Criminy -- that's the second wonderfully good entry that I've lost in a week, since, while I'm typing them, I time out of my connection. I would be able to salvage them, of course, if I didn't try to close the alert window instantaneously, which, since it's "not a real window", or some such rubbish, only closes, forever and hopelessly, my browser window.
The entry began with a meditation on how Italy was a completely fictional country and no matter how you get there, when you get there, you ultimately go through some kind of transmogrification portal and lose touch with Reality. And then you come home and there's something vile waiting for you in the kitchen sink, and you think, Ah, Italy; and, since you're no longer staring at the Tuscan hills at sunset, the vile thing in the sink demurrs from disappearing like it ought to and you feel all the sadder for having been someplace beautiful and fictional. I suppose this is how Italians must feel about some other country. Anyway, one of these days I will walk into Italy instead of being driven or taking the train or flying; then I will be able to pinpoint the exact moment when the universe folds itself into pastry.
This was brought on by EN's impending flight to Rome, of course. Perhaps Italy will turn her back into the girl I knew and loved. "I want you", sings John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, "the way you were..."
Oh, Dorothy, you've always had the power to go to Italy -- Dahin, baby, wo die Zitronen bl�hen.
Is this what I'm missing? Travel? I haven't been more than four miles from Boston since March.
I also wrote about the rock star I'm in love with and the rather sad mental block I have that, despite being an acquaintance of acquaintances, and despite thinking that, all my self-loathing shyness aside, he would probably think I was pretty cool, I am loth to pierce the plastic-wrap veil that separates me from people I don't know yet and on whose approval I have considerable bets running. Luckily, I lost the first flush of that entry, which, though beautiful in my characteristic way, was ill-considered. Or at least under-considered. Now I can present you with what I think about what I thought, and then, unless I go to the trouble of deleting or editing this entry, I am safely protected from your scorn by my special winged critic shoes.
I have been reading, in case you can't tell, Martin Amis. (Should I call him MA, as he would himself? Or as I do with everbody else with whose names I wish to titillate you?) He is awfully good at setting up little Martello towers of .... uh, .... authorial intent (?) which undermine his attachment to the text while simultaneously showing you that he knows that you know that he knows what he's doing. He says, in a million ways, "I'm going to do Z", and then he does it, and you feel mildly pissed off about it, but since he's given you fair enough warning, you grudgingly admit that despite some inherent wrongness of Z, some feature of Z that no author, including MA, should be able to pull off, it was all right that he should go ahead and do Z. Thank god, this is not the only transaction I sense when I'm reading London Fields, but it does seem to me the most characteristic, as well as being what I, with my quirks of epistemological caginess and self-referential ass-covering, am more than happy to learn from a master.
SB and I talked at length two --days ago (on our habitual secret night) about how remarkable E. M. Forster is. Your assignment for this week is to read A Room With a View, even if you haven't already and don't miss it terribly the way I do, ---it's a funny thing, but there are a very few books the love for which I feel as a sort of dull ache when I'm not reading them. They're not invariably my favorite books, it's just a way I have. Other books I only love when I'm right there, some books I love in some aorist sense, where the timespace when/where I loved them is finite and completed and yet stands inalterably monumental, the way I love Wind in the Willows most when my father reads it to eight-year-old me. --- You must, as I was saying, read Room with a View, which is a scifi fantasy book about a mythical realm called Italy, and then you must read Umberto Eco's essay about navigating Milan's noneuclidean streets, and then you must eat some citrus fruit, or perhaps a pomegranate, and think about a small patch of hair on somebody you once loved very much.
And if you do all that, and bring back a magical sausage from that holy land of Italy, I will love you.
a