joon can read!

paperback; © 2007 by melville house publishing

i'm poor, and libraries have strange, inconvenient hours, so sometimes i read books in sporadic one-hour installments during trips to the union square barnes & noble. the barnes & noble has four floors. on the second or third floor, there's a café with a big sign at its entrance prohibiting patrons from bringing in food from outside vendors, but on the fourth floor, where the fiction is, i can sit on the floor or in a folding chair in the section where readings are held and eat anything i want. that’s not true; technically, i'm not allowed to eat in these places, but no one has ever stopped me. once i brought in a sandwich and a beer and sat on the small stage in the front of the room, because i liked the way the light was coming in through the window over it. it’s as if by acting with enough confidence and nonchalance, i can persuade the people around me that i know more about the rules than they do. but all i know is that sometimes, even though there are people everywhere who might object to it, i want to be the way i would be if no one else were around.

is that more? or is the rule that i should be trying to act as if other people are around even when i'm alone? when i act like no one can see me, does it become self-fulfilling?

anyway, i have decided that this is the only way to read this book—in erratic and unannounced bursts, alone in a place that is not my home, in flagrant and yet utterly unchecked violation of the rules of social conduct, surrounded by strangers who are having hushed and incredibly serious conversations about things that strike me as wholly meaningless. really, i think it’s the only way to understand this book.

in eeeee eee eeee’s two hundred or so pages, characters drift in and out, with little or no fuss made over their entrances or exits. some of them have extensive back stories; some of them seem to have no history whatsoever. some of them play main roles for a chapter or two, dominating the entire plot, and then vanish and are never mentioned again. some of them are children. some of them are bears. some of them are so unspeakably isolated and untethered that they can’t visualize their own thoughts or desires clearly enough in their own minds to devote an action to them and instead wander numbly from one stationary object to another, looking, turning away, seeing nothing, responding to nothing. this is a lot like the reading room of a popular manhattan book store, and every public space is a microcosm representative of the broader, surrounding population. so eeeee eee eeee is about twenty-something-year-old pizza-deliverymen who have ironic and seemingly purposeless conversations with their friends, and it is about dolphins who live in an underground city and sometimes bludgeon celebrities, and it is about hamsters trying to explain the underground city to strangers in a park. but through these things, through their randomness and disconnectedness and the flatness with which the characters in the novel receive them, it becomes a spot-on telling of the state of society. it may be my generation's catcher in the rye.

we think we’re bored, but maybe we aren’t, and either way we aren’t sure how to fix it. we try things that don’t work, but we think they should have worked, so we don’t admit that they didn’t; then we are bored and depressed, and we can’t admit that either. we don’t know what to say instead, and we aren’t sure who to talk to, but we’re afraid to stop talking. sometimes we do terrible things and don’t know why; we regret them, we cry about them, and we do them again. sometimes the only way you can think of to tell your sister that you love her and you’re lonely and you want to be her friend is to sit on her head. sometimes people die and no one talks about it at all, and it feels incredibly strange, to know that someone has died and no one is talking about it, and you want to ask everyone why they aren’t talking about it, but you know that you will never ask and that no one will ever explain it, and it makes you desperate. it makes you so desperate that you cover a moose’s head with a blanket and punch it in the face, and when it says, “thank you,” you want to give it a cookie and kill it and drown, you love it and envy it so much.

eeeee eee eeee is about an invisible person in the center of a crowd of millions of people listening to one person nearby saying, “i’m so tired today. every time i try to think about something, i forget and think about something else,” and wondering, “am i tired? is that what’s wrong?” and writing, “i’m so tired today,” and knowing it isn’t the answer, and thinking about someone who isn't there, and moving to a different seat. that person disappears for two weeks and then comes back, and no one mentions it. someone stands on a chair and throws a bottle, and someone starts to cry, and other people look up and think, “i wonder if that would make me happy,” and then go back to their books.

you, all alone in the corner, with the untied sneaker and the hat hair—this book made me want to offer you my sandwich. i wanted to give you a hug. but you never looked up.

a note to my admirers

i have had enough of this responsible-adult-with-a-full-time-job nonsense. it is not benefiting me either financially or psychologically, and so i can see no point in carrying on with it. i should like very much to instead become a lady of leisure and/or letters, and i will happily accept donations enabling such a transition. if you have an opening for a kept woman and/or a well-positioned apartment* in which to keep a woman, please consider me as an applicant. i am an excellent cook and tend to smell nice, and when i laugh at your attempted witticisms it will be with thoroughly convincing sincerity. i'm not prone to clinginess; in fact, if you never stop by at all, i won't complain. i don't even care for jewelry, really, so you'll save a bit there. you will have to be kind to my cat. that is not a euphemism.

invitation not extended to: men who have slept with or plan to sleep with my sister, anyone who has followed me onto or off of a subway train, people who think nancy franklin is funny, dennis miller.


