pretty dumb things

spencer t. jones, the dog of my life

Chelsea g. summers — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:38:29 GMT

I wrote this piece a couple of years ago to honor my loss of my first dog, the legendary Spencer. I've reposted it here because try as I might, I don't think I could write anything more beautiful and right.

Three years ago on 3 July 2003, I euthanized my dog, the Legendary Spencer. I quail a bit at the word "euthanize"; I find my chest contracts at it. It's an ugly word. To my mind, though, the euphemisms are worse: put down like an insult or put to sleep like a child, as if there is a time when he, my furry eternal toddler, will rise again.

Three years ago Spencer and I took our last walk. I leashed him, and he looked at me with dying and hopeful eyes because he loved me and because he loved walks. He unquestioningly went with me; he stepped gingerly down the stairs of my apartment for the last time. For the last time, I watched him pee, him no longer able to lift his leg. For the last time, I saw him pause outside Bang! Bang! because one upon a time the store had been another store, a store that unfailingly had provided Spencer with biscuits, and he never, not even in his slightly addled dotage, forgot a place that gave him biscuits.

For the last time I took him for a walk and for the last time he trusted me.

He was, unquestionably, ready to die. His kidneys were failing, and his lung cancer had progressed to a point where he hacked and coughed often and with a painful rawness; just breathing, for him, was difficult. He had ceased to eat, even yummy treats like liverwurst. I had, a few weeks earlier, had him shaved for the summer, something I had never done before. I felt he was old and uncomfortable in the heat, so I had brought him, also for the last time, to the groomer's, which he hated.

I bid adieu to his beautiful caramel sundae hair, the first bits of him I said good-bye to; the rest would come later.

And so three years ago for the last time, I brought him to his vet's, where she put us in a quiet room and then injected him with some kind of preliminary downer, to get him to sleep before she gave him his lethal dose of whatever.

He wouldn't sleep there on the vet's floor. He couldn't. His body, dehydrated from his failing kidneys, and his mind, nervous from being at the vet's, wouldn't succumb to the soporific drugs. His eyes remained open and he remained restive. Finally, unable to wait any more, the vet just came in, and kindly and gently injected him with a series of shots. He died in my lap.

I held him and cried, and then I clipped tufts of his ear hair, which I have saved in a box. I also took ink prints of his left front paw on rice paper. (I would, about a week later, walk back to the vet's to pick up a white bakery box that read " Spencer, the loving pet of chelsea g. summers." It still contains his ashes, but now box and ashes reside in a creamy white marble mausoleum, lovingly made by a friend.)

I walked home from the vet's alone. Alone I spent that night and the next day, 4 July. The following day, I took the prints I had made of Spencer's paw after his death to a tattoo artist, and I had him tattoo me with Spencer's paw, his name and his dates on my right deltoid. It's not a very good tattoo—it wasn't my usual artist, and I knew I'd regret its ham-handed scarring depth—but I will never remove it.

I have lost friends, I have lost family members. I have never in my life felt the keening grief I felt over losing my dog. I sobbed with animal loss—deep, heaving, inarticulate moans of loss. I can't even write this today without tears. And I think that this grief is due to the fact that people have disappointed me. People have created conflict. People have given me qualified affection.

My dog never did. Sure, he made me angry. Once he ate the corner of my then-roommate Becky Sue's mattress. It was not a good day for either of us. But Spencer was always unequivocally happy to see me. His love for me was pure, and steady, and unqualified.

I was his God, he was my dog.

I remember in those first few weeks of insane grief, in those days when all I wanted, all I really wanted was to be with him, how I felt his fear of being removed from me, how I worried that no one would take care of him wherever he was, and how I had a dream. In my dream, he and I were out on a beautiful summer day, in a park that wasn't a park, and somehow we got separated.

I saw him across a wide expanse of very green grass and I called him, but he didn't come. He stood there, his long blonde and white hair rippling in the breeze as I called and called, and then he walked, his big Aussie butt twitching, away from me. In my dream, I remembered that he was deaf, that he couldn't hear me, but then I woke and I realized that he had left because he was dead. He was gone, and I could never call him back.

I don't have a religious background. I don't have a clear idea of an afterlife, of a heaven or a hell or even a reincarnation. However, in my hopes, if I live a good life, if I'm moral and take responsibility for my mistakes, if I treat my neighbor as myself, and apologize when I do not, then I shall at my life's end be reunited with Spencer.

In a perfect world, dogs like him would never die. In a perfect world, I would never have known this loss. But in a less perfect world, I console myself, I would never have known his love.

Spencer T. Jones 11/27/90-7/3/03

on blott, the octogenarian cat

Chelsea g. summers — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:32:04 GMT

Living in Vermont, my family often went through cats like we went through tubs of mink oil, which is to say quickly and without much attachment. My first pet was a cat named Brillig; I’m too young to remember him because when my mom fled her abusive husband on that May day almost exactly 46 years ago she also abandoned Brillig. The next pet was also a cat whose name has gone the way of all cat-flesh, as did the cat. The next one was named Sammy Davis Jr., as were the next three or four, who were named Sammy Davis Jr II, III, and IV. One was killed by Parvo, another by a car, yet another by something unknown, and the last died of old age.

I have owned seven cats myself. The first, named Ms, a feline testament to my very early feminism, lived with my family after I went to college, and she lived long enough to grow swaybacked and bald. She also grew demented, thus leading my sister to buy a refrigerator magnet that read, “A cat by any other name is a horrid little fleabag that shits behind the couch,” a sentiment that rarely fails to make me giggle.

After I left Ms to my family, I got, successively, Grant, Pig and Jasmine, all of whom drifted away, as cats are wont to do. I once saw Pig and Jasmine after they abandoned me; they both gave me the feline stink eye, turned their tails at me, and flashed their anuses as one. I’m pretty sure their body language meant precisely what it seemed to say. When I lived with Eff, we adopted Sam Shepard, the Cowboy Kitty. I moved to Gotham to be with Eff, and Sam accompanied me. He hated it, the indoor kept-kitty lifestyle, and Sam blew up until he looked like Walter Matthau in a cat-suit. I brought him back to Vermont to live out his days with my parents in suburban splendor. He died a few years ago; he was old and still glorious.

Living with and without cats, I discovered something I never thought possible: I am a dog person. In high school and college, when the choice between cats and dogs defines you as much as whether you wear Sweet Honesty or Charlie, drink Coke or Pepsi, or listen to Devo or Motörhead, my choice was firmly feline. I collected cat poems (Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,/are changeable, marry too many wives,/ desert their children, chill all dinner tables/ with tales of their nine lives./ Well, they are lucky. Let them be/nine-lived and contradictory) and made a chapbook. I had the B. Kliban books, the B. Kliban mugs and the B. Kliban posters. I held a staunchly pro-cat agenda. I was all about the cat.

Growing up, I’d had dogs, two of them, both St. Bernards and both hairy, drooling, stinky and much beloved. But in wanting to give myself the insouciant, tail-flipping independence of the cat, I renounced dogs and all their shaggy, needy fidelity. I embraced the cat within, which is to say that I often treated people poorly, was conscious only of my needs, and held no compunction about gacking on anyone’s floor and leaving it to them to clean up.

I’m not exactly sure what changed—maybe it was living in an alienating city for a year in a small apartment with a man I no longer loved. But at 28 I made the conversion to Dog Person. As with most converts, I became a zealot. I was all-dogs-all-the-time, even working as a dog walker for a year and a half. During that time, I got the Legendary Spencer, and while the canine fervency has cooled, I would describe myself doggy. I love dogs, can’t live without them, want a man who is a dog; pro-dog, that’s me.

And yet I have a cat. His name is blott. He’s black, and he’s evil, which is to say that he isn’t, but being bound by his genetics, as we all are, he can’t help but be evil. Cats haven’t much of an innate desire toward altruism, and no matter how many heart-warming reports of cats dragging babies out of fires I read, I’m not going to alter my views on the intrinsic, and not unpleasurable, evilness of cats.

Cats can see things we don’t. I’m convinced my cat, who routinely sits in corners and stares at the wall with great intent, communes with Other Beings. Blott is odd, and black, and dark, but as cats go, blott’s pretty good. He is friendly and he doesn’t bite much. He is also, finally, old. He’s seventeen, maybe sixteen, and he’s lived with me in this apartment almost as long as I have. He has seen Spencer live and die, and he’s seen another cat, Smudge, a cat who was notable for his stickiness and stupidity and torpor, come and go. He’s seen many boyfriends and born witness to much pain and bad behavior. He doesn’t care. Blott’s indifference is the stuff of legend.

