Dear Jonas:

i have a confession to make. This evening you were beside yourself. You are teething again, so you have a little fever sometimes and a lot of drool. You have less of an appetite and, quite frankly, you cry a lot. In fact, every once and a while you do something i would almost call a tantrum. You had a needy day, and wanted to be held a lot, and grabbed ahold of my legs when you wanted to walk somewhere with me. You usually have a fantastic sense of humor and laugh easily. Funny noises and goofy faces provoke you to belly laughs, and the cats crack you up. These are the things i was thinking (Jonas is tired, Jonas likes animals, Jonas is funny) when i did what i did.

i sat you next to me on the couch and turned on the TV and started flipping through the Netflix instant cue, thinking that the sound of a movie in the background might help you stop crying. i wasn't intending to actually have you watch something, but then i saw it. Jonas, tonight you actually watched about half of a movie. That's exciting, right? The lame part of this event? It was Beverly Hills Chihuahua. For the record, you didn't laugh once. You watched. Quietly. But you were not impressed.

I Can't Sleep

Dear Jonas: I can't sleep. i'm not sure if it's because of my cold or if it's the medication my doctor has me taking to stop these weird panic attack fainting spells i've been having, but it's very strange. Usually, i can't stay awake. i fall asleep on the train, during every movie i try to watch, and in countless other inconvenient situations. i love to sleep. i prefer to sleep. i thought Thomas Pynchon's new book, Inherent Vice, would knock me out. No such luck; i can't put it down. i worked brunch today, which usually guarantees that i'll be napping for hours when i get home. Not today. i gave you a bath and after you went to bed we watched Claire Denis's film I Can't Sleep. i needed company.

If the grand reduction of Ozu's work is "Isn't life disappointing," then Denis's tagline could be something like: "Isn't life disappointing in a way that is complicated and interesting?" When we finished I Can't Sleep, your Dad asked: "Isn't it sad?" i said, no, not exactly sad, although i suppose it is sad. Arguing that a movie "about" a serial killer who preys on old women, broken love affairs, and a troublesome immigration to Paris is not sad might seem perverse, but sometimes it is invigorating to be reminded that difficult, inscrutable things just happen, and happen, and happen. Or, as the title of another of Denis's films has it, there is "trouble every day." The fun part is training yourself how to convert trouble into something you can live for, or with, or in.

"For it is what is what happens between people, Brecht insists, that provides them with all the material they can discuss." Jameson

Dear Jonas,
You don't like it if someone on the street doesn't smile at you. In the rare event that this happens, you crane your neck around and stare them down. Your favorite thing to do right now is to push your own stroller. You enjoy doing this so much that it has begun to impair our trips to the park and back. When we're about halfway home, you start squirming and stare me down until i take you out and let you "walk." Every so often you sit down for a second and then either start pushing again or take off in an exuberant crawl down the sidewalk. i chase you down, reposition you behind the stroller, and we try it again. This goes on for a city block or two, then you're back in the stroller with black fingertips and dusty knees. Yesterday some men driving by on Metropolitan Ave. yelled at us, "You better wash his hands." i was so thankful for that. i'm sure i never would've thought to do it otherwise.

Tonight our friends Jimmy and Borcu came over and sat with you so your Dad and i could go see a movie. You were already asleep when they got here. i wonder if you had any notion that we were gone? We met at Union Square and walked down to Film Forum for the first time since shortly before i had you. On that last trip, we saw Encounters at the End of the World. While we were waiting for the film to start, your Dad told you about the director, Werner Herzog, and he explained what he thought the film would be about.

We went to see The Headless Woman, an eerie, mesmerizing Argentinean film by the director Lucrecia Martel. The plot gestates around the asphyxiating moral ambiguity of Vero, a wealthy and well-connected dentist, aging beauty, and mother of grown children. Vero hits and kills a child (so we think--it is crucial to the film's order that we are never 100 percent positive on this) and a dog as she answers her cell phone while driving down a dusty country road. Out of this event, the film makes good on its title's promise of the bizarre ways that class and gender can bewitch subjectivity. Her disconnection to her pre-accident world at first seems to be the result of a head injury sustained during the crash, but as the days pass, her actions reveal her to be more present than we expect, and her inability to proceed normally exposes itself as at least equal parts emotional and physical trauma. As she realizes that the men in her life are not only hiding from her what they have uncovered about the event, but have also erased all evidence of her crime, she dies her platinum hair black--a silent nod of complicity with their plans. The film refuses to verify what actually happened, and Vero's deed is never legally punished. Its riveting narrative rhythm elicits a sympathetic character from a repulsive act of careless class privilege, the viewer is forced to let this small part stand in for the much larger impasses of history. How many times, and in how many ways, is this process repeated, and what is lost in the transaction?

