atlmalcontent:

1. Wondering whether Burt Reynolds knew he was playing a pedophile.
2. The Sapphic ode to the “Moon Mother” 
3. Swoosie Kurtz and Mary Kay Place. In the same movie. 
4. Ruth’s mother: “What if I had aborted you?” Ruth: “Well at least I wouldn’t have had to suck your boyfriend’s cock!”
5. Norm (Kurtwood Smith)’s reaction when his boss tells him to collect the shopping carts.

I had a dream I was Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to kill anyone with my chainsaw, and with all the tentative swinging of my roaring saw and then my recoiling from landing the killing blow, I accidentally dropped the chainsaw and sawed myself in half.

Story of my life.

I’m on what is either my third or fourth full read-through of IJ. (I honestly can’t remember which it is, third or fourth: I definitely read it once in high school, when it was published; I definitely read it once in college, for a paper; and then I think I read it another time at some point in my twenties, but I’m not 100% sure I actually did, which I don’t know what that says about my twenties, that I can’t remember.)*

Now I’m having that familiar pgs. 200-300-of-IJ-experience, where the book ceases to feel like a brilliant but exhausting and problematically sophomoric exercise and starts to seem like undoubtedly the best book ever written, ever (sic), and all of the book’s grotesquely overscaled future-historical comic inventions (subsidized time, O.N.A.N, mutant hamsters and Quebecois assassins and etc.), the humor of which has not aged especially well, begin to recede, cease seeming to be the (possibly misbegotten) point of the whole book and start to become like the essential, heartbreaking wallpaper over the shoulders of his characters’ exquisitely well-rendered miseries, which miseries we wouldn’t be able to see quite so clearly and up-close if the wallpaper behind them weren’t so lurid and fantastical and ridiculous.

*That I am doing a low-grade DFW impression is involuntary, and I think a forgivable consequence of immersing myself in this book again.

“Titanic” was the first movie to wed a front-and-center, starmaking youthful romance to a big budget action-adventure spectacle, and to win BIG at it. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it paved the way for current hits like “Twilight” or “The Hunger Games.” But as an aspirational figure in a romantic teen epic, Rose Dewitt Bukater eats Bella Swann and Katniss Everdeen for breakfast.

Whereas Bella is entirely defined by her willful consignment to her teen dream (she has no convictions or priorities beyond “love”), and Katniss Everdeen has few clear priorities beyond the mere survival of herself and her family (this is the fun and the limitation of the dystopian protagonist), Rose combines these values…and has a few more besides.

As much as I teased Titanic’s wraparound narrative when the movie was first released—the grandma with the necklace on the boat, free to die at last; the whiff of The Even Greater Generation piousness that hovers over her scenes with the entranced members of the salvage crew; what I took to be the filmmakers’ lack of courage that we could identify with a story set in the past that stayed in the past—upon seeing its rerelease last night I take all those criticisms back. The whole point of the movie’s romantic narrative—and what makes “Titanic” such a useful corrective to the values of “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games”—is embodied by that framing device: in the time between the film’s present and its past, Rose went and had a life. She lived for more than love: she lived for experience.

Sure, it’s a bit too romantic, Jack’s near-death preoccupation with her doing so (“have lots of babies!”), especially when he would’ve been saying “I’m so cold, bitch you’re lucky I’m letting you rest your fatass on that headboard.” But as an imperative for viewers—“live an actual life”—it’s a lot more challenging than anything the current youthquake fantasies currently ask of us. (As multi-film franchises, what these films ask of us is not to go out and live, but to continue indulging our escapism with them.)

And now that I’ve had time to come full circle from laughing at Celine Dion’s theme song for Titanic, to absolutely dreading hearing it, I can appreciate how the lyrics “my heart will go on” speak to the movie’s theme in ways that are less-than-totally saccharine. Rose’s heart won’t go on just for her Leo, but for herself: her life, her experiences. James Cameron’s feminism, however crude, is also potent and powerful. Gripping Jack’s hand while floating near-death on that headboard, the rescue boat passing them by, she—realizing he’s gone—says “come back, come back,” pleading with Jack not to be dead. And at some moment as she repeats her refrain, we realize she is no longer mourning Jack but weakly—and with gathering strength and insistence—attempting to call the life boat back. To save herself. (This is up there with the most beautiful moments in popcorn cinema.) Fighting for her right to work other jobs, screw other men, see other things, accomplish things and make mistakes and yeah maybe settle down at some point and have some babies.

I cried.

