Dead Letter Department #69 (nice)

weather report

We’re about to slide on into heat wave, starting today, but the weekend was perfect: warm enough to go swimming at 8:00 up at the top of the lake before the whole place fills up with kayakers & jet skis—we were the only ones at our spot, splashing in the water while my niece floated around in her pink sparkly donut float. J & I swam out to the last pylon of the disintegrated ruins of the dock, and today my chest is pleasantly sore. I’ve got to get some better swimming shoes at some point, though: the crocs are great for wading, but they feel like two heavy foam blocks if you actually start trying to lift off & kick through the water.

The soreness could also be because I’m finally trying to address some storage problems in the apartment, which has been a mess ever since the abrupt department of my long-suffering wardrobe a few months ago(seen in DLD#47),  temporarily replaced with first a $20 freestanding clothes rack from Amazon & then an extremely ugly armoire with a particle board back that ended up being several inches too short in every direction to contain my actual clothing. When I start to see fall cresting the hills in the distance, I am usually possessed of an urge to get my home in order, like a little animal running around gathering all the leaves & berries for winter.

I finally decided the easiest solution would be to allow the good word of Ikea to enter my heart & home, so I’ve got a big shipment coming tomorrow, & had to get the old armoire out. It was manageable on my own, but only by wrapping it in an old blanket & bumping it down one step at a time while I rested the base against my chest, which was definitely more weight and exertion than I’ve done since surgery a few months ago, but both the armoire & I arrived at the front lawn intact, where I taped on a free sign & hoped for the best. Someone came & loaded it up a few hours later—hopefully whatever they’re wanting to put inside it actually fits, once they manage to wrestle it into their house. I should have left a note recommending the blanket method.

Tomorrow I’ve got both a doctor’s appointment & the furniture delivery scheduled, so hopefully the dehumanization I always feel after being prodded and viewed like a slab of undesirable discount meat at the doctor’s office will take the productive, slightly dissociative left turn into stamina for furniture assembly, rather than the less functional need for a recovery nap.

I keep wanting to tell you about the book I just finished, Divorcing by Susan Taubes, but it’s almost impossible to summarize. Sophie Blind, the narrator, goes from Vienna to Budapest to New York, from dead to living and back again, confronting her mother, her husband, her lovers, her father’s insistently inaccurate Freudian analysis, the demands of her children. There are dreams, and a play where her ancestors come to her coffin & berate her. Time slips from her adult life all the way back to childhood, & she captures the strangeness (to those of us who are grown) of a child’s perception of time & memory.

This is an early passage I loved:

“God was painting the world on her retina with the softest brush; stars, snow falling, blossoms, rows of wild chestnut trees in bloom, each leaf a green tickle. She had never laughed like this before. This was not to be believed either. Just because something puts you in a rapture it is not necessarily to be believed.”

& here, about Sophie’s mother:

“Kamilla, taking all rumors into account, seems to have divided her time between consulting the best practitioners of the new science to cure herself of her follies & abandoning them. Her follies included carrying on nineteenth-century-style romances (in the Austrian corruption of the Russian manner), mostly with military men; displaying herself in public in the most extreme, provocative & bare fashions of the day; & catastrophic ventures in the worlds of finance & the arts.”

At one point Sophie’s husband Ezra receives a postcard from her, sent from Pythia, the site of the Oracle of Delphi—“The gods descended,” she writes, & he decides, self-servingly, this is a code meaning Sophie has been unfaithful, so he immediately embarks on his own affair. Sophie meant it quite literally: the gods descended. He twists her meaning out of all recognition, as he does the whole marriage.

If you decide to read it, get the edition with the introduction by David Rieff, who knew Taubes in her too short life, and who writes of her:

“Indeed, the typology of the cult figure fits her so well as to be almost discomfiting—her charisma, her Garbo-esque beauty, but above all, that sense, universally subscribed to by those who were close to her, that she found the burden of being itself too crushing & that her relation to the world always was a radically contingent one.”

I find myself thinking about that a lot, what it means to have your relationship to the world be a radically contingent one.

one good thing

It’s tomato season. They’re quite good at the store, the red-purple heirlooms & the sun golds & the little boxes of sweet plum tomatoes, but the best kind are the ones you wrench off the vine yourself, which I got to do at my friend’s house the other day. Her garden has gone mad with pumpkins overrunning everything, huge and green, hidden among the prickly vines, but the tomato patch is nearly as productive, and we pulled out little handfuls of perfect golden bites, and fat, palm-sized red orbs.

First I did the best caprese salad I’ve had in years, & then went & got a loaf of sourdough bread so I could make one of the ultimate summer meals: a tomato sandwich. All you need is good bread, coarse salt, mayonnaise, and the freshest, ripest possible tomato. I toasted the bread in an iron skillet so the mayonnaise & tomato juices melted down into the crisp buttered top. It tastes like the fullness of summer, & if you’ve never had one before, I recommend you get your hands on a tomato as quickly as you can.

Thank you for reading. If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may your tomatoes be abundant & perfectly ripe.