A stranger read me a bedtime story

Never Done: A stranger (artist) read me a bedtime story

Let me start with the words of the artist:

In Here Is Where We Meet, artist Madhu Kaza will travel to individual participant’s homes by appointment to read to them at bedtime. This project is part of the artist’s ongoing Hospitality series, which includes projects that explore social conventions, rituals of domestic and daily life, relations between strangers, hosts and guests, and boundaries of public and intimate space. Here is Where We Meet is particularly concerned with the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep (including the drift from the world of stories to the world of dreams), a re-engagement of voice in our experience of texts, and the possibility of trust.

And now, my words. A couple weeks ago, on the day I flew home from Germany, Abigail wrote to me to tell me that her friend Madhu is doing this project where she goes to people's houses and reads to them at bedtime, and that she thought I should do it for my Never Done year. When I went to Madhu's project website, I knew right away that I wanted to do this. I loved the idea of sharing the liminal space between being awake and being asleep with someone I don't know, but whom I could assume I could trust. It's a little hard, now that I have met Madhu and have a real experience of her, to summon up the images I had of what she might be like, but I think that knowing she was Abigail's friend and a doctoral candidate in comparative literature, and the fact that she describes the project in terms of trust were enough to allow me to trust her in my space.

I filled in her application questionnaire:

Please list the members of your household and their relation to you (including pets): Josh, partner

What time do you go to sleep? 11 PM

What days and/or dates you are available for an appointment? (I gave her lots of dates.)

Please describe your bedtime rituals: I try to have my teeth brushed by 11, close the shades, and get in bed with very little light, and read until I fall asleep. The rest is erratic -- sometimes I shower, sometimes I don't. I usually wear the same t-shirt for pajamas but sometimes I wear real pajamas or nightgown. If it's warm out I open the window. If it's cold out I keep it closed but turn off the heat so I don't get hot in the night. If I am sleeping with Josh, I take a blanket off the bed. If I am sleeping without him, I add a blanket. No computer in bed before sleep.

Please list a few books that you love: Fugitive Pieces, To the Wedding, Pride and Prejudice, Just Kids. (and so many more)

How did you hear about this project? From Abigail Miller

What most interests you about participating in this project? My liminal space between wake and sleep is very, very tiny. I tend to be very alert and then on the verge of sleep, and then asleep -- without much transition time. When I am alone, I love to cross that line with a book. I think it would be very interesting to see what it would be like with a benign stranger/artist -- and the words of some wonderful writer. Will I want to stay awake to experience it more? Will I trust that falling asleep IS experiencing it more?

She wrote me back and we scheduled, and I started thinking about what book I might like her to read to me. I have not read the book she has named her project after, Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger, but I have read others of his books, including To the Wedding, which is a gorgeous love story about AIDS, rooted in his own family's experience. Most of my books are in storage. Really, most. Hundreds are in storage, and only a couple dozen are here. And when I looked on the shelf, I realized that I don't love most of the books that I have here with me. I'm not using love sarcastically here -- I am not saying that the books suck -- I am saying that there's a difference between a book that is useful, or well-written, or interesting, or substantial, or a guilty pleasure and a book that I love.

I meant to get a book I love from the library before Madhu came over, but I didn't. Instead, I stewed about what it means that I have been living for so long now without my books, and while I was at it, I stewed about living without all my other stuff (my warm winter boots, most of my pretty shoes, my guitar, my CD collection, my LP collection, etc.) But mostly my books. I really miss them. Living in limbo has required a great deal of Patience: Do not aggravate a situation with wasted grief -- but is it wasted grief that I miss my books, that I wanted to find No Flying in the House the other day after I went walking with L, that I want to lend one of my extra copies of Goodbye Without Leaving to ... damn, to whom? You see the problem? I have already forgotten who would love to read that book. I think it is wasted grief that I stewed over this instead of going to the library to get a copy of something, but here's the thing. I ended up finding a wonderful book for her to read to me.

I have been trying to read Soul Mountain for years now. Josh adored it, and highly recommended it. I started it, put it down, started it, put it down, and started it and put it down. My recollection is that I thought it was beautiful, but that I didn't have a sense of the narrative, and so I just didn't stay engaged. It's a book full of close observation, and I think I grew impatient with the lack of story. "But it won the Nobel Prize for literature," I would tell myself, trying to convince myself to keep reading. But I never kept reading.

