The music in the background this evening is Helios' "Eingya". I can't recall who first recommended it--- Kelsey at clush or Lissy at emigree. Ambient music recommendations from lovely girls are something I do treasure. I'll have to thank both girls.

The dread Iso T-Storms are here this afternoon. Thunder all through the south and west, intermittent bursts of rain hitting the swimming pool. It's one of those Deepest South afternoon rainstorm days: sudden rains just on one side of a street.

Metonym at Diaryland once wrote that many people don't think that a correct answer to the question "how are you?" is "longing for death". It's a good answer, though. And maybe not out of place in a summer here.

Someone once (a girl, obviously: young, literary, knowing) told me that whenever I wrote love letters, they turned into possible suicide notes. I didn't agree with her then, and I've never agreed with her. But I do love the line, and it's one I've replayed in my head ever since.

Joan Didion wrote once from a trip to Vietnam that she tried to hum along with a song in a Party songbook for children--- "When The Party Calls Us To, Our Hearts Are Filled With Hatred". I used to say that I always thought it should have a Calypso beat. These days I imagine Samantha Ronson doing it as a dance track while making out with Lindsay Lohan in the d.j. booth. Liz V. at nightmareteeth does the Hot Girl DJ thing at clubs in Lincoln. I imagine her playing "When The Party Calls Us To..." and flirting wickedly with the younger Lohan.

A charming girl called Symmetries at D-Land is reading Alain Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy". She's a Brian Eno fan, and she liked "The Conformist", too. So she gets many points from me. But...I remember reading Robbe-Grillet's "The Erasers" once upon a time, and I think I read "The Voyeur". I never did read "Jealousy" or "In the Labyrinth". Robbe-Grillet was someone I learned about from the great huge "Evergreen Review Reader" when I was something like thirteen or fourteen--- a collection that sent me off to watch "Last Year at Marienbad" and read things like "Zazie in the Metro" and "Story of O". I really must've been an obnoxious and over-bookish child. No one in junior high is supposed to obsess over hearing Bartok's "Miraculous Mandarin" or tracking down books by Robbe-Grillet in the library. No one in junior high can possibly understand what was going on in Robbe-Grillet--- but I desperately wanted to read everything, and I wanted to be Literary and Decadent and Avant-Garde. I suppose I might take a look at "Jealousy". I half-remember the essays in the "Evergreen Review Reader" that praised Robbe-Grillet and the New Novel...but only half-remember. I have no idea what the controversies around Robbe-Grillet were all about, or what the New Novel was supposed to do.

Ginny at ginny_mccoo wrote once that when she was fourteen she went through a major Milan Kundera phase. Eight or nine years on, I wonder what Ginny thinks of Kundera--- and more importantly, what she thinks of her fourteen-year-old self, of the girl reading Kundera.

When I was thirteen or fourteen, I had a List. I've always had Lists. This one was a List of books that would make me Decadent and Literary and Avant-Garde. I can recall some of the titles, but what baffles me is how I made the List in the first place. Where did I ever hear about some of those books? Where did I even come across other books that referenced them? Some things are obvious--- "Dorian Gray", "Lolita", "On the Road", "Naked Lunch". Precocious literary adolescents all know about those. But...Doughty's "Arabia Deserta"? Where did I run across that? I remember having Henry Miller's "Time of the Assassins" on the List. Okay, fine--- Henry Miller on Rimbaud. But why would I list that instead of "Tropic of Cancer"? My father at least had a copy of "Tropic of Cancer"--- why pick a much more obscure book? The only thing I can think of is that I'd read Cordwainer Smith's story "Drunkboat" in a sci-fi anthology--- I was a big sci-fi reader then ---and seen a note saying that it was a play on Rimbaud. That was how I discovered titles in those days--- books talking about other books. And I was a great reader of book reviews in magazines at the library. I read reviews of obscure books and learned about how they related to other books and to literary movements--- but had no way of reading the books themselves. That's probably why so many authors disappointed me later on--- I'd read about what the books were supposed to be like, or what critics said they were like, and had them written in my head before I ever ran across copies on shelves. There's a moment in "Metropolitan" where the lead character explains that he never reads actual books, that he just reads the reviews to learn if a book is significant. I had to laugh about that...and maybe cringe a little, too.

