Nina MacLaughlin's Blog, page 19

The plumber, a big guy with a high voice, listens to country...

The plumber, a big guy with a high voice, listens to country music as he works. The adhesives he uses stink up the whole house. “What’s that smell?” the twelve-year-old kid who lives in the house we’re working on now asked no one in particular.

It’s a smell the brain and body both register as wrong. It’s a smell that says open the windows, turn on the fan, get away from here. Cold and chemical, it needles your nose, the space behind your eyes, a woozying toxicity. The brush attached to the lid of the jars of rubber cement comes to mind, school projects, construction paper, and the relationship between stick and stink.

I worry for the plumber. He’s in this cloud all day, and the particles travel up his nose, through his mouth, and they have sharp teeth and feed all day on the cells of his brain, chewing and chewing, and the music twangs from his tiny radio and the glue makes a meal of his mind.

[Image: Paint Splodging in the Sink II by Caitlyn Roberts]

A hummingbird this morning flew inside the cabin. The wide doors...

A hummingbird this morning flew inside the cabin. The wide doors are open. The wall of windows is open. In it came. It announced its arrival with an insect buzz, a rapid beating of the air and my first alarmed thought: giant bug, huge wasp. No. Tiny bird. I am away from home, away from the hot sidewalks and roar of city buses and everything that’s overfamiliar. From the wall of windows I watch the leaves on the elms and oaks move in the breeze as though it was the ocean. It’s a time and place that has me wondering: why do I live the way I do? The hummingbird huzzed and hovered, dipped towards my shoulder and I flinched – I, who could swat this small creature across the room, was startled, frightened. The energy of its aliveness filled the room, made my heart pound faster. “Find your way out, friend,” I said. “Find your way out.”

The painter’s mother died. He had to leave the country. The...

The painter’s mother died. He had to leave the country. The woman whose house we were working on huffed. “Doesn’t he have a crew?” The painting fell to M. and me. We’d finished the cedar ceiling (how beautiful it looks) and were eager to be out of there, but remained a few more days to paint the high walls of this peaked room. I stood on a ladder, twelve feet off the ground, face to the wall. Four days of not speaking unless spoken to, only half-grateful for the quiet, mindless work. Mindlessness is all I wanted, some escape from my own head. I brushed and rolled White Dove on the walls, blinked back tears (the summer has been hard). One tear slipped, off my cheek and down to the rosin paper, dusky red, taped on the floor to protect it from splatter. I heard it land, first raindrop. Later in the afternoon, on my way to the hose at the side of the house to wash a brush, I rounded the corner and frightened a bird. It fled and in its haste flew into a glass door at the back of the house, an awful smack of beak and feather flesh and it sat stunned on the ground, a broken lump of bird. It was there when I left that evening, and gone when I came back the next day and recovery was not the sense I got from its goneness.

"All you have to do – and watch this carefully, please – is keep writing. As long as you write it..."

“All you have to do – and watch this carefully, please – is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.”

-

Shirley Jackson

The new Shirley Jackson collection, Let Me Tell You, which includes nearly sixty short pieces, mostly unpublished, proves, piece after piece, that the scariest place to be is inside our own heads. I reviewed the book for the Boston Globe. Give it a read.

We’re lining a high-peaked ceiling with cedar in a house on a...

We’re lining a high-peaked ceiling with cedar in a house on a hill in a fancy suburb northwest of here, not far. It is fussy work and it is hot at the top of the ladders, and it is hot outside where I cut the boards, one at a time. I cut the board then bring it in to M., hand it up her, and she slots it in as I head out again and the next measurement follows me as I go. Forty-five and a strong three-eighths, she says. I repeat it, sometimes outloud, sometimes in my head. I cut. I return. I hand her the board. Forty-five and thirteen-sixteenths. Cut. Return. Forty-five and three-quarters. The lengths shift as we move up, answering the contours of old beams. The hours are spent within a cloud of cedar spray, looking at the sixteenths of things.