Blott was spry and gorgeous and now he’s old and evil and, I fear, a wee bit senile. Of late, it’s felt like I live in Alistair Crowley’s Shady Pines, a geriatric home for aging Satanists. Daily there is poo and there is goo. This morning I woke at about 6:00 to the scent of doody and a carefully deposited tiny turd under my pillow. I had been visited by the Shit Fairy or, more likely, my cat’s dexterous ass had defied inertia to plop that pinky-nail sized poop on my bed. Later, when I rose, I found a seven-foot long trail of cat gack trailing a slimy path through the kitchen into the bathroom; this line was punctuated by a hairball the size of a gerbil.

My cat is old, 84 human years, if websites can be believed. He has grown extra intensively cantankerous and privileged, which in a cat is saying something. He cries like a banshee in the night, and I answer with food. It’s clear that his death is nigh, and sometimes I feel like it’s not nearly fucking nigh enough. Night after night blott wakes me with caterwauling and bad smells, and I imagine my hands closing around his ancient little neck and snapping it like a sere twig.

I won’t, of course. That would be “wrong,” and “immoral,” and “illegal,” but to not admit my urge would be to refuse the whole story and to renege both my feelings for this cat and my own humanity. Aged dogs look wise and gentle; they look at you with love and the patience of eons. Cats just look more calcified in their spite. Their entitlement grows a stony carapace around them, and we—or at least I—bend to the old cat’s will. I kowtow and placate and scratch behind the ears and beneath the chin. I pick up the shit where I find it, and I’m finding it in just horrible places. I mop up the goo, and I rub the snot from the cat’s nose. I buy the canned food, and I open the stinky tins at ungodly hours. I do it all because I feel an unlikely, reluctant love, and because I know that when that day comes, and I find blott hard and still and quiet and dead, I will be sad.

I will miss him, that evil little fuck.

james joyce, a man who liked rumps

Chelsea g. summers — Wed, 13 May 2009 03:02:33 GMT

I've a new piece on Filthy Gorgeous Things about James Joyce. It's called "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pervert," which is a title that does give you a fairly comprehensive idea of what the piece is about. Here are the first two paragraphs:

Stephen Joyce, the grandson of literary giant James Joyce, doesn't want you to know about the letters discussed herein. Stephen Joyce has refused copyright permission, sued Sotheby's auction house, and destroyed documents in order to keep people like you--and me--from reading his grandfather's correspondence and discovering this: that James Joyce, in addition to being one of the greatest writers in English, was a pervert.

I use "pervert" here with affection, not condemnation. Pretty much any person who is a pervert is fine by me. (N.B. I do mean to say consensual and safe perverts. As long as the executors of sexual preclusions toe the lines of both the safe and the consensual, I believe perverts everywhere should be free to let their freak flags fly.) And Joyce, the author behind such works of devastating brilliance and beauty as Ulysses, Dubliners, Finnegan's Wake and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was pretty much a dyed in the wool--or, rather, skid-marked on cotton--pervert.

Should you want to read the rest--and how could you not?--go here and do so. Then leave me comments below because, sadly, F/G/T doesn't give you that option.

bodies in time and space

Chelsea g. summers — Tue, 12 May 2009 01:04:41 GMT

This August, I’ll have lived in Gotham twenty years. In those twenty years, I’ve lived in eleven apartments, though I’ve spent fifteen in the one I’m typing in right now. I moved around a lot my first five years, which is pretty typical for new New Yorkers, actually. In those eleven apartments, I’ve lived with four men, with collective whom I shared around eight years, to make a smeary approximation. Add to those eight the five years or so I’ve spent with assorted other dudes (including the three-ish years I spent with Donny) and for a total of thirteen years, give or take, the cavalcade of my dating life has been traipsing through Gotham.

There are many bodies that hang like asteroids in my one-score block of Gotham time and space. There are bodies who throb and glow like pulsars, and others who lie dead and dormant like white stars. There are none whom I’d call black holes, thankfully. But they’re all there, somewhere. Spend enough time in a city, date enough people, and the landscape becomes dotted with relationship remembrances, a ghostly breadcrumb trail that pulses with meanings invisible to any other naked eye.

Taking a cold empiric if necessarily hazy accounting, I’ve spent only seven years on my onesy, and yet it feels like I’ve spent ever so much more time alone than partnered. I am, of course, single now and feeling fine about it. I suffer an almost rosily nostalgic glow when I see couples performing couplehood, which couples do as much to express affection between themselves as to express their bond to the world. Ah, I think, I recall holding hands. Yes, I know of having a wisp of hair brushed from my forehead. I can recollect that specific canting of torsos, the one that implies shared intimacy, emotions and bodily fluids.

I remain able to summon a vague cloud of dating interest, a romantic nebula. It’s a pretty sight when I let my mind drift into that telescopic view. I see the sparkles and the lightning flashes and that ethereal glow intrinsic to the happy clashing of two separate people who spontaneously unite into one hot element. I can visualize that moment and feel it resonate with that pleasurable bassy thrum that bounces between my solar plexus and my svadisthana, to drift a little old-agey prose-wise. I can see it, but I can’t touch it, and I’m not sure I want to.

Which is all to say that at some point in the past few years a seismic change took place. Something major shifted, almost without my notice, and the landscape of my interior life changed, possibly irrevocably. I used to feel a mad desperation at being alone. I felt oppressed by singularity, disfigured by it, strange and crazed and wild at my single experience. I dated in a frenetic rush. I flagellated myself with my own undesirability when I wasn’t dating. I felt the press and crush of my own romantic failures with gravitational force. I nearly broke myself with my own pressure to date. Without a man, I was nothing. I didn’t cease to exist—that would have been a step up in emotional health actually—rather, I turned antimatter, a singularly horrid and shadowy incarnation of my dated self.

Now that wild compunction is past. I put my eye to the romantic pinhole and see the expansive glory that can be a romantic relationship, but I’m still nonetheless aware of what lies just outside of the rim of my vision. The unavoidable disappointment, the uncomfortable sleeping, the pain and the fear and the meeting of parents and other family, the boredom and the sports watching. The apparitional specter of Xs and the weighty baggage that every human accumulates after adolescence. The bad smells and the anger and the stuff that drifts gently away like so much space detritus.

I hope some day that I’ll be able to put these two views together—the rosy macro and the lurid micro—and finally put the “real” in “relationship.” Neither one view nor the other is valid, though neither are they false. And yet, even a contented spinster such as myself can see the value in the coupled state. Plus, I would really rather enjoy someday having sex. Bodies in space are nice, but bodies in bed are nicer.

Or, faint as the morning star, so I seem to recall.

picture this, my telephone number

Chelsea g. summers — Wed, 06 May 2009 00:51:24 GMT

I rarely serve up pictorial evidence here on my pretty dumb things, but I've lately embraced the photo booth feature on my iMac. Pictures, for all their two-dimensional limitations, do provide an accurate, if peccable, documentation. I've been documenting change, in short, and I'm going to show it to you, courtesy of my iMac and some help from my friends.

For any number of reasons, I've been slowly emerging from the chrysalis of doom that held me in its livid embrace for so many months, and for any number of reasons, that emergence has caused me to change my appearance. Part of my choice to relinquish the cookies of pain--which I've written about previously--and implement the diet of vigor sprung from internal forces, the feeling that I was just over and done with managing my emo self by eating. But the other part of my choice came from purely external and vain reasons.

Two months ago, I decided to put into action my friend Karl Elvis's kind offer to buy me a tattoo. I saw my tattoo artist, the very fabulous Stephanie Tamez, at her studio in Brooklyn, and staring at my toad-white upper arm in the clinical fluorescent light of the studio, I was appalled. I got my tattoo appointment, did some quick calculations and cemented my desire to get into shape. If I was going to sport a new tattoo, I wanted that arm to look good enough to eat.

I wanted Stephanie to transform my memorial Spencer tattoo that I already had from its thug life incarnation into something pretty (see original at left; click to embiggen; my computer flips photos; the text isn't mirror image in real life). I'd had an idea that Stephanie, in her infinite dermal wisdom, quickly convinced me was stupid beyond the telling of it. Mercurial and dark, Stephanie rummaged through some of her many drawers and pulled out a tattered and battered book of Victorian clip art. Rapidly, she thumbed through the book, pausing every once in a while to jab a forefinger at one illustration or another. I told her that I absolutely deferred to her good judgment, and after Stephanie took a picture, drew a diagram, filled in a form, and looked at me decisively, I got an appointment.

Stephanie chose for me a design based on Victorian graphic filigree, and yesterday's tattoo session was long-ass, highly painful, and incredibly successful (again, pictures at left; clicking and embiggening). Naturally, because my tattooist's opinion of me is paramount, I sat still as a Maori and stoically let Stephanie have her painful inky way with me. We chatted about books and sex work and her girlfriend and my lack of boyfriend and Texas and why it's difficult to go home again, and three hours later I had new art.

