DC's

 

‘David Altmejd’s work is a unique and heady mix of science and magic, science fiction and gothic romanticism: a post-apocalyptic vision which is at the same time essentially optimistic, containing as it always does the potential for regeneration, evolution and invention.

‘‘A perfect object for me’, the artist has said, ‘is something that is extremely seductive and extremely repulsive at the same time’. Decay exists in balance with regeneration, the exquisite in tandem with the grotesque. The sculpted heads that have been Altmejd’s recent focus provoke that shiver of the uncanny lifelike sculpture tends to induce, but skilfully realistic features are interspersed with crude expressionism, gobbets of raw matter or hanks of fur. They have a hallucinatory quality – vivid and startling. One head might sprout another, inverted, so that they they share a pair of eyes, or a face is split into a trio of profiles and half-a-dozen eyes, as if refracted by a kaleidoscope. In others the faces are gone, as if they have been scooped out, but the gaping wounds reveal cavities of dazzling crystal or the inside of a hollowed-out fruit, as if to collapse the categories of animal, vegetable and mineral. There is an immediate sensuality in the artist’s juxtaposition of finely-wrought realism with crude gesture; the proximity of crystals and delicate gold chains with fur and abject matter suggesting ever-present decay.

‘In counter-balance to the aesthetic of profusion is a sculptural impulse to containment and order, evinced in gridded forms and orthogonal mirrored structures recalling Sol Lewitt or Lucas Samaras. Some of Altmejd’s best-known works are his vast, labyrinthine vitrines built of Plexiglas, and often with mirrored elements. They play on the aesthetics of design and display as well as minimalism, but these structures are not simply a means to contain or protect the elements housed within. Rather, the entire structure is an organism or a machine, making visible the processes of growth and decay, generation and destruction that take place inside it. Movement is frozen, but sculptural elements are animated through repetition and incremental change, like the stuttering frames of stop-motion film.

‘Altmejd described himself early in his career as a ‘process artist’. His works not only reveal the process of their making, but suggest that those processes have simply been paused in their unfolding. His monochrome relief panels are austere in comparison to the heads, focusing our attention on the plaster-like material and the actions wrought on it − where it has fallen in wet splats, where a brittle, chalky surface is scratched or fractured, where hands have gouged and clawed. Hands themselves, in cast form, appear and multiply in some of the sculptures, fostering the illusion that the works create themselves. Monumental figures, such as the ‘Bodybuilders’ and the ‘Watchers’, are similarly engaged in their own making or unmaking, sprouting hands that clutch and mould the very substance of their bodies.’ — White Cube

 

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Further

David Altmejd Site
DA @ Xavier Hufkens
DA @ David Kordansky Gallery
DA @ Instagram
DA @ Twitter
Yeasayer + David Altmejd
Learning from Objects: An Interview with David Altmejd
David Altmejd, le prestidigitateur
Video: David Altmejd: The Heart is a Werewolf
In Conversation: David Altmejd
Video: Chaorismatique, David Altmejd sculpteur
La métamorphose dans l’œuvre de David Altmejd
Inside David Altmejd’s Crystal Palace
David Altmejd Creates Sculptures That Blur Concepts
David Altmejd’s New Busts Embrace the Real and Absurd
David Altmejd’s World of Pure Imagination
David Altmejd’s seductive yet repulsive sculptures
David Altmejd: la beauté du monstre
Dans les abysses mentales de David Altmejd
David Altmejd ou l’art du malaise absurde
Getting Lost in David Altmejd’s Hall of Mirrors
David Altmejd is Arresting
Ten questions for David Altmejd

 

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Extras

The Desert and the Seed, 2015

David Altmejd at MAC Montreal

David Altmejd at MAC Montreal

David Altmejd: Heads | Art21 “Extended Play”

 

______
Interview

 

