spring
springing
Table of Contents
Ok let’s set the scene: here’s me, double-edged smile, tipping my hat to you, I’m on the ground, I’m being dragged through the mud by one foot which is tied to the fabled fire horse, who does not give a shit. Patchy grass now: I pluck a flowering clover as I slide on out of frame. Squelch, squelch.
Longer winter, you know? You know.
How do I park this clown car?
Big realization this quarter: oh my god, I’m driving a clown car. I only realized it because I typed it in a message mindlessly (“So sorry, gotta park my clown car first”) and was dazed by a dolly zoom feeling. What? Since when? Pivotal, dizzying. A red sphere where the nose lives.
Hurtling down clown highway in clown car feels like a curse, but it is in fact all choices made by me. So I’m formulating a clown car parking plan. Step one is to realize I’m a passenger in a clown car, been there done that, and step two is to take the wheel and become the big clown. Ten and two, baby. Or donuts? Maybe both. I have hunches about what comes after that, but something tells me it’ll only become clear in hindsight, and you know what, that’s cool, that’s a cool part of living, the unfolding. Clowns and ex-clowns, weigh in.
Shelley Duvallways On My Mind
Shelley Duvall is the reason I learned how to [redacted] a while back: she's the creator of the kids’ show “Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle” that I remembered from the 90s, where a demented jester woman is hired over and over to concoct avant-garde punishments for small children in her community, which to no one’s surprise only the Russians had archived. I had to see it again, had to revisit the haunting image of a little girl hobbling down a staircase after having been transmogrified into a radish garden (now on youtube, with Joan Cusack!). For these reasons alone, Shelley Duvall has changed my life, but you know it doesn't stop there.
I’m trying to savor what I have left of her weird little filmography as slowly as I can. This quarter I watched Popeye (1980, dir. Robert Altman, cin. Giuseppe Rotunno), a movie musical that’s bad in a way that doesn’t matter. Gaspworthy, really cartoonish and entirely Altman. Sets like you wouldn’t believe. Layers layers layers. A young Robin Williams in his first-ever starring role.
But it’s Shelley Duvall’s movie, the whole thing blooms out of her. What she does with her face and her voice, the senses of self and humor that must come from some kind of controlled awareness but feel as unconstructed as a breeze. There’s ~3 seconds during the song “He’s Large” that I rewound a bunch of times because she flutters around and swoops her head and spins in a way that would take paragraphs to even outline the mechanics of. So right and funny. Remember when J*ff B*zos was getting roasted for texting someone “I love you, alive girl”? This is me declaring I knew exactly what he meant and it’s the only sense he’s ever made to me.
Talking to god on the phone
I’m freaked out by how much I love hand-knotted wool rugs. I’m scared — of something — that they are here at all, that I could have access to anything so special. It gets rarer and rarer to see anything so artful and labor intensive. It’s the same feeling I get when I’m looking at someone I love so much that I can't keep a vision of loss from breathing down my neck. Beauty, greed, desire, love, joy, awe, gluttony, fear, grief. Me for the rugs.
Just caring for the sheep, carding the wool, washing it, spinning it, dyeing it, just that. And so much else. Four people side by side, tying tiny knots. If these were made farm-to-floor in the US, you’d be out a quarter mil for a big one, with the workers just scraping by (source: napkin math but prove me wrong???). Which is how so many things work. Art squeezed through the dough roller of global commerce. “Global commerce.” Once I talked to a rug on the phone in a dream, and it felt like talking to god. You can buy god used for a couple hundred dollars if you know where to look. Scary, no???
Unhorsed by slant
One time a college research librarian tried and failed to convince me not to write a paper about Emily Dickinson because it was “overdone.” ???. And to think I felt a little dumb about it then. Are librarians not subject to the Hippocratic Oath? Emily Dickinson is our goth princess of sweet severity and we can all write about her as much as we want.
Sometime in the 1860s she wrote:
Renunciation — is a piercing Virtue —
The letting go
A Presence — for an Expectation —
Not now —
The putting out of Eyes —
Just Sunrise —
Lest Day —
Day's Great Progenitor —
Outvie
Renunciation — is the Choosing
Against itself —
Itself to justify
Unto itself —
When larger function —
Make that appear —
Smaller — that Covered Vision — Here —
I read that and I’m like DAMN what do you MEAN what are you SAYING and then I read it ten more times and it’s like getting beat up on the side of the road by choice, beat up by huge Popeye arms, an experience to savor for the rarity of it.
Speaking of Emily Dickinson as a source of inspiration, I bring this next poem up a lot but it’s like a favorite song, we can play it all the time:
GRAZING HORSES by Kay Ryan (1997)
Sometimes the
green pasture
of the mind
tilts abruptly.
The grazing horses
struggle crazily
for purchase
on the frictionless
nearly vertical
surface. Their
furniture-fine
legs buckle
on the incline,
unhorsed by slant
they weren’t
designed to climb
and can’t.
Unhorsed by slant!!! Unhorsed by slant makes me want to start a metal band. Speaking of—
My First Guitar Recital
This quarter I put on my first ever guitar recital as a new guitar player. It was really like a house show with a band because my friends Esther and Eliza played with me, and they’re pros. It turns out I’m surrounded on all sides by musicians, which is true wealth as I turn into one myself. The first night after we all practiced together I cried with a weird doom because that flavor of happiness was so unfamiliar to me. I can have this?
Playing is one thing but it’s the singing that’s scary. I was as nervous as a chihuahua playing these songs in front of people and I did it anyway. I’m proud of myself and my friends and I will cherish all of it forever. But posting video evidence online still makes me feel all tense. No, don’t look, I’m a beginner, rough and stumbly! But god that’s so boring and totally at odds with the golden retriever barking in my heart under old clenching muscle memory. By all means, behold the beginner beginning!!! Look at her go!
The first song is dirgey and threatening, the second song has dueling flutes and an evil bar chord, and the third is a cowboy song with a dramatic reveal:
Bye/trees
Does this issue of Annie Quarterly feel a little unsettled to you? A little on edge? It does to me. But now the cherry blossoms are here and I see more and more with my eyes. When I walk outside I try to walk with no hurry. Slow bossa nova.
Do you feel like you can hold hands with trees in your mind? When I sit in the park between two big trees I reach out with my mind and I can feel the betweenness of the betweenness of us. When I walk by big trees I walk slow, and I feel them behind me as I pass, I feel sad to leave them. When I walk by flowers I think “that’s me” and it’s true. I see a good jug on a little table and I think “that’s me” and it is. And it’s you too.
Bye!
Love,
Annie
P.S. One more thing: Eartha Kitt opening her TV special by slinking around on a bunch of chaises while holding a mini microphone with the world’s longest cable all coiled up in her hand and draping everywhere. C’est magnifique…
