The weekend of the Russian Bathhouse Experience, Aaron’s old roommate Marsha invited me to see “Happy Days” in Brooklyn. Her parents have season tickets to BAM, and told Marsha the play was “life-changing,” so she thought I’d appreciate it. I was head over heels thrilled to go, because not only is Marsha the most amazing woman I’ve met in a long time, I’ve heard wonderful things about BAM, and probably would have had to blow my weekly food allowance just to buy a ticket.

The BAM theater house has an interesting history to it—it was originally “The Majestic,” a classical Greco-Roman style amphitheater erected in 1904, which quickly fell into ruins by the 70’s. In the late-80’s. Harvey Lichtenstein wanted to produce the 9-hour Mahabharata, but was (inexplicably!) having trouble finding a theater willing to stage it. After doing some urban exploring, Lichtenstein crawled through the broken window of the Majestic and decided it would work perfectly. The left everything more or less as it was—chipped paint, crumbling artifice, exposed beams—and made sure the new additions blended seamlessly with the derelict nature of the building. The result is the most fantastic, striking building I’ve seen in some time—it made the experience of seeing a play somehow dangerous and tragic.

It was also the perfect venue for a play like “Happy Days,” a Samuel Beckett play about time, decay, and routine. The play starred the marvelous Fiona Shaw (Mrs. Dursley from the Harry Potter movies). When the play opened, the stage wasn’t really a stage, but an elaborate post-war/moonscape hybrid, littered with sand dunes and huge slabs of broken concrete. Winnie (Shaw) is buried up to her waist in the dirt, surrounded by an umbrella, a black bag, and a hat. In the bag is a pistol, some pills, some medicine, a tooth brush, and a comb. Every day Winnie is woken by a whistle, and she goes through the same routine, and at the end of the day, no matter what she does, everything returns to exactly the same place as it was the night before. Winnie’s husband, Willy, lives in a cave underneath her, and for the majority of the play keeps his back to her, and almost never talks to her. Winnie is an unflagging optimist, even though it is never revealed why her husband doesn’t dig her out, or why she doesn’t dig herself out, or why she’s even there. She talks about people leaving, about the hot sun, but she’s just terribly grateful for everything, you can’t help but laugh with her.

The second act was devastating. It opens with Winnie buried up to her neck, many of her teeth missing since she can no longer brush them. Her optimism is still there, but with a panic edge to it. The whistle now blows every 20 minutes, making Winnie unable to fall asleep. She hasn’t heard from Willy in weeks and doesn’t know if he’s dead or has left her, and she doesn’t know what will happen to her when the dirt piles up over her head. Finally, in the last moment of the final act, Willy appears, and makes the desperate climb up to her head—the play closes with him reaching towards her.

It was a wonderful play in the sense that it ended with a definite sense of optimism about marriage and love, but at the same time, there was the horror of uncertainty as to Winnie’s fate, and the crushing boredom she had to endure. Marsha and I were a bit saddened by it, so we went nearby to Juniors and had fries and chicken fingers and told stories about crazy hippies and head-trauma love making.

This one goes out to Adele

I didn't have time to make you a Valentine's Card this year, so instead I borrowed one from Gallery of the Absurd.

XOXO

Mary

Hey everyone! Meet my fiance!

So my diet ended painfully last Tuesday. Unlike my usual calorie restriction, the actual diet diet created these profound, almost maddeningly overpowering cravings. The days following the vegan diet saw me doubling over in stomach cramps everytime I ate cheese or meat. But it did it’s job, I lost weight, and now I’m back on my 1200 cal a day diet, hoping to become thin enough to be dateable at some point.

Caring about your appearance in this fashion is one of the most boring things ever. I cannot stand the fact that I have to care about it. And yes, despite the platitudes everyone says about “loving your body” and “being confident,” the truth is I’m in one of the most competitive dating markets in the world, at a church where women outnumber men 2-1, and I have to be realistic about what I have to do to date. But man, I am SO OVER IT.

Miriam—an old friend from junior high—came last Wednesday to stay with me. The AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) was in New York, and she was in town representing her literary magazine. On the weekend I tagged along with her to the literary magazine fair. I haven’t done the “scene” in so long, that it was a real trip. There were three floors of literary magazines taking over the midtown Hilton. Most of them were incredibly dull—stapled together in the center, manila cover—but some were really pushing boundaries as far as layout and design went. I gravitated towards the slicker magazines, because low-fi layout is a sign to me of laziness. I know working at “StoryQuarterly” that often times stellar pieces come out of ugly magazines, but not that often that I need to fill my bookshelf with a bunch of ugly books.

