherine's diagnosis comes at a time when disease has been virtually eradicated. It's unheard of to die of anything but old age. Katherine's 44. Perhaps it's telling that she works as a programmer of romance novels. Katherine leaves her husband, and it's not immediately clear to Katherine or the reader whether it's out of love, to spare him the ordeal.

Roddie, meanwhile, is a TV personality who's had a camera implanted in his eyes. Everything he sees is automatically captured and transmitted to the studio for review and editing. (It's like he's live-streaming. He can cut audio, but he has somewhat modified his gaze — always scanning for the moneyshot but never looking down when he pees.) His network has invested in him, intent on broadcasting Katherine's demise to a "pain-starved public."

This near-future scenario from 1974 felt a little dated at the start, with its forward-looking vision of public telephones (hah!), post offices and reams of mail (how quaint), reality TV (wait a second...), and hi-fi records (umm...). But that Philip K Dick/Robert Sheckley vibe quickly faded into the background. It became a brilliant story of two fucked-up people in fucked-up circumstances.

Katherine seems to have a clear idea of how she should come to her end, but she turns out to be confused, desperate, and lonely. Roddie is truly conflicted, remorseful, and wants to atone.

They grow very close to each other, both lying to each other, and it is profoundly moving.

The thing is, beauty isn't in the eye of the beholder. Neither is compassion, or love, or even human decency. They're not of the eye, but of the mind behind the eye. I had seen, my mind had seen, Katherine Mortenhoe with love. Had seen beauty. But my eyes had simply seen Katherine Mortenhoe. Had seen Katherine Mortenhoe. Period.

I also saw her with love.

I want to see people as continuous. I want to see the possibility of joy.

The Atlantic published an adapted version of Jeff VanderMeer's introduction to the novel.