Dear Kitty: Maryann's Poignant Memoir
"My Life Is An Open Book"

I have to clap really loudly for Matt. When I realise that sometimes no-one else would if I didn't almost give them electric shocks, I feel it's more important than ever. The continual distortion of his amp makes it difficult to know when a song has finished. Maybe because he feels more appreciated than last week, or just because he's in a better mood, after about 1-2 10 minutes he comes down onto the floor, a few centimetres down, and starts singing bumblingly into the microphone. He's stepping between two microphones; later Pat smiles at me over the drum kit; I'm happier and happier too, but when I look sideways at the other couch and at the armchair behind me, underneath the bar, no-one else is laughing.*

*The advantage of a title is that we can avoid explanatory sentences. We can begin in the subject matter.
*At this point she wanted to digress into some kind of explanation about the importance of Matt's music, but she decided that saying that she was laughing was perfectly satisfactory.

Overall this review gets 3/10. The reviewer stuck to the story and was almost, or perhaps even adequately, humble.

Thursday September 13 When I read yesterday in the cafetaria at university, on the front page of the ODT, a little article about the World Trade Centre I only thought six people died, and I already felt too depressed to think about it. Then on the bus I heard people talking and realised it wasn't like that, and started to fear that I would only hear the conservative 'attack on civilisation' line and my left wing friends variations on 'yeah, but get it in perspective, America does stuff like that all the time.' I hoped instead people would be frozen but it wasn't so ... it's like seeing a movie and then having to discuss it straight afterwards. Pat told me that he saw a documentary about Waco and afterwards, the guy behind him stood up and said 'Well that was a real eye-opener.' I lay in bed most of the afternoon, didn't want to get drunk ... town seemed empty.

Monday September 10 Hello I have the flu and feel crazy. But the world is very distant and fairytaleish. Opposite me I just saw a boy who used to watch me and who I could never quite understand - I mean I always thought 'what kind of person is he'? - he had kind of thinning hair and a friendly face, and his clothes looked like my favourite style, the 'I have no idea' Frisbee-style of dressing, which isn't like models wearing supposedly ugly clothes, but boys wearing old grey fishermen knit jerseys with stonewashed jeans because they really just have no idea - to elaborate on this style a little more, I've only seen a couple of people who have it perfect, for example a man in income support who served me wearing synthetic 80s houndstooth suit trousers and an eighties tie, and looked thin and sick like he smoked too much and had hugely long fingers, and was very thin and bent over and tall - and then there was this girl yesterday in the computer lab and I noticed her, she was wearing a flowery skirt and flat shoes and looked inquisitive and small - and today I saw them together, boyfriend and girlfriend. Now he comes back into the computer lab and they talk again! Anyway I'll go back to bed, it's very sunny ...

'In a Year of 13 Moons' by Fassbinder has a long sequence with 'Frankie Teardrop' by Suicide as the background music, and 'Song for Europe' by Roxy Music.

I don't think I've said enough about what it feels like to rest my head on Rainy's arm, and feel the fibres of her wool/sythetic jersey up my nose - and her hand when she pats my head is so small and cold.

Thursday September 6 Yesterday I had to comfort Rainy for a long time because her awful boyfriend is a jerk, but it was ok because I got to sit in the sun on a park bench underneath a tree with dangling down ropes of seeds that looked strings of dead pearls, and at a distance from us I could hear Pat K. and Gilbert talking about abstractions faintly as if it was the radio and drinking beer while Rainy was crying and I got to press my face in her shoulder, which smells so good ... Gilbert had had his hair cut. I dreamed about Ricko. He had quit drinking and was still thin, but his clothes were clean and tidy; I think he was wearing a suit with an orange polo neck and a white shirt. I was saying 'can it really be true? Is it really true?' and he was putting his arms around me and hugging me and saying 'It's really true.' The people in my dreams are often patient and wise ... I keep asking them questions and they respond with the same thing over and over again until I understand. But what I understand isn't just the content of the message, but that they're good ... If you want to see my Dunedin Myshkin, go to the first floor of the library and see the thin old man who works there. Well, he is old, but he doesn't seem old ...