At one point, I asked Josh to tell me what happens at the end. I think, actually, that he told me that the last page was wonderful, and so I was going to read the last page -- which is something I tend to do -- but he just hated the idea that I would jump to the end without arriving there step by step. This precipitated a huge discussion about the valid ways to engage with literature, and during that discussion, I came to understand that my tendency to jump to the end has a lot to do with wanting to avoid unnecessary tension, as a result of extremely tense trauma I've experienced, and that if it means that by skipping to the end I will pay closer attention to the journey of the rest of the book, that that's completely valid.

The language in Soul Mountain is gorgeous, and I thought it might be interesting to hear it in Madhu's voice, as a new way in. And even if it turned out not to be a new way in, it would at least be a new experience of the beginning. So let me tell you what it was like to have Madhu come over and read to me.

She showed up and I immediately felt like I already knew her. She came in and chatted easily, and she asked me if I was sleepy (I was) and Josh gave her a gorgeous scone he had made (with no flour but almond flour) and I brought her in to the bedroom, where I had set up a chair and a glass of water and a lamp and my book. We talked for a while before she started to read. I don't actually remember what she asked me, but I do remember we talked about Soul Mountain, and I told her the final image of the book (Josh finally agreed to tell me): an image of god as a frog, with one eye continuously open, and one eye continuously blinking. She showed me the little book she was making for each person she's reading to -- it looked like a little Muji notebook, and she asked me to sign the front of it. She told me she was going to write the first and last lines she read into the booklet, and also some other notes. She reminded me that she was going to tape record her reading. And then some other warm talking -- I don't remember about what -- but I do remember that it felt like talking with a friend.

And then she transitioned into reading. "Soul Mountain. One. The old bus is a city reject. After shaking in it for twelve hours on the potholed highway since early morning, you arrive in this mountain country town in the South." And she kept reading, and I watched and listened to her read, and voice was fluid and melodic and soothing, and she was a wonderful reader -- I don't often follow well when someone else is reading, but I followed. I heard Gao Xinhjian's images, and I heard his humor, and I loved it when both Madhu and I found the same passages funny, and at some point I remembered the truth about why I haven't continued reading this book. He uses a second person convention -- it is right there in the first paragraph that I printed above -- that I find confusing and annoying. Normally when someone uses the second person, it's clear what the convention is. It's either meant to be the reader, or it's meant actually to be the writer, or he's writing to another character in the novel. But in Soul Mountain, I have never understood what convention he is using -- it seems to move around -- and I find it incredibly annoying. Maybe it's incredibly literary. Maybe it's going to have a beautiful payoff, paid off by my stunning persistence and patience once I have actually read this book. But for now, it's annoying.

A little less annoying when Madhu was reading. Maybe because, unlike me, she didn't skip over "boring parts." In fact, with Madhu reading, I got to realize that reading this book is going to be like climbing an actual mountain. Sometimes there are going to be breathtaking vistas, and every now and then there's going to be a mountain spring to drink from, and sometimes you (second person meaning "one" and including me) are going to cross paths with other hikers, but mostly you just have to take step after step after step. Like training for the triathlon. Like Haruki Murakami writes about in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Like climbing a mountain.

And it's going to take patience -- and a commitment not to waste grief on the confusing second person convention -- nor on the question of whether I'm stupidly not getting his actually quite brilliant convention that's completely clear to everyone else. That most of all.

But I wasn't thinking about all this while Madhu was reading -- I was listening to Madhu read, and eventually I got sleepy, and I noticed the sensations in my body, that my legs were a little restless, that my neck hurt, that my heart rate was slowing down, that I was starting to drift. And then I did drift, and wake, and drift, and wake -- and I thought I was following, but I knew I wasn't really, and I would wake to images that I wasn't sure came from the book or my mind, and then I eventually turned on my side, and I just let myself be comforted by the melodic lull of Madhu's voice, and I knew I wasn't really hearing the words any more, and that was just fine with me, and then I was asleep, which I only knew because at some point I noticed that she turned off the light and slipped out of my room.

And I tucked myself deeper under the covers, and fell back to sleep until early morning. And Madhu, no longer a stranger, went out into the night, and rode the trains back to Manhattan. I hope we see each other again.

I watched Breaking Bad

Never Done: I watched Breaking Bad

I recently read an interview in which Tony Kushner said he thinks that some of the best dramatic writing being done now is for cable TV dramas, and The Wire and Breaking Bad were his primary examples. Apparently, when Tony Kushner tells me to watch something, I put it on my Netflix queue and get around to it a few months later. The problem is, I am a monogamous TV viewer, and I am currently seeing Battlestar Gallactica. (And I am quite happy in our relationship. We usually see each other late at night, in bed.)

