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The night of the dinner, Barth had on a black beret, worn at a jaunty angle upon his bald crown, and looked just like John Barth. He made the rounds to each table, and when he took a seat at ours, he talked wittily about hot-air balloons, which was just the sort of thing you’d expect John Barth to talk about. As he charmingly held court (unlike a lot of writers, he was very good at talking), I was thinking about how weird it was that John Barth was seated right there, performing for us. (Who were we, relative to him? Who was I?) Here was the novelist emeritus who once stood at the vanguard of American postmodern fiction, a truly innovative artist who had produced an original, hilarious body of work (although in truth a lot of it was also pretty bad), and still it wasn’t enough. Each book is always a starting over, for every writer. I was thinking then about how I had always been so terrified of this line from “Lost in the Funhouse”: “There ought to be a button you could push to end your life absolutely without pain; disappear in a flick, like turning out a light,” because someone who could write that was someone who knew a lot about despair, and I was thinking about how Barth, with his jauntily angled beret perched upon that great big bald crown, was being reintroduced to whippersnappers such as myself, and about how we all become self-parodies in the end, and about how the whole Barth project concerning the internal problems of narrative in literary fiction maybe didn’t even seem all that pertinent anymore.
Barth wrote a short “review” of Coming Soon!!! for Esquire. At a later date, someone at his publishing house said to me with a weary sigh that his piece in the magazine was the only good review the book got.
damn
For four years I’d been attempting to accept David’s paradoxes, his self-contractions, and his darkness—the whole rich Wallace bouquet. I loved David, and I wanted him to be better than he was. I’d try to remind myself that no one is ever clear in moral terms, and so who, really, was I to judge? I was a wayward creature myself—I was haughty (and would grow haughtier still), I had a nasty temper, I was too enticed by material luxuries (David, snooping through my closet: “You’ve heard of Marx, I presume?”). I was obstinate, solitary, and self-protective, and I could be dismissive of those who did not live up to my own standard of perfection. I knew I was cold. I knew I was inscrutable. I was not a great friend. I waited an unconscionably long time to return David’s call when he left a message saying that his grandfather had died. These sins were just the beginning. I didn’t have clean hands, either.
the marx line is funny tbh but i do relate to this sentiment
What are we to do with the art of profoundly compromised men?
I’ve got no answers for you. I do know that Peter Shaffer wrote that “goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.” Charles Dickens destroyed the lives of everyone close to him, his family most of all. Same goes for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Beethoven. Mozart and his once beloved sister were estranged at the time of his death. Ingmar Bergman slept with nearly every actress he cast in his movies, and he made a lot of movies (most of them exquisite masterpieces). During a rehearsal for G. F. Handel’s opera Ottone, when a well-known Italian soprano refused to sing her opening aria, Handel screamed, “I know well that you are a real she-devil, but I will have you know that I am Beelzebub!” He picked the soprano up by the waist and threatened to throw her out an open second-story window.
What, you thought creative geniuses were pleasant people? You thought you could be friends with them, maybe? Sure, have at it. Enjoy.
this isn't wrong but i do think that it's worth trying to hold ourselves to higher standards [or at least moving towards that horizon]
And so that was the first week, me trying to deny them this treat or that privilege and them complaining and me giving in immediately, buying them bomboloni in the morning and cornetti in the afternoon and them having no appetite for dinner at eight and demanding to stay up for the eleven-fifteen movie on Retequattro, the boys whining, So what that it’s rated red, which is how Tom and Teo fell asleep watching Basic Instinct, me thinking, Well surely it’s been edited for broadcast and certainly it’s been dubbed and really how much Italian can they actually understand, even with the fluent grandfather, the cognates. Like the language was the problem. I did keep my eye on my wine.
lmao
Finally, Artemisia sighed, one afternoon, I found him waiting for me outside my door. This was a weekday. The building was two stories. The front door opened onto a small landing and on the left side of that landing a hallway led to the door of the landlady’s apartment. On the right side were the stairs. Artemisia’s hands were moving as she spoke, sketching. He must have knocked on the front door and my landlady must have heard and let him in because that afternoon I found him sitting on the second floor. His head was bowed and his back was against the door to my apartment. I remember my cheeks were flushed. It was late March but still cold. I think my landlady let Virgilio in out of pity. She would not have wanted him to wait outside. Certainly that was why I let him in. By then it was clear to me that our relationship could not continue. I had not yet decided whether that meant it had to end or if its—its terms, the terms under which we were operating, if they might still be transformed. We had not had sex in months. Not since our first weeks in New York. By choice. By my choice. It wasn’t that he was controlling—that he was trying to be controlling. In the end this is not what bothered me. It was that his desire to control, she paused. This desire, it stemmed not from his power but from its lack. It was his desperation I despised.
i get it
[...] Artemisia looked at me then and our eyes met. She stubbed out her cigarette. The heat pulsing through my body, at that moment, I called it admiration. Admiration because Artemisia knew herself so well and I, at twenty-one, did not, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life. Had not yet realized the folly of governing narratives. The certainty of Artemisia’s voice, this is what I was responding to. It is what, remembering her story, remembering that summer, knowing that folly, I still, unwilling, respond to now.
