excerpt(s) from The Spill (pt. 1)

*I wrote a manuscript, pre-COVID, currently called The Spill (thank you to our daughter Loulou for thinking of the title), and I have tinkered with it for years. I don't think it'll ever get placed anywhere, which is fine. But I think I'll just kinda self-publish it here! 

I was trying to write about and into a truly hybrid genre, and to describe my somewhat half-cooked idea called "time genre." Later, after I was purely editing and thinking on it, I read Melville's Pierre (thank you, Phil and thank you, Logan)--and then that experience turned into a way to understand Literature and the project itself. 

Two pieces from it have appeared elsewhere: OLIVIA CRONK / THE BOBBIES — always crashing & Olivia Cronk - Hybrid - MER - Mom Egg Review (merliterary.com). And parts of the ms. were in a short play that Phil and I co-wrote and that Logan Berry directed.

Since my beloved Shelly Duvall just died, I thought it was a good time to share it, as some of my work was to try to understand the movie 3 Women through mothering & gossip.

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But now, now!–Isabel’s letter read swift as the first light that slides from the sun, Pierre saw all preceding ambiguities, all mysteries ripped open as if with a keen sword, and forth trooped thickening phantoms of an infinite gloom. Now his remotest infantile reminiscences–the wandering mind of his father–the empty hand, and the ashes–the strange story of Aunt Dorothea–the mystical midnight suggestions of the portrait itself; and, above all, his mother’s intuitive aversion, all, all overwhelmed him with reciprocal testimonies.

from Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

Most people don’t realize that they can sit up in the coffin and bite at the bubble’s edge so as to peer over the dream and into the other. I am so like a widow when I do it. I am only in need of those little mirror-spots, the oldness of the edge wherein glass meets room and there’s that rubbed dipping effect. If only we could do without the evil oldness of mere impression–




a whole room of farting in a wet bathing suit

the poodle skirt with musical note applique

woman head cake

woman head cake art deco plate

a seat at dinner

pastel cotton briefs

the duplicating licorice I’ve already asked after five times




–almost like freckles on the reflection, that stiffness of the face up against the loose shimmer, like how I feel when I can finally lie on my bed and have my glitter painted fingernails right close to my face and can just see purple silver smear, how only that matters to me. Only that.





The curdling in my house was curdling my house. I was its head seeing its shimmer around to a liquid puma with its hand cupped to ear to listen.





That fucker.

I can hear plaid in here today, too.

I can wear a hat like a swimcap and sheen.
























My friend once met a famous artist at our famous art school. This artist is loved for her particular way of inflecting information. A conceptual artist, she deals in response and correspondence and documentation.




My friend says that he got unsettled by his time with her: he could see too easily how her charm works




and he felt that the exposed mechanism of her charm exposed him, too. He could see his own charm inside of hers. And this was an uncomfortable and compressed experience of dread.



My grandma always said “Bet Davis,” not “Betty,” like some Hollywood hallucinant lint; its recollection generates an anti-chronology/a quick memory of my ma’s chemo wig on the armchair (where is she nauseous in the house on the phone like she’s she like she’s my daughter, pre-my daughter, double the girl double as a blond spill). All of this memory a gossip of sound, like a wooden goat tube. No less.













To mouth around a sickness: such intense discomfort (but mere discomfort, not something grander), just very pervasive consuming intrusive, the stomach bad of thinking of my having sprayed perfume in the vicinity of a glass of water, the water on a lower surface–a lower cylinder of flat silk on which things could get caught–not “things,” rather droplets of the perfume (chemical, bodily)–& worrying over




Had the water’s silk lip caught the spray & could the water no longer be drunk?





Then the sickness of knowing it’d be simply poured out, both possible directions of water-movement absolutely upsetting–nauseating, in fact.








