Lusty letters all leatherbound
There was both rain and snow as I walked to and around Harvard Square with no hat and an umbrella that kept trying to blow inside out, but it was so good to be outside and moving around without a schedule, I did not care. I had gloves.
Between now and Friday when I last saw it, someone bought the NYRB edition of Gert Ledig's The Stalin Front (Die Stalinorgel, 1955) that I had been dropping in on for weeks at Raven Used Books and each time leaving on the shelf because I could not justify buying it for myself; I had concluded I was the only person in the greater Cambridge-Somerville environs interested in a German novel about the Eastern Front of World War II, but in keeping with the laws of irony, no. Fortunately, I found very nice paperbacks of Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), which I have never read, and Millen Brand's The Outward Room (1937), which I had never heard of, and now that I know that the NYRB has also reprinted Mezz Mezzrow's memoir Really the Blues (1946) I can keep an eye out for it.
I could not afford the green suede flat cap I found at Goorin Bros.; I just took it off several times and told myself firmly it would clash with my green corduroy coat in season. I could afford a brown butter snickerdoodle and a rooibos chai from Crema Café and enjoyed them at one end of a bench by myself, reading the first chapters of The Outward Room. It's a novel like an Edward Hopper painting: a young woman who thinks of herself as dead runs away from the mental hospital where she has been living for years with depression and maybe some other things (the Freudian-speak of the time makes it hard to tell), makes up a name for herself, pawns the ring which is the one remaining token of her much-loved, definitely dead brother, and begins a life in Depression-era New York City, which she does not recognize as such, but it is. It is not inspirational, nor does it lean too hard on its metaphors, although they are resonant with me and so it could probably fall asleep on them for all I cared; the narrative cares very much for its protagonist and does not sentimentalize her. At the point where I put the book down, she has just ridden a subway all night, half-asleep and homeless, in one long gorgeous paragraph full of rushing and rocking and advertisements and strangers and glares of light and speeding, swaying dark. The other thing it's like is my favorite line from Outrageous! (1977): "You're not dead. You're alive and sick and living in New York like eight million other people." It will really have to fall apart in the second half for me not to love it. I have no idea if I will love The Man with the Golden Arm, but it was on my mind from planning to watch the movie and the language of the first few pages was good.
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spatch thinks the college-aged kids I heard discussing their favorite accents as I came up Plympton from Bow Street might have been acting students; I just heard one of them say grudgingly, "A soft Irish accent is all right" before declaring her preference for French accents, although one of her friends strongly wanted an Italian accent if she could choose. They sounded all vaguely Northeastern American to me. I have no knack for accents myself and desperately wanted to be able to walk past them saying something Irish. I went into the Harvard Book Store instead. Which was great, because while I had not planned to walk out of there with anything, I found a beat-up and thoroughly worth it trade paperback of Chester Himes' Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1998), otherwise known as the original, partly autobiographical version of his third, censored novel Cast the First Stone (1952). I am maybe a quarter of the way in and already I can see that, on top of the general racist fuckery which Melvin Van Peebles details in his excellent introduction, the publishing industry in the early '50's might not have been very friendly to a prison novel which deals so non-judgmentally with queer relationships, including on the part of the protagonist. I am finding it refreshing and rather sweet and glad it has been recovered.
Getting home on public transit was much more piecemeal on account of the MBTA and Sundays, but I walked home from the top of School Street in a grey-violet dusk; I wanted a camera for the subdued rain-wet glow of the bricks on either side of Medford Street and the orange and teal graffiti in the windows of the ex-warehouse until I reached the split with Pearl Street and realized the whole slope above the train tracks has been deforested. There was a bright yellow backhoe sitting up there among the splinters, like a Tonka truck left out in the rain. I am sure it has something to do with the Green Line Extension, but I like trees. I was just appreciating these ones last month. Now there's the back of the high school and a rather industrial chimney stack. The streetlight where the signs change flicked on like a punctuation and I kept walking; I came home and made omelets for dinner with Rob and vanilla pudding with goat's milk for dessert and now I am listening to the rain slap itself against the windows. I will need to remember a hat for the bridges tomorrow.
I think my best plan for the remainder of the evening is either watching a movie or curling up with a book. A cat no matter what.
Between now and Friday when I last saw it, someone bought the NYRB edition of Gert Ledig's The Stalin Front (Die Stalinorgel, 1955) that I had been dropping in on for weeks at Raven Used Books and each time leaving on the shelf because I could not justify buying it for myself; I had concluded I was the only person in the greater Cambridge-Somerville environs interested in a German novel about the Eastern Front of World War II, but in keeping with the laws of irony, no. Fortunately, I found very nice paperbacks of Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), which I have never read, and Millen Brand's The Outward Room (1937), which I had never heard of, and now that I know that the NYRB has also reprinted Mezz Mezzrow's memoir Really the Blues (1946) I can keep an eye out for it.