Philippa Snow: I wanted to ask you about how you got into using the werewolf motif.
David Altmejd: It was pretty intuitive. I think I just felt as though my work was a little too structural, very minimalist; I would use large light tables, I would use Plexiglas, so all the materials were pretty cold. I just thought at one point that these structures I was building needed to be infected with something. Then I started thinking, what would be the one object that would contrast with them the most? So I thought about a body part. Actually, I thought about a head, which I thought would be powerful enough, and would contrast with the coldness of the structure. I thought with a head, I could start creating a very particular energy.
But then I thought that maybe a human body part, the human head, was a little — not necessarily cliché, but certainly something that had become commonplace in contemporary art. Some of my favourite artists have been Kiki Smith, and Louise Bourgeois, and Robert Gober, and I love their work; but I did feel that following work like theirs, the use of human body parts in art had become more predictable. So I thought instead about referring to the body of the werewolf, which in my mind is the most humanlike monster: meaning the werewolf body part would be just as powerful to look at as the human body part. It’s possible for a viewer to identify with it. But at the same time, it’s weird instead of being familiar. And I really like that.
So that’s the reason I started using the werewolf body parts in my art. And very soon afterwards, once it found its place in my work, I started being conscious of ideas of transformation, and energy, and contrasts between light and darkness, and tension, and all these things, so I just decided to keep the werewolf as a kind of totemic figure in my work.

PS: It’s interesting that you mention the transformation aspect of it, because a lot of your work has the appearance of being…this is an odd thing to say about sculpture, but it almost has the look of something that’s in flux, or something that’s in development. It looks like an organic thing.
DA: Yeah, and it’s important for me to feel that the object, or the sculpture itself, is in the process of developing. One of the things I realised about sculpture that made it really amazing, and that gave it so much potential, is the fact that it exists in a real space. It doesn’t exist in the space of representation. So it exists in the world in almost the same way that a body does, or a person does, you know?

PS: Right. A photograph or a painting of a body that’s life sized is never going to be like a body in the same way as a sculpture of one at the same scale.
DA: And the body of a person is probably the most amazing thing that exists, for so many reasons. So the fact that sculpture inhabits the same space means that it has the potential for having the same kind of presence. Ever since I realised that, I’ve been trying to use the body of a person as a model; and one of the characteristics of a human body is that it’s constantly transforming. A person is never a finished object, and that’s part of what makes them amazing.

PS: And because a lot of the structures are quite dreamlike, there’s quite often the suggestion of a psychological transformation as well.
DA: Absolutely, yeah.

PS: Are there any filmmakers you’re particularly inspired by?
DA: There are certainly filmmakers whose work has excited me. Often I don’t like saying this, because I think that people consider it really, really obvious, but I love David Cronenberg.

PS: Oh, me too!
DA: But not necessarily because of his taste for the organic or the weird. I like him conceptually. I like the way he builds a movie. I like the way he understands — and this is my interpretation, I don’t know if it’s his, but I just have a feeling that he understands the film as being this independent object that develops its own intelligence, and its own language; its own logic, its own sexuality. I kind of like the fact that he steps back and lets the film develop by itself as if it was a body. Who else?

PS: I mean: David Lynch was the big one I was thinking of. But I’m always thinking about David Lynch.
DA: I would say that Lynch has been very, very important for me. Just as much as certain American visual artists from the eighties and the nineties are an influence — ones that still work today, but were very well-known then, like Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, Mike Kelley — I see David Lynch the same way. They were very important for me at the beginning. I really admired that attitude; the space that they were exploring, which was somewhere between supercomedy and superdrama. You know how sometimes there are scenes in Lynch where you don’t know if you’re supposed to laugh, or to feel uncomfortable?

PS: I was thinking about it because of his being very interested in the fragmentation and the refraction of the human body — but especially in the head. There’s always a lot of stuff about head trauma, decapitation. Are you watching the new series of Twin Peaks?
DA: No, I haven’t been.

PS: Oh it’s amazing! I’m a Lynch obsessive anyway, but it’s really pulled me right back into the depths of that obsession.
DA: I do intend to watch it; I saw the first episode and I’m meaning to go back. I really loved the way the special effects are so clumsy, if I’m allowed to call them that?

PS: He loves that, I think.
DA: Because they could have been high-tech, but he obviously chose otherwise. That was amazing. That was completely his sensibility. Nobody else could have done that and actually pulled it off.

PS: No — it’s like the robin at the end of Blue Velvet. It’s an aesthetic decision.
DA: And so funny and not-funny at the same time. Personally, I like being uncomfortable. I think my favourite kind of laughter is uncomfortable laughter; and I think the best horror is the sort of horror that makes me want to giggle because I’m so uncomfortable.

