Nazario Scenario

Someday You Will Be Written

You are a story I have been thinking of for years. I first began drafting you up in spring 2005, but I shelved you to go write other things. Your working title is "I Love Lila," though I'm not sure about that anymore.

You are about a love triangle between Lila, her husband Brice, and their best friend Daniel, who is a little younger than them and a lawyer -- their lawyer. Lila works at a company called Handi-Towel as a customer-service rep, and later gets promoted to manage the call center, though she also makes, fires, paints, and sells decorative tiles for bathrooms. They all live in Minneapolis and the winter scenes are very snowy, but I'm not sure if the winter scenes will stay in you. Originally I wanted your narrative to span several years; now I prefer the idea of it happening in a single afternoon, which is in the summertime.

Lila has been fired from Handi-Towel for sleeping with a coworker. Brice doesn't know about this. When Lila confesses the affair to Daniel, he says something like, "Jesus, Lila, if you were going to fuck somebody, shouldn't it have been me?" It was around this one line of dialogue that I based you, the entire story.

The only other thing I know for sure about you is that your climactic scene takes place on a rollercoaster, because Daniel loves rollercoasters. And that this is how you will open, more or less.
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Dingdingdingdingdingdingding!

WHO just got to my blog by Googling the phrase "naked coeds CCNY"?

Was it you? Was it YOU? WAS IT YOU?

Scraps

Last spring, at a book party at the Bowery Poetry Club, I had a booth where I drew cartoons all evening as fast as I could, folded them up, and put them in a big wooden bowl. People took cartoons from the bowl, as with Secret Santa names (or Shirley Jackson's lottery) and, I guess, enjoyed them. I had a tip jar and made like fifteen dollars, so I remember the experiment as a moderate success.

This morning I took the bowl down from the top of my refrigerator, unfolded all the leftover cartoons, and looked at them again for the first time. Here they are. I think they work better all together, as a compilation, than any individual one would alone, but that may just be my pro-compilation bias.

My favorite deserves to be full-size: The Bipolar Glass of Iced Tea discusses literature with his best friend, the Cup of Coffee With a Drinking Problem. Small wonder how well this anticipates Shay's work in Ugbun; when I saw it I couldn't decide whether this was Shay talking to Justin, Dave talking to Justin, or Shay talking to Dave. Although I usually view the Bipolar Glass as myself.

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Lox

When you eat lox, your hands smell like lox all day long even after you wash them. This is the only thing I dislike about lox.

The Sad Place

I am making a belated Christmas call-out to Meakin, who chaperoned me and our friend Stephanie to dinner in Chinatown on Tuesday night. Also, he gave me a great holiday gift: a tin toy made in China called the Push And Go Dog. It's a dog on wheels that rolls across the floor when you push down its tail.

I love the Push And Go Dog.

When we had finished the walk from Meakin's apartment in the East Village all the way down to Chinatown, we were all really hungry, but the good, fancyish restaurant was packed and we couldn't even get on a list there. My blood sugar was flagging, so I suggested we go next door, to a grubby little restaurant that looked really cheap. Meakin said, "Okay, you want to go to the sad place?"

After we were seated, he compared the experience to the opening of Stardust Memories, in which Woody Allen rides the German Expressionist train right beside a train full of fancily-dressed people who are having a nice time. I watched the video of that today, and I have to say Meakin's remark was pretty accurate.

But the company was lovely, of course, and it was among the sweeter Christmas dinners I've had. We talked about happy stuff as well as sad stuff.

With Such Joy

I knew I'd been saving this David Shrigley snippet for a reason.

This afternoon I reunited for coffee with Martha Bagnall, whose comments on this very blog have (for the past couple of years) made for a breath of fresh, erudite air. I've appreciated her comments and emails and the fact that we've been in touch. However! Martha and I, who parted ways after tenth grade when our high school shut down, had not actually seen one another for fifteen years. And now we have. And it was really wonderful. I find Martha fundamentally the same in all the ways that made me love her in high school: she is a genius of both words and methods (M. is now a neuroscientist), has a keen sense of people and their habits, loves to talk up her friends, laughs about PG Wodehouse, and enjoys mascarpone cheesecake and hot chocolate.

Plus she's pretty. But married, fellas! Tuff nuts!

Precious Memories

I don't have any photos from this Christmas, because it's still happening. But here are a few from last Holidayze that I happen to like.