It's not quite finished yet. Stephanie wants to add another curlicue or two and shade the bellies of the cues with gray. "It'll give it depth," she said. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but given how well she does what she does, I'm tractable as a lamb. The next appointment is Friday 15 May.

I've another physical transformation in the works. On Thursday, I have an appointment with Randall, my Texan hairstylist, for a haircut. I've not had my hair cut in a year and a half, pretty much to the date (see eighteen months for significance here). I grow hair like Julia Roberts grows teeth. My hair is an unstoppable force. It grows recklessly, willfully and with an assertively healthy abandon. Currently, my hairstyle is out of Lord of the Rings (see left, and what the hell, right). It reaches my waist. And while even I must acknowledge it's pretty, I nonetheless feel like it's also sort of creepy in its Crystal Gayle excess. It's not going to be turning my green eyes blue, but it's not making me happy. Plus, it's a heavy, itchy, cumbersome animal, and I just want to hack it off with an Exacto.

The haircut I'm considering is that of Starbuck in Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. Which basically means that I'll be taking my hair into hyperdrive and crossing time and space, as well as transforming it from Eowyn exorbitance to Kara efficiency. Hair has always held a kind of Victorian significance for me. I understand with visceral inarticulacy why in Robert Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" the eponymous Lover chooses to strangle Porphyria with her own hair: her hair is inextricable from her eroticism and to use it to kill her is to punish her for her promiscuity. I fear cutting my hair will divest me of my mojo, but I'm so very tired of this beast decorating my scalp that I'm ready to risk it.

I may still change my mind.

Finally, my friend 1st Republic, 14th Star has made good on his promise to photograph my much beloved graveyard, the one I felt such nostalgia Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book. Looking at the photos of this halcyon/eldritch space, I get that strange emotional palimpsest of recognizing the old while seeing the new. The graves, their decaying gray and wind-worn nubs, remain the same. The pointy fence and the arching sepulchral trees, however, are gone. The hill to the east remains, but while it had been carpeted in spiky evergreens, houses now peek above the sight-line. about after reading

It's hard for me to look at these images. A tsunami of remembrance hits against a flood of newness, and I swirl in the vortex. That said, I do love the one with Camel's Hump in the background. This is the view I remember well, and in a strange reverse-Proustian memory, looking at it summons the smell of meadow, earth, strawberries and growing things.

(Want daily doses of my thoughts and bon mots? Follow me on Twitter.)

write on, a status report

Chelsea g. summers — Mon, 04 May 2009 01:09:01 GMT

A realization struck me yesterday: for the past year, for better or worse, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, I supported myself with my writing. One complete year now, I’ve been a writer. I’m a bit stunned, actually.

To be skeletal honest, most of my paid writing isn’t the writing I’d like to be doing. I am not, for example, being paid to be a columnist, a job I’d dearly love. No great media giant like Condé Nast is doling out my happy yearly salary in great dripping gobs. I don’t get much groovy gratis stuff such as hot-and-cold-running tickets to rock shows (like my friend Sasha Frere-Jones) or tickets to plays (like my friend Terry Teachout) or cruises with 90’s bands and trips to Sasquatch seminars (like my friend Eric Spitznagel). I don’t have a book contract. I didn’t get my piece published in the Times, sadly. I don’t even have agents falling over themselves to court me, as I once did. But I do pay my bills by the fruits of my linguistic labors.

Most of what I write falls under the broadly defined rubric of “copy.” The term brings to mind packing excelsior: stuff that’s made to fill other stuff so that yet more stuff doesn’t rattle around and break from stress, entropy, or gravitational force. The copy I write sells things. It seems I’m fairly adept at writing stuff that sells things. I also ghostwrite, and it seems I’m fairly adept at ghostwriting, that practice that seems more ventriloquist than apparitional, for when you write as a ghost, you’re transmitting someone else’s voice through your body of work. I sometimes write for magazines, though not often and not the ones I want to write for. I had three sexytime stories published in three separate anthologies writing for a sexytime website (which writing I actually do enjoy). But what I want to write for money mostly isn’t what I’m getting paid to write, not yet anyway. last year. I’m

I have hope. I have guidance. I have ideas. I have talent. And—enter the weirdness—I also apparently have diligence, devotion and discipline. It has been four years since I waywardly began my journey into this writing life, and though I’ve not quite stumbled onto my perfect path, I don’t veer off the trail, to run a metaphor into the dark, loamy ground. I doubt myself with soul-keening acuity, but I do so less frequently. This is a good sign. I also feel as if my writing is getting stronger, more structural; it’s losing its wisteria. Don’t get me wrong: I like wisteria; it’s pretty and it smells good. But wisteria in all its purple glory hides its roots that tear up foundations and leave buildings hollow rubble. It needs to be pruned. Prose is the same way.

I may not yet be paid to write what I want, and I may not yet be paid enough with the kind of consistency to keep me thoroughly solvent, but I am getting closer. Most importantly, none of it would be possible without this blog. This blog started me writing consistently. Having it made me write honestly, bravely and dangerously. I am not a person who can write without an audience. If there’s no one reading, I don’t want to write.

Like the generous support that makes the fine programming at PBS possible, my freelancing year was made possible by this blog, and by extension those people who read it. Because not only did my blog kick my writing ass, and not only did it provide me with my much loved and very necessary audience, but it also brought me almost every single opportunity I’ve had to write. With the exception of one magazine gig, the paid projects I’ve received have come to me through people who read my pretty dumb things: the copywriting, the ghostwriting, the Penthouse and other magazine pieces, the public relations copy, the erotic stories, the sexytime website—all of it.

One thing I’ve learned about blogging: you never know who is reading. It’s a risk to choose to write, but it’s deadening to choose not to. I’d rather be alive and reckless than inert and reckful.

All of which is to say thank you. I write as much because of you as because I must. I don’t know most of you, but you’ve made an indelible, positive mark on my life, like a collective big check in the plus column. I’ve only yet realized an imperfect version of my dream, but I’ve found some lurking eldritch confidence that I’m edging closer to what I want. Slowly, slowly, I’m getting there. Thank you for pushing me.

14, 2, 18 and 99 matters of time

Chelsea g. summers — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:18:10 GMT

I am woman who is decidedly not a mathlete, yet I am obsessed with counting. This post is about numbers, those theoretically pure empiric indicators of time’s passage and all that goes along with the slow counting of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and so on to inaccurate infinity. Pythagoras and his mystical manipulations might have been misguided in believing that numbers hold an intrinsic magic, but there’s no denying that they carry unassailable power.

On the surface, they’re just figures. 14 years. 2 years. 18 months. 99 days. But as with make-up, linoleum and Potemkin Villages, a pretty façade can hide a Midas load of loss. This final week in April marks a series of anniversaries. Fourteen years since my ex-boyfriend Will placed a significantly dog-eared copy of Herman Hesse’s Siddharta on the floor, entered his closet, put a needle in his arm, and shot himself up with a lethal mixture of heroin and cocaine. Two years since my long-lost biological father sent me that digital bolt from the blue and claimed his stake in my life. Eighteen months since my ex-almost-fiancé Donny and I split. And 99 days since we last spoke.

The weather of this end-of-April has mirrored the weather of that end-of-April fourteen years ago when I got the phone call that Will had died. It has been freakishly warm, warm in that uncanny untimely way that nearly robs the warmth of its pleasure. April in Gotham should not reach 92 degrees. This year, like that year, spring sprang like a jungle cat and wrapped the city in its furry close embrace. After Will’s death I spent a series of odd, disjointed days as an unwitting drug widow—I had not known that Will had loved me as deeply as he had until his funeral; I had not known that he had considered me The One; I had broken up with him six months before, and I had moved on with the single-minded Acela speed—and every April since then, I have felt Will’s death hanging apparitional. This year the ghostiness has been especially acute. The trees aggressive budding, the acres inappropriate and glaring white bare skin, and my own excess of free time have pushed me further into reverie than I like.

I don’t miss Will, but I do wish he weren’t dead in an ambient way. The loss nonetheless remains.

Two years ago, I woke up, flicked on my computer and found an email from my biological father. I’d not heard from him in 44 years. For about eighteen months, our relationship remained steadfastly electronic; we sent hundreds of fevered emails, almost like those of lovers in their joy. We did not call one another. When he came to the Gotham area, he made no attempt to see me. Our correspondence began with frenzied, gleeful steps, but it soon became clear that I was not following his lead. I was not the dutiful daughter welcoming back her prodigal father with open arms and boundless forgiveness. He bristled, objected, lashed out, and grew petulant. The last I heard from him was in November. He sent me an email whose subject line was “Hoping you’re not wishing you weren’t born.” He was sending me birthday greetings. I’ve not corresponded with him since.