Respond to but don’t trust. What I mean is that Artemisia seemed to know herself. Seemed because Artemisia was less master of her fate, captain of her soul, than she was a clever gardener. Sequestered in a domestic plot, she worked with the tools at her disposal. Trapped, yes, but in a hedge maze of her own careful design. How else to interpret her insistence that she had never wanted control? That she had, in her relationships with men, only ever wanted to be a child? How else to interpret her insisting all this to someone she barely knew, to someone who was still a child herself? Though sometimes I think in fact she did know herself. Sometimes I think one of the things she was trying to tell me was that she was unhappy in her marriage.
i kind of feel like the second para takes away from the insights of the first but i have to include both for accuracy
“Anyway. We told ourselves she must have known what she was getting herself into. We told ourselves she was an adult, and sure the rumors were widespread, sure they were widely believed, but they were also just that, rumors. The porn wars were over and porn had won and we were porn-positive, we were sex-positive, we probably wouldn’t have even called ourselves feminists. Who were we to judge.” The tenant walked over to the chair she’d been sitting in and began to lower herself, changed her mind, stood back up. “At first,” she said, “at first they seemed happy. He started going out a little bit less and she started going out a little bit more. Once a month, twice a month, we’d see them at a party together—she’d always be wearing something ridiculous. Once, this was in March or April, nowhere near Halloween, she came in a kind of—classy cowgirl costume, patterned dress, lace trim, hat and boots and a ribbon around her neck.” She shook her head. “But so anyway they’d show up, arm in arm, and she’d be wearing something ridiculous and she still wouldn’t drink, just sit on the couch and sip from a cup of tonic water all night while he took shots with former students. Now I tell my undergrads, told my undergrads, If a grad student wants to hang out with you, that’s a sign, a sign you should definitely not hang out with them, but back then”—she shook her head—“it didn’t occur to us, how inappropriate it was, this guy at parties with people a decade younger than he was, people whose grades he had recently been, in some cases still was, responsible for. We thought it meant we were—mature, sophisticated, I don’t know, adult.” She lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of the one she had finished, left the butt in a plastic cup to smolder. “Anyway, we thought it said something good about us, his being at our parties, rather than something evil about him. But okay this girl—so at parties she’d sit on the couch and she wouldn’t really talk to anyone, just sit and sip and watch, but also she didn’t seem unhappy. She had this smile like she was”—the tenant made air quotes with the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette—“ ‘happy, with a secret.’ I heard that somewhere. I’ve always liked it. ‘Happy, with a secret.’ The safest way to be happy, if you think about it. If you keep it a secret, the happiness, it’s harder for someone else to, you know”—the tenant shrugged—“take it from you.”
What happened was my friend got divorced, and then, for a while, she went to live with my parents. She said, my friend, that she wanted to spend some time with people who liked her. I lived in California too, though up north. With my husband, though my friend did not ask if she could stay with us. I guess I was a little offended. Told myself she wanted to be tended to, knew I would not tend to her and knew my mother would. Though also I was relieved. Just then we were trying to have a baby. Baby books everywhere and me lying on my back, in bed, a thermometer in my vagina, trying to take my basal body temperature so I’d know when to fuck my husband, this, we’d been told, was the most natural way. My mind so filled with this one desire—baby, baby, baby—it might as well have been blank. Dutiful copulation. Tension and resentment packed into each of our small rooms like pudding into pudding cups. “Do you think,” my friend asked me, “that it’s ethical, right now, to have a baby. Considering where we are. In late capitalism, the life cycle of the planet.” I hung up. My husband and I did not end up having a baby, though not for ethical reasons. Later we also got a divorce. Having a baby, in any case, is never ethical. I don’t mean it’s not, just that’s the wrong scale.
yeah fair
Also that I’d started involuntarily imagining what it would be like to fuck every man I came into contact with. What it would be like if the power went out and everyone else in the room were raptured and we just had to do it right there on the conference room table for the sake of, you know, humanity, his hand in my hair, pulling, and me opening my mouth to protest, the words dying in my throat. Involuntarily, right. I was working in HR at this point, is that irony. I should know, that PhD I didn’t finish was in English lit. Probably this was connected to the fact that I’d started watching porn. Every morning, right after taking my basal body temperature, like putting a thermometer in my vagina gave me the idea. Like I couldn’t think about making a baby without thinking about making a baby. In retrospect I think I was mad at my husband. Is that too obvious? Remarkable how hard it is for women to admit they’re angry. Not annoyed or upset or irked or miffed or any sentiment that might be captured in a text message that ends in a series of exasperated question marks. Angry.
John was on a health kick, had been, and to spite him I’d been buying frozen pepperoni pizzas, Confetti Cupcake Pop-Tarts, going out for groceries and coming home with buckets of KFC. These were, to be clear, for me. They were to spite him, but they were for me. He’d open a can of soup, Amy’s Organic, while I picked a chicken wing clean with my teeth. As the soup heated, split pea maybe, barley vegetable, John would chop a head of kale. The night before I drove down to the city, the soup was black bean chili. The soup was heating and John was chopping his kale and I was mauling my wing and every so often I paused, a finger fishing for gristle between my teeth. “It’s not,” I said, “like it’s going to help.”
lol