by
Keith Gessen
project/beach-house
Catherine Lacey,
Keith Gessen,
Jeffrey Eugenides,
Mary Gaitskill,
Helen Garner,
Kate Folk,
Leslie Jamison,
C.J. Hauser,
Thomas Pynchon
It was just at the point when things were finally cracking up for me that I ran into Lauren and her father on Madison Avenue. Jillian, my fiancée, was visiting her family in California and I, I had raced up to New York in our car. I didn’t know what I was going to do there, in fact the people I contacted to announce my trip were people I barely knew—but the main thing was to get out of our apartment. The life I had then was slipping away, I could feel it, and I had developed the notion that some nudge, some shift or alternately some miracle, might help me fit everything back into place. I would hold on to Jillian, I hoped, and last until the next election, and then we’d see.
Most of these places had declined or changed—they were not for me, just then—but Morris Binkel’s articles in the New American were a different story. His mind was ablaze. It was his belief that American culture was corrupt; that it was filled with phonies, charlatans, morons, and rich people. Also their dupes. Binkel called for a renewal of an adversary culture—the young writers of today, said Binkel, were social climbers, timid and weak; they stood around at parties in New York waiting to be noticed, waiting to be liked. He reserved his especial scorn for his own people, for young Jewish writers, who had once been the bravest and the most outrageous, and now were the most timid, the most polished, kowtowing to their elders’ ideas of orthodoxy and demeanor. (None of them, I read between the furious lines of Binkel, could lift a couch in a Mount Vernon apartment and toss it in the back of a U-Haul truck.) No one spoke anymore from the heart, said Binkel, and it was a shame.
norman finkelstein i assume???
Susan was thirty-five years old, and Leisha thirty-four. When they were friends, Susan was an aspiring writer and Leisha an actress. Whenever she had a positive image of Leisha—a rarity during these last six years—she saw them together in Leisha’s apartment drinking tea, drinking wine, snorting coke, something, and talking about their careers. Leisha had loved the word “career.” “I think it’s going to happen for you really first,” she’d say. “Like boom, your career’s just going to skyrocket—I mean it.”
It hadn’t. Susan had spent most of her New York years typing, proofreading or coat-checking, selling an article maybe twice a year. Little by little she had given up trying to make it as a writer and had taken an entry-level position with a journal that she didn’t think much of. Her editorial career didn’t exactly skyrocket, but it puttered along nicely. In Chicago, where she lived now, she edited a pretentious TV magazine and occasionally wrote film reviews for a local entertainment guide that paid almost nothing but gave her a chance to pontificate about aesthetics. When she thought about the magazine, she despised it and considered herself a failure; when she didn’t think about it, she would catch herself enjoying the work and decide that it was where she belonged.
Stephanie hung up feeling vaguely humiliated. She thought of her job at Christine’s, almost so she could feel worse, but felt strangely comforted instead. This made no sense to her, but she accepted the comfort. She wished that she could tell Sandra about her real job, but she didn’t dare. Perhaps Sandra wouldn’t be shocked, but she would think it was self-destructive and insulting to women. Well, maybe it was. She never got any writing done while she was hooking. Somehow the idea of coming home after a day at Christine’s and sitting down to write was impossible; her thoughts were clotted by the clamoring, demanding ghosts of the men she’d seen that day. She needed to make herself a nourishing meal and sit still and take care of herself, as her mother used to say. Working at Christine’s was a time for making money and resting her brain, she told herself. Writing would come later.
I learned how to block out the sound of a cheering crowd and his occasional howls as I read. Henry was such a remote, dispassionate person that I enjoyed seeing him experience an extreme emotion, even if the feats of strangers were the only thing that seemed to rouse such feelings from him. The fact that I wrote all day and came home to read, he said, proved that being a journalist wasn’t taxing in the same way that being an artist was. I never disagreed with him. I did not understand what Henry did in his studio or why. At home, we spent our time together engrossed in opposite things, and this had seemed like one of the things a person had to do in marriage—accept differences, block out certain noises, be alone. There may be nothing inherently wrong with living a life like that, and perhaps I could have safely remained married and had his children and gone along with the original plan. It’s not as if I would have died from it. Not immediately.