It’s hard to miss someone you never knew. And yet I still miss the idea of a father I’d carried with me from childhood. My biological father showed himself to be untrustworthy, immature and hurtful. The loss nonetheless remains.

Eighteen months is a squidgy time-frame; it’s the only number that is not exact, but then given its significance, it could hardly be carved in stone. Here’s the thing: many years ago my stepfather left my mom after she’d confessed an affair. He was torn up and went to see a therapist. He told me a story. “I can’t eat,” he’d said to his therapist. “I can’t sleep. I can’t concentrate. I feel so much goddamn pain. How long will it last?” He said he expected his therapist to dole out some soulful emo panacea along the lines of “until you come to terms with the bird that is your love’s fluttering beauty,” but the therapist instead looked my stepfather in the eye and said, “Eighteen months.”

Eighteen months is the average amount of time it takes an averagely sane human to cope with a loss. And it’s actually pretty accurate. From the evening that Donny showed he was neither living up to his word to marry me, nor was he taking responsibility, I started clock-counting. I knew that the pain I felt was finite and its end was hovering somewhere around a year and a half in the future. For months, I felt tremendous, solar plexus searing pain. I found myself plunged into an industrial-sized vat of I-wanna-die, and I was pretty close to doing it myself. I made plans. I wrote a note. It’s a testament to the power of my friends to my unconscious tick-tick-ticking math that I’m still here, about eighteen months later, feeling fairly free.

Which leads to the next number of 99, the only exact figure I have. It has been 99 days since I last spoke to Donny; I know this because Obama has been in office 100 days, and we last talked the day after the inauguration. 99 Donny-free days have passed, and in that time I have morphed from a person who missed him with a sweet acuity to one who doesn’t really miss him at all. I once wrote of missing Donny like ellipsis, missing these bits and pieces of him, his Jersey twang, his beech-tree smell, his long fingers, the point of his tongue when he laughed. I think of him, of course—how could I not? But it would be inaccurate to name what I feel for Donny as missing. You only miss what you want; I don’t want that man.

And yet I might miss missing Donny. It’s its own oddness, the loss of loss, the strange nostalgia for pain I don’t exactly feel anymore. There aren’t words in English for the faint echo of a loss that has healed. It would be nice if there were. The loss nonetheless remains.

I look at this string of numbers—14, 2, 18, 99—and think of the first few lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”:

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

If April is the cruelest, and certainly a case could be made that in my life it has a sadistic streak, it nevertheless holds a strange and dogged beauty. Memory and desire do live hand in hand, as much as they die side by side. Time passes, and as it does, it marks us, quiet and indelible as ballpoint pens. We remember our losses, but we also see what has grown because of them. The dead are buried; the living rise; two phrases whose syntax reflect their truth. I am a sum of numbers, both infinite as pain and fixed as healing, and I shall count at least as long as I am alive.

And then, when I am gone, or when you are, the loss nonetheless remains.

my new body of smut, now conveniently located otherwhere

Chelsea g. summers — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:07:38 GMT

(I wrote this post originally for my main blog, pretty dumb things on Typepad. For context, you might need to know that I once wrote a lot about sex.)

It began as just a default setting, but as with so many decisions that wear the cloak of circumstance, it has become a clear and conscious choice. I’m not writing about sex here on my pretty dumb things. Or, I should clarify, I’m not writing about the sex I’m having, the sex I’m not having, the sex I had, the sex I want to have, or the sex I dream of having. I do reserve the right to write pretty dumb things about sex as a generalized or ambient concept, a sex divorced from my specific genitals at a specific moment in a specific time with a specific human, machine, or implement. I further reserve the right to write about my sexual history in less KA-BOOM! POW! BLAMO! graphic terms. I reserve the right to break my own rules, in short. I am a despot in the land of my narrative.

This not-choice to not-write about sex seems to have started when I stopped having sex, but in truth, it began well before I started living the lover-free life. It started, really, when I began to realize that I loved my ex-almost-fiance Donny deeply. To trot out the intricacies of our intimacies, however displayed in the laciest of poetic language, felt at odds with my love for him. It began to take on a patina of betrayal, and to pour out to a faceless public the liquid details felt like I was making a product out of precious experience. I stopped enjoying the writing, in short, and it began to feel like a burden rather than a gift.

Then Donny and I broke up and I stopped having sex. I slumped into doldrums; the doldrums grew into a vast depression; and I drowned in that murky black for altogether too many months. I didn’t fucking feel like living, much less did I feel like fucking. Forget fucking writing anything other than what I was paid to write, which was not about fucking.

The lake receded and I’m now high and dry and relatively chipper for an ambient misanthrope raised by a long line of dour people. I have vague and happy notions of perhaps dating in the not-too-distant future, and I have optimism that this potential dating might lead to actual physical friction with another willing, perhaps enthusiastic, partner. But I won’t write about said friction because, as I’ve explored previously, I don’t want to jeopardize a fledgling relationship with my occasional will to overshare the very moist, throbbing and tumescent portions of my life.

Plus, I don’t want to be only a sex writer for the rest of my life. So there’s that. I have too much to say to limit it to things most quintessentially expressed in guttural phonemes.

And yet, I acknowledge that I do like writing about sex. I think it’s important cultural work. I think there’s a power in doing it well, and I have the hubris to believe I do do it well. I just don’t want to do it on my blog. Therefore, you will be able to find all of my new sex writing at the gloriously shiny, newly opened, terrifically sleek and gleefully—if thoughtfully—perverse Filthy Gorgeous Things.you can go here to read my first piece for the site. It begins with Hegel and ends with Oscar Wilde, and because I’m both thinky and kinky in equal measures, it meanders through strip clubs and deep-throating. I’d love to know what you think here because there are no comments there. In fact,

I’m keeping my smut archives here on my pretty dumb things because to jettison them would be untrue to the history of this blog, but the great priapic share of my new sex writing will be now found on FGT. I’m already working on two new pieces on sex and techs. They’ll be really very, if not like totally fetch.

I do hope you enjoy the full body of FGT. It’s quite beautiful and strange and erotic. Plus, it’s wicked smart, and anyone who doesn’t get the intrinsic sexy value of the grey matter is no friend with benefits of mine. I’ll let you know when I post new material, or you can check out my Twitter feed here.

the weight and the loss

Chelsea g. summers — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:27:56 GMT

Once more, I have cheekbones. They’ve returned or, to be more factually accurate, they haven’t. They’ve always been there like twin hillocks hidden under the snowy cover of my adipose tissue. The spring has sprung; the snows have melted, and the cheekbones have become visible again.

Which is all a purple way of saying that I have lost weight. I have lost weight and I have done it on purpose. For the past six, almost seven, weeks, I’ve been dieting, a word I hate with passionate abandon. I have also been working out, a term I loathe for its blind punnery. We work out issues, we work out with weights, we undoubtedly work out issues whilst we work out with weights, or on the treadmill, while boxing, when we do yoga, or any number of other dumbly physical activities. But diet I have been and working out too, in several senses of the term.

I am counting calories. I use a computer program, and I dutifully enter every food, its calories and its fat content. The program tells me how many calories I’ve eaten (1,238 today) and how many grams of fat (36). When I go over my allotment in either, it flashes red. It’s very stern for being a great big fiction. Only were I to measure my sustenance out gram by gram and milliliter by milliliter would I have the truth. I can live with the fiction.

Michel Foucault’s eternal canonical life was made on his tenet that prohibition of sex created an unavoidable “incitement of discourse” about sex. The same, I’ve found, is true about dieting and food. It’s less that I want to eat everything that crosses my mind. Indeed, I seem to have commenced my diet at precisely the right moment. I felt pain; I bought cookies; I ate the cookies of pain; I felt more pain: I realized this cookie-pain chain wasn’t working any longer. I stopped; I started a diet. But if I don’t desire food in the way that led me to snowcapped cheekbones, I still nonetheless constantly think about food.

All day, every day, food is at the forefront of my mental conversation. What I’ll eat, when I’ll eat it, how many calories it has, and how it fits with everything else I’ve eaten that day. It’s a great, big, apparently very pleasurable, puzzle that I put together each new day, all day long, because I eat four or five times a day, every three to four hours, like clockwork. It is all incredibly boring and immensely engrossing as only complex math problems can be. I carry food with me when I leave the house. I feel like a refugee fleeing her metabolism.

I once counted calories before. I was thirteen. It was the summer before eight grade and my parents had sent me to spend a few weeks with one of my father’s oldest friends in Greenwich, CT. The wife in the couple had a slight issue with control, and she saw in me yet another new project. She taught me to count calories. Each one, all day, every day. A Nilla Wafer + a banana slice + a dollop of Hershey’s = 42 calories. A bowl of cereal + skin milk + a slice of toast = 280 calories. I did a lot of math that summer. By the time I left that house, I’d lost about twenty pounds and gained valuable precision in addition.