PS: On an unrelated note (or maybe a related note, as we’re talking about uncomfortable laughter) — I read in an interview that you’re really into the Real Housewives?
DA: Oh my God! Yeah, yeah, absolutely!

PS: Because I’ve never seen the Real Housewives shows, but I did do a thing this year for which I had to watch every episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians ever broadcast in one month. There are thirteen series of it, so that was intense.
DA: I’ve never watched Keeping Up With The Kardashians, but my idea is that it’s one family, so they’re all sort of together in this, right? They’re not all rivals? But the Real Housewives are so great because they’re all rivals.

PS: Is that inspiring somehow, because you’re watching — I don’t know, humanity play itself out?
DA: I mean: it’s hard to see the humanity.

PS: Really? It’s just totally inhumane?
DA: Totally inhumane. I think that it’s totally human, because even the producers are human, so it’s technically a product of humanity. So it’s human in that way. But the set-up is so unlike anything you could understand or experience. I can’t start to think or imagine what it would be like to have a camera on you all the time, or have people there encouraging you to drink wine all the time so that you’ll be in a volatile mood. And producers who will make more money if there’s a fight! It’s a horrifying set-up. It’s like putting a rat in a maze, a labyrinth: of course they’re going to act like rats. They’re in a context that’s kind of indescribable. So it’s hard to understand them. But it’s exciting to see human beings try to survive in such a weird, extreme environment.

PS: We could tie it into our earlier discussion by saying that Real Housewives is a constructed take on the organic. And there are a lot of physically constructed bodies in reality TV, also! Certainly in the case of the Kardashians.
DA: Yeah, you mean facelifts and so on?

PS: And really extreme body augmentations. I find that fascinating, as well.
DA: And it’s funny, because with the Real Housewives there are different — they call them franchises, but it means there are spin-offs in different cities. And they’re usually groups of women who have transformed their bodies in very different ways. For example, the Real Housewives of New York are a group of women who are transforming in one very specific direction, and then you go to Beverly Hills and the Housewives there are taking a totally different transformative route. They end up looking like different species, in the end. It’s amazing.

 

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Show

First Werewolf, 1999

 

Untitled (Jane), 2003

 

Untitled (Black), 2003

 

Untitled (Blue Jay), 2004

 

Untitled (Swallow), 2004

 

The Lovers, 2004

 

The Builders, 2005

 

Untitled, 2006

 

Untitled, 2006

 

The New North, 2007

 

Untitled (Dark), 2008

 

The Center, 2008

 

The Egg, 2008

 

Untitled, 2010

 

Untitled, 2011

 

Untitled, 2011

 

Untitled, 2012

 

Untitled 3 (Rabbit Holes), 2013

 

Untitled 5 (Rabbit Holes), 2013

 

Untitled 6 (Rabbit Holes), 2013

 

Untitled, 2014

 

The Flux and the Puddle, 2014

 

Eye, 2015

 

Le Grand Theatre, 2016

 