I could not afford the green suede flat cap I found at Goorin Bros.; I just took it off several times and told myself firmly it would clash with my green corduroy coat in season. I could afford a brown butter snickerdoodle and a rooibos chai from Crema Café and enjoyed them at one end of a bench by myself, reading the first chapters of The Outward Room. It's a novel like an Edward Hopper painting: a young woman who thinks of herself as dead runs away from the mental hospital where she has been living for years with depression and maybe some other things (the Freudian-speak of the time makes it hard to tell), makes up a name for herself, pawns the ring which is the one remaining token of her much-loved, definitely dead brother, and begins a life in Depression-era New York City, which she does not recognize as such, but it is. It is not inspirational, nor does it lean too hard on its metaphors, although they are resonant with me and so it could probably fall asleep on them for all I cared; the narrative cares very much for its protagonist and does not sentimentalize her. At the point where I put the book down, she has just ridden a subway all night, half-asleep and homeless, in one long gorgeous paragraph full of rushing and rocking and advertisements and strangers and glares of light and speeding, swaying dark. The other thing it's like is my favorite line from Outrageous! (1977): "You're not dead. You're alive and sick and living in New York like eight million other people." It will really have to fall apart in the second half for me not to love it. I have no idea if I will love The Man with the Golden Arm, but it was on my mind from planning to watch the movie and the language of the first few pages was good.
spatch thinks the college-aged kids I heard discussing their favorite accents as I came up Plympton from Bow Street might have been acting students; I just heard one of them say grudgingly, "A soft Irish accent is all right" before declaring her preference for French accents, although one of her friends strongly wanted an Italian accent if she could choose. They sounded all vaguely Northeastern American to me. I have no knack for accents myself and desperately wanted to be able to walk past them saying something Irish. I went into the Harvard Book Store instead. Which was great, because while I had not planned to walk out of there with anything, I found a beat-up and thoroughly worth it trade paperback of Chester Himes' Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1998), otherwise known as the original, partly autobiographical version of his third, censored novel Cast the First Stone (1952). I am maybe a quarter of the way in and already I can see that, on top of the general racist fuckery which Melvin Van Peebles details in his excellent introduction, the publishing industry in the early '50's might not have been very friendly to a prison novel which deals so non-judgmentally with queer relationships, including on the part of the protagonist. I am finding it refreshing and rather sweet and glad it has been recovered.Getting home on public transit was much more piecemeal on account of the MBTA and Sundays, but I walked home from the top of School Street in a grey-violet dusk; I wanted a camera for the subdued rain-wet glow of the bricks on either side of Medford Street and the orange and teal graffiti in the windows of the ex-warehouse until I reached the split with Pearl Street and realized the whole slope above the train tracks has been deforested. There was a bright yellow backhoe sitting up there among the splinters, like a Tonka truck left out in the rain. I am sure it has something to do with the Green Line Extension, but I like trees. I was just appreciating these ones last month. Now there's the back of the high school and a rather industrial chimney stack. The streetlight where the signs change flicked on like a punctuation and I kept walking; I came home and made omelets for dinner with Rob and vanilla pudding with goat's milk for dessert and now I am listening to the rain slap itself against the windows. I will need to remember a hat for the bridges tomorrow.
I think my best plan for the remainder of the evening is either watching a movie or curling up with a book. A cat no matter what.
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But The Outward Room sounds amazing, and so do brown butter snickerdoodles and your evening plans, which I hope worked out excellently.
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The commuter right-of-way in Porter Square was also clear-cut recently and I feel about the same way toward it. I don't see how it's necessary to wreck so many trees.
But The Outward Room sounds amazing, and so do brown butter snickerdoodles and your evening plans, which I hope worked out excellently.
Thank you! So far The Outward Room has not fallen apart.
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Whaaaaaaaat *dashes to the Goorin website*
The only suede cap on their site is this one and it appears to only come in brown. Thank goodness, I don't think I could have justified that.
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I assure you that the hat I tried on exists! If it's healthier for it not to, however, I'm glad it's being elusive.
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Like, thinks of herself as metaphorically dead, or full-on Cotard’s Delusion?
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Something in between, which is why I say "and maybe some other things." She believes herself to have died in the car accident that did kill her brother; her continued existence is not life, but merely a different kind of death than his where he was mourned and buried and decently acknowledged as dead. People keep insisting to her that she's alive and she knows they're wrong. But she doesn't know completely, which is part of the reason she runs away from the hospital—if she's capable of coming back to life, she'll never find out there. (Her therapist joked that escape was the only cure they hadn't tried. She took him at his word.) One of the reasons I am enjoying this book so much is that she doesn't simply snap back into stability once she's outside the hospital, or living on her own, or living with the man who found her in an all-night cafeteria and gave her a place to sleep, no strings attached or questions asked. She hasn't been sane for a very long time and technically she might never be, but that doesn't mean she doesn't deserve a life.
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Now I want a brown butter snickerdoodle.
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The short author's bio at the front of the book mentions that he worked as a psychiatric aide before writing The Outward Room, so, yes. (It also mentions that The Outward Room was adapted into a successful stage play, which I almost cannot imagine. It's not a soft-touch story, but it would collapse into slush if you breathed on it wrong. I am being amazed right now that it's managed to introduce a romance that I both like and believe.)
Now I want a brown butter snickerdoodle.
I bet there are recipes on the internet. It's an excellent innovation.
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I had something like that happen with Barbara Hambly's Dead and Buried (2010), which hit like a bomb despite my recognizing and delighting in its use of classical references (and correctly predicting the key of the plot from one descriptive adjective), and that was a character who had literally faked their own death, not just thought of themselves in ghost terms. If it helps, in the case of The Outward Room there's not a lot of existential uncertainty; the question is whether the protagonist will be able to think of herself as alive, not whether she's doubting or unable to prove that she is.