Even in knowing in the dream that all books already contain the world miniature, I was more convinced by more thrilled by impressed with the machine: it was an xray machine that mapped the skeleton in some way comparable to how the chalk line snaps down when one is employing a chalk reel in an as yet un-composed space




a kind of flash-puff of definition




And somehow I thought this to replace books and other gossip, but language that is used to gawk must be made sculptural, and marking an erased distance instantly produces a kind of archive:




my ma and I sitting at a bank desk, having not slept, my father dead for a mere twenty hours, we told the eyeball-ish lady sitting across from us that we just needed to change the paperwork





In an awful but intoxicating tunnel of shimmer-noise, I can somehow see, in the far away, a kind of microscope/telescope image.









Oh how we clutch the littlest souvenir, its recollection as a smug knowing of the impossible acquisition of collapsed time.






The day or two after Phil and I brought our newborn daughter home from the hospital, my mother came to sit the day with me and the baby. I had some minor writing work to do. My mother was sewing something and set up her sewing machine on our grimy kitchen table. We put my daughter in a bouncy chair and made a tiny digital video of her. We drank coffee. In the video, my mother’s voice says, “That’s cute”--and I don’t know if she’s describing the whole effect (my daughter’s little newborn clothes and her funny clenched fist and thoughtful expression and the silly hand-me-down baby chair with its outdated safari print) or a specific gesture or particle of mine or hers. We three are all eerily jumbled here, though the vibrating panel of the video and its colors certainly center my daughter’s presence: a new person with whom to animate with our textures:




Though neither adult can be seen, we two women crowd into the peering at this small shimmering creature: we’re at the edge of the canvas.










I’m after a way of reversing embroidery to unleash women’s faces: the self violently removed from the self so as to be considered on video, keyboard distance.












Though I knew she would love such a thing, I did not give my mother the canvas baguette sleeve I’d acquired in Barcelona.








Dripping with the impossible condensation of pre-self gossip, I choose a collared blouse. Now you choose alienated undone woman looking lost in the bathroom image.


The odd soothe of tiles. I proceed away from a violence.








In Robert Altman’s 1977 (based on a dream, no less) 3 Women, Shelly Duvall ad-libbed the flowingly outrageous dating advice she offers to Sissy Spacek.








When my mother saw the somewhat viral video of an aged and mentally unwell Duvall, she was outraged and sad. I’m sure she saw in it all women and all mentally ill people. Duvall, of course, was also blatantly tormented, decades before, by Stanley Kubrick, for The Shining.


I have always identified so strongly with Shining Duvall in her long underwear and corduroy jumper and with her cigarette and terror and childcare work and those giant canned goods in the institutional kitchen.













I wipe blood from my nose onto my floral-print blouse. It is late-70s Lane Bryant Juniors and it looks like my favorite kind of garden (meadowy, English cottage-y) and also like what I’d imagine wearing as an old lady while working in that garden, though I must admit here that I do not yet show any particular interest in nor talent for the garden.



Eleni Sikelianos: “But what is the key that turns the lock of the poison dress? Who is us? (Me and my mother.)”




I stand at the front windows of our apartment and peek out of view if someone looks up.



One late night, after a dramatic experience with some shitty edibles (“eat a pie, get high”), I thought I was permanently damaged, and I looked at my daughter’s toys (which, I think it’s useful to note, had been my own) on the living room floor, and I thought myself time-traveling, and I thought myself my own mother, and the front windows my childhood apartment windows (two-flats of Chicago all have similar postures). Even the smeared look of the laptop screen in front of me—I’d shut off the Italian Realist film I’d been watching because I was too scared to see bodies moving, and I’d left the google page in place—seemed to be from 1983. The terror generated another anti-chronology.






My mother saying, after we’d paused to speak with and as soon as we’d passed the “live-in girlfriend” of a neighbor, “She’s babying that arm, if you ask me.”


Well this was something new and electric.