But after friend after friend told me how good Breaking Bad is, I finally gave it a look. I like that there's a character with cerebral palsy, and I like that it gets underneath a mundane working/middle class life and shows us a world of seedy underbelly possibilities. In case you don't know, it's about a meek high school chemistry teacher who is struggling financially -- so much so that he has a second job at a car wash -- and is diagnosed in the Season One Premiere with inoperable lung cancer. Hoping he can secure his family's financial future, he teams up with a former student turned fuck-up, and cooks the kind of pure methamphetamine that only a meek high school chemistry teacher can cook. It turns out, he's a crystal meth artist.

At its essence, Breaking Bad is about a middle-aged man reinventing himself. A meek man who at the start of the episode can't get a hard-on (granted, his wife was paying more attention to her laptop than she was to the hand job) rediscovers his virility after he creates a mobile meth lab, knocks off a couple drug dealers, wields a hand gun, and flees from the authorities in his skivvies. Also, after he kicks and humiliates a trio of immature high school thugs who are mocking his son (the one with cerebral palsy.) In essence, cancer gives him a new lease on life.

I wonder if Breaking Bad will follow in the tradition of misdiagnosis literature (the loftiest that I can think of being Soul Mountain) -- in which the main character thinks their life is nearing its end, and so they change everything, only to find that there was a mistake, and that, as the saying goes, life goes on. But now that bridges are burned, priorities clarified, old patterns shed, and hard-ons regained, they get a brand new life. I can't say for sure, but it's my guess. (I was right when after the Battlestar pilot I guessed that BSG is an Earth creation myth.) I'll have to watch to find out. But first, I have a hot date with another two seasons of Battlestar.

Olive Kitteridge

Never Done: Finished Olive Kitteridge

Josh has been wanting me to read the Nobel Prize-winning novel Soul Mountain for about 6 years now, and I finally brought it with me on vacation, determined to read it. I had tried once before, and found it dense and difficult, with more description and inner narrative than I usually like, and so I eventually put it down. Apparently there is an image on the very last page that he hoped I would get to, because he adored it. I suggested I just read the last page, but he found that unbearable to think about, and I, out of respect, actually didn't go reds the back page, even though it would have been in my nature to do so. Finally, after a realization I had that if I want to read the last page first, for any reason, it's a completely valid approach, I told Josh that I wanted him to tell me what is on the last page. And he did, and it's an image of god. God as a frog, with one eye always open and one eye constantly blinking. A beautiful image, for sure, and probably the best image of God I have ever heard, which is a lot coming from an atheist like me. So, as I said, I packed the book on vacation, and I started it on the way to the airport. I read the Forward, which I had not read the first time, and I understood why it is so inward and metaphoric (it has to do with the author Gao Xingjian's experience coming out of the Cultural Revolution.) I was also extremely moved by his writing story -- he destroyed hundreds of stories, essays, plays, and poems, and still went on to amazing prolificity. I know that's not a word, but he was incredibly prolific.

So I had the book with me, but as soon as I got to the airport and saw a book store, I lost my resolve to read Nobel Prize-winning Chinese fiction, and was seduced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American fiction. I bought myself a copy of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, and became immediately engrossed in the tales from the fictional small coastal town of Crosby, Maine. It reminded me of when I was young and moved to Maine, and it reminded me of when I got older and visited Maine, and it reminded me of my friends who live there now, and it reminded me of what I think about when I think about living there again. It was foggy and slow, and old timers lived alongside newcomers, sometimes with grace and delight, and sometimes with a gulf of misunderstanding. When I lived there in the late 1980's, my mother used to say, "Jenny doesn't live in Maine; she lives in alternative Maine." She was partly right (I did live in a yurt on five acres of land that we rented for $50/month, and I did work at an art house movie theater, and belong to a food coop, and spend time on womyn's land) but the part she missed is the part where my neighbors and I shoveled each other out, and I worked at Family Planning and helped women of all types and ages with their reproductive health, and we all walked on the same trails, and swam in the same lakes, and ate at the same diners. So when I read in Olive Kitteridge that when Harmon first sees Nina, the anorexic girl whose boyfriend steals tubing from his hardware store to make a bong, and his reaction is that he loves young people, I smiled at how right Strout got it, and that in her dark, sad book in which people struggle with change, she offered this vision of hope.