For a few years now I’ve tallied the absence of words I write myself on this website, this blog, with a kind of apprehensive anxiety I don’t know how to name, let alone measure.
I used the word write in the sentence above, but the word I suppose I want, the right verb, or righter verb I want, is the blogging verb post. See, I write things—posts, riffs, bits of riffs, rants—and then I delete these things, or let them languish in a drafts folder for whatever small eternity they might be afforded. I write a bit and then decide that the world doesn’t need my (half-assed) opinion or impression or interpretation or whatever on, say—
—Don DeLillo’s novel The Names (his real 9/11 novel), or the aesthetics of breakfast in Claire-Louise Bennett’s story-novel-thing Pond, or the cinematography in Sofia Coppola’s reinterpretation of The Beguiling, or my inability to get through the first 100 pages of William H. Gass’s The Tunnel, or Transcendentalism in the Predator films, or finally reading Eudora Welty’s short story “The Death of a Traveling Salesman” and being utterly stunned by its strangeness, or having to suspend all my cynicism and ironic impulses to find a spark of joy in Ava DuVernay’s film A Wrinkle in Time, or the small connections I note between Iris Murdoch’s The Bell and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, or watching Hayao Miyazaki’s film Ponyo in the theater with my children, or my strange joy in the “steamed hams” microgenre, or etc.—
—so, I guess what I’m saying is—
I’m going to try to blog on this stupid blog more, in a freer way, without the pretense of applying any kind of strong critical acumen to what I’m blogging about. For years I thought of this blog as a sketchpad. Then I started taking the reviews I wrote more seriously, then too seriously. This blog has been an excuse for me to learn about things—a kind of mixtape of quotes and art and etc.—but the more I’ve learned the more I realize that I really know almost nothing about literature and art, and that I usually cannot say what I mean to say (about how I think and feel about what I do know and don’t know about literature art) clearly, so I should do better to pass over in silence (etc.). But this silence mutates into an applied anxiety; it hangs like a big non-attempt in the shallow back of my mind—this silence is its own kind of pretension, or cowardice even, if I’m feeling cruel towards myself.
So like let’s try a Thing on this blog. What if I try to, like, just blog about something every day this month? I could title each post “Blog about X” (let X stand for any old thing—a Gordon Lish sentence that I kept tripping over, or a ditty on light in certain George Frederic Watts, or maybe my recipe for caramelized onions and peppers). How many days are in April? 30 I think? I’ll look it up later. I guess I’ll try to commit to post 30 of these things and see how that feels, although it might feel terrible and I might even let myself fall way short of that goal. This particular Easter Sunday/April Fool’s Day seems like a good day to start a bad project though—an earnest hope for fresh newness as a sort of fool’s errand. So I’ll be the fool.
“White Rabbits”
by
Leonora Carrington
THE TIME has come that I must tell the events which began in 40 Pest St. The houses which were reddish-black looked as if they had survived mysteriously from the fire of London. The house in front of my window, covered with an occasional wisp of creeper, was as blank and empty looking as any plague-ridden residence subsequently licked by flames and saliv’d with smoke. This is not the way that I had imagined New York.
It was so hot that I got palpitations when I ventured out into the streets—so I sat and considered the house opposite and occasionally bathed my sweating face.
The light was never very strong in Pest Street. There was always a reminiscence of smoke which made visibility troubled and hazy—still it was possible to study the house opposite carefully, even precisely; besides my eyes have always been excellent.
I spent several days watching for some sort of movement opposite but there was none and I finally took to undressing quite freely before my open window and doing breathing exercises optimistically in the thick Pest Street air. This must have blackened my lungs as dark as the houses. One afternoon I washed my hair and sat out on the diminuitive stone crescent which served as a balcony to dry it. I hung my head between my knees ¡and watched a blue-bottle suck the dry corpse of a spider between my feet. I looked up through my lank hair and saw something black in the sky, ominously quiet for an airplane. Parting my hair I was in time to see a large raven alight on the balcony of the house opposite. It sat on the balustrade and seemed to peer into the empty window, then poked its head under its wing apparently searching for lice. A few minutes later I was not unduly surprised to see the double windows open and and admit a woman onto the balcony—she carried a large dish full of bones which she emptied onto the floor. With a short appreciative squawk, the raven hopped down and picked about amongst its unpleasant repast.
The woman, who had hemp-long black hair, wiped out the dish, using her hair for this purpose.
Then she looked straight at me and smiled in a friendly fashion. I smiled back and waved a towel. This seemed to encourage her for she tossed her head coquettishly and gave me a very elegant salute after the fashion of a queen.
“Do you happen to have any bad meat over there that you don’t need?” she called.
“Any what?” I called back, wondering if my ears had deceived me.
“Any stinking meat? Decomposed flesh … meat?”
“Not at the moment,” I replied, wondering if she was trying to be funny.
“Won’t you have any towards the end of the week? If so, I would be very grateful if you would bring it over.”
Then she stepped back into the empty window and disappeared. The raven flew away. Continue reading ““White Rabbits,” a short tale by Leonora Carrington”
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