Anne Carson's _The Beauty of the Husband_ and vibes

I can't get into my Black Lodge space with my writing.

I thought I was working on a new poetry novel, this one about vampires and the infectious acts of looking and listening. But I scrapped most of it. Maybe it's the apocalypse. Maybe just gloom. Maybe too busy with new summertime union duties. Maybe too hot and sleep deprived all the time. Or maybe--there is a tiny grain/glimmer/something there--I am actually working on something called Bergamot, which gets closer to what I want to do. Something about smells and reading. Backyards. Vampires, too--as a construct, as one of my most favorite pop cultural representations.

I always think I can read my way out of a writing-gloom, and usually the information-experience gives me new threads to follow. New smells. A something. Like an impossible to find piece of glass in a shoe.

But this time I'm just reading.

I don't really know Anne Carson's work in a deep way--and as Phil pointed out, sometimes she seems a bit cold and tasteful. Other times: shockingly explosive and delightful.

I just read The Beauty of the Husband. 

It's about Keats (truth and beauty but also the perma-ephemera of Keats's own marginalia) and also fictionally/autobiographically/in-betweenly about a first marriage (doomed and doomy). This part, for me, was so pleasurable because of the world it's inscribing and bounding: it's like a Cassavetes film. Dark kitchens, cigarettes, books, late-night discussions, a short order cook who gambles and womanizes, some bad gender dynamics, sadness, midcentury white American middle-class sleaze or disaster. It's the kind of too much dreariness that can reactivate some memory space from my twenties: we really lived in the other century back then. Apartments that lasted less than a year but felt like all of reality. The endless demand of smoking cigarettes! How it gave us a hobby and a task and wonderful ghost-train for our conversations. Drinking wildly. Quitting jobs unexpectedly. I guess I was having a Cassavetes time. A Beauty of the Husband time.