These were all taken with the cute digital camera that was Dan's Christmas gift to me in '06. I accidentally broke the camera at Bread Loaf in August by dropping it into a plastic cup full of liquid; still, I retain some nice snapshots from it and remember it fondly.

Here is my little sister Alex (still 19, when this was taken) and her father, my stepfather, Thomas. We were all at my godmother's house, at the great Christmas party she hosts every year.

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Here I am in the hallway of the same place with my sister, in a photo taken by my mom, who cut my head off. But you get the idea.

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And here is my favorite photo in the 2006 Christmas reel. My mom (Clara) and my stepdad (Thomas) sit in the living room of their house in Jefferson, NY appreciating their respective favorite gifts. The purse is, I believe, from a thrift store or eBay. As soon as my mother opened it she got out her shoe polish and began polishing it up. And I don't remember what the book is about, but I'm sure it's something naughty. NOTE: the grape arbor, the wilting poinsettia, the tea saucer (teacup is secreted beneath the coffee table, to be found later when stepped on), and additional present wrapped in newspaper.

A Heart I Know By Heart

Walking a puppy on a Gentle Leader around the square that surrounds the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium. And listening to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, that cliche of an album about postmilennial melancholy, looking at the rain shining on the hexagonal cobblestones and feeling, not great, but good. This is what I'll remember about Christmas Eve 2007. YHF, which we all know backwards and forwards, reminds me of a time of goodness and discovery in my life and can give me that inner warmth, always, no matter what. I think its ubiquity may be precisely why it's so dear to me: it defines my mini-generation -- let's say those of us born between 1975 and 1981 -- in a way I don't think any other album does. (An album that has a similar effect on me is Girls Can Tell by Spoon. But not nearly as much.)

There's a puppy here! My mom gave me a big shopping bag full of little individually-wrapped presents, one of which I already know is a rhyming dictionary from the 1930s! And this is the way I most like to spend my holidays: quietly, in as normal an atmosphere as possible, wherein I can sleep a little later and sit on the couch with a beer a little longer than usual.

Peace on Earth.

Jonathan Lethem Is My Boyfriend Again

Frustrated by writing and general exhaustion, I took a break from writing just now to read "The King of Sentences" in the New Yorker. I found it charming. Now, officially, I can forgive my boyfriend Jonathan Lethem for writing the hit-or-miss short story collection Men and Cartoons, only two of the stories in which I really liked when I read it two-and-some years ago. Rethinking things now, I guess it's no small potatoes that I really liked the two I liked. I think of them a lot. (#1: a Brooklyn house party where everyone plays Spin the Bottle and the narrator is in love with the host's wife; #2: a successful cartoonist has to put up with his old middle-school friend who shows up out of nowhere a deadbeat.) It's possible I just had a chip on my shoulder, as I sometimes do in situations like this, about the title and his New Yorkyness and relative youngness and various other things that would put him in direct competition with me. Why can't I learn to live in harmony with my fellows?

(I've not read Motherless Brooklyn or The Fortress of Solitude. Should I?)

Don't worry, I still hate Jonathan Safran Foer.

Gordon Bunshaft

Lever House revolutionized the world of architecture when it was built in the 1950s in midtown Manhattan. It was the first really super-fancy office building of its kind, the kind that so many office buildings now are, with glass curtainwalls and geometric modernistica and all. Little gardens on the roof. It made the covers of both Life and Time. My NYU architectural history class took a field trip to the area around Grand Central Station to look at it, the Seagram Building, and others. I remember liking this trip very much. I also remember being unduly delighted by the name of the architect who designed Lever House. Now what was the name, again, of the architect who designed Lever House?

Ah yes.

Gordon Bunshaft.

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Addendum: I'm housesitting right now. In their bathroom, the people who live here have a cinnamon-bun-scented moisturizing lotion called "Cinnamon Bun Heaven." The tagline beneath the product name: "All the lovin' without the oven." Sure! Fine! ONLY THE THING IS the type is organized like so:

CINNAMON
BUN HEAVEN

This is a really bad typographical snafu. Seeing it took me back to my days as a copywriter, when I worked a lot with graphic designers and type. The reason why this is so wrong is because it forces us to ask this question: If we look at the whole line of products this company offers, what other kinds of "bun heaven" can we expect?