As far as general trends in modern poetry, I have to say I was shocked. Chicago—but more specifically Northwestern—comes from a formalist poetry tradition. Poetry must have rhythm, it must have a meter, it must have logical consistency, even if not apparent. The line is the basic unit of meaning, not the space around the line. This creates poetry that isn’t always highly interesting, but which is highly cerebral and meaningful. The AWP poets were all experimenting with negative space, which is a bit like word painting. The rhythm of the line was not as important as how the line looked in the space—meaning was imparted by how the white area was used. This kind of poetry is incredibly easy, and often incredibly lazy. I talked to a lot of poets, and few understood the history of what they were doing—fewer still had read any poet before T.S. Eliot. I was shocked by how uneducated everyone was, while at the same time, creating poetry so elitist and confusing as to be alienating to non-poets. It did, however, inspire me to start writing again—I can’t help but be encouraged if this garbage is all that’s being produced.

The one bright spot in this mire was the McSweeny table. I mean, my gosh, how exquisitely playful and well crafted all their pieces are! How aware that company is of every aspect of enjoyment in reading! I know they have one voice—a snarky, quirky, maximialist aesthetic—but it is by far the only company doing something which is both beautiful AND new. I would give absolutely anything to work at that company.

Having Miriam in town was a good thing, in the sense that she was an impetus to do things I have wanted to do for a while, but been too busy to getting around to doing myself. The first of these things was the Russian Bath House Experience. I went to the first Russian Bath in Manhattan, built in 1892 by Jewish immigrants. You walk in through the front door, and you think you’re walking into a prison—it’s incredibly dark, steamy, grimy; people are walking all over in various states of undress, complete with medallions, there’s a bar right across from the check in desk…In short, it was pretty much everything I wanted. Miriam and I changed in a locker room which looked and smelled almost exactly like my old high school locker room. We changed into underwear and robes, put on some plastic shoes, and shuffled down into the basement, where some random guy in a Mongolian hat explained the whole layout to us: “Over there is the Swedish room, it’s 100% dry, and that’s the aromatherapy room next to it, which is 100% moisture. This behind me is the Turkish bath, which is about 50% humidity, but very, very hot. On my left side is a super cold pool if you want to cool off, over there are the showers, and then on the very far side is the Russian Room, which is very, very hot and wet. Some ladies choose to go topless, so if you’re comfortable, that’s an option.” Ummm…thanks there, friend.

We hit the saunas pretty much in the order Creepy Man introduced them. In the Swedish room we ran into Miriam’s other AWP friends, which meant that the stares Miriam and I received from the mostly male, mostly over-40 set were decreased substantially. Every few minutes a thick, young Russian guy in red bathing shorts and a rag tied to his head would come in and see if anyone wanted a platza (sort of like a scrub, only they hit you with oak leaf branches in a steam room and dump cold water over you). The aromatherapy room smelled vaguely of gunpowder, but it was my favorite by far, as it was so steamy and foggy you couldn’t see anything. It was like a cloud of hot relaxation. The Turkish room was amazing, except for the fact that they released a kind of eucalyptus-mint smoke, which really seared the lungs and stung the eyes a bit.

The cold pool was really, really cold, and not exactly the most hygienic, as old men had been jumping in for most of the morning, leaving oak leaves and a skim of dirt in it. But it was highly chlorinated, so I guess it evened out. The Russian room—the last room we went in—was by far the best. It was the oldest bath in the basement, with several seats of marble, an inch of water on the ground, and a giant stone furnace in one corner. There were huge wooden beams on the ceiling, and a trough of cold water in the middle of the room. When you couldn’t stand the heat from the furnace anymore, you stood up and poured buckets of ice-water over yourself. People were lying against the wall, being hit with wet soapy oak branches, then being rinsed over with buckets of water as they screamed. It was a distinctly Russian way to relax.

After sharing some of the black mud the AWP guys had bought, We all rinsed off and changed, then went to a nearby sushi restaurant. I was super dehydrated and dizzy, and didn’t drink as much water as I should have, so I spaced out a bit, but it was nice to have even a spaced-out conversation about books and writing again.

Just so you know, my lack of blogging is not an indication that I've fallen back into old haits. I have a houseguest, and I'll update when she leaves. Cause, you know, I'm sure you were all on the edge of your seats about it