that's just some other time

 

Detail of lace dress, 1900.

Dear Women,

Have you ever read The House of Mirth?  I think maybe that Edith Wharton wanted me to feel, at least in part, that Lily Got What Lily Deserved, and then died happily ever after in redemptive glory.  I just couldn't, though.  I felt like Lily was sold down the river before she was born; I felt like I did one day when my friend was really tired and unable to cope, and she was asking her fool boyfriend for some help, in an indirect but utterly desperate way, and this person, this Man acted like he didn't understand her need, when even a stranger across a room could have read it.

Perhaps Edith Wharton just wrote it, and said it like it was, and left the figuring out what to feel for Lily Bart to the reader.  There is also a chance, and this disturbs me greatly, that romanticizing the suffering of tragic women leads to acceptance of the Patriarchy, and what am I to do with that, I ask you?

The thing is, people need help from each other, all the time, for lots of things they cannot cope with alone.  Let us know that, and let us offer help and seek help from each other as often as we can; taking care not to romanticize our suffering, and if we cannot, then we will keep on waiting for the man.

incomplete

 

Dear Dodo-istes,

Do you know that I have 64 drafts posts, spanning all 12 years of Dodo?  There are topics like harina de arroz, spinning Churro wool, the dark songs of California, fairy eggs, Joan Brown, and ordinal numbers.  What happens to these dust-gathering half completed posts is that the time is not right.  Maybe it is a summer topic, and it is storming and cold out in January now (not), so I wait to post it.  Sometimes the theme is too slight or light for the times, sometimes I just don't feel it myself, and sometimes I am unsure of how to complete these orphan posts. 

Today, though, today is just to bring you the song of the day, which I got from my DJ last week.  

things I love: versions 1 & 2

 

Version 1

Dear Watchful,

Yes, it is your song for today, but I also kind of wanted you to watch the Noir-esque video.  Here is what I love:  

It is long.

There is something about identity, here.

Candy Necklaces.  I really love those- edible body ornament?  Need I say more?

Lana Del Rey is the great mumble singer of our time, and I love that; mumble singing is a place often reserved for men, and she just takes that place, as if it were hers all along.

Jon Batiste.

The show about a show; kind of Droste.

Descending a staircase.

Version 2

Dear Watchful,

The title of your song for today has me thinking of things I love, but not the specific things, not the ding an sich, but the love, as a verb.  

What do you do about a thing you love?  Let us take, for example, a thing I have loved for most of my life, since childhood when I first got one of these pale, chalky beaded loops wrapped in crinkly cellophane: the candy necklace!  There is nothing not to love, and if you are unsure of that, let me convince you!  

It is sweet, it is candy, it is jewelry, it is ornament, it is meant for girls.  It is beautiful; the pale pastel rainbow of it.  It melts, it becomes sticky.  It is awkward to eat if you are wearing it.  It fits everyone's neck, its elastic self-adjusts.  It is beads of sugar.  It doesn't last at all.  It is not at all valuable.  Simulacrum.  You see here, how one of the things I love about it is that it turns a lot of jewelry associations upside down and inside out?   The sound of the words- the double hard c and the soft c ending, in other words, the poetry of it.  Oh, and I almost forgot, it smells like sugar, too.  A certain kind of sugar, dubiously sweet, like those baby aspirin smell.

Back to what to do with things you love- just now, I gave you a written paean to the candy necklace, but I have seen beautiful polymer clay versions of it for wearing without getting a sticky neck, and I could imagine making a painting, or opening a candy shop, just so you could show your love for the candy necklace.  You could name your band Candy Necklace.  You could embroider it on your shirt.  All of these things for love of a thing.

I guess that's it.

 

Dear Reader,

Well, you never know when that was your last transmission, do you?  It has happened several times; I am no longer writing to you here.  Why?  You might say:  What has happened?  Are you okay?  Are you unwell?  

We are all unwell, and I have not written to you because they said to me, when I was young and impressionable, a little duckling, imprinting on aphorisms that are the equivalent of Twinkies as nutrition, they said:  if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.  Let that ring, will you, in your years for a couple million minutes.

Are you ready?  Are you with me?  Are you going to continue to believe that if you tell people how you really feel they will not love you?  My work here may be done.  Or, rather, I may have nothing more to say.

On the other hand, I liked that saying- I held, I hold, dear the idea that we should not spread misery with our words.  I have known people that I began to avoid because they would only tell me of the terribleness, of the suffering.  They never had a sentence for the good things, of which there must be one or two.  I give you some right now:  Daffodils.  Titmice.  Sameness, a thread, in old old friends, a kind of reaching back to yourself in being with them.  I guess my question is this:  do we report only on the things that keep us going, or do we only sardonically allude to the things that kill us?  I want something in-between, but I don't know if there is a there, there.

It is just a riff on Silence is Golden, anyway, and I don't think silence is very useful between humans, because we have not worked much on our non-verbal communication skills in what must be a 100 thousand years now.  I will give it a try, now, to say something to you without words:

(this is now a pink air, a mist of light)

(listen to this quiet)

(I am setting my hand over yours, palm down)

(I am tapping out a slow beat with my foot; barely audible)

(let us now both notice the feeling of the pink air, the dampness of it, the smoothness)

(end transmission)

a moment

 

Dear Today,

Here is your song!  I kinda love it, and I hope you do too, today, because you are all we have.

corazones quebrados

 

Dear Listening,

Well.  We find ourselves in such a pickle these days.  I don't really know where to start or how to address this mess we are in, so I guess I won't speak of it just now.  Today is the anniversary of the first Dodo post; 12 years ago.  Time flies, but not really.  It goes forward and back and stays still too, sometimes.

