Bit #1

From Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Volume 1:

I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive. And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape. Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I . . . do what? Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bathe them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others, and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards. It is a struggle, and even though it is not heroic, I am up against a superior force, for no matter how much housework I do at home the rooms are littered with mess and junk, and the children, who are taken care of every waking minute, are more stubborn than I have ever known children to be, at times it is nothing less than bedlam here, perhaps we have never managed to find the necessary balance between distance and intimacy, which of course becomes increasingly important the more personality is involved. And there is quite a bit of that here.

Brilliant/hungry

Ed Park interviewed at the L Magazine:

Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?

In my twenties I memorized the prices of the cheap meals I regularly ate — the lunch special at Taj Mahal on 4th Street, for example, or the big roast chicken at the now defunct Cuban Chinese place near 100th. I would make sure I had the exact change necessary for the tip, so that I could put the money on the table and leave quickly. I don’t know that this had any value beyond contributing to my ability to tell you this story now, years later.

Reminds me of a line a student of mine wrote a very long time ago now, in a creative writing assignment (for the Daily Themes class as taught by Wayne Koestenbaum, probably spring of 1996): "When I'm hungry, I memorize well." Hmmm, I wish I could remember that student's last name, I would think she's probably still writing...

Carnivorous boarding

In the NYTBR, Caleb Crain on 19th-century American boardinghouse life:

Boardinghouses in Victorian America served three meals a day, and the low quality of them is Gunn’s chief complaint. At the Fashionable Boardinghouse, the meat is sliced too thin and the plates are whisked away too quickly; at the Dirty Boardinghouse, there are “hairs and crumbs in the ketchup,” and “every body was over-porked.” The landlady of one Mean Boardinghouse serves salt fish and sheep’s liver three times a week, along with pastry “of solid construction, and damp, ­putty-like material,” while the landlady of another prepares salt mackerel and pickled pork by “interring and then baking them in batter.” For one experimental summer at a Vegetarian Boardinghouse, Gunn allows himself to be fed “bananas, melons, peaches, grapes, oranges, cherries, [and] pine-apples,” but he worries that the diet fosters meekness and “a generally-sublimated and windy estimation of our own importance and destiny,” and soon returns to carnivorous boarding, with results not altogether happy. Of an establishment presided over by an untidy Southern woman, he writes that “we have known blood to follow an incision in a shoulder of veal.”

Table talk for 24 October 2008

Dinner was better than the play.

(Dinner: endive salad with roquefort, apples and candied walnuts; tuna tartare with avocado. Both served in attractive and substantial hockey-puck-type molded tiers for forkish deconstruction. Chocolate mousse - usually I would have ordered the tarte tatin, but I had a late-night stomach-ache and wanted something lower-volume and super-delicious/icing-like. Marathon training is making me ridiculously hungry!)

(The play: a slightly condensed version of the entire Oedipus cycle, with two intermissions and a 3+-hr. running time. The first play opened with Monty Pythonesque chorus members ostentatiously shrouding themselves in stained rags, very Ben-Hur-leper-like, and giving theatrical coughs to show that there was Something Amiss in Thebes - it went on in that spirit, with a lot of very stagey verse-reciting in a language that bore little resemblance to conventionally delivered spoken American English! ARGHHHHHH!)

Also: tips on cutting costs in the home....