The Vibrating Man, 2019

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Adem Berbic, Or you might think, ‘Huh, that’s all?’ Negotiating omnipresent paranoia sounds noisy in the bad way. I think I just worry at worst? How does a paranoiac know they’re being paranoid? Isn’t that assumption inherently unreliable? If you can make others intuit that re: your new writing thing, you will be a literary god. ** Tosh Berman, My pleasure, Tosh, she’s worth a read for sure, I think. ** _Black_Acrylic, Even Sypha’s not curious? That’s something. Maybe you should start a ‘Shards’ Spy substack. Could be lucrative? ** Carsten, Hey. I have a strong aversion to Burning Man, and the religious-adjacent pontificating by its adherents doesn’t help, but I am tempted to watch that doc. It seems like a post-internet Rainbow Gathering kind of equivalent, and attending one of those back in the 90s was one of the miserable experiences I’ve ever had. But, yeah, I’ll try to watch the doc with open eyes. ** Don., Hi, Don.! I think I can imagine that transformative thing to some degree at least, and it does feel too deep and personal/complicated to get words to convey. Interesting. Aw, thank you for fighting for my talent. I’m not sure how to fight for yours, but if there’s a methodology, I’m ready. ** Uday, Déconfit is such a good word, isn’t it? The French do make excellent words. Even the simple ones. I think my favourite French word is ‘donc’, which comes out of French people’s mouths all the time. There’s something about it. Or how and when people say it, I guess. Interesting about veganism being the turf of the Hindu right. I guess a lot of people in the States who hate vegans think they’re snotty purists. ** Steve, The heatwave is creeping into being. Yesterday it started, today it’ll tick upwards, and tomorrow it’ll start blasting us full on for three days, they say. So the hatred of ‘ICM’ is mostly people scapegoating it within the general ‘AI is the boogeyman’ thing going on these days? I have a very faint memory of hearing a portion of that McLuhan album at the time. It was a thing in the late 60s to try to get hippies to think by slapping electronica or psychedelic jams behind the spoken words of relative brainiacs like McLuhan or Timothy Leary or Baba Ram Dass, etc. Same thing with Terrence McKenna especially in the early Rave days. ** laura w., After that frustrating losing battle, I think I’ll leave ‘Luigi 3’ to my imagination. I hate boss battles. When I lived in LA, I’d always make my gamer roommate win those fights for me so I could start wandering and poking at puzzles again. Thrilled that you loved ‘Four Nights …’. When I first moved to Paris I met and had a long, great conversation with the guy who played the main part in it. In real life, he was/is an astro-physicist. This had better be the last heatwave of the summer or I’ll … well, actually I can’t do a thing about it, can I? Smooth skies to you. ** HaRpEr //, ‘Nightwork’ is excellent. ‘Télex n° 1’, yes, that’s it. A friend of mine is the person who translated it. I guess it’s the most experimental by far of his novels, and my friend said it was a nightmare to get into workable English. Well, you can do like me and write an interconnected cycle of short books and have your cake and eat it too? Maybe? ** Thom, Cool. If our local fete foraine ever brings back its dark ride, I’ll hit audio record on my phone and send it to you. Week is looking scary scalding hot over here, but I’ll try to make it work. I hope yours is cloudy (but not humid). ** Okay. Today I decided to give David Altmejd a solo show in my galerie. Have a look around please. See you tomorrow.

 

‘I do not want an impenetrable style but prize compression and music. I abhor quotidian easy speak, psychobabble, brands, news and slogans—a “writer’s prose” as Gordon Lish once described it. Mine calls for close, hard readers of fiction. This year in reviews of Prosperous Friends, I was bumped up from being a writer’s writer to being a writer’s writer’s writer; either way, it cautions challenging prose ahead. A lot is left unsaid and must be inferred simply because I want to avoid the dulling effect of belated language.’ — Christine Schutt

‘What do we make of the adjective poetic when applied to prose fiction? While meant as praise, the modifier often sways backhandedly—as eclectic does for a menu—warning that what’s ahead may prove puzzling at best or downright indigestible at worst. Certainly the description indicates the presence of typical techniques—rhythm, alliteration, figurative language, and the like—as well as a density of both locution and imagery. But when used to characterize prose, on book jackets or in reviews, there’s an abiding sense the word also signals effeteness and self-indulgence.

‘Christine Schutt has been tagged with this adjective throughout her career. Indeed, quotes from John Ashbery, who selected Nightwork as a best book of the year for the Times Literary Supplement in 1996, can be found among her blurbs. And the much-lauded author (National Book Award nomination, recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Guggenheim, and a finalist for a Pulitzer) has done rather nicely despite the designation’s ambiguities. Still, it bears pondering, just what is this hybrid blossom, poetic prose, and how is Schutt’s fiction—rather commonly themed around incest, emotional disturbance, marital dissolution—particularly different for its presence in her pages?

