Daybook: Another possible direction

On misreadings, a cold afternoon in November, and watching Peter Hujar's Day

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The photographer is Peter Hujar, and the film is Peter Hujar’s Day. I recommend!! The film is based on a real-life transcript; the writer Linda Rosenkrantz recorded Hujar with the idea that she was going to compile a book of interviews with all her artist friends in which they’d detail everything they’d done on a particular day (the project was never fully realized). Halfway through the movie I had the realization that Linda Rosenkrantz must be the same Linda who wrote the novel Talk, which I’d borrowed from my friend Julia during the pandemic but had to return to her before I got a chance to truly read. The novel is composed entirely of dialogue pulled from recordings Rosenkrantz took of her friends’ conversations, and I got a little thrill whenever I opened it at random…I’m not sure why I never read it all the way through. Anyway I WILL be rectifying that sooner or later.

After I watched the film, I thought a lot about Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, her slim little book about her lifelong obsession with keeping a diary. “I started keeping the diary in earnest when I started finding myself in moments that were too full,” she writes. I have felt like this before, and have often wondered why some days or moments feel unbearably full while others barely register on my skin. Better to write down everything that happens, to save it all, just in case. I’ve often found that writing down random moments from my life lends it a sense of novelty and charm I didn’t fully perceive at the time (you see that life is full of other possible directions, i.e., dailiness is delightful and strange instead of merely commonplace…things are not nearly as routine as we think they are). “Nothing had happened,” Manguso writes about a random afternoon, “but I still needed four hours to get it into the notebook.”

Reading: Confessions by Augustine (for Garth Greenwell’s Daddy Augustine class). Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (as seen above), for my classics book club. Big Kiss, Bye Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett. Goodlord by Ella Frears. Onement Won by Prageeta Sharma, which I purchased on a whim from my favorite bookstore in NYC (192 Books, best place in the world) when I opened it at random and read the poem “Friendment” which ends with these lines: “A poem, while it can expose us to our imagining selves, can also trick us into imagining / ourselves as something beyond our behaviors.” (!!!)