Hi lucky-ducks,
On my 21st birthday, I also graduated from college. It was a 17 year cycle of cicadas, so what I recall is leading the national anthem inside the new gym instead of outside on the spectacular lawns (which were crawling hideously, as were the cars, the eaves, and ugh - don’t get me started on what it was like to stand beneath the ancient trees on campus). I recall being surprised that I got a graduation gift from my philosophy professor, still one of the smartest people I’ve ever met (Stephen Vicchio, are you still out there thinking vastly about minute things?) — the book was the second volume of the letters of Rainer Maria Rilke in translation, and I read only the dedication, over and over, whenever I was feeling down.
This week, I started to read the book at last. It will be a major college reunion for my graduating class this year. I won’t attend because I am sad that my magnificently strange, honorable, tiny, and decidedly quirky historical women’s college closed the music department altogether and has since transformed itself into a dull, intrinsically minor and ordinary coed university that teaches a single trade.
(I was their only Music Major that year, but graduated only magna cum laude since my exacting piano professor gave me two semesters of Cs in piano for failing to focus - he wasn’t wrong, I was taking 21 and 24 credits those semesters, but I was devastated that my GPA wasn’t perfect.)
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And speaking of random things: this week, in addition to finally reading Rilke, I found myself dangling yarn in front of my son’s cat while working a jigsaw puzzle only moments after he told me “Trump’s got a new one: he’s planning to rename the Department of Defense by executive order. Meet: The Department of War.” There followed some musing over a timeline before Young Pioneers are instituted in schools, and then a resigned debate of value of the linguistic honesty of such terminology vs. the implied acceptance of (or even eagerness for) violent aggression that such a renaming might indicate, then a resigned debate over what movie we would watch (The Thursday Murder Club won: merry pensioners solving crimes and reminding American viewers that a) British actors can act and b) once upon a time, movies were amusing without explosions.)
There is a great deal of resigned debating in our home these days.
I saw a play this week that moved me to tears: House of McQueen. It was a quite staggering display of designer talent - the screens, the simplicity of the set that showed off the costumes…. I don’t know if my emotional response was specifically for the play. I thought the script was good, but it was after all, basically a biography with one very talented and charismatic lead actor and a lot of very talented supporting actors playing a multitude of extraordinary characters) It is possible I was overwhelmed by Alexander McQueen’s audacity. Or perhaps for nostalgia for a world in which an artist could stand up to the rigidity and commercialism of society and channel his rage and dismay into the creation of extraordinary art by building on his talents, deeply learning his trade, and then using a sort of second sight, a broader visioning, to show the beauty in perseverance. Hard to say.
(The audience looked like they had just stopped at their Upper East Side apartments after getting off the Hampton’s Jitney this morning. Tight matching pairs of natty silvery men with Warby Parker glasses, trios and singles of steely women in the only McQueen shoes they owned, proudly tottering to their seats and poking at their phones as though their hedge fund daughters had once taught them to Instagram. )
Here’s a link to the whole quote, by Jans Peter Jacobsen.
I ran into the playwright Darrah Cloud after the event, in a dark hallway. I hope I didn’t scare her.
SPARKS OF INSPIRATION:
I was interviewed by bestselling author Jo Piazza last week about Pen Parentis and that episode should drop any time. It is on the podcast Under the Influence which has, apart from me, episodes on everything from seeking truth in the Instagram mom world to trendy plastic surgery and who gets to choose whether you get it.
This week Chicago-based author Ben Tanzer (you may know him from my Chicago book event in August) recorded an interview with me for HIS podcast This Podcast will Change Your Life. I had a great time taping with him - he asks such wide-ranging questions that the whole interview felt like an improv show with me as the main character and writing and Pen Parentis as the situations that I was placed into.
I also am 4/5 of the way through the book Babel by RF Kuang. Anyone who speaks two languages fluently should read this book. If you loved any liberal arts university you’ll love it but if you went to Oxford, it is absolutely written with you in mind. It is set in an alternate historical 1800s and is quite simply carrying me away.
What else did I do this week? I worked a lot. Hard. Took a thousand meetings on Zoom. Wondered what it is that makes me long for other people’s company. Informed the next Pen Parentis Fellow of her win (here’s the winners’ list). Got rejected by a lot of small presses and one notable placement that I really would have loved to get:
“…out of 1,132 applications, your work rose to the very top and earned a place on the shortlist of 20 finalists. We were deeply impressed by the strength, originality, and vision of your submission…”
Helped a friend deal with his own rejection letters. Oh! And I tried out fencing. That was a lot of fun. I signed up for two private lessons and a group class. Was looking for something that was active that wouldn’t feel like a singles’ mixer. It worked: stabbing people wearing metal masks is less likely to lead to pickup lines.
Well, unless you’re really good at ripostes.
RANDOM FINAL THOUGHT
Powerball was up to 1.3 Billion dollars this weekend. Why does it seem more likely that someone might carefully select six personally-lucky numbers that a machine might also choose, than that the same machine might choose 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6?
It is equally likely.