‘Schutt works surprise and dislocation into the midst of efficient description to piercing effect: The plaintive “I wanted it” in the wake of the elegantly turned “smoke-thin nightgown,” or the aptly architectural “crooked roof of her arm” preceding the guttural “gagged and heaving sorrow”—these micro-contrasts in tone and imagery ably mimic consciousness at its most alert, most mutable, in short, most transcendent. The shifts set off tiny detonations that build in much the way that, say, a sonnet assembles revelations toward its clinching couplet. In Schutt, the poetic in her prose is not the obvious lyricism and compression, but their relation to the mundane and the broadness of plainspoken expression. When these juxtapositions succeed, she performs what Baudelaire, in the preface to Paris Spleen, calls the “miracle of a poetic prose,” writing that’s “musical though rhythmless and rhymeless, flexible yet rugged enough to identify with the lyrical impulses of the soul, the ebbs and flow of reverie, the pangs of conscience.”

‘Schutt may treat Fitzgeraldian themes of marriage, money, and thwarted affection (Isabel even quotes Nick Carraway’s famous line about being “both enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life”), yet her style is stately, more Jamesian, although her elliptical tack is James on a severe diet. This concision and its consequent rhythm—the narrator’s perceptions and the characters’ thoughts register in quick bursts of sharply struck notes—excite us; in their brevity and elevated pitch, her sentences sound ready to pounce upon intimate disclosure. Like James, Schutt penetrates to the core energies of human drama with a pointillist’s touch; feeling is lent graceful shape, less readily apprehensible, but ultimately more incisive. The poetic devices, however, can sometimes prove more compelling than the discovered content. But such instances only throw into relief the overall risk Schutt takes. Prosperous Friends presses adventurously against mere telling’s quotidian restrictions and attempts to enact “the lyrical impulses of the soul.”’ — Albert Mobilio, Bookforum

 

___
Further

Christine Schutt
Christine Schutt @ goodreads
A Conversation Between Christine Schutt and Diane Williams
Podcast: Christine Schutt on Bookworm
Correspondence with Christine Schutt
The Crass Class in Christine Schutt’s “Pure Hollywood”
Pure Hollywood – stories to take you out of your comfort zone
ISSUE 4 An Interview with Christine Schutt
Christine Schutt: Learning What You Do Well
Podcast: Between the Covers: Christine Schutt: Pure Hollywood
‘The Blood Jet’, by Christine Schutt
“Remembered Landscapes,” an Interview with Christine Schutt
‘The Dot Sisters’, by Christine Schutt
Uncomfortable Places
Glitz & Infidelity: On Christine Schutt’s ‘Pure Hollywood’
“something else, with it, in the sky”
the garden of earthly delights: christine schutt’s pure hollywood
Atmospheric Disturbances
Hanging Out With Christine Schutt
The Graduate
Matt Bell on Christine Schutt
Buy ‘Pure Hollywood’

 

___
Extras

Christine Schutt’s First Time

Christine Schutt Fiction Craft Lecture

Christine Schutt: The Writers Studio Reading Series

 

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Interview

 

Michelle Y. Burke: One of the things I admire most about your writing is how it sounds. Your sentences are so rich and lyrical. To what extent are you thinking about sound when you’re writing?

Christine Schutt: I do think about sound. What I want to do is wed sound to scene. What comes first is a picture. I’m thinking of the way my new book, Prosperous Friends, begins. I had this idea that there would be a couple in their mid-thirties outside of London, maybe in the Fens, near a priory or a church. I was remembering my own experience at that age, being in those sorts of churches, and the stones, and the moss on the stones, and the coldness of it. I thought about that a lot, and I thought about what the couple was doing. They’re alone. He wants to surprise her and be sexually risky. I wanted to get a sound that would call up or be right for those stones and that place.

Burke: Is that how you start a new novel or story—an image catches your attention and you find the sound from there?

Schutt: Sometimes there’s an image, yes, and the language comes so fast on it. I look at something for a long time and roll over words right to the occasion.

Burke: Is that also true when you’re creating a character? Does the character come from an imagined scene or image?

Schutt: When I was creating one of the characters in Prosperous Friends, I looked at a postcard picture of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I bought it at the National Portrait Gallery. Then there was this quality my younger son had when his hair was long, and then there was someone I was making up: a handsome young man with a side-part. I liked this character so well I gave him some success.

Burke: Your story collections are like catalogues of compelling first sentences. The first sentence of “Teachers” in Nightwork—“She told her daughter as she might a love such things her lover said were best kept secret from a girl”—does amazing work at the syntactical level. What do you expect from a good first sentence, and how do you move forward from there?