I started writing the Dodo to memorialize all these things that were disappearing: the empty lot, the VHS player, the corded telephone, the roller rink; but right away, I couldn't do it; I couldn't only send you stories of my sadness and loss.  It felt cruel; people want to look forward, to look to something that hasn't been despoiled yet.  Plus-what, I don't think of every loss every minute of everyday.  Double plus-what, I am not sure that sadness isn't a kind of patina that we could learn to enjoy.  Nostalgia might be one; we seem to enjoy that kind of sadness so much it isn't even funny.  I didn't want to just give you nostalgia either.  I wanted to give you that one cream biscuit recipe, only now I usually make *these biscuits (which are NOT fast like the cream biscuits are!).

In any case, happy anniversary to you, too, if you read these pages- because if you don't, it's kind of silly for me to be here, whistling in the dark, but I will be here anyway.  Making art is like that; you just make it, even if you can't find anyone to show it to.

PS  Your song for today.

* Flaky-ass Biscuits adapted from Jessica Koslow's Everything I Want to Eat.

4 cups AP flour

2 Tbs. sugar

1 3/4 tsp. baking powder

3/4 tsp. baking soda

1 1/2 tsp. salt

Put all this into your mixer- mix it.

Add:

250 grams (1 cup plus 2 Tbs.) frozen unsalted butter that has been patiently cut into cubes.

Mix it for maybe 30 seconds.  Then add:

1 1/4 cups buttermilk

while the machine is running- don't mix it too long!  What does that mean?  You know it if you know it, and if you don't, make biscuits more often, or watch some cooking shows. 

Put the dough out onto a flat surface; shape, roll, or pat it into a rectangle about 3/4 of an inch thick.  Spread:

4 Tbs. room temperature unsalted butter

over two-thirds of the patted out dough.  Now fold the unbuttered third over the buttered third, and then fold the last third over that.  Like you would fold a letter.  

Put it in the fridge, and in a half hour, roll it out, and give it what the pastry chefs call a 'turn.'  Repeat this two more times; then leave it in the fridge for an hour.  Now, roll it out and cut it into biscuit about 3/4 inch a thick.  I just cut them into squares, but you can cut circles with a cutter if you like.  To be even more exacting, to exercise even more patience in the kitchen, you can brush the tops with buttermilk and sprinkle flaky sea salt on top of them before you bake them at 400 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes.  

Note:  One December, I gave this book to several pals, for Old White Man's Mas.  It was received as though it were a Rubik's cube: it might be fun, but it is too hard.  I still say, it is an amazing cookbook; I think my mistake was in my estimation of people's patience.  If you, dear reader, are not looking for ease, if you like hard things; women like Violette LeDuc and Emily Wells, then you should get this book!

The bookshelf.

 

Dear Reader,

It's time for me to try to tell you about a book I have been reading.  I am reading it slow, languorously even.  I think, as I often do, that it is a book for everyone, but don't I think that about most of the books I am reading?  

Let us think on that while we listen to this, your song for today.  

It has to do with the problem of audience- audience of one, or less than a million, or less than a hundred; the audience is like ants, you know, one only matters to oneself.  One ant is nothing to even mention.  Of course, in writing you here, I do think of audience, I think of reader, listener, viewer.  It's thorny.  Do I do a thing for just one person?  Or, even for the hope of just one person?  

Here is a page from The Observable Universe by Heather McCalden:

CULTURE = LIFE CONTENT

If you have ever found yourself on the periphery, outside of dominant narratives and nuclear-ish families, you will have passed through a period of emptiness wherein the material of  your life was not 'suitable' for any of the things around you.  Meaning: no outlet or form of communication existed to convey your experience, and so the experience remained caught inside you, seething.  Without external channels to link to there's no way to transmit your information, so the internal landscape deactivates.  It shuts down and remains inaccessible, since no actions or language can scrape away at it.  Since you are, in fact, on your own.

The only recourse then is culture.  Instead of one's experience, songs, podcasts, and TikToks are transformed into a shorthand for particular emotions or situations.  At certain points in my life, if you asked me how I was I would have only been able to respond with data.  I could summarize the latest Game of Thrones episode, or recite the anecdote about Esther's dollar bill from This American Life.  I could tell you about the New Yorker story of red honeybees and the 'maraschino mogul,' but I would not be able to answer even the simplest question about myself because I had nothing inside.  I felt like a ghost and quite often when I entered a room I felt people pull away from me as if suddenly encountering a cold front.  Maybe this fetishizes or romanticizes the situation, puts a metaphor on a state of being that quite possibly doesn't deserve one, but how do we talk about pain in a world full of pain?  We can't.  We don't even try.  We talk about culture instead.  That's why it spreads.

  

Let's hope this message finds its audience.

PS

I might have given you this one, instead:

OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK

If life has ever scraped you out and left you with no prospects, you can use art as a coping mechanism.  You can apply it to your day-to-day.  Take its content or its forms and use them to patch in what's missing.  Take a fictional premise, maybe even a genre, and adapt it to your situation.  See what happens.