Let's make a note. I learned about Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" not from anything I read about Russian lit or the destruction of Russian culture under Stalin, but from a review in an old and yellowed edition of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. They were reviewing a paperback English-language edition of it purely as a fantasy novel. I shouldn't complain, of course. When I took my first undergraduate Russian history course, I got major attention for having read it. I got smart-boy points for Ilf & Petrov's "The Twelve Chairs", too--- and I'd only heard about that from hearing Frank Langella being interviewed long before about his "Dracula" and saying that his first real film had been a Mel Brooks version of a Russian novel called "The Twelve Chairs". I tracked down a copy at a used bookstore--- a ratty paperback with a cover illustration from the film.

Funny thing--- I've never actually seen the film.

I looked at my desk calendar this morning and realised that today is the tenth anniversary of my mother's death. I hadn't remembered. My sister hadn't either; she's usually the one who calls about family dates. My mother saw me get my doctorate; she died before I went back to law school. I can remember things she and I talked about. I can remember things she did for me. It's harder and harder to remember her voice. I do hate that. I miss things like the rice-and-gravy she'd cook. She knew how to make gravy that was thick and rich and sharp-spiced. She learned it as a girl from her family's maid. I've never liked anyone else's gravy. I miss that. I miss her voice, too.

I wrote Lissy at emigree asking her advice about iPods. I really do need an iPod. I need to have music I can take with me. I trust Lissy on these things--- she's never anywhere without her iPod. I'm not sure that she's ever going to respond, though. I have this fear that Lissy is becoming one of the Missing. I suspect that I'll never hear from her again.

I do envy people who can travel. I envy people who do summertime trips--- Lissy at emigree, Ginny at ginny_mccoo, Cassandra at wineandscarlet. I don't travel any more. Afraid to fly, of course. And probably afraid to drive--- especially in summertime. No money. Nowhere to go. There's no one to visit--- or at least no one to visit that I'd allow to see me in the flesh. And there's no one to go with. I'm too old to travel with a male friend, even if I had one. One can only travel with a girlfriend; all travel should involve romance. There's no point in a hotel bed or a wagon-lit if it's not shared with a lover.

Consider--- there's no point in going almost anywhere if there aren't Seductions and Encounters involved. Travel, clubs, restaurants, beaches, pools... None of it is worth anything if there's not flirtation and seduction and Encounters involved. And what could be more pathetic and despised than a single male at any of those places?

Ginny at ginny_mccoo writes about the delight of sliding naked between fresh-laundered sheets on a spring night. That's a lovely image--- though it only works for lovely young girls. Males being naked--- not a correct thought. A beautiful young girl naked on 300+ thread count sheets is deliciously sexy. A male doing the same thing only calls up contemptible thoughts of leaving what Carson on "Queer Eye" used to call "DNA deposits" (or, worse--- the faecal streaks that one of melt212's boyfriends left on her sheets). Ginny or Lissy or Deserie at eyelines or Krystina at yes_please naked on 300+ thread count sheets with a book there late at night would be a lovely vision. The same thing for a male is just...wrong. And creepy. I can't even imagine the tactile pleasures that Ginny writes about--- flesh, soft cotton, spring breezes. I really don't take physical pleasure in anything, even the touch of fine fabric.

Maybe all my love letters do end up sounding like suicide notes.

Erin at Metonym is only half-right. The correct answer to "how are you?" isn't "longing for death", really. The better answer is "longing for oblivion". Vanishing into the high desert or into the Tokyo night isn't about death. It's about forgetting everything and just...having no past to feel empty about.