My mother has spent her entire life counting calories. Her Chabad-Lubavitch calendar shows a cheerful image of Jewish life on top, but below every single day waits patiently until she fills it in with a number. My mother’s day isn’t complete without adding her daily food fiction and plotting these numbers in red ink, like so many little empirical stop signs. It’s what she does. She’s done it since I was old enough to recognize numbers, which is, at this point, a long time indeed.

There are two big upsides to all of this planning, adding, plotting, carrying, graphing and dieting. The first is the self-evident one. I have lost weight. I can wear jeans that I couldn’t get up over my hips a year ago. Salutations have been made to bones I’d lost and nearly forgotten: cheekbones, ribs, knees—my hipbones will be next; that will be very exciting. So there’s the weight loss part. The other thing is that when you are dieting, everything you eat is the best thing ever. It’s like going to bed and waking up Samuel Pepys, who was always eating the best meal he ever had (when the Great Fire of 1666 threatened his home, Pepys made sure to bury with his treasures both a wheel of Parmesan and his wine, a decision I can fully endorse). Hunger, it turns out, is the best sauce for supper. Also breakfast, second breakfast, lunch and snacks.

It’s all a little weird to me, really, this sense that I’m content with the diet because, hungry or not, I am content. Odd, strange, even eldritch, but content, if mildly obsessed. I’ve been meeting my emotional needs with food for so long that to now be meeting my emotional needs with emotions (and my food needs with food) feels like speaking in a strange language. I can’t quite wrap my tongue around it, and yet there is pleasure in the process. I’ve also always felt such a wilding despair at dieting, such a resentment and such a rage, that it’s weird for me that those feelings too are gone. All I feel is that this is right and that I like avocado in my salads. Weird, but freeing.

I don’t know how long this odd détente with my appetites will endure. I almost feel as if I’m skidding along updrafts like a kite, and the drafts might keep me aloft, or they might betray me and I’ll fall, thudding gently when I hit the ground. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m learning how better to take care of my insides and my outsides, and maybe I’ve realized that cookies of pain taste not like sugar and chocolate but of ashes and loss. I’ve realized there are much better tastes to have in my mouth. Triumph is good. Pride is quite nice. And with a little soupcon of self-love, it’s even better.

one lone gunperson aiming from language's grassy knoll

Chelsea g. summers — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 03:43:20 GMT

In an interview last March, German magazine De Spiegal queried Secretary Homeland Security Janet Napolitano about her choice to replace the term “terrorist” with “man-caused disasters” when she addressed Congress:

Spiegel: Madame Secretary, in your first testimony to the US Congress as Homeland Security Secretary you never mentioned the word "terrorism." Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?

Napolitano: Of course it does. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word "terrorism," I referred to "man-caused" disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

This linguistic shift has been termed “Orwellian” by many neoconservatives, while Peggy Noonan archly commented, “Ah. Well this is only a nuance, but her use of language is a man-caused disaster.” Certainly, whether an adherent of Fox News or a devotee of MSNBC, you might feel the new term seems at the very least to be engaged in a warm and fuzzy obfuscation. We ought not to be fearful of terrorists, Napolitano’s suggests; rather, we should be afraid of men and the disasters they can cause. This linguistic re-habbing by Napolitano—and, by extension, the current administration—longs to place the responsibility on individual people who take destructive actions and to equate their destruction with the seemingly senseless abandon of a natural disaster, a tsunami, a hurricane or an earthquake.

The linguistic prestidigitation that turns “terrorism” into “man-caused disasters” does seem to deflect the looming Code Orange fear. We don’t live in perpetual terror of natural disasters. We watch the weather, we hope for the best, and when the worst is coming, we do our best to plan accordingly (or not, in the case of Hurricane Katrina). In effect, the administration seems to be saying, it’s time to take the same approach in the face of terrorism. It may work, it may not, but what interests me is less the softening, humanizing touch of Napolitano’s phrase and more the thorny issue of the word “man.” Because in this shiny, new phrase, it’s a word that is problematic, political, and just plain wrong.

Unsurprisingly, New York Times language guru William Safire disagrees with me. He says:

Napolitano...is to be hailed for breaking the taboo that has afflicted the word man. Political correctness, driven by the abhorrence of sexism in language, has banished such phrases as the forgotten man, man on horseback, century of the common man, even man in the arena. The adjective manly is forbidden and mankind is out, replaced by humanity. Chairman finds its substitute in chairperson or plain chair (although The Times requires a writer to choose between chairman and chairwoman). The only acceptable use of man is when it is introduced by hu.

The crux of Mr. Safire’s protest is the wresting of “man” from the linguistic fallback setting for “people.” In this brave new politically correct world, man is only man, a change that Mr. Safire decries. His litany of devalued man-based phrases illustrates his nostalgia for a time when men were men and man was everyone.

It’s a feeling I can’t share. I do believe that the world is a better place now that there are firefighters, postal workers, police officers and homemakers. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” Ludwig Wittgenstein said, and I have to agree. When we use language to ghettoize occupations and people, we do a disservice to the occupations and the people who do them. More importantly, we create a world where a culture holds a subtle bias both for and against genders.

What we say, how we say it, and what we associate with what we’re saying is fundamental to how we understand the world, as a recent study by Stanford cognitive psychologist Lera Boroditsky suggests. Studying gendered languages to see how native speakers connote feminine or masculine terms, Boroditsky determined that gender matters. "In one study,” she said on NPR, “we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender." At least when it comes to gender, studies suggest that we think the way that language tells us to.

Which then creates problems when you’re talking about “man-caused disasters.” Despite what Mr. Safire argues, there is a whole lexicon wherein we freely use man, and they often have to do with violence. Hit man. Gunman. (Also, I might add, longshoreman.) We never talk about hit women, even though we like it when Angelina Jolie plays one. We never talk about gunwomen, even though Bonnie was as much a gunslinger as Clyde. We don’t, mostly, because we don’t like to associate violence with women, a psychic holdover from the eighteenth-century concept of women as the feeling, healing and moral cultural force, an idea that morphed into the Victorian Angel in the House, and an idea that never really went away.

The thing is that women do do violence. A quick Google search of the term “women terrorists” brings up over eight million results. There are Pakistani women terrorists, and there are Palestinian women terrorists. There is even a history of American women terrorists (see: Hearst, Patty). And as much as one woman’s activist is Glenn Beck’s terrorist, there is no disputing that women are capable, willing and active in “man-made destruction.” The term is incorrect. It’s wrong and, even more, it’s pernicious.

The thing is that until such time that we as a culture can accept that women are as able to be evil as men are, women will not achieve equality. Feminism is discourse engaged in arguing women’s parity with men. We all have the ability to be good, evil, creative and destructive because we are all—sorry, Mr. Safire—human. Fail to recognize that women can be violent, can take violent actions, and can be destructive, and you continue to buy into a deeply problematic mythology of moral superiority. Our language needs to reflect that fundamental humanity in all its glories and in all its horrors. What our language does not need to do is coddle a public with sexist terms under the rubric of warm, fuzzy humanism.

Terrorism is scary, fear-mongering is bad, but I myself would rather worry about the equanimous terrorist than the sexist “man-caused disaster.” Nuance be damned.

parts and holes, frankensex and murk

Chelsea g. summers — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:38:26 GMT

If, like the kids today, I’d gotten my nascent ideas about sex from heat-n-serve, hot-n-cold-streaming Hi-Res porn, my ideas would have been a lot more complete. Which is to say they would have been just as incomplete, but in totally different ways. But in the 1970s, porn was not as easy to come by as it is today, and I had to glean sexual crumbs where I could and then mash them together in my head until they formed some sort of cobbled-together whole.

I sneakingly read my uncles’ nudie mags; I squirreled away pieces of the letters to Penthouse, the better to line my erotic nest. I took sexy scraps and amatory orts from whatever novels or movies would offer them up to me: a scene from Oh, God; a limpid nude scene from a Bertolluci film; the flash of thighs and chests from Dukes of Hazard or Love Boat. I even pilfered the soundscape of my parents’ sex, a recollection that today fills me with thudding horror. When you’re twelve or thirteen, you’ll do whatever you need to do in order to flesh out that mute, yowling need.

I remember being around twelve or thirteen and, having just discovered the secret garden that is masturbation, taking the Frankensteinian erotic monster of my own creation out to play. Often, that monster would take the form of a local boy, this kid I’ll name Lance Irish, because it’s the closes approximation of his name I can come up with. I remain certain that Lance’s phallic name had as much to do with my picking him as anything else. Lance was a chimera. It was upon his body I projected my inchoate desires.