We were walking down the block, quotidian as can be, probably to get bread at the factory outlet store on the corner. The girlfriend (and it seemed to me the whole block knew of this) had accidentally cut her arm with a knife. Her arm was in a sling, an image-rhyme with holding a baby so close. My mother is no conventional “gossip,” but she can talk shit, with me . . . and perhaps, in her life, a handful of others. She was talking shit on this lady, privately, with me, but on the street.


Electricity between us as womanly intimacy, as a blanket we stretched out and flapped parachute-style.


This was indeed some gossip.




This was observation and description.


Gossip is trajectory-information.

Gossip is predictive.

Gossip is an inflection of a report. Fabrication. Speculation.

Gossip is literature.


Hannah Black: “The gossip . . . brings news, warnings and information. Worlds appear from her big mouth.”







Bridget Talone: “The experience/ of others like some hidden/ sea beneath the skin of/ things.”







Maybe my second or third period ever, my ma and I were gonna go swimming at the Y, but that meant my getting a tampon in, something I’d yet to do successfully. I was standing in our bathroom, purple swimsuit hanging around my ankles, my mother hanging around outside the door, coaching me/advising me to try straddling, squatting, to relax.


I’m crying and so frustrated, making the insertion even more unlikely. My ma offers to just skip it, “No big deal, we’ll go do something else.” I am so mad but grateful that she’s there, just, such a cliché, on the other side of the door. Our bodies practically with each other, but the skin-sea of door-body-blood-containment




I felt something similar when trying to learn how to nurse my daughter, and my ma with me again, and my daughter screaming and unwilling to just take the fucking nipple and drink, all of our frustration all together at once in body skin sea blood.








Sara Ahmed: “We all have different biographies of violence, entangled as they are with so many aspects of ourselves.”





Doris Day’s boy drove around drunk shooting out the streetlamps.




Say one thing but then, instead: a motel room. Looking out the window, past the railing, into a parking lot. Any interior package can be folklore. Parentheticals even.






When my friend met the famous artist, his dread set him on to data-collection, then, about authenticity and honesty and presentation of the self and happiness–and then when I wrote to him about wanting to say his gossip in my own gossip, he began emailing me some gossip. Daniel Woody:


Went to see Ai Weiwei speak and it was v interesting. I thought of you when he and his interviewer began discussing poetry of the Tang Dynasty. Apparently it was the golden age of poetry in China, and in order to work in civil service you had to master poetic craft.


During this time, whenever there was a really joyful and wonderful party, people would stop and write a poem about it so that they could remember the occasion. So, they said, the way we constantly take selfies at events has descended from an early Chinese poetic tradition.


Idk how one would find these poems written by ordinary people—





Elliott Chaze: “Peeking, as a cultural instrument, must have come into its own with invention of the lacework balcony.”








An erased distance. The poem as the memory and the anti-chronology.


How much, I’m sure, we’ve all longed for impossible snapshots of ourselves in the chalky lines of wept off eye-makeup. Staring out at the bank lady. Stomach bad of it. How my mother and I gossiped it out later.