Schutt: When I was an MFA student at Columbia, I was in class with people who even then were able to tell a story. I could not. What I could do, and what I was praised for doing, was write a great sentence. It was my only pride. When I tried to write a story, I thought what I was good at had to be put aside in favor of advancing the narrative. I would have a nice, rich opening, and then suddenly, I’d think about how I had to move the character across the room. The character had to say something, do something. Dreaded dialogue. I still have to work hard on it. Now I often take out every other line of dialogue. Then it actually sounds like human speech. Then you get something interesting.

Any success I had early on had to do with the fact that people would say, “Wow, you can really write a sentence.” Gordon Lish taught me how to use what I was good at to tell a story.

Burke: Has your writing changed on the sentence level?

Schutt: Yes. I’m not packing every sentence anymore. I’m not indulging that tendency as much. When I was writing Nightwork, I loaded the sentences because I could; I hyphenated a lot to make adjectives, very self-indulgent. I did that to a lesser degree in the second collection of stories, Day and Night. I have been looking for other sources of interest, along with interest in language and finding different ways of getting drama. So, yes, Prosperous Friends is different. I mean, there are descriptions of houses and barns I am proud of. I love dying barns. I love to look at them, but the characters and their movement take precedence; the exchanges between characters are sharper.

I was very confident about Prosperous Friends for a long time. I went around bragging about it, saying this is it, this is the best thing I’ve done. I surprised myself by saying such things. I’m a little superstitious. I thought I should stop bragging. The first time I turned it in, my agent said the novel was too difficult, too elliptical. Who are these people? How old are they? Where are they? The kinds of questions I’ve always been asked.

Then I had a younger reader weigh in on the sexual dysfunctions the book explores. She said, no, these kinds of dysfunctions don’t exist anymore. They’ve gone away. I was devastated when she said that. I thought, my god, they’ve really advanced, but I decided to keep all of the sexual dysfunction in, because they can’t be all cleared up, right? Not for everyone. It really threw me for a loop. Here I was writing about people in their late 30s and 40s, and I suddenly thought that perhaps I really missed the boat. Perhaps young people today are entirely liberated, at ease with their sexuality, and women are having orgasms left and right. In the end, I decided that can’t be the case, but it really caused me to have a crisis of confidence. A real crisis.

I wrote a new beginning to the book at one point. It was very clunky, but it came very easily, and I thought, all right, maybe this is the way to go, but I ended up throwing it out. When I came back from teaching in California, I got rid of it. But I inserted other things, clarifying things, and the book is finished, but I have not felt that initial certainty of its worth.

Burke: Do you think of your work as challenging? Difficult?

Schutt: No, I don’t. I haven’t. That’s why it unsettled me to have what I’d thought was finished returned with questions. My agent said all of the things that people said when I was doing my MFA: The writing is great, but where are we? How old are these characters? In the last draft of Prosperous Friends I changed the chapter titles to place names and the year.

Overall, I don’t think my work is difficult. I don’t write jolly stories, so maybe that’s hard for some readers.

 

___
Book

Christine Schutt Prosperous Friends
Grove Atlantic

‘Described by John Ashbery as “pared down but rich, dense, fevered, exactly right and even eerily beautiful,” Christine Schutt’s prose has earned her comparisons to Emily Dickinson and Eudora Welty. The New York Times Book Review described Schutt’s All Souls as “shot through with [Virginia] Woolf’s lyrical, restless spirit.” In her new novel, Schutt delivers a pitch-perfect, timeless, and original work on the spectacle of love.

‘Prosperous Friends follows the evolution of a young couple’s marriage as it is challenged by the quandaries of longing and sexual self-discovery. The glamorous and gifted Ned Bourne and his pretty wife, Isabel, travel to London, New York, and Maine in hopes of realizing their artistic promise, but their quest for sexual fulfillment is less assured. Past lovers and new infatuations, doubt and indifference threaten to bankrupt the marriage. The Bournes’ fantasies for their future finally give way to a deepened perspective in the company of an older, celebrated artist, Clive Harris, and his wife, a poet, Dinah Harris. With compassionate insight, Schutt explores the divide between those like Clive and Dinah who seem to prosper in love and those like Ned and Isabel who feel themselves condemned to yearn for it.’ — Grove Atlantic

 

____
Excerpt

Such exorbitant crying! Just when the old woman thought she had stopped crying, the girl would start again. The sound raised in the old woman gladness and amazement, and she lay awake to listen, but all she heard was crying; the rest she made up.

