diary

I feel I need some sort of space-holder here, and I erased my last, angst-ridden post as that didn't feel right having that stay in. Leonard Woolf reading his wife's Virginia's journal says that diarists only write in one mood. I don't know if that's true. Maybe it's true. I guess I tend to write when I feel most the desire to communicate. But when I choose to write here...I don't know. When I choose to write here versus just inside a notebook.

Anyway. I am attempting to move into Part Two of the book, ignoring the trainwreck behind me. It is set in the South and the present-day. There should be something reinvigorating about that. Yesterday at the Durham's farmer's market I bought cornflowers (which the woman behind me in the tomato line told me are called 'bachelor's buttons') and sweet williams. Some sort of theme, of courtship or something.

I interviewed for a bookstore job last week, I don't know if I'm going to get it because realizing I need to continue to work full-time on the book this summer, that I'm not as far ahead as I would have liked. It's a used-bookstore in Chapel Hill. The manager who interviewed me told me about the section called "toxic books" that she likened to the "cult fiction" selection at Foyles that I looked over when I was there. "Toxic books." I like that. I think I write those. I think I am interested in those. Funny to interview for the position - they asked for a service CV, they weren't interested in any teaching or writing or editing stuff. They wanted me in my early-to-mid-twenties. I gave her that girl. A sort of lightness but then perhaps alienation. 

Next weekend John and I will be in New York at the Prose Event. We plan to gorge ourselves on art in three days - Alexander McQueen at the Met, the Glenn Lignon at the Whitney, the New Museum, the Francis Alys at the MOMA, then tons of gallery shows: deKooning and Bourgeois' fabric and Bacon and Picasso's mistress at the Gagosian. We have been planning for Scandinavia, I hope to hell I am done with the book by then. I can see myself: in the Norwegian town of Bergen while John is at his meetings, walking around and thinking of Ibsen's women. Also: Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, the train from Oslo to Bergen, the fjords. I haven't left the country in years. I wish this book was done so I would be lighter, able to feel like I could explore new territory, exist in new space. I feel I must be the same person until the book is done.