Lance himself had a kind of annoying greaser patter. He had the affect of an unsuccessful snake oil salesman. Today, I’d grant him the metaphor of selling off-brand Viagra, but Viagra didn’t exist in the mid-1970s, Viagra—like cellphones, personal computers, post-it notes, and Hot Pockets—had yet to be invented. So Lance had the unpleasantly slick manner of a huckster, a mountebank, but he was only fourteen too. He would have been a mini-mountebank. He had black hair and a tender sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of his nose. His lips were wicked red (that’s how we talked then, and there, in mid-70s Vermont), and he had these skinny hips. He had a pervert’s air, and I imagined his body white and whippy, interestingly tufted with that black, black hair, and I even gave myself permission to almost imagine Lance’s lance.

Lying in my bed on dark winter nights, or sunny summer afternoons, anytime, really, I would think of how to get Lance to have sex with me. I’d imagine calling him and being all like, Hi, Lance…so, like, do you want to have sex? Or I’d imagine being somewhere and being all coy and flirtatious, rolling double-entendres like spit balls and lobbing them at him until the idea stuck to his skin. I would imagine us somehow, magically, improbably alone, in the same empty place at the same empty time, with too much time on our hands and too many hormones coursing through our bodies. I imagined nature taking its course, even if I couldn’t quite grasp what nature would do.

Unsurprisingly, that place would sometimes be on the flat moor-like plain cresting the hill behind my house. It might be smack in the middle of the fern patch fed by the crick running down the length of the mini-mountain to the right of the moors. It might sometimes be the high and dry sandy ground of the graveyard; I envisioned Lance leaning casually on the blocky mauve carapace of a grave and somehow being improbably suave, and then I imagined us a tangle of limbs in the strawberry-scented air. Sometimes I even imagined him in my own narrow blue bed.

But while the urge was strong, it was not stronger than sense, and I didn’t follow through with any of my rococo and painfully unlikely scenarios. I mean, obviously. Part of the problem was that while I had the Frankensex shambling about in my head, it was missing bits. I knew how sex worked, and I knew that I seemed to want it, but while I could define the act of copulation in a stunning array of biologically correct terms, and while I had a vague idea that people engaged in a whole bunch of activities between the kissing and the copulation, and while I could even tell you some of the Latinate terms for those activities, I couldn’t for the life of me fathom how they worked. And, of course, the other part was that the very concept was absurd. Even at thirteen I knew the value of fantasy.

I’d only kissed my first boy at twelve, and I was stunned to find out that the pink slippage of tongue made it exotically French. The magical genie who could make manifest, even in the privacy of my imagination, those other activities was still locked tight in the bottle. And so I was stuck between the hard place of stampeding libido and the vertiginously swirl of my own incomplete knowledge. The sex need pressed itself upon me with enough weight to conjure Lance Irish naked, tufted and indistinctly assertively male, but I couldn’t make a whole out of the parts.

These days, I have to range far and wide in the lecherous fields of my mind to come up with anything as eldritch as those amorphous Lance fantasies. My years of experience have licked the erotic lump into a fully formed baby bear, and that bear has itself grown up and given birth. It’s nostalgic to think of those times when alone in my narrow bed, I gave a long, if borrowed, leash to my sex, and I didn’t know where, out in the darkness, it led.

play out your dead

Chelsea g. summers — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 08:23:10 GMT

When I was seven, my mom married my stepfather and we all moved to Middle-of-Nowhere, VT, pop. 700. My mailing address was Chelsea G. Summers, Middle-of-Nowhere, VT O5555. Were you to have sent me a postcard, it would have gone to a post office about the size of my current bedroom. I would have walked the half-mile to the boudoir-sized post office to pick up said postcard, and if you’d sent it to me after the age of nine, I would have done so with a large St. Bernard padding along beside me.

My family lived in a converted two-room schoolhouse. Initially, we only rented the right half, but then the grandmother of my mom’s high school friend sold the house to my parents, and we had the whole drafty, poorly renovated hydra-house, and sometimes rented out the left half. To the exact right of us lived an old German couple in an old American farmhouse. To the left and behind us rolled out a carpet of farmland, a sometime home to a herd of Holsteins, and in the spring, many frogs who sang their guttural songs about eggs and flies and the pain of pollywogs and other chthonic frog songs. The house to our left was bilious green and owned by a family named Moody. They shared our party phone line. Mrs. Moody drew on her eyebrows. The Moodys had gun racks made out of deer hooves, the deers’ little feet pointed eternally up, ironically carrying the method of their own destruction.That house always smelled like the bottom of a grease can.

In front of us was a wide ribbon of field. White in the winter, green in the summer and brown the rest of the year, the field unfurled to a river. On the other side of the river were more hills, a string of houses that at night lit up like Christmas lights, and a big red barn where square dances were held. Women went to there dressed in poufy little skirts held aloft by crinolines ethereal as mounds of egg whites. Men wore string ties. I imagine that on Sunday nights these people watched Hee-Haw and enjoyed it.

To the far right, beyond the German couple’s home, beyond the sliver of woods behind and the evanescent pond before, a pond that sometimes froze in the winter and the local boys would play hockey, and I would skate alone thinking of Dorothy Hamill, beyond all that lay our local graveyard.

Like any proper graveyard, it was limned in pointed metal fencing. The very best dead real estate—the graves closest to the road and fading gently back—were the oldest graves. Set amid great dark trees, these stones were fragile, the dates and names worn down to gentle depressions by the constant touch of breath-quiet fingers. These carvings had become shadows of themselves: the most apparitional ivy, the flirtation of an angel, the barest filigree of skeleton. Many whole families gathered together under the ground as their tombstones grew equal portions of lichen and disrepair. Often, the family had gathered together the same year, the same month, the same week. I imagined some great felling by ague, calenture or chilblains, some illness I’d gleaned from compulsive reading of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

As the graveyard unfurled uphill, as the trees gave way, as the ground grew sandy enough to support wild strawberries, the graves grew older, firmer and colored. Here were names of families I recognized. Here were stolid, solid graves, not those vulnerable wafer headstones so popular with Victorian dying. Here, where the gravestones were warmed by the sun, away from the shadowy crypts lining the far darkest right wall, the fancy flew. These graves were unabashedly pragmatic, whole and discrete, and sometimes decorated with plastic flowers that never wilted but rather turned ever paler in the sun.

I spent a lot of time with the dead of Middle-of-Nowhere, VT. For many of them, I was their only visitor. I’d wander through the graveyard singing Judy Collins songs; if anyone had seen both sides now, these people had. I trailed my fingers over names strange and familiar and do the math. If Constance B. Haskwell had died in 1856 and been born in 1847, then she was nine or so, I’d think, and see this girl around my age dressed in picturebook pinafore and tights grow ill and feverish and expire, a white pale light in a nightgown, because I read a lot. I did much math in the cemetery.

In early summer, I’d walk through the upper aeries of the graveyard looking for berries and reciting Hamlet’s various death soliloquies. To be or not to be, that is the question, I’d say and paw through a black raspberry bush. To die, to sleep, perchance to dream, I’d confess to a particularly monolithic pink granite grave. Ay, there’s the rub, I’d say, and wonder what Walter Patrick Elmer dreamed of, if he dreamed of all. The speech usually ran out around “contumely,” a word that I would look up again and again and always forget what it meant. To this day, I can’t recall. A display of contempt, it turns out. I just looked it up again.

I liked the graveyard. It was quiet. It had drama. It held that faint frisson of ooginess. It felt comfortable. In retrospect, I suppose I’ve always been a morbid girl, for all of my Malibu Beach Barbie looks. The woods behind my house may have had this terribly attractive stream and many rotting logs under which I could look when I felt like playing naturalist. The river in front of my house might have had a lovely river for plashing around in when I felt like giving my inner naiad a twirl. The cows may have been there when I wanted to feed large things and smell their patient odor. But it was the graveyard that worked the greatest mental magic. I was alone there, and I was not.

I’d more or less forgotten my time with the dead people, but then I read Neil Gaiman’s Newbery award winning The Graveyard Book. The story of Nobody Owens growing up in graveyard surrounded by ghosts and one kindly vampire who would bring him bananas and crisps jostled my memory enough to release that cemetery nostalgia. Seemingly alone in Middle-of-Nowhere, VT, removed from people my own age, plunked down in this grim and verdant place with my mother and a usurper father, I discovered this place of ghosts held a kind of logic. Where else could a ten-year-old girl recite Shakespeare with impunity and great volume?

