Elvis Has Left the Building

Yesterday I finished Anna Karenina. It wasn’t momentous. The book peters out, quite deliberately, in an imitation of regular life – a mixture of pettiness and exaltation. The ending finds the hero, Levin, contemplating a recent spiritual and philosophical breakthrough and recognizing that it won't change him much, if at all. He’ll continue to be short-tempered, to argue with his wife, to be socially awkward. He’ll just have a different belief system in the back of his mind. He believes he’s found the right one, of course, but he also recognizes theory is no more closely related to life than clouds are.

The novel is an astonishing collection of human moments like this one. Tolstoy is passionately direct and realistic, noting at one point the nagging discomfort one feels after forgetting a disquieting thought and the counterintuitive need to keep searching until you remember source of the bad feeling. Oh yeah! you keep going. That is exactly what that feels like.

He reminds me of D.H. Lawrence in his minute scrutiny of human emotions. Has anyone else made this comparison? If not why not?

The experience was marred for me only when I read, after much anticipation, Mona Simpson’s introduction. She, to put it without Tolstoy’s eloquence, is out to lunch. She asked, for instance, if Kitty really had to end up with the boring prig, Levin. Could she not have had a baby by and felt the same devotion to Vronsky?

Vronsky! Vronsky is a wealthy lightweight, a social gadfly, a man elevated by his love for Anna K. but essentially shallow. Yes, it seems he’s good in bed, and he’s rich and caring, but he’s too insubstantial to lean on, as Anna finds to her peril. Levin is a big, dark, serious thinker who plainly overshadows Vronsky almost as early as Anna steals him from Kitty. Very soon after refusing Levin, Kitty realizes what a mistake she’s made and sorrows so deeply she has to be taken to a spa. Yes, a spa!

Ms. Simpson also writes that she always thought Kitty was something of a drip. Kitty isn’t as nuanced or dashing as Anna but she’s far from a drip, Mona Simpson. Kitty nurses Levin’s dying brother with loving patience, while Levin can’t cope at all. Kitty is a princess and has a certain preciousness, but we see her through Levin’s eyes and it’s hard not to love her. Talk about the male gaze! I was overwhelmed with tortured longing for Kitty just like Levin and would have proposed to her too. But I also yearned for dark, restless Levin with his crushing gait and lack of social graces.

Simpson explains that she read Anna Karenina when she was at Yaddo and feeling like an outsider. Anyone can sympathize with that feeling, but what does it lead Simpson to do? To identify with a minor character, Varencka, who’s at the spa where Kitty goes to recover her health, and who envies Kitty her wealthy family and position. Since the book is about Kitty and Levin’s courtship and marriage, Levin’s philosophical struggles with Russian economic life, and Anna and Vronsky’s love affair and tragic end, it seems obvious the spa section is quite minor and that identifying with Varencka is a bum move.

I didn’t mean to go on and on about this. I’m stressed like all of us by the holiday season. It’s supposed to be fun but it’s a giant strain. That’s a cliché by now but it’s still true. I’m tired, my friends are tired and ill, everybody’s feeling it. My sister’s family just went down the coast of Mexico and rubbed mud all over their bodies. Now, they know how to enjoy the holidays.

Say Hello to My Little Friend

There are more mice than I thought. There are more mice than it's possible to understand. I just saw a dead one in the bathroom, caught by a trap, as the super said it would be though I didn't think they ever went in the bathroom.

They go everywhere, it now seems.

But they mostly live in my stove, and I saw one run down through the space of a gas burner the other day. I put a new trap up by the stove and added new peanut butter -- I thought my super had forgotten to put some on, in his inept way. Au contraire. When I saw the new peanut butter lying beside the trap, I realized with a creeping horror that the mice are now removing the peanut butter without getting snapped by the trap (two were killed that way).

I took that dab of peanut butter and put it back on the trap, smooshing it down so it couldn't be easily taken off. They got it off anyway! Yesterday I put a new dab on right near the snapping mechanism. "Take that, you fucking cunts," I said, my concern for them gone. This morning, the new dab had been neatly removed. They are winning this battle. Mice are outsmarting me.

Plus peanut butter is not cheap, and this is the good health food kind.

