novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Waking up to pee and then suddenly being fully awake. Lately I've noticed a small undercurrent threading through many of the things I've been reading: the scarily beautiful woman. Amy Hempel and Tobias Wolff have mentioned this in their short stories. That memoir I just finished about the urban hermit goes into limited detail about it, and even Danny Goldberg makes a few off-hand comments about it in his memoir about the music industry. A woman so beautiful that she is unapproachable. Scary to talk to, to confront, to engage with. So pretty that she is spooky. This gave me pause every time I came across it. A small pause, and then I ticked over it and continued with the narrative, but the notion of a flawless beauty and the isolation she is given is incredibly interesting because I've never really pondered it before. Firstly because it makes me feel a relieved validation that I'll never be spooky-beautiful -- I've got too many battle scars. Odd self-effacing physical mannerisms, nail-biting, sheepish grins with bitten lips, stretch marks, odd hairs and acne scars. I've accepted them as little wonders of my body (what would the earth be without Stonehenge? Without the volcanoes and killer bees?) and I'm proud because they've become markers of my past, of my aging and growing. I mean, I'm proud when I remember to be proud. When I notice these things at all, anymore. Aging. Don't get me wrong -- I've always wanted to be an overwhelmingly beautiful woman, and I used to lament the fact that I'd never be as pretty as a model. I'm serious. Too vulnerable to mention on a blog? Fuck you. I wanted that. I wanted to be coveted in that way, mostly because I'd never experienced it and I romanticized it. Maybe I could pull it off if I starved myself got things lasered off kept my hair from getting too big stopped falling down etc. If I always stood in low light? But I just don't have it in me to forget my teenagerhood as a goofy fat kid, or rather the socialized education that growing up relatively flawless brings. I was clinically obese when I was a teenager: the male gaze rolled right over me for most of my life, and I was socialized to that. After I lost over a hundred pounds, men started giving me attention and it had me feeling like I was stuck in Italy without a guidebook for a handful of years. It took me a while to reconfigure. I still feel that sway sometimes, that odd misunderstanding. And then there's, you know, pimples. Oh frail little body image that can pop just like one. How disgusting, right? But here I'm glad to wallow in my filthy imperfections. Who wants to be unapproachable? I'm more bothered to avoid loneliness than ugliness. All of this is viewed with my particular lens: a feminist and ex-fat girl who doesn't validate herself by partnering with the intimidatingly beautiful. There's no story to the flawless, there's just... flat character. No interest there, not for me, not at first and not usually for a long, long time. Except now I correlate the flawlessly pretty with a kind of sweeping isolation that I imagine must feel like tumbleweeds on a desert blanketed by a shallow sand. Underneath, the dirt must be packed rock hard. Imagine being a spooky-beautiful woman: your needs are met on a surface level by some sort of physically validating encounter. Perhaps you have grown accostumed to being seen as a gorgeous trinket, but you like to think of yourself more along the lines of an ethereal muse. What is real there? Ah, I'm sure there's a lot real there, it's just harder to get to because of what she's used to. Are you haughty because you think you're beautiful, or are you haughty because you're more often than not just stared at and given a wide berth? This little vein has caught my attention for some reason, and I think maybe I'll try and stick it into a short story draft. No one really wants their heroine to be so unapproachable nowadays, so perhaps she'll be a supporting character. Maybe I'll make her a him, but I don't want it to come off like Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise. I don't know yet. It's been a while since I've thought about the reverberations of the various incarnations/interpretations of the beauty standard, but disparate things have been happening lately: there is the spooky-beautiful woman cropping up in what I've been reading. (There is Danny Goldberg talking about how Warren Zevon chose the company of a gorgeous flight attendant in the year leading up to his death. There is that urban hermit guy talking about how perfectly-coiffed women intimidate him in his rolling memoir. There is a repel and an attraction.) There are done-up women, more and more it seems, quaking before the thunder of Valentine's Day, wandering the aisles of Whole Foods just looking like they want to be mentioned in a Craigslist Missed Connection. There's the TV shows we've been watching on DVD, especially the first season of Dexter and the rival serial killer who cuts up women into neat little packages. There is the shivering walk back to my car from Fanny's birthday through a few blocks of the Tenderloin. Even that. Makes me wonder. That's a separate story, though. And then there's the drunk guy who smashed my awesome screen-printed mirror in the bathroom last week during Katie's dinner party, and I was so sad to see it go that I couldn't clean it up. Cassie had to collect the fragments. I have a thing for mirrors with images or text, especially text, printed on them. I collect them, so if you come across one maybe get it for me. (But my tastes are oddly particular, and I can't really explain what I'm drawn to past typographic and specific graphic pulls.) It was this goofy seventies hand-drawn design of three owls perched on a tree limb, and one was hanging upside down. The caption (green and yellow text, all caps) read: NOBODY'S PERFECT. And that drunk guy smashed it. He claimed he was looking for the light switch. He was probably just drunk, but maybe that amplified a sudden, focused anger at the clawing nature of perfectionism. Because it's my mirror, and I loved it, and now it's broken, I can say what I want about his motives. We are awesome & marred. 5:45 am - 02.13.09 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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