Dear Jonas,

You turned one this week. We celebrated by going into the city and fighting the mob at the Magnolia Bakery, eating ice cream at the Highline park, and having dinner with some of your best buddies at Diner. Your Sara-nanny gave you a wooden drum. It is now your favorite toy.

You also had your one-year appointment at the doctor. Your height is in the 75th percentile. Your weight is in the 13th, little man. Soon you'll grow.

This morning, in your pre-breakfast frenzy, you went straight for the bookshelf. Everything you pulled down is still in a pile at the foot of the bed. From here i can see Read My Lips by Riki Anne Wilchins, D.W. Winnicott's Playing and Reality, Patricia Williams's The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Discipline and Punish, Gender Trouble, The Communist Manifesto, Writing and Difference, and Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. i'm taking this as your proposal for a future reading list. We can start as soon as you're ready.

Dear Jonas,

Yesterday we went to see the Elizabeth Peyton show at the New Museum. Your dad says you fell asleep shortly after seeing the Johnny Rotten portrait. Since your Dad could be a sort of handsome John Lydon, I guess that makes sense. Maybe the pinks and oranges felt familiar. If so, I think her paintings worked on you in the same way they arrested me: their obsession with fey, arrogant beauty is one with which I am familiar.

Reviews of Peyton’s work often describe her colors as “gem-like,” but her palate is totally Ziggy Stardust’s androgynous make-up box: kabuki exotica sharply blended over pallid junkie foundations. The obviousness of the colors—chartreuse, carmine, indigo—denaturalize her subjects and lend them their emphatic beauty. The impossible glamour is underlined by the fact that viewers can’t always be sure of which of Peyton’s subjects are people she knows and which are people with whom she has fantasized a relationship, a move that destabilizes their relationships to copy and original. The eyes of each painting seduce, reach out, and reassure the viewer with a very pretty urgency: your desire is not impossible, or, to quote Lady Stardust: “Oh no love, you’re not alone!”

Her work is successful in the way that young adult fiction by Francesca Lia Block, or films by Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson are not. Whereas these people often have the necessary ingredients for glittery preciousness, the end result is almost always cloying and self-congratulatory. Peyton’s small squares promise a captivating, actually existing, world of aristocratic common people where beauty is a generative response to beauty. Like Todd Haynes, Peyton renders a process of desire visible. There is a queer argument to this exhibit that is keenly exposed by “E.P.’s” self-portraits in which she may as well be one of her young male sylphs: become what you want. As contemporary queer theory has shown, this is entirely possible but with the permanent caveat of subjection: we cannot exist without context, without history, without other, and in this sense Lady Stardust’s advice is also practical and contemplative—autonomy is impossible. I had the sense that, had E.P. begun her career a bit later, there would be more of an “all the young dykes” feel in place of all the young dudes. I hadn’t before put the current trans-aesthetic in line with the history of hot androgynies Peyton has curated, but I think a link might be drawn. In any case, there is a consistency of gaze and figure throughout the entire collection that underscores the fragile ways we own our attractions—what is it that all of these objects have in common? What exactly is the desire that Peyton has isolated through this work? Looking at the portrait of Keith Richards somehow made the million times I've watched Gimme Shelter make sense. Perhaps the show’s title offers one explanation: “Live Forever.” Of course vampires are the only ones who enjoy this privilege—vampires and anyone beautiful enough to make their way into one of these paintings.

"black" by Min Song


Dear Jonas,

Last Saturday, for a change, I didn’t have to go to work. Your Dad and I took you out for brunch in the early afternoon, which seems to be your favorite time of day for adventures. I wrapped you in all of your layers and carried you in the sling, and you waved to the air with your mittens and grunted when the wind got too invasive. We rode the train to Bedford, and then walked to the restaurant, and soon afterwards I pulled you onto my lap and gave you a bottle. While you were eating you stared at the photograph on the wall just at your eye level and the tin tiles on the ceiling. Afterwards you actually sat on my lap while I ate, which you have never done before. You are three months old this week. There were other babies in the restaurant, but you weren’t interested. You didn’t cry when they cried or give them a nod of baby recognition when they bounced by on a parent’s shoulder. You focused on the light fixtures, and their shadows, and the glass in the windows, and the decorative lace on the walls.

Later that night, just before you fell asleep, I left to go see your Auntie Beth’s dance performance. Beth came to the hospital when you were just one day old and held you, and we like to go and visit her when she’s at work, too. She’s pretty like Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe she’ll teach you about dancing some day. This weekend she had her first solo show at a place called The Kitchen, and it was called “what it looks like, what it feels like.” The performance didn’t start until 8pm, which is when you usually go to bed, so you stayed home with Daddy, but I wish you both could’ve come, too. The piece was a consideration of this word “like,” and whether or not it is possible. In the context of this title, “what it looks like, what it feels like,” like indicates a similarity or resemblance. In other words, the dancers’ movements are showing the audience how “it” looks and how “it” feels. Part of the challenge of interpreting the performance is to consider what “it” is intended to modify. “It” is a strange word that means nothing on its own—it is a way of referring back to something that has already been described; however, in the case of Beth’s performance, it is a non sequitur. We begin in the middle without a direct point of reference, and so we are left to imagine what it is that corresponds to what we see.