Before writing this, I looked at Google maps to see if I could find a street-level view of my graveyard. The street-level van apparently has yet to make it to the Middle-of-Nowhere. There are only satellite views, and they reveal a Middle-of-Nowhere that is now the Middle-of-Somewhere. I see the aluminum roof of my old house gleam dully. The woods behind my house are much diminished. The river before it dried up. There are new houses to the left and to the far right. And the graveyard, most tragically, seems to be gone. Maybe it simply doesn’t show up on the satellite photo, those little dots of crumbling stone and those blocks of moldering granite. But there’s a new road—a large, wildly looping road—that seems to be where the graveyard once was.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope it’s just a trick of the light, of the lens, of the space. I hope that the Middle-of-Nowhere graveyard lives on. I hope the graves molder and the leaves fall and the berries come and that they are all appreciated. I hope that someone, sometime, visits that graveyard and invites, as I did, the dead to play.

(The very lovely photo at the top comes from the Flickr page of Snake Eyes. Also, should you wish to listen to Neil Gaiman read The Graveyard Book, go here. I recommend it.)

on Amazon's cruel, senseless and sudden breaking of my heart

Chelsea g. summers — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 21:50:40 GMT

I spent my first five years in Illinois with my single-parent mom, her parents and her three brothers. There were always lots of people milling around that big castle-like house, but when my mom left to go to her job serving pizza or out on a date, I grew immediately lonely and sad. Often I'd run away next door to the artsy couple who had this fantastic house sprinkled with magical things--a purple shag rug, split geodes studding the walls, water taps shaped like swans. I loved them and this quiet, magical home they had.

When I was twenty, my parents and I returned to that place and unexpectedly knocked on the door of the old neighbors. They and the house seemed the same, but the walls were now dotted with countless paintings of churches. Old churches, new churches, churches with white steeples, churches with steel spires. Everywhere churches. The couple, it turned out, had been born again, cheerfully, assertively, self-congratulatorily, evangelically born again.

I was crushed.

Which is precisely the feeling I had yesterday upon hearing about the recent and much descried changes on Amazon. Over the past few days--or, according to other sources, over the past couple of months--Amazon has quietly been making software programming changes. These changes were brought to light by author Mark R. Probst who noticed that his books had lost their Amazon ranking (the numbers that indicate the book's sales relative to other books and thus show the popularity of a book and whether a book is a best-seller). The numbers were simply gone. Writing to the company, Probst received this reply from an Amazon representative:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Much has been made of this Amazon debacle. (It was the hottest topic on Twitter yesterday, gaining its own organizing battle cry #amazonfail. Jezebel has a fairly comprehensive thumbnail of the issue, a listing of books both losing and keeping their rankings, and a roundup of stories on the matter, if you want more information.) Much has been made and for good reason. There is no logic to this restructuring at Amazon. In fact, not only is there no logic, there is a great logic suck and that void is carrying with it books good and bad, books high and low, books classic and pop-tart, books of a stunning range of topics, interests, readership and quality.

Amazon ranking does more than simply tell a reader, or an author, how well the book is selling. It also tells the Amazon search feature how to function. Screen out "adult" books--and adult here means books dealing with GLBTQ issues, erotica, sex manuals (gay, straight and, I might add, Christian), books by GLBTQ authors, and sexual memoirs--and you're going to get a funky-ass crazy quilt of results. Perhaps the best example is this one, which gives four results for books searched under "homosexual," all centering on the topic of how to "cure" gayness. This is a problem of mind-imploding proportions.

The problems here are myriad. On a purely pragmatic level, you can't set up a search feature to "exclude 'adult' material" because most literature is "adult." You set up a search feature like this and you exclude not merely erotica, but you exclude Jeanette Winterson's memoir Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, and Betty Dodson's Sex for One. You don't, however, screen out Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho or Tucker Max's frat-boy memoir I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Set up this kind of screen, search for "Lady Chatterly" and you get four pages of results before you get to one in-print copy of the book. It's fucked up and it's just mouth-breathingly dumb.

On a political level, it's hard not to get irate at a company who feels it needs to parent its many, many consumers. I'm fully confident that if I search for books on anal sex, books by Quentin Crisp, or books on anal sex by Quentin Crisp, I can stomach the results. A search result never hurt anyone, as Susie Bright pointed out. Moreover, there's more than one way to incense a cat. Search for "helium balloons" and you get a string of suggestions for books on suicide. There's no way for Amazon to police for people's tender sensibilities. It's futile, offensive and stupid even to try.

On a purely capitalist level, Amazon is a company. It sells things. That's what it does--and does well. To set up strange, ineffective and pointless barriers to bringing people the things they want to buy is counter-intuitive. It's like a McDonald's turning out the lights, erecting a maze of curtains and making its customers grope in the dark to reach the kiosk. Your average web-savvy customer isn't stupid. We're going to toddle down the Internet highway and find that copy of Anaïs Nin's Spy in the House of Love somewhere else.

And on a personal level, I am sad, confused and angry. I love Amazon. I love it so much I want to take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant. I want to make sweet, drippy, sloppy, sweaty, unprotected love to Amazon. That's how I feel about Amazon. I spend thousands of dollars I can ill afford at Amazon. I am a book/DVD/music glutton and Amazon is my 24-hour Quickie Mart. I can't believe Amazon is making these gigantic mistakes, kowtowing to this shadowy and invisible "customer base" who is mortally offended at the idea of adults doing what adults do with other adults (but only in book form--it's not a problem to buy any one of the four really bad DVD versions of Fanny Hill, only the original, excellent novel), and making it hard for me to buy what I want to buy.

Or anything at all, really, because if Amazon doesn't fix this egregious error, this "glitch" that they are calling it, I'm done. I'm gone. And I'm taking my money and my love with me.

(If you're as angry as I am, take twenty minutes and call the Amazon customer help line, 800-201-7575, and ask to speak to the customer representative manager. Explain to him or her your reasons for your anger and tell him or her you'll boycott Amazon. You can also join Twitter and send messages to Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels. There's also a petition, but I don't have a lot of faith in it.)

UPDATE:

This afternoon I received the following email from Amazon's customer service. I kind of like the use of the adjective "ham-fisted." Here you go:

Thank you for contacting Amazon.com.

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.

Sincerely,

Customer Service Department
Amazon.com

UPDATE: A really good analysis from Information Today on the spectacle of the #amazonfail and why we should continue to be dubious about Amazon. It's chock full of info.

what is a man? read this, print it, staple it to your forehe

Chelsea g. summers — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 02:18:58 GMT

In response to Esquire's essay of the same title published in its instructional May 2009 "How to Be a Man" issue.

A man carries cash, or at least a debit card. Maybe a handful of loose change, which he puts into a bowl of assorted change at the end of the day. Or perhaps the man just throws it on the coffee table. Because a man owns a coffee table. Also coffee mugs. But not demitasse spoons. A man wouldn’t be caught dead with a demitasse spoon. Unless he is Jonathan Adler, in which case he proudly carries his demitasse spoons with him. A man eats peanut butter out of the jar. With his fingers. But without washing his hands.

A man builds things. Bookcases out of bricks and 2x4s. A coffee table out of a deer crossing sign. A fort out of his mashed potatoes. A mountain out of a molehill. This is his way of escaping mortality. Also of escaping Alcatraz. A man knows how to tunnel out of a maximum security prison using only a toothbrush and the cardboard from the center of a toilet paper roll. Steve McQueen was a man. So is SpongeBob Squarepants. You can tell because they both wear pants. That’s where they carry their cash and maybe their demitasse spoons.

A man can look you up and down and tell whether you’re wearing pants. Before you say a word, he’s figured out the pants situation. That’s because a man is fearless about scoping the crotch every once in a while. Even if he gets busted. From your shins, from your loins, from your button fly, a man infers.

A man owns things. That is why Buddha is not a man. Maybe he was when he was alive, because he probably owned that sheet thing he wore, but let’s face it. Buddha didn’t have pants. So he had no place to carry his cash, his keys or his demitasse spoons. What kind of man is that. Not much of a man. He would have been stuck in nursery school, never mind Alcatraz.

A real man loves the human body. All of it, but especially the delicate skin at the base of a throat, the swoop and curve of the left instep, the ineffable squishiness of the medulla oblangata, and the entire lymph system. A man, a true man, appreciates the glorious beauty of lymphocytes. When his woman, or his man, or, hell, even his dog, bends over, a man sees the beauty of the initial lymphatics, the prelymphatics or lymph capillaries that specialize in collection of the lymph from the ISF, and the larger lymph vessels that propel the lymph forward. Seeing this, he feels a thrum that only a man can feel.

A man doesn’t point out that he has a pimple.

A man looks out for children. Makes them stand behind him. Especially at parades. Because a real man loves a parade and doesn’t want any damn children blocking his view.

A man has had liquor enough in his life that he can order a drink without sounding breathless, clueless, or obtuse. Also without sounding obsequious, purple or clairvoyant. When in doubt, a man panics and orders a Slo Gin Fizz. Because they’re yummy, dammit.