Infidelity? Boredom?

The old woman went downstairs to turn off the lights left on for the young couple now upstairs. She went close to the registry to see their names, but decided not to look.

What else did the old woman let herself know?

Their car was like everyone’s car. New York plates. They were a couple; they had signed in under the same name. The girl’s name started with a large and upright I, but she was not wearing a ring and the boy stood apart as if he were single. They were traveling to East Blue Hill but for how long was a question they had answered differently. The girl said maybe six weeks; the boy said three.

The boy, the old woman thought, was very pretty. A girl would cry over losing him, but this much?

The girl’s kind of crying was at a pitch that befitted a graver occasion. The girl’s crying was wholehearted, a baby’s kind, in no way self-conscious; but unlike a baby’s crying, the girl’s had nothing to do with discomfort or hunger. Hers was purely announced sorrow.

The old woman had heard and so had the old man.

The old man, the next morning, looking at the ceiling, asked, “What was that last night?”

The old woman shook her head and said, “Wasn’t it terrible?”

“So she wasn’t moaning?”

“Honestly,” the old woman said, and she looked back at where he lay with his hands behind his head. This was crying, the sound of which made the old woman believe that she, the girl, was in the right. Whatever cause was being fought, the girl deserved to win for her sincerity. Her swept, stripped crying was like an empty room, the boxy shadows on the walls, the unfaded parts against which beds and desks had pressed. Whoever had lived there, slept there, adjusted in front of a mirror there, was dead.

The rooms left by the old woman’s dead are all yet unused. The closets are full; in a laundry basket still are her father’s best shoes in shoe trees, a box, tissue paper.

Spendthrift mourner.

Ten years come August. She should clear out Daddy’s room to add a room to the Wax Hill B&B.

Ed and Aura’s is a farmhouse laddered with additions and trellises of clematis and roses; the inside walls are thin; the floors, slant. The rooms the Kyles let are low-ceilinged in the way of farmhouses, but the best of these, with the morning light, Aura gave to this couple. Aura gave the couple the whitest room because of the girl but also because of the boy. Aura had looked at the two when they were reading the brochures Aura always gives to guests. Aura considered their faces — they were probably not so young, not a girl and a boy, though she was of an age that turned everyone under forty into girls and boys, and so, too, these guests. The girl’s straight eyebrows, her wide-open expression, the girl’s face and the boy’s face — she would not tire of looking at them.

No matter. The couple left the next morning. They left before breakfast, which Aura thought was wasteful.

Age is some of the story. Aura has a spot on her hand that she is watching grow. Halved in a fold of skin for a time, it has looked like shadow, but now the spot is larger and outstandingly itself; nevertheless, Aura believes only she knows the brown declivity for what it is.

