Books: The Erotica Project, How to Travel with Your Demons
My long-form essay, Warsaw, is published in Eckleburg No. 22, a literary and arts journal that publishes both emerging and celebrated voices. Warsaw tells the intergenerational story of my grandmother and mother, who made unimaginable choices to survive post-war Germany
History runs through St. Mark’s Place in the East Village like dirty water — Federal-style mansions and celebrities like James Fenimore Cooper and W.H. Auden. Ada Calhoun, who grew up there in the 70s, writes in The New Yorker, “Gone were the days of Thelonious Monk playing the Five Spot Jazz Club, Andy Warhol hosting the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and the New York Dolls ambling down the street in hot pants.” Yes, those days are gone, but something always takes its place. Like the kids with rainbow mohawks and tongue piercings. It’s always the epicenter of something bubbling up from the ground.
This was our last conversation on earth. We went out laughing. We went out talking about ghosts, the shadows we leave behind. The body is gone. It was organic, composed of carbon molecules. But there are trees that live thousands of years. How do they do this? In Tasmania, there is a grove of King’s Holly that is thought to be 43,000 years old. They’ve survived by growing up, falling over, and starting again. A group of 47,000 Quaking Aspen in Utah, nicknamed the “Pando,” are all connected by a single root system. Scientists say, according to the trees’ genetic makeup, they could be a million years old.
EB: I love the brilliant and playful way your feminist deconstruction of A Streetcar Named Desire approaches these questions. What are your ways of thinking about autobiography versus fiction, “real” versus imaginary or invented? How do you use yourself in your work? How does your work change and shape your life?
On Groundhog Day, I read that the movie, Groundhog Day, is considered a Buddhist meditation. My brother talked about it in the weeks before he died. He liked watching it, and liked comparing himself to the hero.
Everything is green, too green. Even Demeter is dying. Here in Westchester, 20 years after the marriage ended, there’s a heat wave, and thunderheads in the still, blue sky. There’s a different kind of stink, not like the city, but still sweet. Things rot in this heat. Only yesterday, I finally took out the garbage, it was starting to ferment. This is the apotheosis of high summer. It is that space, where the wheel of the seasons is on the brink of shifting again. You can stand the heat, because the smell of things rotting is also the first sign of re-growth. Wallace Stevens wasn’t wrong, because the quiet death of all green things, in high summer, late July, is sweet.
I have big plans to wash clothes and bedding, and mop the hardwood floors. Instead I roll a joint on the desk in the large empty living room. It’s the only piece of furniture in this room; not counting the kitchen chair where I’ve propped a large framed photo of the Rolling Stones at Altamont–a gift from my late brother. The very same picture that fell off the wall the first day here, and completely shattered a glass topped coffee table. I didn’t have a broom, never mind a dust pan. It happened at five in the morning, still dark out. My first thought; I’m taking this fucking picture and throwing it in the river. Because once I started to let go of things, it was hard to stop.
Lillian Ann Slugocki 