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see inside for verso. Read the rest of this entry »
read comments (0)read comments (1)read comments (0)read comments (0)read comments (0)read comments (0)Exclusive #8: What are all those people talking about all day, anyway?
Category: exclusives!Author: Housewife
read comments (1)read comments (0)The real housewives of Bushwick aren’t here for your fucking funeral. As far as we’re concerned, that coffin is made of glass, and we can already see the goldfishes flopping around inside. We can throw stones inside it, and not break anything but our own view of the street. You haven’t sold us a single vacuum cleaner, not even one with an attachment that can suck up the emotional residue of your own untoward death. You might as well stop trying.
And now that that’s settled, and you’re down on the couch, resigned to your highball in lieu of a bouquet, I can ask you: why is the desire to be a robot so universally selfish? It only takes a moment on the internet to ascertain this: millions of people wish they were, themselves, robots, but no one at all wishes the same thing for their daughters, husbands, boyfriends. It’s sad, really. Emotional remove, automation, appears to be a private luxury, something hoarded, something no one will give as a gift.
(And only one person wishes to be a machine. I don’t know who it is. Everyone else wants to gain the detachment while retaining the humanoid shell. They’re tricky that way. And no one wishes they were a typewriter.)
And are they so different from you, my dear, with your inhumed words, your turned-over goldfish, your legs always straddling that coffin? Don’t you realize we can all see you aren’t inside it?
read comments (0)read comments (0)Dear Housewife, What is your preferred way of coping with a hangover? XQ
Dear XQ
Today I stayed in bed all day reading Proust; I find Proust is the best hangover cure out there. His description of the flowering hawthorn makes me wonder at how mechanical my life has become, how predictable. I wish I weren’t a machine! I’m like a living keyboard, but my escape key is sticky.
I haven’t traveled in years, not since that last trek across Siberia. The miners were so generous, cooking me squirrel stew with an obvious Tuscan influence. But while their squirrels were delicious, their bears were authentically Russian. I sat in the snow watching the bears dance, and after a while I noticed that their arms were prostheses. You could just make out the plastic and ball bearings where the dark fur had worn away.
The queen of the miners sat yawning in her furry hood, and I thanked her for her kindness, especially touching in the frozen wastes. Lady Wristband’s delicious squirrel is a meal I will never forget!
read comments (0)read comments (0)There’s practically nothing on the internet, really. Except here.
Category: exclusives!Author: Housewife
read comments (0)read comments (0)read comments (0)read comments (0)Slender and childless: an excerpt from Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s Madeleine is Sleeping.
Category: ellipsesAuthor: nobody
“When Madeleine sleeps, Mother says, the cows give double their milk. Pansies sprout up between the floorboards. Your father loves me, but I remain slender and childless. I can hear the tumult of pears and apples falling from the trees like rain.
Smooth your sister’s coverlet. Arrange her hair on the pillowcase. Be silent as saints. We do not wish to wake her.”
read comments (0)“When the sun stands striding at high noon,
then up from the waves he comes—
the Old Man of the Sea who never lies—
under a West Wind’s gust that shrouds him round
in shuddering dark swells, and once he’s out on land
he heads for his bed of rest in deep hollow caves
and around him droves of seals—sleek pups bred
by his lovely ocean lady—bed down too
in a huddle, flopping up from the gray surf,
giving off the sour reek of the salty ocean depths…
Now I will tell you all the wizard’s tricks.
First he will make his rounds and count the seals
and once he’s checked their number, reviewed them all,
down in their midst he’ll lie, like a shepherd with his flock.
That’s your moment. Soon as you see him bedded down,
muster your heart and strength and hold him fast,
wildly as he writhes and fights you to escape.
He’ll try all kinds of escape—twist and turn
into every beast that moves across the earth,
transforming himself into water, superhuman fire,
but you hold on for dear life, hug him all the harder!
And when, at last, he begins to ask you questions—
back in the shape you saw him sleep at first—
relax your grip and set the old god free
and ask him outright, hero,
which of the gods is up in arms against you?”
I was a bit surprised to realize that almost exactly the same fight occurs in certain Russian fairy tales, except in those the protean figure is the hero’s lost beloved, and if he can just hold onto her through all her transformations he’ll win her back. He lets go. (Menelaus deals better, here.)
I’m sorry to have been so absent, dear housewives. For one thing I was reading the first two Twilight books, which are much better than expected but don’t inspire much in the way of commentary. (Buffy disempowered at last! Sub-dom manhandling as a substitute for sex! If vampires have no blood flow, then how can they get erections anyway?)
They did inspire a dream, however, in which a crew of vampires was painstakingly disassembling my body for parts—spooling up my intestines, carefully peeling my muscles from the bones and sorting them out, etc. I was conscious and in pain, but quite calm.
read comments (0)Persistent housewives will know I’ve done some theorizing in these pages about the relationship between plot and character. More specifically, I’ve advanced the view that there is not really plot-as-such, but only plot as the phases of the characters, their disclosure in action and event.
Oh, I still believe this. But the trouble is that I believe the reverse simply can’t be true: character cannot be only the source of the plot. (Character can be no more than that, of course, even in good books; but, I ardently believe, not in great ones.) The moment where the character digresses, takes on a private trajectory, becomes the source of no story, serves nothing, is utterly unto itself: that, I think, is what fiction is looking for. A novel is a search for the moment where the self exceeds the structures that define it.
Of course a character has no possibility of exceeding the plot until their symbiosis is established…
(If anyone is waiting for further word on The Savage Detectives, well, I’m pretty near the end, but I’ve been too fluttered of late to read much. And it’s become so cuttingly, terribly beautiful that I’m not sure I’ll be able to write more about it. At this point I’ll just say, Go see for yourself.)
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