Loud Cloud Crowd

Went over to Delancey St. for some cheap Christmas dross. Bought colored lights, 3 strings, for only $3.99. Also socks for my nieces, .99 each. Can't beat it. Also some Christmas socks for my mother -- revenge for all the years I've received holiday-themed socks. Ha!

Stopped into Babeland to buy Bitch, a magazine that I hope to write for, and a few other sundries. (Dross and sundries -- do I sound evasive or what?) Babeland is such a funny place. They're so sex-positive that they want to give you a lecture and demonstration about every knick knack you buy. We Americans remain giggly and silly-acting at the counter. I wish the whole thing were less furtive -- that there weren't a velvet curtain across the door. It really isn't such a secret that people buy these things.

I can only stand the city south of Canal, I've decided. You can still feel the old tenement atmosphere, and there are still deals. Also the sky is very beautiful as it fades behind the crowded streets of the Lower East Side. Or is that above Canal? I still don't know.

I can't believe I decided to buy pine branches and decorate them with lights. What kind of a sap am I turning into? But I can't wait to see how the lights look! I can't wait to see my mother's face when she opens the Christmas socks!

Oh, and the mouse is dead. My super came with traps and one snapped right at the end of Mean Girls last night. Tchah! I'm not happy to destroy the little thing, but I'm not happy with it racing around like it owns the place either. Had some pangs about it today though.

Not a Creature Is Stirring -- Well ...

Even though freedom is both blessing and curse, lately I've been finding it a blessing. It's cold and flu season, and I've succumbed to neither so far. Know why? Because if I do something at night, I'm free to sleep an extra hour to make a full 9 1/2. When I get up, if I feel the slightest bit under the weather, I can sit on my couch all day, sipping grapefruit spritzers. It's the good life.

Unfortunately I have company. Mice have been runnin in or across the most unexpected places. Nothing seems to deter them. I've been screaming whenever I see them but it isn't working. Calling my super (why is he called that) doesn't work because he says he'll come with traps and he never does. Something keeps me from buying my own traps. If he buys them and sets them, the murders are on his hands.

Here's the most unfair thing of all: I used to think long periods of inactivity and reading on my part were what allowed mice to think they were alone in the apartment and could venture out. But the other day I was crashed out on -- where else? -- the couch watching the Colbert Report and a mouse dove across my front hallway as if it were his personal athletic field. Where do they get this brazenness? If I'm still for a long time, I watch TV as a mouse deterrent! But it's not working. Don't tell me I'm going to have to become active, clean up the piles of crap, and move around the apartment like I care if it's clean. I'm not up to that charade.

Except for the mice. I'm not happy with the mice. I don't like them because they seem to confirm something about the stasis I feel I've been living in for a while. It's so still that now mice think it's fair game. Well, I've had just about enough. One of these days I might get up off the couch and clean. Then who'll hold the power? Hm?

Sour Grates

Last night I went to my first holiday party. As I sat on the subway awkwardly holding my bottle of wine on my lap and feeling the chemicals from my eye makeup swirling noxiously over my eyeballs, I felt it was an unfortunate night to try to start 'Buddenbrooks.' I couldn't concentrate on the quaint old masterpiece and found myself just staring at other people on the subway, trying to breathe in my anxiety and breathe out my anxiety, in the Buddhist fashion.

Even after all these years, I feel miserable with fear going to parties, as if some awful humiliation awaits me. It's irrational, though the Times says this morning virtually everyone approaches a party feeling this way. But a lot of my good friends were going to be at the party and another good friend was giving it and so what was the fear about?

I found myself blaming it on New York, as usual. My trip to midtown east took a bit more than an hour but it felt more like three. I felt irrational rage at the bizarrely long climb from the subway platform to the street at 61st and Lexington. Happy revelers all about 26 years old frolicked on the streets as I humorlessly hurried past them. Why is everyone here so young? Why is their conversation so insipid? I fumed to myself in a wonderfully holiday-spirit way. Why do so many people believe so deeply in living in this horrid, barren metropolis? How can you preserve a good mood here?

I had a good time talking to my friends at the party. There was tons of good food and wine. I shared a taxi home to Brooklyn with a friend that cost about $180 (well, it felt like that) and apart from the denseness of the driver ("Left here. No, left. You'll want to get into the left --oh well, take the next left") it was, as always, heavenly luxury to ride home from a party. But I seem to feel anger over every condition of living in this once dreamed-about city.