rural appalachian teenage shit

your bibliomancy forecast for the week of july 21

tarot card: the lovers; excerpt: Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red

Traffic was crashing past outside. Dawn had faded. The gas-white winter sky
came down like a gag on Buenos Aires.

Would you care to come and hear my talk? We could share a cab.

Can I bring my camera?

the aleatory

As a teenager, I felt myself to be garrisoned behind enemy lines. On the school bus, I would perfect my capacity to stare at a non-space in the distance and think: Yes. I am like a Soviet gymnast. I see beyond the white sky and the green hills and I feel nothing.

I couldn’t have said why I felt so deeply out of place, even though I was born there like everyone else. I was aware that something about me made other people uncomfortable, although I didn’t know what it was, and eventually I leaned into the role I had seemingly been assigned. As the anchor of the televised morning announcements, I signed off every day with a quote from Hemingway or Voltaire. On my first day at a new school, when the cheerleaders invited me to sit with them, I said: “Why on earth would I want to do that?” In home ec, on the day that we were allowed to make whatever we wanted in the whole world, my friend Brylynn and I made instant mashed potatoes with blue food coloring in them.*

But when I needed to not hate where I lived, I took pictures

.

Not just me, but all of my friends. Somehow we all had film cameras (or maybe we all took turns on my dad’s old Pentax? I don’t remember), and in summer, we would drive around on back roads looking for pictures to take. My friends were not comfortable in this environment either—gay, mixed-race, heretical, etc. Under no other circumstances would we roll up on a barn with an interesting stolen horse poster on the outside and end up talking to its owner (one of the original McCoy family, as it happened).

Someone dull might have told us that if we wanted to love the sometimes difficult place where we were, we would have to accept it as it was. (Including the football player who frequently wore a T-shirt that said PET MY FURBY and pointed to his crotch.) But that’s not right. Pointing the camera was the only way to do it. (And the opposite of a middle-distance Soviet gymnast stare, it turns out.)

forecast

Bring your camera.

writing prompt

Go someplace that you find, for whatever reason, to be difficult. Go there with the intention only of taking pictures. Write poems that distill your hatred into something cool. Put the pictures in your high school literary magazine. Don’t publish anybody else’s poems. (Heartless swine!)

a chune

“Le Pastie de la Bourgeoirsie” by Belle & Sebastian

I didn’t think much about why I instantly loved Belle & Sebastian in the above era, but now it is so obvious: They wrote songs that would lend to us buck-teethed and split-ended the cool gravity of a French New Wave film. We’re trapped in school and waiting tables and the drug store and church pews, but only for the moment. We only have the acoustic guitar, but we don’t love anyone (not even Christmas). No wonder it made such instant sense.

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credits: small spells tarot deck by rachel howe
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
3 … 6 … 9 Seconds of Light by Belle & Sebastian

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dear diary, something you might not know about me is that I have an intense toxic masculinity reaction to small cars like Mini Coopers. I detest them. I think they should be stepped on. When they are parked in a regular-sized space, they look like they’re cowering. I’m not usually this way about things, and I don’t know where it comes from, but I think they want to be punished. (I would never!) (But I think about it.) XS

*For some reason, I have the impression that I’ve mentioned this before in the newsletter? Possibly paired with a different song from the Lazy Line Painter Jane CD EP box set?! It’s humbling to have one’s character revealed like this through repetition. Idk. Brylynn, this one’s for you. You were the only sane person in that fuckass cookie factory.