thank you notes 3/13

i'm thankful for the care package our friend jk sent us, which included cute stickers and stationery and korean beauty products for d and fancy department store stocks and a huge plastic-wrapped package of whole flat-packed dried squids for me. i'm thankful for her lovely note—i'm thankful that jk is such an artful writer and thoughtful person that she can casually mention virginia woolf's suicide note in the one paragraph card attached to a box of socks in a care package. i'm thankful she is the best friend i made in graduate school and thankful that we've still kept in touch even after she moved away. i'm thankful she has always been kind and encouraging about my writing, even though she's a much better writer than me (i'm thankful that one of my favorite of her stories, "the reunion," was recently published and you can read it here). i'm thankful to have gotten to read her work and thankful for the way she thanked me in the acknowledgements of her thesis ("I am indebted to all my workshop peers for their critiques. Still, I would be amiss not to single out Justin Wolfe, who always does me the honor of reading my stories with joy"), which really made me feel proud and known. i'm thankful to remember her brechtian flourish of distributing choco-pies at her thesis reading of "the reunion." i'm thankful to remember lots of fun drunken lunches with her talking about art and film and childhood and people we knew, especially the one where we got quite buzzed on whiskey before a fiction workshop on a beautiful spring day in our last semester and she, who was normally a quiet and sober presence in workshops, couldn't stop giggling. i'm thankful to remember when she was taking a filmmaking class that summer, i think, where she was shooting on real film and had n and i act for her. i'm thankful, even though n and i weren't good actors, that we laughed our way through it and had a good time together.

i'm thankful that i thought of her often, of the conversations we've had about the films we love, while reading innocents and others, the dana spiotta novel, which i finished last night. i'm thankful for the bit in the novel about andrei rublev, which we both saw for a class we took together and which blew our minds: "One day she showed them Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev. She remembered when she'd first seen its black-and-white images, and how she thought that this was what films made in the fifteenth century looked like. And she remembered Hosney saying that Tarkovsky wanted to use images to make us feel the infinite, find a form to express the infinite. That's all! She thought it worked like this. His films made you regard a person in a landscape , the beauty of the composition drawing you in until you lost your impatience, your preoccupation with temporality, with the next thing, drawing you in until you stayed there with him and the material world and the mystical world became one. He used conjure and artifice to show what was true." i'm thankful for the line of "this was what films made in the fifteenth century looked like," which really captures the feeling of the film. i'm thankful to remember one day, while we sat in the dark looking up at a projection, the professor in our film class talking about tarkovsky and time by isolating a long shot of milk being spilled into a river, the way it had form and then dissipated into the body of the water, which continued to run downstream forever.

i'm thankful for the novel, which was thoughtful and affecting and morally rigorous and structurally interesting. i'm thankful for all of the detailed descriptions of fictional movies in the novel. i'm always thankful for that in novels. i'm thankful for that in paul auster's novel the book of illusions, a book about a professor who becomes obsessed with the work and life of a silent film comedian, which was one of the first contemporary 'literary' novels i read. i'm thankful that when i was in high school, my mom went back to work part-time at a local bookstore and that occasionally she would bring me by and we would go on a "shopping spree" through the ARCs in the storage room with a carrier bag and take home the ones that interested us. i'm thankful that before that, i mostly read bad rock and roll biographies and that the access (and sharing it with my mom) changed the way i read. i'm thankful for my favorite novel of imaginary films, which is kiss of the spider woman by manuel puig. i'm thankful that before jk moved out of town, i gave her a used copy of the novel because i knew she would love it and i'm thankful that she did.

i'm thankful for the poem from today's alipore post, which is "the quiet world" by jeffrey mcdaniels, which is beautiful on its own but also resonates deeply with innocents and others, and reads: