Angeleno Femme

‘Mysteries Of The Brain’

The lonely pace, sleep, dream. I recall a friend telling me that what made him the saddest was to think of his father in solitary confinement at some penitentiary in the empty, frost-bitten lands of upstate New York. He was locked up for life for crimes bred from seventies idealism. I’d watched his father’s kind on television before, a cameraman the closest connection to humanity as the prisoner exercises in a blank room, and then stares out his small, barred window for the rest of the day. Years pass. His mind unravels, and I, many states and mistakes away, watch while eating a bowl of grapes.

In fact, his father sits in a nondescript cell right now. Staring, thinking. I lie in bed touching the gauze of my canopy, thinking about my characters, wondering about a local happy hour and if I should clean my bathroom or not. I should. I probably should.

I could never claim to understand it. None of us could, unless there, alone.

Recently, the writer’s life (or whatever it’ll be called) swallowed me up. To set my own schedule: stay up late typing, sleep in as sunlight stains my eggshell walls. Pace in my kitchen. Let stories blossom in my head as I find patterns on the ceiling. Hit a coffee shop to purge it out with my keyboard, and as I drive home, listen to the wind hit my car, the gears shift, the engine hum. I track the days in a diary but even that is smearing the calendar lines together into something of a “it’s all feeling the same.” I progress in pages, but regress elsewhere. Suddenly sleep is too easy. My dream world begins to substitute the reality of my Hollywood apartment.

I’d forgotten how much the office life stabilizes the mind, and how writing — to truly write, to let it overtake you — consumes you at times to the point of insanity. I’d always teetered on the edge. As a young girl, I’d spend hours quietly alone after sleepovers with screaming pre-teens and NSYNC blasting from boomboxes. No one would assume I was a loner in high school or college, either; I hid it well with high heels and a propensity to party. As I began to lean towards my own solitary confinement, the drag of work would pull me back on a Monday and I’d find myself in a cubicle, connected with the world yet again by means of deadlines, work lunches and ubiquitous, polite smiles in the elevator lobby. I’d go home, spend quality time by myself, a daily balance stricken not by some knowledge that I’d be healthier that way, but by a need to pay bills and stick to the post-grad cues.

But now, without an office to incubate my social life, I’m found in daily free fall, a blessing and curse all at once. I set my own schedule. I wake up when I want, and can sleep when I want. Perhaps it is the ultimate freedom, and it was certainly something I longed for during the days of pre-dawn wakeups and paperwork stacked so high I couldn’t see past the copy machine. I’ve wanted this for so long, yet now that it is here, I question my ability to handle the freedom, a freedom that at times feels suffocating.

Like most writers, there comes a point of regression into a mild form of solitary confinement. Many find themselves in rural cabins, or holed up in studio apartments, scribbling away about a world that does not exist. Some find themselves awake specifically during the hours of the day (or night, rather) when they will be least disturbed by other people. But the momentum of their alone time builds and, like some mental snowball, it takes on a life of its own. The solitary confinement, at first purposeful, is suddenly unintended, like the mind’s unstoppable inertia guiding you through exhausting sleep patterns and dishes stacked up in the sink. You feel like an unwilling participant in your own descent, even though the descent is based almost purely in unbridled mental freedom.

This, as it turns out, is like a weakened homophone to what is considered to be one of the most taxing forms of punishment. For those who act out while locked away with other “dangers to society,” it’s a year…or two…or maybe seven of being alone. Of your sleep patterns making vague sense only because of a small window. Of the mind trying to make use of the vast space now dug up thanks to a completely blank, untouched schedule that is peppered occasionally with meals and an hour of exercise. One man’s freedom can begin to, if misused properly, resemble another man’s complete lack thereof. In the end, the challenge is how to make use of our mental space. To create outwards, or to self-implode. We could never claim to understand, but we could see glimpses — just momentary glimpses — into the downward corkscrew and nod in humble recognition.

The difference that separates understanding and not understanding is a simple matter of choice. For the prisoner, their world is wiped away by the hand of another, and the mind festers in its place. To see the artist’s mind dip into bouts of shallow madness after being alone with itself reminds me of the depth of madness that must be experienced by those who wake up and fall asleep each day alone in a small cell. Charles Dickens wrote of solitary confinement, “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” As it is, it isn’t the specific act of being alone that can be so troubling; rather, it is the mind’s reaction to the loneliness that begins to spiral it into madness. It is the “mysteries of the brain” that close the walls in, not the architecture, not the room.

My friend told me he does so much, achieves so much, because he knows his father — holed away in a cell — cannot do anything. He lives for two, now. Though I only live for one, I keep in perspective my own “mysterious mind” by reminding myself of those who lack choice in their loneliness. Yes, the inertial mental tendencies of a writer (or any artist) can be a slippery slope, leading you into the pits of a narcolepsy fueled by your mindspace widening and closing in all at once. But there is a choice. There is a phone, a laptop, a car. There is a friend, a family member, a stranger’s smile. There is a ladder to climb out with.