Or not. We might take a different route and understand the performance as a meditation on the impossibility of ever showing exactly what something is “like.” For the first portion of the performance, the dancers move across squares of mirrored glass, which fit together like a tic tac toe board. Two women almost double each other’s movements as they ignore and engage another woman moving alone in the center of the stage. Women crawl, sometimes slither, across the surface. Dancers come close, envelop each other’s bodies with rounded arms, one woman slumps onto the back of another, the woman underneath balances the other’s weight just slightly off the ground. The glass is somehow opaque and imperfectly reflective, creating the sensation that the mirrored foundation for the dancers’ confident movements could also, without warning, swallow them whole. Transparency is certainly on trial, and when each square is removed during the performance by groups of two—dancers and stage hands—each upturned mirror briefly reflects the audience as it is carried away, returning an image more like a funhouse distortion than a recognizable twin. At this point, the “it” itself is doubled. Audience and performer, self and other, are projected onto each other just as the dancers have at different points mimicked, but not mirrored, each other’s movements.

As the mirrors are carried offstage, the line between performers and spectators as well as the designation of any particular space as stage—reminding us that stage or no stage, we are always performing—is relaxed. During the next sequence, the shadows cast on the walls replace the reflections from the mirrors. In a series of stunningly complex variations, the dancers perform the same smooth gestures, each at slightly different times, enacting a continuum of variation within the restraint of a single move, offering yet another possibility of what it looks like to always, in some sense, be an other to one’s self. Using the body to make visible the complex workings of subjectivity, the limitations of self-knowledge are rigorously yet honestly conveyed. All of these different movements around a single “it” have taken the cohesive, self-same “I” and shown “it” to be an enterprise that is always already collective.

You, Jonas, are only three months old, but so many places and people have already contributed to what you will be “like.” You have a whole slew of aunties and uncles who will help you understand ideas like performance, me, you, self, and other. You are just now beginning to notice that when you wave your hands,when you circle your fingers around an object, you can make something happen. Hopefully this is an idea you will never tire of considering.

Dear Jonas,

“B” is for beets, Bolaño fever, Bildungsroman, and for brisk, too, because it is cold outside now. We went into the city today to run an errand and you wore layers of clothes beneath an anorak. As usual, you weren’t displeased with the bulk of the clothing. When I faced you toward the mirror as I folded you into the sling, you mugged big smiles. Only when i wrapped my long black scarf over your face to block the wind did you begin to protest. You like to see where you’re going.

I finished Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives last week, so now I can return to reading Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. I’m resisting jumping into Bolaño’s 2666, the translation of which just came out last week. I tell myself that the last thing I need is a 912 page detour from the dissertation, especially since I just indulged in a 648 page one; nonetheless, the pull is strong indeed. I suppose if I purchase it now but read the entire thing while we are out of the city at your grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving, I won’t really be disturbing my work. What I mean is that I anyway won’t work on the dissertation while we are away from home, so it would be nice to finish something next week. Maybe if I make it into a challenge, I won’t feel guilty. "Thanksgiving" always makes me feel guilty enough on its own.

Truth be told, I spent almost as much time making a beet salad as I did writing today. We walked to the vegetable shop up on Graham Avenue and picked out the beets and other ingredients. When we came home I rinsed clumps of dirt from their leaves and bulbs. I shaved each beet with a vegetable peeler and chopped them all in the little food processor. I stained my fingers and the corners of my mouth with their juice, and somehow splattered the wooden floor with fuschia droplets, too. Then I washed, chopped and shaved fennel and carrots. I mixed them all together with olive oil and pistachios and we ate it over sautéed kale. I joke to myself that pleasurable exercises like this one illustrate the general rebellion against the Bildungsroman the dissertation is meant to invoke. In other words, if a Bildungsroman is supposed to illustrate its hero’s collaboration with adulthood, my reticence to ever actually finish my dissertation is a small act of discomfort with the fantasy of adulthood my written argument has yet to produce.

Thanksgiving will mark your first visit to the country, and knowing how much you like the noise of the streets and the trains here and dislike the quiet of the parks, I am curious to see how you will react to the silence. I hope the leaves are still on the trees and that you will tolerate a few long walks in your stroller. I am anticipating that you will enjoy the shiny colors and the shadows made by the fireplace. Hopefully you will be able to see the deer that come into the yard at sunset.