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Christmas In June
Dec. 26th, 2021 10:31 amVery pleasant Christmas Day, too.
I spent it happily isolating, occasionally trotting down to exchange vocalizations with L & C. Also, two lo-o-o-ong phone conversations with der kinder.
Ichabod in Tustin sounded bored and stir-crazy. He’s visiting his Dad and step-mom. “There are a lot of family traditions we used to do, but we just didn’t do them this year—”
Right, I thought. ‘Cause Beau’s dead.
“—so mostly we’re just sitting around eating and watching television.”
I have spent many Big Holidays doing exactly that! And I fuckin’ hate it.
###
I think this may have been the longest telephone conversation I have ever had with RTT! Mostly, we text. He told me something that blew my socks off. Well. Maybe not completely off. Maybe the socks just sagged around the ankles a bit.
“Marissa made me show her your journal. The parts you wrote about her.”
“She did?” I said. “I don’t think I wrote anything too objectionable about her. I liked her!”
“No, she was just fascinated by it. And afterwards, she felt bad.”
“Well,” I said. “People who read other people’s journals do so at their own peril. They may find things in those journals they don’t like. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s on them. I mean, I police my etiquette in social situations with the aim of being pleasant to everyone. But I’m certainly not going to police my thoughts.”
###
I write some deeply personal things in my online journal. There’s a certain risk to that: My life is no stranger to trainwrecks, so there’s always the fear that I am being judged—OmyGAWD. Did you see what she’s done this time? What a loser!
People do like to read about other people who are bigger fuckups than they are!
My entries generally remain unlocked for about a month.
That’s because I have a handful of people who are close to my heart but whom I interact with at only the oddest of intervals in—ha, ha, ha!—real life. These friends like to keep up with I’m doing and thinking and feeling and imagining.
They have no interest in signing up for LJ or DW accounts—Well. Two did, actually—and I want to make it as easy as possible for them to access my life.
There are some friends-locked entries. And the occasional entry, when I’m feeling particularly perturbed, for my eyes alone.
After a month, I lock everything up! So in the end, it’s only another minor footnote in the vast spider-spun Internet archives.
###
Did a lot of writing and editing, too, yesterday!
Still floundering on the electroshock therapy scenes and also the final chapter where June dies in Arizona on the edge of the desert. Blah, blah, blah—Gee! These desert flowers are pretty, and guess what? They only bloom for a couple of days after the monsoon! That’s like cosmic, right? Blah, blah, blah.
Edited out a couple of thousand words from Chapter 5.
The problem with writing about June Miller is that Henry Miller wrote more than a million words about her, too!
And Anaïs Nin wrote a couple of hundred thousand.
And you don’t necessarily want to repeat what they wrote although you have to use their anecdotes to establish some kind of a timeline.
So, it’s a complicated process of inventing dialogue and incidents that aim to complement the dialogue and incidents that are already out there.
###
Henry Miller’s descriptions of his early married life with June are actually one of the best and funniest parts of Sexus:
We had come in the night to Dr. Onirifick's hideout. A light snow had fallen and the colored panes of glass in the front door were covered with a mantle of pure white. It was just the sort of place I had imagined Kronski would select for our «honeymoon». Even the cockroaches, which began scurrying up and down the walls as soon as we turned on the lights, seemed familiar—and ordained. The billiard table which stood in a corner of the room was at first disconcerting, but when Dr. Onirifick's little boy casually opened his fly and began to make pipi against the leg of the table everything seemed quite as it should be.
The front door opened directly on to our room which was equipped with a billiard table, as I say, a large brass bedstead with eiderdown quilts, a writing desk, a grand piano, a hobby horse, a fire place, a cracked mirror covered with fly−specks, two cuspidors and a settee. There were in all no less than eight windows in our room. Two of them had shades which could be pulled down about two−thirds of the way; the others were absolutely bare and festooned with cobwebs. It was very jolly. No one ever rang the bell or knocked first; every one walked in unannounced and found his way about as best he could. It was «a room with a view» both inside and out.
Here we began our life together. A most auspicious debut! The only thing lacking was a sink in which we could urinate to the sound of running water. A harp might have come in handy, too, especially on those droll occasions when the members of Dr. Onirifick's family, tired of sitting in the laundry downstairs, would waddle up to our room like auks and penguins and watch us in complete silence as we ate or bathed or made love or combed the lice out of one another's hair. What language they spoke we never knew. They were as mute as the reindeer and nothing could frighten or astound them, not even the sight of a mangy foetus.
Dr. Onirifick was always very busy. Children's diseases was his specialty, but the only children we ever noticed during our stay were embryonic ones which he chopped into fine pieces and threw down the drains. He had three children of his own. They were all three super−normal, and on this account were allowed to behave as they pleased. The youngest, about five years of age and already a wizard at algebra, was definitely on his way to becoming a pyromaniac as well as a super−mathematician. Twice he had set fire to the house. His latest exploit revealed a more ingenious turn of mind: it was to set fire to a perambulator containing a tender infant and then push the perambulator downhill towards a congested traffic lane.
Yes, a jolly place to begin life anew...
I had a lot of expository stuff in the final coda of Chapter 5 describing the proposal, the marriage ceremony and the first few months of the marriage, but then, when I was editing yesterday, I thought, Why are you including this? Miller’s descriptions are perfect.
And edited them all out.
I’m a little worried that that coda is so short. But it contains all the info that’s relevant to the reader: Her world fell apart, her father died, she wouldn’t have married him if her father hadn’t died.
