what is?

So down today, down down down, like at the point of downness that you can do nothing else but pick yourself up again and return to some sort of living, so this afternoon I dried the tears away and put on my new silk dress and went out walking with John. Because it's hot, and I felt a desire to feel the heat on my skin. I went to a show of German art at the Ackland, but I just walked through, I didn't really stop, it's so seldom there's an art show I want to see here, and I almost felt I didn't want to see it all at once. I did like looking at Martin Kippenberger's hotel stationary drawings. I ate a pomegranate popsicle (Locopops). I sat at a bar and drank a ginger lemonade while John had a martini (sometimes it is necessary to pretend one is on holiday when things seem so desperate and sad). I went to the Walgreen's in Chapel Hill to get my new passport photo taken (I lost said passport in move, or something, I don't know, and I need it for Scandinavia). I did my classic pursed lips swivel. To the Walgreens boy who was kind of sexy in an unwashed collegiate way. I guess I mean if I was a decade younger I would have fallen in love with him and he would have ignored me. He said, "Ma'am, you're going to have to look straight on." I adjust, slightly. Later at home I admire the photo. John says, "You're always doing that same pose when you take a photo, what is that?" I said: "It's my sexy pose." He says: "You know I think you're beautiful, but you always look like you're going to answer a  question on Jeopardy when you pose like that."

What is?
What is?

I don't know. Tonight I'm going to watch Isabelle Huppert in Violette and think about her saucy flapperness. Isabelle Huppert, my favorite actress who plays my favorite criminals (Emma B and Violette in the Claude Chabrol films, she is Erika in The Piano Teacher).

And then tomorrow I'm going to meditate as I have been for months on this woman question, this question of escape, the possibility of escape.

What is?

I don't know.
Can you repeat the question?



Or maybe I'll just go to bed early. I don't know.

Super Massive Big-Ups

To my lovely and wonderful friend Suzanne Scanlon, who I mention here often and link to often, and who I'm actually dedicating Heroines to, whose story "Her Thirty-Seventh Year: An Index" is the runner-up for the Iowa Review Prize, which gets her $500 and publication in the journal! I'm so overjoyed. Someone, please, stat, get this woman a book deal. I see her as the next Mary McCarthy. Or like a Colette from Chicago.