good point for BH
Often X made the argument that our supposedly liberal society was illogically puritanical about age differences in romantic partners, that “some” fourteen-year-olds were more mature and capable than adults well over twice their age. I agreed this was a possibility, but it seemed sagacious teens were in shorter supply than lecherous adults, and lust itself has a transfiguring effect, a way of taking action and justifying it later. I’d once had a professor who’d pursued me while I was his student, and though I was technically and legally mature enough to consent, the imbalance of power seemed to me a warning. To this, X groaned: Didn’t I know that personal experience blurred the truth? And furthermore, she said, the professor obviously hadn’t been appealing enough to me, so it wasn’t an adequate example. I did not bring up the fact I’d been quite attracted to him, as I never mentioned any attractions I’d had in the past; I even found it difficult, in her presence, to remember them clearly, so completely my sense of desire and sexuality seemed to rest in her hands. We never reached a conclusion to this disagreement; we simply concluded and re-concluded that there was no use bickering over abstractions, though abstractions continued to be the sole subject of our bickering.
this is funny. maybe bh inspo? for arguments
Once I theorized aloud that X’s circadian rhythms might have been abnormal, that they might have worked differently from those of the average person, but she asked me to explain how, precisely, circadian rhythms “worked” in this supposedly “average person.” What did I know definitively about such rhythms, and could I cite any reputable studies, and was my understanding of this so-called biological process up-to-date? Of course, I had no such information at hand and had to cede the discussion to her; that is, I had to stop talking.
This happened not infrequently—this realization of how little I actually knew and how much I repeated or relied upon information about things of which I had no direct understanding. Though such probing of someone’s ignorance may seem hostile, even controlling, I did not experience it as such. Instead, it had the result of deepening my understanding of everything, of relying less upon shorthand, and though I did eventually read extensively about circadian rhythms, there were not, at that time, enough credible studies on jet lag to convince X of its existence.
definitely similar to BH lol
I soon realized that inevitability of every relationship: the things which initially draw you to each other become the exact things that irritate you the most. I’d loved Andy’s nonconformity, which became irritation at the lack of structure in his life. He’d loved my independence, which became an annoyance at my remoteness. In the early days, he explained away my lateness with my free-spiritedness. After a while he thought it was selfishness. I used to love that he wanted to make everyone laugh because I thought it was a sign of his generosity. At some point I saw it for what it really was – neediness. I realized he saw every social interaction as a miniature gig and therefore an opportunity for acceptance or rejection. His mood was so dependent on how he felt these conversational performances went and I hated being wise to it.
She tried to explain to him about the level you reach, with both feet in, when you lose your fear, you lose it all, you've penetrated the moment, slipping perfectly into its grooves, metal-gray but soft as latex, and now the figures are dancing, each pre-choreographed exactly where it is, the flash of knees under pearl-colored frock as the girl in the babushka stoops to pick up a cobble, the man in the black suitcoat and brown sleeveless sweater grabbed by policemen one on either arm, trying to keep his head up, showing his teeth, the older liberal in the dirty beige overcoat, stepping back to avoid a careening demonstrator, looking back across his lapel how-dare-you or look-out-not-me, his eyeglasses filled with the glare of the winter sky. There is the moment, and its possibilities.
She even tried, from what little calculus she'd picked up, to explain it to Franz as At approaching zero, eternally approaching, the slices of time growing thinner and thinner, a succession of rooms each with walls more silver, transparent, as the pure light of the zero comes nearer. . . .
But he shook his head. "Not the same, Leni. The important thing is taking a function to its limit. At is just a convenience, so that it can happen."
He has, had, this way of removing all the excitement from things with a few words. Not even well-chosen words: he's that way by instinct. [...]
ugh i love this
beach house inspo?
H: ‘Let’s take out hospital insurance.’
V: ‘Why.’
Pause.
H: ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s agree not to ask each other why in that aggressive way. Could we avoid that tone? Do you think? For the New Year?’
V: ‘Why is one of the most important words in the language. It’s an absolutely crucial word. It’s a much better word than Let’s.’
Short silence.
H: ‘Do we have to be in competition all the time?’
He makes out he doesn’t know, can’t imagine what I mean. I point out his placing of why and let’s in opposition. He acts as if he’s amazed by this ridiculous suggestion.
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