She did not love him.
I spent it happily isolating, occasionally trotting down to exchange vocalizations with L & C. Also, two lo-o-o-ong phone conversations with der kinder.
Ichabod in Tustin sounded bored and stir-crazy. He’s visiting his Dad and step-mom. “There are a lot of family traditions we used to do, but we just didn’t do them this year—”
Right, I thought. ‘Cause Beau’s dead.
“—so mostly we’re just sitting around eating and watching television.”
I have spent many Big Holidays doing exactly that! And I fuckin’ hate it.
###
I think this may have been the longest telephone conversation I have ever had with RTT! Mostly, we text. He told me something that blew my socks off. Well. Maybe not completely off. Maybe the socks just sagged around the ankles a bit.
“Marissa made me show her your journal. The parts you wrote about her.”
“She did?” I said. “I don’t think I wrote anything too objectionable about her. I liked her!”
“No, she was just fascinated by it. And afterwards, she felt bad.”
“Well,” I said. “People who read other people’s journals do so at their own peril. They may find things in those journals they don’t like. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s on them. I mean, I police my etiquette in social situations with the aim of being pleasant to everyone. But I’m certainly not going to police my thoughts.”
###
I write some deeply personal things in my online journal. There’s a certain risk to that: My life is no stranger to trainwrecks, so there’s always the fear that I am being judged—OmyGAWD. Did you see what she’s done this time? What a loser!
People do like to read about other people who are bigger fuckups than they are!
My entries generally remain unlocked for about a month.
That’s because I have a handful of people who are close to my heart but whom I interact with at only the oddest of intervals in—ha, ha, ha!—real life. These friends like to keep up with I’m doing and thinking and feeling and imagining.
They have no interest in signing up for LJ or DW accounts—Well. Two did, actually—and I want to make it as easy as possible for them to access my life.
There are some friends-locked entries. And the occasional entry, when I’m feeling particularly perturbed, for my eyes alone.
After a month, I lock everything up! So in the end, it’s only another minor footnote in the vast spider-spun Internet archives.
###
Did a lot of writing and editing, too, yesterday!
Still floundering on the electroshock therapy scenes and also the final chapter where June dies in Arizona on the edge of the desert. Blah, blah, blah—Gee! These desert flowers are pretty, and guess what? They only bloom for a couple of days after the monsoon! That’s like cosmic, right? Blah, blah, blah.
Edited out a couple of thousand words from Chapter 5.
The problem with writing about June Miller is that Henry Miller wrote more than a million words about her, too!
And Anaïs Nin wrote a couple of hundred thousand.
And you don’t necessarily want to repeat what they wrote although you have to use their anecdotes to establish some kind of a timeline.
So, it’s a complicated process of inventing dialogue and incidents that aim to complement the dialogue and incidents that are already out there.
###
Henry Miller’s descriptions of his early married life with June are actually one of the best and funniest parts of Sexus:
We had come in the night to Dr. Onirifick's hideout. A light snow had fallen and the colored panes of glass in the front door were covered with a mantle of pure white. It was just the sort of place I had imagined Kronski would select for our «honeymoon». Even the cockroaches, which began scurrying up and down the walls as soon as we turned on the lights, seemed familiar—and ordained. The billiard table which stood in a corner of the room was at first disconcerting, but when Dr. Onirifick's little boy casually opened his fly and began to make pipi against the leg of the table everything seemed quite as it should be.
The front door opened directly on to our room which was equipped with a billiard table, as I say, a large brass bedstead with eiderdown quilts, a writing desk, a grand piano, a hobby horse, a fire place, a cracked mirror covered with fly−specks, two cuspidors and a settee. There were in all no less than eight windows in our room. Two of them had shades which could be pulled down about two−thirds of the way; the others were absolutely bare and festooned with cobwebs. It was very jolly. No one ever rang the bell or knocked first; every one walked in unannounced and found his way about as best he could. It was «a room with a view» both inside and out.
Here we began our life together. A most auspicious debut! The only thing lacking was a sink in which we could urinate to the sound of running water. A harp might have come in handy, too, especially on those droll occasions when the members of Dr. Onirifick's family, tired of sitting in the laundry downstairs, would waddle up to our room like auks and penguins and watch us in complete silence as we ate or bathed or made love or combed the lice out of one another's hair. What language they spoke we never knew. They were as mute as the reindeer and nothing could frighten or astound them, not even the sight of a mangy foetus.
Dr. Onirifick was always very busy. Children's diseases was his specialty, but the only children we ever noticed during our stay were embryonic ones which he chopped into fine pieces and threw down the drains. He had three children of his own. They were all three super−normal, and on this account were allowed to behave as they pleased. The youngest, about five years of age and already a wizard at algebra, was definitely on his way to becoming a pyromaniac as well as a super−mathematician. Twice he had set fire to the house. His latest exploit revealed a more ingenious turn of mind: it was to set fire to a perambulator containing a tender infant and then push the perambulator downhill towards a congested traffic lane.
Yes, a jolly place to begin life anew...
I had a lot of expository stuff in the final coda of Chapter 5 describing the proposal, the marriage ceremony and the first few months of the marriage, but then, when I was editing yesterday, I thought, Why are you including this? Miller’s descriptions are perfect.
And edited them all out.
I’m a little worried that that coda is so short. But it contains all the info that’s relevant to the reader: Her world fell apart, her father died, she wouldn’t have married him if her father hadn’t died.
She did not love him.