I climb out with blisters. It happens. To lack daily structure is to, at times, lack mental structure. But with the free space, I skip around and create. It is a blessing, truly. But a blessing swathed in a challenge. And it is amazing how a blessing can almost degenerate to a shade of punishment, the brain walking a fine line between sanity and madness. Some are shoved over into a barred cell. Others trip over in the pursuit of something else. Me, I wobble across like a young gymnast on a balance beam. My toes grip the edges with each night of sleep.

To pace, to sleep, to dream. Hugging the wall, hugging the edges, thankful for the movement of my feet to keep in stride with the movement of the mind. Thankful for the ability to say yes, to say no, to turn a door knob, and walk out.

Que Veut Dire “Dating?”

Back when I was cultured, I studied French for six years in middle and high school. I learned all of the different conjugations, all of the irregularities, a range of vocab words that would serve me well in Parisian train stations, hotels and parties. I learned how to cuss, how to shorten words, how to understand French text messages (“textos”). After 6 years, you’d think I’d have been fluent.

But one afternoon, when I was the deepest in my French studies, I learned of a form of French slang — verlan. Verlan is almost like pig Latin in that it inverts French words: “cigarette” becomes “garettci”; “femme” becomes “meuf”; “disque” becomes “skeud,” and so on. I considered myself to be the type of girl that had a tight grasp on not only the English language and all of its proper moments, but also on American slang, especially LA slang. If you stand around me, you’ll hear a mixture of grammatically correct sentences peppered with words like “gnar,” “dank,” “broski,” “cray,” “steez,” and weird derivations of profanity like “fuggin” or “shite.”  But with French, I was still grappling to understand just its proper form — now I’m supposed to understand French slang as well? Words that technically don’t even exist except in the minds of the French youth? Where’s the fuggin French dictionary for these words? English slang I could handle, but French slang felt intimidating and like a huge blockade between me and fluency. How well could I even get to know a language that had so many rogue factors?

My lack of fluency in French was, in the end, just a way of saying “I can’t communicate completely with people in a different part of the world.” Sure, we say we aren’t “fluent in a language,” but really all that means is “I can’t understand French people most of the time.” I placed out of French in college and left foreign language behind in order to work on my experimentation with English, but that thought about communication stuck around. As a single gal, I’d often wonder: if I’m able to make connections with men in just the greater Los Angeles area, how many people must I be compatible with in the world? And how many of those people will I never be able to explore a future with simply because they don’t speak my native tongue?

It was a romantic idea I tossed around in my head for awhile. I meet some extremely handsome man in Spain or something like that, and sense a connection that has nothing to do with language and everything to do with…whatever else relationships are based on. Except, he has no idea what the fuck I’m saying most of the time, and neither do I when he speaks. But were we to speak some middle ground language, we’d realize we had so much in common, so many shared goals, outlooks, and beliefs.

I liked the idea mostly because I conceived of it when I was profoundly single and hoping that there were more “fish in the sea” that I just didn’t know about. I decided that those fish simply were there, but just not bilingual. In spite of that, the romantic connection still existed in some energy conducted by the ocean’s salt water. It’s the shit of movies, really.

So, here’s a scene, the stuff of movies: I met an Italian while in Las Vegas who, before I could really establish how fluent in English he was, attacked my face with his mouth. I had been standing there, minding my own business around 3am, when in swooped a very attractive, olive-skinned man. “Why do you look so sad?” he said through an accent. I wasn’t sad, I was just exhausted and becoming sober, but I guess that didn’t translate. When I tried to explain that I was tired, he quickly said, “AJ I will fix the sad face” and proceeded to furiously make out with me while my eyes were open. I let it happen until I pulled back and tried to laugh it off. I attempted conversation, but my fast-speaking quickly tripped him up and slowing down my words has always felt like a form of blasphemy. I was able to gather that he did some line of work involving cars in Italy, and that he believed the key to happiness, for me, would be to love an Italian man. I ran away to the dance floor after I gave him my number (blaming the residual booze on that one) but it was when he started texting me that I realized I couldn’t handle the language barrier.

“Meat me at the elevator, AJ!”

When my impulse was to text him back about how it was “bacon” in the club, I decided it’d be best to delete his number.

Language is a huge determining factor in relationships, and one we often overlook until it explicitly rears its head in foreign settings. Back in our hometowns, girls — and guys alike — note seeing someone they are incredibly attracted to, and then report that the attraction is ruined when the person “opens his/her mouth to speak.” I’ve had that happen plenty o’ times. I call it the “shh factor.” The shh factor is implemented the moment that you realize the person you are interested in can’t provide you any deep intellectual stimulation. But driven by some primal instinct, you decide to instead hang with them in environments where you can appreciate their qualities that have nothing to do with speaking, like at clubs, bars, parties or anywhere with loud music. “Shh,” and suddenly they are viable again. As Fish from “Ally McBeal” once said about the hot mail girl, “I don’t want audio ruining it.”

