I received a letter from Seth Fischer and he sounded so happy. I laughed at this part of his letter: “How is your family? Your health? I want answers where you avoid the questions! I miss that.” Usually when Seth asks me questions, I say, Why do you bother asking me questions you know I won’t answer? He laughs with what seems like delight.
This week Antonia Crane and I discovered we confide in strangers. She mentioned our conversation in her recent blog. Antonia and I were talking about strangers while Matthew Specktor and Lauren Eggret-Crowe were probably not talking about strangers. We were gathered together at a bar and I left early to meet a deadline for an essay I was writing.
I usually leave places early. It’s as if my motto is the Elliott Smith line in No Confidence Man: “I got to split, I’m late to leave.”
I told Jillian Lauren I felt nervous about the essay and she offered to take a look at it. Which was really generous of her. She gave me notes, and I thought of Scout Niblett’s Pom Poms. I felt like Jillian was cheering me on.
In Jillian Lauren’s My Inappropriate Relationship, she writes, “My first kiss was not about pleasure but about power and for a long time those two things became indistinguishable.” When I was growing up, my friends talked about their first kiss. I never did. My first kiss was enshrouded in shame. For the most part, it still is.
After I submitted my essay, I read Matthew Specktor’s Last Book I Loved. Why haven’t I heard of Seek before? It seems strange because I like Denis Johnson a lot.
In his essay, Matthew writes, “I found myself thinking, in my thoroughly stupid perambulations with the book (lugging a suitcase across a Ramada Inn parking lot, haggling with people at the Delta ticket counter), that just about everywhere is worth avoiding, that even the earth’s green places house more than their share of misery and boredom. Which is why Johnson’s book is thrilling. Not because it offers views of things us pampered first-worlders know not quite enough about (though it does, of course), but because, too, those views are so personal. Johnson’s haplessness, his strange—and most likely exaggerated—incompetence keeps clouding the frame.”
That night I also read Lauren Eggret-Crowe’s Last Book of Poetry I Loved. The book is about Los Angeles, and Lauren tells us, “Places stick inside us perhaps just as much, or more, than people do. Like lovers, they become symbols that represent our past and/or future selves, as they give sensual definition to our identities.”
A man once texted me a bunch of questions. He was trying to prove a point, he was trying to prove me wrong. He was in the airport, thousands of miles away, and killing time before he boarded the plane. I started crying and told him, Now you’ve made me cry. Then he called me but I didn’t answer. Why would I want to answer the phone when I was sobbing? Especially if I generally never want to answer the phone. I asked him if he forgot I was sensitive. I asked him if he forgot I hated questions. Sometimes I think of him as the last man who made me cry. Like it’s a Rumpus essay title. Last Book I Loved, Last City I Loved, Last Man Who Made Me Cry.
When was the last time you cried? I asked Davy. He said the last time he cried was watching Medora. I want everyone to meet Davy Rothbart because he’s a really nice guy. When he asks me questions, I don’t dodge them. Both Medora and Brian McGinn’s Record Breaker are appearing in Full Frame. I wish I could be there.
I’m a cryer, said Aisha Sloan during our interview at LACMA. At one point during the interview, she said something uncomfortable was coming up for her. I was interviewing her about The Fluency of Light, a collection of personal essays. I love her writing. I underlined sentences, starred many passages, and asked her to participate in my reading series in April.
When I interviewed Adrian Todd Zuniga, he said the same thing. Both Aisha and Adrian were trying to tell me something emotional was coming up for them and both times I was afraid of what would happen if I listened to them. I was afraid of what would happen if I responded with my full attention. I’m interviewing many people, and L.A.-based photographer Meiko Takechi Arquillos takes photos of them. This is her photo of Adrian.
I once interviewed a friend about growing up in San Diego. Suddenly, in the middle of the interview, he started talking about an intense sexual experience with a powerful executive in a hotel. This incident took place in San Francisco when he was an adult. He talked about cocaine and blood, and waking up and looking at himself in the mirror. Later he told me my interview triggered a series of trauma responses, including flashbacks.
What happens when we listen? What happens when we ask questions based on our listening? What happens when we ask these questions and someone answers sincerely? Muriel Rukeyser once asked, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” Unlike me, she answered her own question. She said, “The world would split open.”