Summer is not my season. I am bad at heat. It feels a little like a disease: a flatness of head, a retreating, a difficulty with engagement, energy squelched, fire behind the eyes extinguished. The annual dulling. One of the first questions I will ask you: what is your favorite month? One of the other first questions I will ask you: what is your sibling situation? I’ve been wondering if they have anything in common, those two questions, besides time. I talked this weekend with a pal about seasons and she said in summer she feels more a part of the world. This made sense to me because that’s how I feel from November through February. If I pass you on the street and don’t meet your eyes, here, in the thick of July, or in smudged and weary August, it’s because I’m infected for the moment, under the weather, and will be until the air dries and the shadows get longer. In the meantime, the ceiling will be cedared, one board at a time, and summer everyday will shrink in its slow thick trudge towards fall.

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Also, I met Nina MacLaughlin, Tumblr friend and author of the extraordinary memoir HAMMERHEAD!

I knew it was going to be a pleasure to meet Edan Lepucki this evening at the amazing tiny force of a bookstore called Papercuts in Jamaica Plain. It was! She was poised and funny and relaxed and warm and I’m so glad she made a stop in Boston for the paperback tour of CALIFORNIA.

Friends, neat news: HAMMER HEAD is a finalist for the New...

Friends, neat news: HAMMER HEAD is a finalist for the New England Book Awards in non-fiction. What a group to be included in! What amazing company. Elizabeth Alexander (oh god, read The Light of the World if you haven’t), Atul Gawande, Rinker Buck, Richard Blanco. I’ve got the too-good-to-be-true feeling.

I’ve spent a bunch of time over the past four months since the book came out in independent bookstores doing readings. They’ve been like this extended family of cheerleaders for the book, this group I feel so hugely lucky and grateful to have had rooting for this thing. I get a little bashful and gulpy thinking about it. So it’s especially graitifying to be a finalist for an award put on by the New England Independent Booksellers Association. What a warm welcome indie bookstores all over New England gave me. Harvard Book Store, Porter Square Books, the Concord Bookshop, Newtonville Books, Sherman’s Books in Portland, Maine, Longfellow Books, the Maine Coast Bookstore, Water Street Bookstore, Norwich Bookstore up in Vermont (and even though they’re not in New England, I can’t help but mention and give a blog post equivalent of a hug to WORD in Brooklyn and the amazing Housing Works and McNally Jackson, as well as Charis Books in Atlanta, Avid Books in Athens). Each one of these place has its own fiery personality. Visit.

It’s summer. Maybe you’re down on Cape Cod this week, taking a...

It’s summer. Maybe you’re down on Cape Cod this week, taking a break, waiting for news of the latest Great White sightings. If you are, if you’re on the Cape, come to the Brewster Bookstore this Wednesday morning from 10 am to noon. I’ll be there, signing books, talking about HAMMER HEAD. You can collect shells and work on your tan afterwards. Come.

[I took the photo a couple years ago. Not in summer, and not on Cape Cod.]

A good surprise in the mail yesterday. Old friend, photographer,...

A good surprise in the mail yesterday. Old friend, photographer, teacher Joe Swayze sent me a HAMMER HEAD cyanotype, a process that uses sunlight and results in the summeriest blue, a type of photograph that I learned to make with him – (oh fuck) – twenty years ago. What a gift.

Body of water. Are there other parts of earth described...

Body of water. Are there other parts of earth described this
way? Body of hill. Body of canyon. Body of dune. No. Water is the only one.
Maybe because it is something to enter and be absorbed by. Maybe because
there’s some surrender possible, some release, in a way not possible in or on a
hill, a canyon, a dune. An essential sort of dissolving, like being absorbed in
the belly of your mother, that original swim, like entering another’s body in
sex, not in the simple penetrative sense, but in the dissolving of solid
boundaries of bone and skin.

Late last week, M. and I took a business trip to paint the
side of cabin by a lake in Maine. It was good to be away, good to do quiet work
with a paintbrush and look over a shoulder and see the lake, this body of
water, and its small waves. It was good to see the stars reflected in it at
night.

M. and I talked as
the smell of woodsmoke from the campfire absorbed into my sleeves and hair
about which type of bodies of water we prefer. M. prefers lakes because they
are finite, have boundaries, because you can see across to the other side and
all around the edges, like this one, which was rimmed with tall pines, with
small camps and cabins here and there, and short, low docks. There’s too much
infinity with the ocean for her. Which is exactly why I like it. Edgeless and
endless, there’s a shore somewhere, some solid place to land, but an
incomprehensible in between. The ocean makes me feel more comfortable with
infinity – here it is spreading out before me – and therefore with death. An
end (some solid place to land) within the endlessness.