Words can lead to the deal breaker, the red flag. It’s that joke that has the scent of jealousy underneath it, or that sarcastic remark about an ex that makes you question whether audio really did just ruin a decent dating prospect. Sometimes the first conversation reveals it, sometimes it takes months into dating to notice that something your partner is communicating to you just doesn’t mesh with your life. And a language barrier thus serves as an obstacle not just between you and the flourishing of a possible connection, but also between you and a possible connection spoiler. Perhaps all of those language translation apps and grammatical slips merely stall an inevitable moment of “Oh, wait, you’re aren’t right for me.” Maybe it was always there, swathed in the opacity of a foreign tongue.

But what about finding that common ground? Maybe that’s possible with someone who doesn’t speak your language. Love knows no language barriers, right? We may not need to speak one anothers languages in order to understand one another and be happy, or at least that’s what I hear (in English, of course).

When it comes to those I have truly loved, I say I know every corner of their personality, of their being. I am fluent in them. And perhaps that’s what it comes back to in the end — just…fluency. Like learning a language, we explore all of the nouns, verbs, and slang of our partner in an effort to understand them entirely. In this sense, language is not the stuff of coherence, but rather the vehicle that brings us to that fluency, allowing us to say, “Yeah, I know this person.”

But becoming fluent in someone is difficult, and takes a long period of time. There are the conjugations you weren’t expecting, the fights you didn’t anticipate, the slang you can’t quite grasp, the future questions you can’t answer. You’ll fail your vocab and grammar tests from time to time. In spite of this, each person is like a foreign language that, from your first date onwards, you are trying to understand. We may not make flashcards and study guides, but we are nevertheless on a mission towards fluency. Actual language — words, phone calls, text messages, long conversations late at night — those are just the study tools.

I wrote during the summer about literacy when it comes to reading others — how I spend time trying to “read between the lines” of people and understand their authorial voice. I guess this ramble is the derivation of that thought. In order to even read someone, we must understand their language and be fluent in them. Whether that reading comes with eyes quickly scanning over pages and pages of literature, or with a foreign language dictionary in hand as you look up each word one at a time, you end up understanding eventually.

“Que veut dire, ‘You don’t have the same goals as me?’” or “Que veut dire, ‘Your ex is still in the picture?’”

“Comment dis tu ‘There’s something about waking up next to you that I like?’” or “Comment dis tu ‘This doesn’t seem to have a future that extends past next spring?’”

We can figure out how to translate it into a language we understand, somehow.

As for me, well, I work with words on a daily basis and it’s hard to imagine dating someone who can’t understand what I’m toying with. Certain things I can only figure out how to say in my language, in English. “You tasted like mouth wash, vulnerability and new” I once wrote, and how the hell can I have that make sense in a foreign language if it barely makes sense in English? For as romantic as I’d like to be about the prospects of a foreign love, I at the end of the day express my romance mostly through words of my native language. Maybe I’m a “special needs” dater in that English fluency is, as of now, a requirement. And maybe I won’t always translate to other people properly, but all language barriers aside, I just want to find the right person the way I want to find the right words.

And then, with that in mind, write.

You Should Be Visiting This Site If You Consider Yourself To Be Literary In Any Sense:

A friend is working over at the Los Angeles Review of Books — or LARB, as I believe it’s lovely referred to. Publications have been slowly phasing out book reviews from their repertoire, and LARB plans to revive the practice and also prove that LA isn’t a literary vacuum (though my god does it sometimes feel like it in this film-centric city).

A snippet from the Review’s “about” section:

The great tradition of the American comprehensive book review, in magazine and newspaper form, has been in its death throes for years. The disappearance of the newspaper book review supplement (papers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Des Moines, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington and elsewhere have shuttered or radically shrunk theirs) has been accompanied by an explosion of titles in the book market. The net result: twenty times as many titles are published each year than were a quarter century ago, and we have one twentieth of the serious print book reviews. They have been replaced in partial ways by web-based reviews, many of them crowd-sourced or user-generated forums for book talk. There are many excellent websites, too, and numerous blogs, some also of the highest quality (and we hope to have deep linking relationships with the best of them), but very little in the way of full-range book reviewing, covering everything from architecture to YA, from academic monographs to genre fiction, and from the latest publications to classic texts — rigorously edited, carefully curated, deeply informed discourse by experts in their respective fields — has been mounted to take the place of the dwindling comprehensive print reviews.

I’ve read a few of the reviews and they are very, very well-written and impressive when it comes to the analysis of texts along with their relation to the publishing world in general. 

If you are a reader, writer, English/Lit major, or just enjoy enriching your mind, check out the site.

OH AND I ALMOST FORGOT THE MOST IMPORTANT PART!!!!!!!

THE SITE RIGHT NOW IS A TUMBLR (beta version, in other words, while official site is being constructed) SO YOU CAN *FOLLOW* THEM. SO EASY. ZOMG.

Go support <3

http://lareviewofbooks.org

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