About halfway through my recent trip to Cape Town to visit my friend Simone I found myself out for drinks at a swanky old hotel’s outdoor club/lounge. We had snuck into the hotel’s pool earlier that day, and the vibe there had been, to my tourist’s eyes at least, thrillingly and “characteristically” white colonial, but the nightclub’s vibe was all-white in a trashier and less interesting way.

It was still early, but I was already wiped out from the day’s activities, as I was virtually every night I spent in the city. As a result, I wasn’t particularly in the mood to dip into Simone’s social waters, as virtually every person I had met through her was astonishingly well-traveled and multilingual and cosmopolitan, or cosmopolitan-seeming. And they all possessed that cosmopolitan’s attendant urban provincialism, whereby most of their conversation consists of speaking with a deep and intimidating knowledge of the city they live in: where to eat, what to do, who’s who, etc. (Certain hip and sophisticated Los Angelenos possess this mixture too, and even here at home I tend to regard it with both genuine admiration and gut-twisting envy.) Which culture was thrilling enough to immerse myself in, and a rare benefit of having Simone, instead of say Lonely Planet, as my guide to the city. But I anticipated yet another conversation in which the people I was with spoke glitteringly for hours about national politics or local happenings and then asked me what I thought of Cape Town, to which I would respond yet again with a screechingly lame…”Well I climbed Table Mountain today…it was so pretty!”

Outside at the lounge we met Simone’s sister’s partner Joe and a couple of his art school buddies, who were already deep in conversation: a widely-known South African photographer, his friend and also an artist (let’s call him Bruce), and Bruce’s Irish girlfriend, in town from Dublin to visit Bruce. It took a while for me to warm up and enter the dialogue, for all of the aforementioned reasons and a handful of others, not least the South African photographer’s intimidatingly good looks and powerful physical presence. (We spent a good twenty minutes discussing his boxing injuries.) But after a drink or two I started to enjoy myself. Not for the first time during my trip, conversation gradually tipped to the wonders and addictiveness of American television. (BTW: Anecdotal evidence suggests that white, educated South Africans like the same television as white, educated Americans.) On this topic, The Irish Girlfriend had the most to say, though it didn’t seem all that pleasing to Bruce or the South African photographer: as she seized the reins, the tenor of the dialogue shifted perceptibly from a dispassionate and critical discussion to something more fangirlish, a rattling off of great shows.

Well, I shared her favorites, and what she said gave me an opportunity to vamp professionally, to speak as an (so newly-minted, so fraudulent) Authority on How Television Gets Made. The group appeared reasonably fascinated, and I got to check “Holding Forth to a Group of Inebriated South Africans About the Business of American Television” off my list of Cape Town to-dos. My stock at the table rose as I noticed (or maybe this is just retroactive projection, based on what I learned later) The Irish Girlfriend’s stock dip…I felt a bit guilty, like I’d used her as a lever to the group’s higher esteem, as our dialogue allowed me to (subconsciously! I swear!) position myself as “A Producer”, relative to her “The Consumer.”

Satisfied that I had come off as at least reasonably cool, I was ready for bed. Me, Simone, and Joe split off from the group as they headed off to their next destination. My trip continued on, and continued to be amazing in too many ways to describe here.

I saw The Irish Girlfriend again, on the last night of my trip. I was reading at the airport gate for the first leg of my flight back home when she crossed in front of me, digging through her bag. We made brief eye contact as she approached a vending kiosk for prepaid phone cards. For a moment it felt like we were going to look away from each other, but there was enough crisscrossing eye contact that we both realized it would be weird if we didn’t speak.

But I couldn’t remember her name.

“We met…” she said.

“Yes!” I said, trying to recall her name. I had genuinely liked her and enjoyed her company. Seizing on the one piece of biography I had at my disposal, I said: “You’re dating Bruce.”

She nodded. Before I could clock the sudden downturn of her mouth, I said: “He seems really great!”

My heart sank as I realized what her look was probably about. Worse still, by adding that last comment, I had pressed the point, forcing her to clarify.

“Actually we’re not. Anymore.” A wry half-laugh escaped her lips as she looked all over the terminal: anywhere, anywhere but at me. Her eyes filled with tears.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered.

“Yeah well,” she said, “I’m sure I’ll see you on the flight!” Prepaid card in her hand, she wheeled her carry-on to the other end of the terminal, perhaps to go call Bruce, perhaps to have one last teary “Why Bruce? Why are you dumping me Bruce?” conversation before boarding our flight.