A man welcomes the coming of the apocalypse. It frees him. It allows him to use the Lord’s name in vain because, fuck it, after that thing with that underage stripper that one time and the cheating at Russian roulette he was never going to make it to heaven anyway.

A man writes in short declarative sentences. A man knows that dependent clauses are for pussies. Only the week need more punctuation than a period. Fuckers.

A man owns tools and knows how to use them. But a real man always abides by common safety precautions including the use of safety goggles. A man puts the tools back where he found them. A man also puts the lotion on its skin. Or else it gets the hose.

A reciprocating saw, incidentally, doesn’t quite do what its name implies. Still, it’s a very good saw if you’re fitting windows, cutting down saplings or dismembering a body.

A man knows how to eat frisee without it sticking out of his mouth like he’s some kind of latter-day Apatosaurus. Speaking of which, a man enjoys the oeuvre of Judd Apatow. A real man would like to share a turkey sandwich with Judd Apatow. And then maybe a cuddle.

A real man knows the emotional value of some man-on-man spooning. Also possibly man-on-man forking.

A real man is flexible. He can touch his toes and those of others.

A real man will dance, but only to Huey Lewis and the News. Or Zeppelin.

A man shapes his opinions as carefully as he shapes his pubes. A man puts the “man” in “craftsman.” A man doesn’t fear needless repetition. A man doesn’t fear needless repetition. A man doesn’t fear needless repetition.

Quiet and introspective, boisterous and extroverted, crenulated and caespitose, a man likes to watch stuff. Stuff is what he likes to watch. All kinds of stuff. Anything, really. A real man just really, really likes stuff. This is not so much collection or meditation as obliviation. Men watch stuff and imagine that it’s blowing up. Because if there’s anything a man likes more than the creation of stuff, it’s the destruction. Also the deduction, especially if the man is a tax accountant. Men also enjoy the construction. A man also likes paper. A man refracts vision and gains acuity. But if he’s a Battlestar Galactica fan, the man re-fraks. A man is not ashamed of his Cylon fantasies. In this way, a man is like the Terminator, both captive and free, both man and machine, both artificial and intelligent. You cannot take your eyes off a man when he is like that. You shouldn’t. The hell if you know what he’s thinking, who he is, or if he has his demitasse spoons.

the dearth of cool

Chelsea g. summers — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:55:55 GMT

Music may indeed soothe the savage beast, but what it does best is separate the cool from the dorks. We judge humans first on their clothing and their hair; our costumes provide a map for what we do, where we live, how much money we make and what we value. But nothing tells us whether someone has that ineffable waft of hip or that damning fug of square like the music we choose.

The problem is, of course, that as Maxïmo Park tells us, the coastline is always changing. (This sentence was, of course, a multi-part test, like one of those grade school standardized reading comprehension exams. If you know who Maxïmo Park is, you sail past bubble A; if you don’t, you’re screwed. Bubble B then tests how you understand Maxïmo Park. Being British and marginally on trend with post-punk music, you’ll feel one way; being similarly American, you’ll feel another. If you love, love, love Maxïmo Park, you’ll see me as a kindred cool spirit; if you hate, hate, hate Maxïmo Park, you’ll see me as a tarnished poseur. And even if you don’t know the band at all just their gratuitous use of umlauts could make you see me as a reborn idiot.) Where you are along the musical vista makes you hear the song differently. It’s a Pavlovian Doppler effect, but with rhythm and harmony and bass. Or, you know, if you’re listening to ambient, not.

Two things happened last week to make me consider this kaleidoscopic trait of music. First, I put up a Tweet asking for people’s recommendations for new gym songs. I got only two replies, one from a music buddy who has high confidence in his tastes and the other from a friend who lowered her virtual voice to confess that she listens to Bel Biv Devoe, Justin Timberlake’s “Damn Girl,” or Hole when she works out. The other thing that occurred is that I went to see the ‘80s hair band musical Rock of Ages. (Here is my algebraic review of Rock of ages: (The Wedding Singer + Pippin – Our Town)(American Idol) ÷ (Guitar Hero) = Rock of Ages.) It may not be readily apparent, but the common denominator of both workout music and Rock of Ages is shame. Music, in addition to bringing up feelings, thoughts, and memories also causes one of two ancillary reactions: pride or shame.

When I scroll through my iTunes, and I have about 9,000 songs, my life passes before my eyes. I see “Lovin’ You,” and I remember being twelve and buying shoes with my grandmother in Thom McAnn, hearing the song for the first time, and feeling both like this was the stupidest song I’d ever heard, and that in its stupidity, it might just be brilliant. The Eagles’ “The Best of My Love” causes me to recall in sensorama-like detail slow-dancing with Glen Yandow in seventh grade. Anything by Boston forces me to look for the nearest keg. Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” makes me look for the closest pole. Big blocks of songs bring to mind various boyfriends and my acquiring their music like their t-shirts. Other blocks make me remember break-ups and my applying the Tom Tom Club’s “Man with the 4-Way Hips” like a soothing unguent. And still others don’t bring much of an association at all. These tend to be the songs I listen to like I look at wallpaper: without much thought or attachment.

There is a secondary layer to my iTunes musings, of course. There is the flesh-crinkle of shame and the leaping solar lord of pride. When I consider various people looking at my iTunes library, I feel solid. Substantial. As if I stride the earth as a colossus. But when I imagine others, people whose musical tastes I respect, musicians, critics, or just those people who invariably wear the best shoes ever, I die a little inside. I would not want them knowing that I own three full discs by Sean Hayes, or that Kelly Clarkson’s “Miss Independent” is my fifth-most played song. I fear the judgment.

The thing is that it’s ok to like lame music ironically. It is, as Chuck Klosterman points out in his excellent Fargo Rock City, totally fine to assume the ironic position (which I think involves some kind of hip cock) to enjoy the oeuvre of, say, Warrant or Poison. You can like all kinds of stuff if you like it disingenuously. But only when someone bigger, badder and cooler than you comes out and asserts his or her love of, say, late ‘80s Tina Turner do you feel permission to avow your sincere passion. Music is singular in its ability to inspire as much mortification as pleasure. Sometimes at the same time.

Which is what is strange about both the gym and Rock of Ages (and RoA’s musical ilk: Jersey Boys, Xanadu, Mamma Mia, and the aforementioned The Wedding Singer. I shudder when I consider the eventual musical comprised of all ‘70s era punk; I just can’t tell if I shudder in revulsion or delight). These are two spaces where it’s not only acceptable but actually encouraged to enjoy the worst music known to human.

Gyms require a release of consciousness or else you’re fully aware that you’re doing something absolutely stupid. It’s not just the bobbing iPod nation that is the gym, either. Gym classes play horrible, horrible, delicious, cheesy music. What we spend in fat-and-sugar calories we make up in sweet, greasy musical delight. The body must go on autopilot, and there’s no gas like crap music. The mélange musical, however, operates on the concept of camaraderie. Everyone who is there knows what they’re going to get, and they want it. They want to hear Quiet Riot’s “We’re Not Going to Take It” repurposed as a political anthem. They want to hear Starship’s “We Built This City” as an argument for urban planning. They want to hear Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” as an expression of muffed dating cues. They do, they really, really do. They do because this musical celebrates and contextualizes the now-shameful music of its audience’s past.

I can remember the doozie-of-an-outfit runway of my life’s clothing, and I don’t flinch. I can recall a long battalion of just awful men I pined over, and I find nothing cringeworthy. I can look at any number of terrible decisions I’ve made, and I remain blank as a slate. But if I allow myself to recollect that I once subjected my family to an entire Captain and Tenille album at dinner, I suffer the unmistakable crawl of the horrorsloth. It’s mortifying, really, and I was maybe eleven at the time.

Our choice of music represents who we are to ourselves. Sure, other things do too (Mets/Yankees; Treetorns/Chuck Taylors; Wii/Xbox; iPhone/Blackberry), but nothing quite so much as music. And that’s because music is like the Proustian Madeline of the identity. Nothing shows us who we were, what we loved and loved passionately, and how much we changed than listening to a song and realizing you’ve grown out of a band. And nothing shows others who we are, and how cool we are, like the music we love. Music makes bleating herds of us all. Few are the intrepid enough to hold onto their Falco, their Led Zeppelin Presence, their Olivia Newton John “Have You Never Been Mellow,” their Kris Kross, their Milli Vanilli, their Jessica Simpson, their—gasp—Nickleback—and aver their love. I myself am one of the gutless.

Don’t judge me. Please. Let me just play you this other tune that I know you’d really dig.

(The first photo is uncredited, the second is Minnie Ripperton's album and the third is Mötley Crüe by E.J. Camp via ABC News.)