Dead Letter Department #27

(did you miss dead letter department #26? read about seagulls & Stardew Valley here!)

weather report

It’s been grey & wet for so long I feel like someone has forcibly jammed me into a mildewed cotton ball. Usually I love the emerald green and grey skies, the banks of moss, the ninety-seven type of lichen living on the fencepost. But sometime around February I start craving something different so intensely I can practically taste it, & at this point I’m not sure it would matter too much where it was. You could tell me I was having an all expenses paid lunch at a Jersey interstate truck stop & I’d be thrilled.

I’ve had the same conversation a few times in the past week. “It’s going to get better, right?” someone asks, in the almost frantic way you do when you can’t convince yourself of it & desperately need to hear from someone else. I grope around for something to say that isn’t absolutely gutting, but the best answer I’ve been able to come up with so far is that it’s not going to be February forever. My optimism has run dry & it’s surprising how much, for a generally sad bastard, I counted on the residue of it to let me glide onward. The reservoirs are empty. I can intellectually grab hold of things I still want, but I can’t feel them. I have a couple things scheduled for the spring (actually scheduled, on my calendar) that I should be looking forward to, but since I don’t really think they’re going to happen, it seems more like an exercise in not getting too attached to outcomes which is frankly not a skill I’m interested in honing any further.

There’s a hesitation in getting too honest, too dark, both here at the Dead Letter Department & in talking to friends, because I can’t always distinguish between solidarity—let’s huddle here together, and brace each other up—and dragging someone down that extra half-inch they just couldn’t afford.

There’s this fly that’s been circling in my house, presumably having overwintered in a windowsill crevice & woken up once the sun started warming the glass up enough to go back to regular fly business. I’ve been—worried about it. I know that sounds insane, I really do, but it spends a lot of time smashing its horrible little head up against the window right above my desk so most of my work the past few days has been accompanied by the perplexed buzzing of an insect who does not understand why it can see the big open space but can’t get to it, & it’s possible I have begun to relate to that a little more than I should.

It reminded me a bit of when I had a window seat at my old job & a spider built a web just outside, a full story & a half up from the ground, bravely suspended against the glass. My friend & I would check on it every day just to see what the spider happenings might be, as an alternative to office gossip.

The emotional attachment with this fly built to the point where I was sort of dreading finding it on its back one morning, tiny legs curled up in death, but I couldn’t figure out what else to do, since there are multiple airlocked doorways between it and freedom & it was way too fast for me to catch with anything other than a lucky death blow, which seemed unnecessary & sort of rude at this point in our relationship. Today it slowed down, finally, and was sitting on a strip of birchbark on the windowsill rubbing dust off its forelegs for long enough that I was finally able to cram a jelly jar over it and carry the whole buzzing business out to the back porch for release.

Flies cannot express relief in any way that I am able to interpret, but I felt relieved enough for both of us as I watched it swoop noisily up out of the jar and disappear into the yard. Now it’s just you & me at the desk again, & of course the book I’m working on, the constant companion just under my sightline.

reading room

First of all, I need you to know that Anne Rice’s parents named her Howard Allen. When the nuns asked her for her name on the first day of school, she promptly called herself Anne & eventually had the alteration made legal. Second, I’ve never read a book that addresses the disastrous, (still) contagious legacy of Lolita & books like it in the way Belinda does, despite all its weirdnesses. I think it’s because Belinda herself is actually alive to the reader, a real character, writing her own responses for a good third of the book, not a nymphet fuckdoll fantasy posed in ways meant to first arouse & eventually soothe male egos.

I thought about Anne Rice a lot when she died back in December. I read Interview With The Vampire approximately a billion times when I was twelve, but also The Witching Hour & Cry to Heaven (a historical novel about castrati!!) & the erotic Beauty novels, checked out from the library as a young teenager because I was diligently running down the list of everything with her name on it. I think I even took an unsuccessful crack at her husband’s poetry, just because of the association. A marriage between a novelist & a poet makes a tremendous amount of sense, just on the face of it, in that you could share a love of the work without the weird competitiveness you see in some literary marriages.

Belinda was published under one of her pen names, Anne Rampling, & I wish I knew how she made that decision. Did she sit down to write as Anne Rampling or A.N. (get it? I didn’t until I typed it out) Roquelaure? Did they feel like different artists, with different styles, or did she finish a manuscript & then decide who it belonged to? Was the shadow of Lestat so long that she had to be someone else completely to get out from under him?

I hope we get a real biography at some point—there’s an authorized one, but I am suspicious of authorized biographies in general, particularly ones that are written while the subject is still alive & developing a reputation for fierce litigiousness when it comes to fanfiction.

I started back up with Belinda this time because I remembered it the least—a romance with a huge, questionably moral age gap, I remembered dimly, a children’s book painter & writer, San Francisco & New Orleans (of course) & white mink coats. It has all of those elements, and the difference in Jeremy & Belinda’s ages strikes me completely differently now at 40 than it did when I first read it when I was a teenager myself, not infrequently getting involved with dudes who were way, way too old for me. At the time I thought I had a convincing argument for maturity beyond my years, & good partner selection. Now I know that’s what we all thought, and what the gross older dudes had a serious investment in making us think.

Some other time I’ll write more thoroughly about the queerness of Anne Rice—characters between worlds, how important subtext was to us back when I was first reading her books—but I will mention that there are a ton of queer people in Belinda, flamboyant and subtle, wearing silver sequin sneakers & cowboy boots, & both of the main characters have intensely felt queer experiences too.

It’s Jeremy Walker’s crisis of conscience around his work I found the most interesting this with this re-read, & that’s also the element, other than the eternal love letter to New Orleans, that most made me wonder about reflections in Anne Rice’s life. He’s a very successful children’s book writer & painter, but he knows there’s something missing—there’s a great pile of dark paintings in the attic, finished but emotionally incomplete, & he claims at one point he’s essentially made artistic evasion into a career. The characters from his books turn plastic to him once they’re bought by animation companies, by movies, and he can’t reach them well enough to paint anymore.

There was a lot of controversy around casting when Interview with the Vampire was turned into a movie, culminating in one of Rice’s preferred methods of communication—buying full page ads in various newspapers (apparently she also used to feud with developers in New Orleans this way, using the wildly expensive print space to argue about particularly ugly architecture) to announce her about-face on Tom Cruise as Lestat. His performance won her over, but I wonder if she felt like Jeremy Walker did, that the particular vision of her own character had been lost.

I’d planned to start Cry to Heaven next but I may have to wait until I have a little more spiritual fortitude available.

one good thing

A friend sent me an insanely decadent candle—it smells incredible, but so far I’ve been battling feeling like it’s too fancy to light which means I just huff it inelegantly whenever I pass the bookcase.

write back

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. Write me back at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon & in the meantime if you’re trapped on a windowsill may someone scoop you gently into a jelly jar & release you into a bluer than usual sky.