Wednesday September 5 Follow this gentle reader! If you study linguistics you will be taught to divide human spoken interaction into areas like commands, greetings, etc. In most empirical studies of what people talk about, around 70% of the content of spoken communication is generally classified as gossip (across both genders). People I've talked to about this generally react negatively - why? I thought it was obvious, humans are social animals, and the main part of their interaction will be working out relationships ... anyway, there is this stereotype about girls gossiping more, obviously, but today after reading ILM I had the glaring insight that boys will often be name-droppers, only they will name-drop about social hierarchies they're not even part of, relying on the names of musicians for example, attaching themselves to words and social structures which have more power than the people they're exposed to locally ... boys know a lot more about power than girls ... why aim low and stick to people you've met? In fact, you could reconfigure this whole understanding of female gossiping by pointing out that the only difference is that the theoretical boy doesn't dare to gossip about people he's not sure are actually powerful ... If you read music criticism this way, it's immediately obvious that it derives a lot of its form from the familiar structure of 'gossip' ... especially obvious is that it's filled with names, the construction of a complex set of relationships, measuring and remeasuring people's importance, discovering and evaluating their secrets ... read this thread for example, or any of the threads on the forum ... gossip, gossip, gossip, this insight is funny ...

Tuesday September 4 I crossed the street without looking, holding Rainy's arm, suddenly beep beep, and she says 'that's the last time I take my cue from jaywalking skate punks' . The French library assistant Vincent said 'Perfect, back to zero' when I paid off my library fines. Pat Kraus has the flu; when I went to get him from the 3rd floor of the library he hardly moved, and Rainy was subdued too, she rested her head on the other side of the table. But he told me that the only interesting thing he read today in the council history was that some year in the 19th century, 4 people were simultaneously imprisoned for bestiality; later in the notes bestiality was renamed 'unnatural crimes.'

Saturday September 1 My muesli is: 'Naturally sweetened with tree ripened fruits, tumbled with golden grains and nutritious seeds' - so it says in swirly letters over the sickly picture on the front. That nauseating prose is inimical to eating.

Advertisers can't go backwards in prose style now, because they've upped the ante so far, they exist in their own rare atmosphere - an ad for soap from the early 20th century reads just 'pure, white, floating' and even here, 'floating' has gone too far - the tragic story of the 'old whore' - it's analogous to the baroque sexual conduct we engage in now, we will never be able to go back -

On a related topic, Kosinsky wrote about phone sex: 'To Kosky, to our Tantric neophyte, the merging of mind is achieved by listening to our inner sound (Hatha Yoga Pradipika), not by listening to a lustless, invisible woman practically throwing up a stream of chosen and rehearsed sexual unconsciousness to him on the phone.'

Hey if you want to help me please come to my thread. That includes my boyfriend, who's trying to write about Kant in the library [yes, Duane and I have decided after amicable consultation to debut direct references to our new 'partners' on our website. Respect. Such a model friendship! It's almost like that Virginia Woolf thing ... cue Duane's VW joke] and Di, if you read this, you too ...

Thursday August 30 Already I have five library books in my temporary house.

I went to look at a room in Hamish Noonan's house. First of all we had to walk up a long flight of stairs in the dark. In his house it was quite sparsely decorated. He was very nice to us. Liz was holding a hot water bottle. We went outside to show them where Clayton and Beth's house was. Liz asked if there was a path directly connecting them.

Hamish waited for us outside the door to say goodbye. I said 'I'm not sure if I can be bothered to move, but if I can I would want to move in.' There doesn't seem to be any real pressure on me to move. I'm almost against relinquishing the freedom of my undecided position. Nobody can hurt me here, it's like being in the car on your way to your destination. At home you sit in the car and don't want to get out. My mother and I used to sit in the driveway for a long time before we got out. I think we were almost challenging each other to see who would break the silence first. The kindest one would last the longest.

Wednesday August 29 I was asked, understandably, given the crowded conditions in my house at the moment, not to go home for a while; it feels liberating in a certain way to not have possessions or a place; although on the other hand, as Kosinski writes in Cockpit, 'To live alone, depending on no-one, and to keep up no lasting associations, is like living in a cell; and I have never lost my desire to be as free as I was as a child.' Of course, my position is not at all that of 'depending on no-one', and that's probably why I feel liberated; because I am now completely dependent on other people simply to go out of their way to help me, and don't offer them anything in return. The feeling of being a visitor in someone else's house, and showing as little presence as possible, removes troublesome choices; there's nothing to tidy up or do except for the bare minimum of things you brought with you, maybe two books to read and something to write in. It seems ridiculous to have amassed so much stuff at home, from this position, but I know that I'll find a new house and fill it up again sooner or later.

Kepler

An index to old kitty entries, my links page, and my ontological struggles. XX

... and the Rock City Rocker index