Ed is eighty-two and proud of it.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Adem Berbic, Hm, Seeing a car explode doesn’t seem that out of the ordinary to me, but I did grow up in car central. ‘Vengeance is Mine’, I can’t remember if I’ve seen it off the top of my head. This weekend I watched ‘Ice Cream Man’, which all the critics are excoriating at the moment, but I thought it was simple, gory fun. I think your fear is just a paranoia thing, or that’s the only way I can explain it. ** _Black_Acrylic, I would be literally shocked if that Jorvik Viking Centre dark ride is even remotely scary. Well, I hugely hope that this time enough people are smart and non-lazy enough to cause that Zoom writing class to happen. I and many others need to feel the heat from your Renaissance! Having a deep aversion to nostalgia for whatever reason, I’ll continue to watch for your ‘Shards’ reports. ** voskat, Hi. I’m safe, as far I can tell, and reasonably swell, thank you. Laura’s summer is the enemy. I pray that it’s only being kept alive by the heat, which would seem to be in its death throes, although you wouldn’t know it over here where we’re about to slide into yet another fucking heatwave. I will say hi to L. on Insta. Least I can do. I haven’t hunted for that post yet. Thanks for the reminder. xo. ** Steve, We’re apparently heading into another awful several days-long heatwave starting tomorrow or possibly even later today. Luck with yours. My weekend was mostly catching up on stuff. As I said above, I did watch ‘Ice Cream Man’. I really don’t get the critical vendetta against that film. It’s simple old school gory fun. What, critics want Eli Roth to turn into Christopher Nolan or something? New show! Everyone, The latest episode of Steve’s ‘Radio Not Radio’ is alive and on the move here. Steve: ‘Get up close and personal with a xenomorph to Icelandic industrial punk, go-go, musique concrete, church organs and more! This one features ROHT, Portraits Of Tracy, Charli XCX, Madamloss, The Need, The Tubs, Gentles, Worldpeace DMT, Odor Eater, Zoh Amba, Bill Hsu, Terry Riley/Claire Chase/JACK Quartet, Pino Donaggio, Midori Hirano, Beatriz Ferreyra, Michael Cloud Duguay, Cinna Peygahmy, Toru Takemitsu, Babal, wit., haru matsui, Sayf, Leo, NTFL & PVSSY, Sarah Sampp, Akiid and Trouble Funk.’ Nice line-up. Bill Hsu is in the house! Whoop! Thanks. Scurry through the heat as best you can. ** Rentedrooms, The Thriller dark ride was fun the first two times I rode it, but they really need to fork out the money for a new one. OC Fair, nice. My favorite things about the Pomona fair are the old school things like the ‘dinner place setting’ contest winners display, the creative cake making winners display, the pig races, and so on. And the stomach curdling food, of course. I don’t think I’ve seen that Manson movie, but I’ll check. Seems like I must’ve though. Weekend mostly passed the time, but at least we were still in between heat waves. Yours? Big up! ** Alice, Hi to you, Alice! Improved income is the Zeus head! Congrats! I like the Beach Boys, of course. Favorite … well, after ‘Smile’, their masterpiece, I’m very fond of the trio of albums that followed it — ‘Wild Honey’, ‘Friends’, and ’20/20′. I watched ‘Adieu au language’ again recently, and it really does make 95% of the films that have been released since it seem little more than timid and conservative. I’ll remember to follow _.hurryupandspinmeee._. Wait, hold on … I just did. Very happy to learn that you’re excited. Have a blast-plus in London if I don’t confer with you again before then. ** laura w, Hi. Yes, I played the first two ‘Luigi’s Mansion’ games. In the second one I reached a boss who was impossible for me to beat, so I quit, and now I’m wary of the third one. But I liked them while they were friendly to me. My tabac hasn’t closed for vacation yet strangely. Maybe it won’t go on vacation! My criteria for plane films is Blockbusters that I haven’t watched yet, which happily is most of them. That’s basically all I want on planes. And mainstream horror movies, although planes are pretty stingy with them. My weekend, as stated above, was fairly whatever but okay. It wasn’t too hot, which it is starting to be again today, so just not sweating and having to glare angrily at the sky made the two days okay. ** Steeqhen, I’m so sorry about your dog. Nature fucked up when it gave dogs shorter than human lives. It seems possible that ‘Castration Movie’ is on ok.ru or rarefilmm by now. Yep, I get a namecheck in ‘Totally Fucked Up’. Gregg and I used to know each other in LA back in the day. He wanted me to play a role in one of his films — ‘The Living End’ — but I declined. No regrets. ** HaRpEr //, Haha, Franzen as The National of contemporary lit. I think if he got called the Arcade Fire of contemporary lit, he’d think that was the coolest thing ever, haha. Well, you know how I feel about book tightening. Within reason. ‘Ingrid Caven’, excellent! I think Schuhl’s first novel is finally going to be translated and published by Semiotext(e) one of these years. ** Uday, I don’t think I’ve ever been scared by a horror movie. Or not since I was 6 years old or something. You’re almost out of there. Yeah, enjoy the tail end. Why does veganism have fascist connotations there? If you can say. Odd. Although I guess a lot of Americans probably think so too. ** Right. Today I spotlight a book by one of American fiction’s very best sentence writers, Christine Schutt. Have a look. See you tomorrow.