* minimum requirements: roof access or terrace, oven, dependable hot water, at least one window.

broken-doll blogging

one day a girl began to feel that something was not right

"something is not right," she said, and for a moment things felt more right, because she had said that, and she wondered if she was mistaken. but she was not.

this girl had a brazen and improper heart which would dance and whoop at inopportune moments. the girl tried hard to muffle it, had tried even harder to retrain it, to break it of its egregiously bad habits, but it did as it pleased and shamed her in public whenever it wanted. the girl checked it now to make sure it wasn't dancing on a table or wearing a ridiculous hat, but it was in its cavity where it belonged, talking quietly to itself, and didn't look up. "that seems right," she thought, but she was still uncomfortable. she looked away and then back, quickly, to catch it. but it only drummed its fingers on a rib, innocent and bored. "that must be right," the girl thought, and looked for something else.

she checked her coat pocket to see if she had her keys. she checked her bag to make sure she had not dropped her wallet. she touched her fingertips to her earlobes and felt for an earring on each. she made sure she had remembered to put on clean socks and underwear, quickly and discreetly sniffed her left armpit. she checked her watch against the local time. all of these things were right.

she looked out the window and saw people moving about on the streets and sidewalks below her. it was daylight and it was supposed to be. the sky was not cloudy and nothing was falling from it. the girl could not see smoke or hear sirens, there was no shouting or crying. while she stood near the window she felt better, she felt that things were more right than they had been, and she sat back down. but as soon as she was in her chair she knew that something was not right after all.

she checked her accounts for overdue bills. she reviewed her calendar for missed appointments. she searched her desk and drawers for not-quite-empty food containers or coffee cups. all of these things were right. "i am forgetting something," she thought, and grew optimistic, but could not think of what she was forgetting, and so could not make it right. this cancelled out the optimism, which she immediately missed.

"i will retrace my steps," she said--she had heard of people having great success with such a method on various occasions--and set about it.

she walked down into the lobby of her office and out the door that she had gone in through, across the street and around the corner to the subway station she had come aboveground at, onto her train which took her back to her neighborhood. she walked from the train to her apartment, looking at the ground for things she might have dropped, listening for someone who might be calling for her to stop. she went through her building's front door, up the staircase, into her apartment, and still she felt that something was amiss, and still she could not say what it was.

"i will retrace my steps farther," she said, because she didn't know what else to do. she liked saying this, but she knew that not saying it was not what had not been right.

she went back outside and got into her car and drove to the last place she had lived in, but everything seemed right there. so she drove to the place she had lived in before that, and before that, and even before that, all the way back and back to a place she barely remembered, to the first place she'd ever been a person in. "there are only a few steps left," she thought, and was suddenly very nervous. but something was not right, and so she went on.

this first place had a porch in front, and on the porch was a small pruny woman rocking in a small creaky chair. "oh," the woman said as the girl stepped onto the porch, "it's you!"

"is it?" the girl asked.

the woman leaned forward, squinting, judging, and then sat back. "no," she said. "not really. something is not right."

the girl's heart rattled and flopped and banged a drum and waved a flag and made a general spectacle of itself, and the girl rushed both of her hands up to her chest and covered it, to keep the woman from noticing. "what?" she asked in what she hoped was a very calm voice. "what is not right?"

"well, that," the woman said, and pointed at the girl's hands. they both stared down at the place where the girl's small palms were spread and pressed over the rippling, thrumming, flashing patch below her collar bone. yes, the girl thought, yes, this is not right. but why is this not right?

"why is this not right?" she asked. her heart lit three red flares and launched them toward the porch, but the girl crossed both her arms in front of her, and the torches rebounded and sputtered under her sleeves.

"a girl lived here once, a long time ago. she lived upstairs, and i lived down," the woman said. she rose from her creaky chair, and her creaky legs tottered her slowly across the creaky porch. she stood very close to the girl and extended one creaky arm up to the girl's wrists, crossed tight and hard over her noisy, embarrassing heart. the old woman closed her crinkled fingers about the wrists and tugged, but the girl pulled her arms tighter to her and took a step back. "that is the wrong direction," she thought, but didn't undo her move. the woman lowered her hand to her side, frowned gently, shook her head. she made her creaky way back to her creaky chair and lowered herself into it.

"the girl i thought you were," she murmured, "would never have done that."

the girl let her eyes fall to the wall she had built to keep her heart in its place, her two mortified hands leaning hard against the clanging and whistling and jigging, the colored lights and firecrackers, her crazy clown of a heart covered in bells and spangles, its unicycle careering into the barricade over and over and over again. "of course," she said, and smiled, and was relieved, and had great hope, and lifted her hands up into the air over her head.

her heart, with all its momentum, accustomed to having to use a great deal of force, hit the wall once more and shot right through and out, and disappeared, leaving a trail of rainbow glitter in the sky like a pixie-powered jet, a wild, flying mardi gras party favor. the girl and the old woman watched it until it wasn't so much as a speck among the clouds.

the woman sat back in her chair, satisfied. "that's you, then, after all."

"it is," the girl answered, dropping her arms. "it is, and it's right."

and then she died.