Robert Altman’s commentary on the Criterion disc of 3 Women both supports and does not my own read. I see the movie as palpably about womanly intimacy, how it both gathers one in its folds, and alienates. I’d like to see it in conversation with the HBO series Getting On, which contains three women, at work, in hospital/geriatric care. I identify with all three of the series’ women, at least two of whom are often despicable. In 3 Women, the same. And there is geriatric care. And the women are bound to one another in their caretaking work. And there are unanswered questions about identities overlapping with one another. Does Shelly Duvall’s character (mostly known as Millie) know that her neighbors mock her? Does she really believe her own bullshit? In how many ways is she aware of her posture and her tone, her annoyingly flippant way of smoking through her chatter? I adore her yellow hooded robe over her swimsuit. Her yellow furniture and butterfly bedsheets. For her never-to-take-place dinner party, she buys spray cheese and chocolate pudding and two wines—Lemon Satin and Tickled Pink. She instructs Pinky (aka Rose) in men and fashion and what to do at work (the scam business in which they take elderly people into ostensibly fortifying pool-dips). And Pinky asks Millie, regarding the blond twins who work there: “Do you think they know which one they are?” And then she says, “Maybe they switch back and forth.” And this is what I think I always mean about my time with other women. I remember Carolyn Gruber sleeping over at my friend Jessica’s house. Carolyn was a child model, I guess, if I now take her at her word from back then. She talked like Millie. A know-it-all. About pantyhose and lipstick: things of a whole other world. Millie’s off-the-shoulder blouses, so 70s, were still present in my 80s childhood, and her look makes me think of the women on our block and something next door to my mother–not my mother, but something. (So hard to know the ways that the affect of random, un-remembered others comes creeping into our memory frames around the remembereds.) When Pinky goes out to jump off the balcony into the pool, she looks just a bit like, something like, Edgar’s forgotten and pregnant wife, Willie. When former roommate Deidre cancels her appearance (and with it, the three men who were to be the romantic partners of the evening) at Millie’s dinner party, Millie is pissed. She blames Pinky. Pinky talks through the door to Millie. A door of sad skin. Millie leaves in a different outfit. Willie’s lovely desert paintings of the monstrous men (actually done by a guy, self-named Bodhi Wind, who died after getting hit by a car, according to Altman; and, actually, the paintings are offensively appropriative, btw) hang behind water-images. Everyone is always peeking, but especially Pinky.


There are two very bad nights. In the first, Millie is so transparently defensive in her shame. She brings Edgar home to bed and hisses to Pinky, “You don’t know anything.” In the second bad night, guilty old Millie tries to help deliver Willie’s baby. She does do it, but it’s awful. After all the pushing, there is silence. The baby makes no sound. Millie holds out her bloody hands to Pinky, who has failed to drive to town to get a doctor. Millie slaps her bloody hand right the fuck across Pinky’s cheek.








In most scenes when Millie is driving her mustard-colored car, her yellow skirts’ edges are shut in the car door and hanging out, flapping down the desert roads. Altman both understands and fails to understand when he says that Shelly Duvall’s character is “a victim of magazines and movies.”




And Millie’s careful curation falls apart.


We watch some things through water.


We watch some things through the color-sort that Village Thrift used to do with clothing.

I remember so much of childhood precisely through that watery rainbow of blouses.


I became my mom after eating too many edibles.



Gossip is inflection.

Gossip is event.

Gossip is pulling talk into and onto oneself, a watery rainbow.

Gossip is hole-maker, a watery rainbow.

Holly Pester says you can make gossip from the language on the spines of books.

Tori Amos’ “Cornflake Girl” is (about) gossip.


Hannah Black is sometimes discussing Silvia Federici’s notion that gossip was one threatening (because not in service to capitalism) force that tied women together in community.


Home gossip.

Memory gossip.

3 Women gossip.



A lower cylinder of flat silk on which things can get caught can inflect the later-liquid: an echo of perfume in my waterglass as a rumor.


Eavesdropping on my daughter’s kindergarten dramas as research, as self-inquiry, as an illustration of how gender gets performed. Rumors.


Miniatures are always real.





I bore a friend with a long description of my daughter’s friend-triangle and its psychosocial complications. We sit in a garden my husband made, semi-hidden, two women in intimacy and boredom: ideal growing conditions for gossip and meta-gossip.


I enjoy boredom with a very few people. With many others, even some very beloved friends, I find it stressful, somehow a failure. Of what I don’t yet know.


I enjoy the boredom of holding my daughter’s face against my own as I stare off, this non-time, how it is all gaze and care, no waste at all.


My dear and bored friend in the garden enjoys talking to her mother on the phone while her mother grocery shops.


I enjoy sitting in my mother’s living room and talking to her about the minutiae of my daughter’s life. I drink coffee and run late in this space. My stepfather leaves the room to give us gossip-privacy and the proper conditions for intimate boredom.