Everyday is like Sunday

Ugh, I am still a strain of invalid, lowgrade fever and elephant on chest, so I am watching the abridged Sex and the City on the Style network. It is embarrassing to watch this show after so many years, as opposed to rewatching, say, My So-Called Life and realizing how smart and surprising it still is. Everyone's kind of an asshole on Sex and the City, and it makes me feel itchy, all the consumerism, the shop-to-you-drop as a sort of ethos, the cliched voiceover.

I wonder what Tiqqun thinks of Carrie Bradshaw. I have been writing this a lot: I wonder what Tiqqun thinks, which tells me I just have to really fucking read Tiqqun's translated Theories of the Young Girl - I read some of it in PDF form, and I bought it at the reading at Bluestockings, but then I gave it to Carina F. I have a lot of issues with the work, if it's not meant through any sort of ironic stance, but I also have issues with Sex and the City, while still somehow loving it, but seeing it for how retrograde it is, like I Dream of Jeannie or the Brady Bunch.

Anyway, it was the episode where Carrie turns 35, and she shows up at a tapas restaurant wearing a deconstructed flamenco sort of costume, and I groaningly watched it, because I'm turning 35 in a few months so am sensitive to all of this. While still somehow intensely feeling the pathos of Carrie sitting alone and seemingly unloved in the restaurant.

Most importantly I am reading Edith Wharton. I just finished Custom of the Century and am now reading The Age of Innocence. My favorite is still The House of Mirth. I think that Edith Wharton would have understood the Internet and reality television. She understood so intimately ideas of status and identity, of consumerism and desire. I cannot believe I went so long without reading her. I would like to write about the experience of reading Wharton, maybe, and perhaps Franzen's essay on her and the idea of sympathy and likeability, but I have to first attempt to write this essay on Barbara Loden. I met Laura F. after the Bluestockings reading and I told her about the Barbara Loden essay, which is also kind of about a girl I used to live with, some sort of toxic love affair or fascination, and she said: That's what an essay should be. About women we're obsessed with. I love this and wrote it down and have been thinking of it since.