How to Classify One's Everything

And then running errands after office hours in Akron today I have to go pick up Anne Carson's Decreation from the downtown public library. This week I am teaching her "Glass Essay" and her essay in Decreation on Simone Weil, Marguerite of Porete and Sappho, her mysticism essay, and I might haul out my Nox and spread it all over the floor I don't know I haven't decided my students become alarmed with the idea of too many sheets of paper. I huff up three flights of stairs. I haven't been exercising lately, and I am the philosophical size today of a bloated planet. I approach the cottony beige woman at the reference desk at "History and Humanities" (where I am pointed to). She is elderly and wears bifocals and these are my only acquaintances here in Akron, cottony older women who I understand. And she types something into her computer. "She's a poet." She says. "Yes." I say. She types something else. Looks up. "She writes essays too." "Yes." I say. She types something else. "She's an American," she says. "Yes, she is that too," I say. I am bemused by this. All the ways to categorize the uncategorizable, all of these hybrid writers trapped in-between. The cottony woman in prim beige pants tells me that she's in "Minor Literature." She shows me. "This is for writers who write different sorts of things." I see: Rita Dove, Tupac Shakur, Norman Mailer. In apparently no order. Because of the bifocals she can't see the call numbers on the top and I reach easily over her and grab the book, the golden book, on it written: "Poetry. Essays. Operas." I've decided perhaps I want to call everything I write: Operas.

Then I must go to the bank to sign something John left for me to sign from the bank errand this morning. The person I am supposed to ask for, Peggy, is not there. Instead I get the person at the front desk. She is very snippy with me. I am feeling loose and painfilled and light somehow so I am snappy with her back, but I amuse myself. I explain to her who I am and what I need to do. She is suspicious I am who I say I am. She checks IDs, bank cards, looks at my Illinois driver's license (I refuse! to get an Ohio one! it's philosophical I know. I still have a Chicago area code) and looks delighted that it appears to be expired, so she can turn me away, and I point her to the back sticker. I want to make this easy so I dont' have to return. I explain my situation. "I understand completely," she says, which is something bank clerks and clerk-clerks say, when they don't want to help, when they don't understand. And so then I say: "Do you?" I say this quietly but I smile kind of Chesire. "Do you understand, completely?" Her eyes widened and she shuts up and types the things in the computer and away I go.

Today

I am trying to figure out my Goodreads page and an option is to list "author's death" and I got weirded out. Esp. when I have to consider paperwork lately predicting my age span. All the paper fall-outs from terrible death. One's estate. It's curious when the women die in my family they leave no estate and when the men die they do.

The worst thing I think you can say to someone as you're reading their in-process manuscript is: "The epigraphs are brilliant." If that's all you say.

I am bleeding today it seems an entire continent. Last night I was simply reading in bed working on my manuscript and we realized I bled through my pajamas, the sheets, and stained a quarter-size of blood on the mattress that won't come out. We scrubbed and scrubbed. Isn't that a motif from a horror film, blood that won't wash out? Or, Lady Macbeth. Out, out, spots. Lady Macbeth too is crushed and cruising on death and guilt and vestigial estate sadness. Also, very Vivienne Eliot. I should get black satin sheets. I should steal my hotel sheets and send them back laundered. I will go in fifteen minutes at an ungodly hour and attempt to teach John Berger's Ways of Seeing to my comp class and hopefully not pass out from the constant waves of pain.

What is nudity, he asks, and what is nakedness?