I always forget about National Coming Out Day, so this year I seem to have observed it in the form of the rest of my birthday with my family. I don't mind. We made small steaks and creamed spinach and twice-baked potatoes with enough garlic to threaten a dynasty of Draculas and my father constructed salads with butter lettuce and tiny heritage tomatoes and my mother invented a cake that was mostly meringue and whipped cream and mandarin oranges and my niece insisted on me opening first the present from her family, which was lovely since it was A.C. Jacobs' Nameless Country (2018). I riffled through at random and got the following poem:
Place
'Where do you come from?'
'Glasgow.'
'What part?'
'Vilna.'
'Where the heck's that?'
'A bit east of the Gorbals,
In around the heart.'
Other gifts include Michael Cisco's Secret Hours (2007), K.J. Bishop's That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (2012), a second pair of blue-black corduroy cargo pants, Jake Xerxes Fussell's Out of Sight (2019), Desperate Journalist's In Search of the Miraculous (2019), and Julia Wolfe's Fire in my mouth (2019), which I had not even known existed. My mother heard an interview with the composer on the radio and correctly guessed that a ghost oratorio of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire would interest me. I have plans tomorrow to hear Ivan Gusev at the Museum of Modern Renaissance, but I may spend as much time as possible before then on the couch with new books. Someday I will have a living room where I can set up a sound system, too. I came home and checked the internet for the first time in hours and found that Craig Laurance Gidney had said nice things about me on Facebook ("One of Tanith Lee's spiritual daughters. Her prose is a delight on its own and her baroque plots are imbued with a 'sense of wonder' aesthetic"). I would like to be less sick and I would like to be writing more and a whole bunch of other things with the world or the inside of my head, but: art and people who love you are good things to have. Also mandarin orange cake.
(In re National Coming Out Day: my 2017 post on the subject is still fundamentally accurate. I have stopped feeling even misplacedly bad about not having a coming-out story. I think "BLARGH" may now be my official gender designation.)
Place
'Where do you come from?'
'Glasgow.'
'What part?'
'Vilna.'
'Where the heck's that?'
'A bit east of the Gorbals,
In around the heart.'
Other gifts include Michael Cisco's Secret Hours (2007), K.J. Bishop's That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (2012), a second pair of blue-black corduroy cargo pants, Jake Xerxes Fussell's Out of Sight (2019), Desperate Journalist's In Search of the Miraculous (2019), and Julia Wolfe's Fire in my mouth (2019), which I had not even known existed. My mother heard an interview with the composer on the radio and correctly guessed that a ghost oratorio of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire would interest me. I have plans tomorrow to hear Ivan Gusev at the Museum of Modern Renaissance, but I may spend as much time as possible before then on the couch with new books. Someday I will have a living room where I can set up a sound system, too. I came home and checked the internet for the first time in hours and found that Craig Laurance Gidney had said nice things about me on Facebook ("One of Tanith Lee's spiritual daughters. Her prose is a delight on its own and her baroque plots are imbued with a 'sense of wonder' aesthetic"). I would like to be less sick and I would like to be writing more and a whole bunch of other things with the world or the inside of my head, but: art and people who love you are good things to have. Also mandarin orange cake.
(In re National Coming Out Day: my 2017 post on the subject is still fundamentally accurate. I have stopped feeling even misplacedly bad about not having a coming-out story. I think "BLARGH" may now be my official gender designation.)
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