My cheeks burned red as I contemplated my faux pas. Poor girl, I thought, instantly, selfishly grateful that my trip—which I really can’t stress how great a trip it was—had nothing to do with sex or romance or the expectations and perils of a long-distance relationship: my boyfriend was back home, waiting for me. It was about experience and fun and nature and wildlife and seeing Simone and running through my touristy to-do.

But it—like that night at the hotel’s nightclub, like so much else of my life in general—had also been about avoiding seeming uncool. And I had made it the whole vacation, through countless hangouts and meals and drinks and hikes, without putting my foot in my mouth once, without saying anything deeply uncool or gauche or embarrassing (at least not that I noticed)! I had almost made it!

But there at the airport, in literally my last fifteen minutes in South Africa, I had managed to make an ass of myself, all while twisting the knife in the heart of an already heartbroken girl.

And she wasn’t even a South African.

If all I got out of flying halfway across the globe to visit Cape Town was finally getting around to reading Martin Amis’ Money, I would consider the trip a success. But fortunately I did lots of other awesome stuff too.

For my first couple years in Los Angeles, I was a fairly regular yoga class attendee. (Yogi? Yoga practitioner? They all sound weird.) At the time, it was part of my effort to assimilate, to acclimate, to embrace what I saw or imagined as LA’s wellness and physical cultures, as well as a highly satisfying means of shedding a longheld perception of myself as not physical: unathletic, still the bookish fat kid I hadn’t really been since before high school. Part of falling in love with LA was thinking that there was something uniquely encouraging about the place with regards to this kind of reinvention: on my mat, or running up a mountain in Sullivan Canyon, I saw myself as part of a long line of formerly neurotic east coast wimps, transformed and awakened by the beauty of the west, emboldened to discover our long-repressed physicality, to not be ashamed of the effortful hedonism of frequent exercise.

(Of course, that taking frequent yoga classes has less to do with “being LA” and more with my continued membership in particular social and economic classes was a fact that was almost entirely lost on me. I had plenty of opportunities to do yoga in NY; the only reason it happened for me out here was because it fit into a then-current personal narrative, and fed certain seductive illusions about my new home.)

Yoga was only one ingredient in the mix. There was hiking, gymming, paddleboarding, rockclimbing, scrambling the boulders of Joshua Tree; my m.o. during this period was to pretty much say yes to any recreational physical activity. But yoga was the cornerstone. I won’t speak at length about all of the creative, spiritual, and physical breakthroughs I experienced during or immediately following particularly sweaty classes because, well, boring, but let’s just say I got about as serious as you can get about yoga without actually visiting India or signing up for teacher training. These years had plenty of drama, but the one constant running through them was that physically I felt amazing at all times: my senses dilated, my nerves quiveringly receptive. The physical benefits were so strong I was certain I’d be a yogi for life.

Then my lung collapsed.

I assumed that would be only a temporary setback, that once I recovered I would get back on my mat. I did, a few times, but the slow recovery from surgery—and the residual tightness in my chest from internal and external scarring, which made every twist in yoga feel like I was stretching against tight rubber—made it less than pleasant. I got discouraged, I got lazy. For all intents and purposes, I came to a dead stop. In place of yoga, I started going to the gym…or not going to the gym. And wouldn’t you know it, I quickly became a depressed and depressing person.

I’m on week six of reintegrating yoga into my life. I noticed the benefits, that familiar sensation of low-grade physical ecstasy, pretty much instantly, but it’s only since my job really started winding down and I could attend five or six classes a week that I really saw the crucial change: I am happy. As in, turned a corner in my life happy again yay-style happy. And I know with nearly total clarity that when I get depressed or angry or disappointed again in my life, no matter what the apparent cause, it will be because I’ve stopped going to yoga again. So my plan is to just not stop.

The sick joke of it all is that I’ve spent the past two years staring at my navel, miserable, depressed, blaming circumstance for my lack of joy, blaming others, sincerely theorizing (I am not even joking) that joy must be a thing you just run out of in your mid-30s, when the answer to all my misery has been waiting here for me all along. I sometimes rebel against the simplicity of the solution: If the solution is just yoga, then my problems were more interesting than the solution! It’s not a cool or sufficiently fascinating fix! There is no epiphanic content to dissect or analyze or share! I can’t spin this recovery into a rich literary explanation of the meaning of life, or life’s lack of meaning! What the fuck!

But I’m happy again.

It may be boring, it may be Things Affluent Whites Like, it may be surpremely dull fodder for conversation, but I’ll take it.