anthropology

a series of completely broken thoughts

-Yesterday I was ill, I have been increasingly more ill every month, that's a euphemism, it looks like I might have to have some sort of surgery to remove all of the scarred lining from inside. It's possible I might have to have it soon - when? sandwiched between finishing a mss. on deadline and moving to NYC in a month? Terrible pains in the night, John even stayed home from work to take care of me. This is exposition I totally didn't want to do. But it's done. There. It's done. Ridiculous.

-So we went to the mall in the afternoon, it was a 90 degree day, which here means here the HEAT HAS BROKEN, and I needed to buy myself a bag, which in Zambreno female terminology, means a present, when one is ill or in mourning, mourning of something, sometimes just the day. The women in my family communicate with gifts, usually of make-up. The ones that are left - there are almost none left. Last time I was in NYC, the Sephora at Columbus Circle, my sister buys me a lipgloss (Clinique Raspberry Supergloss). Which reminds me of the morning after our mother died when she bought me a pair of Olsen-esque sunglasses at the Marshall Field's counter. And then a pedicure. All day long she just bought me things. I suppose I am easily bought.

-I remember talking about bags with my uncle as he was dying last year, and he thought it was perhaps an Italian custom, or Italian-American. I don't know. My grandmother's bags were usually candy. Boxes of Fannie May.

-I bought a mango-colored silk kimono robe at Anthropologie, because that is what I needed to imagine myself in a New York sublet, the single air-conditioner blowing, me at a little table, alone, writing. I need always some sort of imagined costume to propel myself into new situations.

-I tried on a few dresses, with no desire to buy any of them, as Anthropologie is on the whole a bit too frilly for me. But the shopgirls kept on bringing me these wide belts. Why does everyone try to force wide belts on me? I feel there's some sort of conspiracy with this.

-I laid in bed and read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Yesterday I thought about all the projects I want to write, essays maybe, books, I dont' know what they are. This I hope will help me, propel me to finish. There's the book on girl libertinage I want to write, that will focus on Gone with the Wind, and also vampire YA novels, and Sade and cruelty and Amanda Knox. There's the small book I want to write about the actress-filmmaker Barbara Loden, who I've written about in every book I've basically ever written, and last night I discover through Wikipedia, my portal for all things, that she was born in North Carolina, and so this feels like twinning, kismet.

And then lately I've become obsessed with Mary Shelley and also all these anonymous women of the Romantic poets who all died these gruesome deaths in childbirth or killed themselves lovetorn. Mary Shelley who started writing Frankenstein when she was fucking 17. Which is like obscene. And I really want to conjure up a teenage Mary Shelley. And her series of miscarriages. Her life dealing with so much illness and death. I laid in bed yesterday cramped and woozy from the half of the muscle relaxer I took in a panic in the middle of the night and thought of monsters, when our bodies turn us into monsters. I want to write a book about a girl-monster, Mary Shelley. A hybrid monster book. Maybe Shelley Jackson already did that with Patchwork Girl. And this morning, reading an interview with Lidia Yuknavitch, this line: "And this, which Mary Shelley told me in a dream when I was 14: You are not a monster."