Sometimes you just need to kill it by force feeding it white meals.

So, I'm scared of writing fiction. As the lovely and honest Abigail Ohlheiser pointed out to me a couple years ago, I am exposition-avoidant. I don't use it in conversation. I don't use it in writing. I also don't talk like most other people I know, which makes it challenging to construct convincing dialogue.

But when Brian Cook and I decided to make a vintage design and cooking project, it occurred to me that a period-appropriate story might fit well. So I tried.

And where better to start, I figured, than a story about murder by scurvy? Here it is.

Making fun of neurotic writing habits

Some people write postcards to their loved ones; I write postcards to my GP.

You can read about it at thenervousbreakdown.com.

On the geographical, on distance

Since moving to Hartford, I've wanted to write about it. I've wanted to write about it in a way that doesn't feel earned. I often wonder how much I can really claim to be here. I spend time at work and at home - so that the moments of feeling in this place stand out:

walking during snowstorms

obsessive photography

being perched up high for the excellent Branching Out series

But, for the most part, I've felt fairly disconnected from an experience of Hartford that I could present to a general audience.

• • •

Last night I was watching Bas Jan Ader fall from a tree, fall from a roof, fall with a bike.

Gravity everywhere, even in tears.



• • •

I was thinking of sitting up in a tree with Jillian and her telling me about her climbing prowess and near disasters. It settled in that the moments that have been most meaningful in this place, many of them have been on walks with Jillian, cradled in branches with Jillian, wanting to swim in a river with Jillian, standing on a cliff with Jillian.

I feel like I'm losing part of my geography.

Photo by Faith Antion

But I'll write you stories about getting lost.

Mute and hardly active

Bird Specimens, Study Skins, originally uploaded by profholtz.

The past several days, I've had the distinct feeling of being mute. I feel as though I'm giving stillbirth to words.

I haven't written anything about which I'm content in longer than I can remember.

I need to be bolstered up and ordered by something, but I'm not sure what that might be.

Et j'ai crié, "Regardez, regardez!" Et alors, il a salué.

More than anything else these days, I have been craving time to write. And I can see it in a lot of what I do.


Silent films look like photographs of hysteria patients.



I can see it in the way Andrew Bird looks like some illustration by Cruikshank come to life (although, I suspect there is far less vitriol in Bird's being than in Cruikshank's).



I can feel it in the way I read. It's shifted (as it does from time to time) from analyzing the text to analyzing how the author structured the text.

On Tuesday, I watched Man on Wire. There's a part in the documentary where the director splits the screen so that on the left, there are photos and footage of the construction of the World Trade Center and on the right there are photos of Philippe Petit as a child.

It's even seeped into the way I do my job. Last weekend I listened to Nuruddin Farah suggest that when we donate something, when we give someone aid, we are not doing it for the benefit of our beneficiaries. We are doing it for ourselves, because that person who needs our aid is a metaphor for ourselves.

It caught me by surprise, like a word...

I have a bit of a fraught relationship with academe. I question my motives in toeing its edges; from the time I was quite young (even, perhaps, as young as six) I understood - not in these terms, but I understood nonetheless - that being a member of academe, being part of an intellectual elite, can in effect make ones class status secondary to the work one produces. The idea was intoxicating to me.

I finished my masters degree in the midst of a very deep depression. I was questioning my identity, reevaluating the extent to which I took my identity for granted. I was overextending myself - taking a double course load (four courses to the standard two), working a double assistantship load (teaching a course to freshmen that was part of a human rights pilot program, while also being a research assistant to a scholar and artist I admire more than I can adequately express), directing a poetry and graphic design project on a volunteer basis, studying for my exams, applying to PhD programs, and doing extensive departmental committee work. I realize that this is, in many ways, a typical academic workload, but it was a lot for me to take on in the context of having just ended the most significant relationship of my life (a relationship that, for many, many years I believed would be the one that would carry me to old age).

I left for Europe as soon as I had submitted my grades for that final semester. I left with the intention of giving a conference paper in Galway, spending a two week retreat in Co. Donegal during which I would complete a draft of my manuscript (historically-informed poems on Charcot's hysterics), and from there traveling to England with no fixed plans to return. I wanted, desperately, to find some anonymity, to have the space with myself I saw as necessary to figure out what would come next, to re-situate myself to my own positionality. It was from the Holburn branch of the London Public Library that I wrote to my would-be PhD advisor at UCLA, declining his offer of admission. Writing that letter was difficult. Very difficult. It meant, at least temporarily, surrendering an idea and a hope and a plan I had had for myself since I was a very little girl.



Today - sun shining across my floors, cat basking in the window, coffee in hand - I finished reading Colum McCann's Zoli. And, in what seems almost momentous to me, when I sat down to write about it, what followed was the most scholarly thing I've written since May 2006. Admittedly, it is half-raw and only the very beginnings of an idea that would be properly researched in an academic context, but it kind of thrilled me. I miss it so much. I miss it. I miss it at my very finger tips and in my mind's heart.