thank you notes 8/23
i'm thankful for the brief quotation of "here, there, and everywhere" on "white ferrari." i'm thankful for this bit from every song ever about how john lennon singing "julia" "seems conscious of how very little matters except the essential things": "There's a thing some singers do: they go transparent in their voices. They seem to become the property of other forces. When they sing it's as if they're ventriloquists, with some clear distinction between themselves and those forces. (If we were talking in religious terms, we'd say between themselves and their faiths.) They minimize themselves; not worried about outcome, they represent the forces in a pure state. They seem released from anxiety."
i'm thankful that lana del rey buys coffee for people on her way to the studio. i'm thankful for the section in moira weigel's labor of love about turn of the twentieth century "charity girls" and the fine line dividing what society considered dating from what it considered prostitution: "When one investigator in New York started to negotiate the terms of leaving a bar with a woman late at night, she demanded that he buy her a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of whiskey. And while he was at it, could he come with her to the butcher to pay an outstanding bill?"
i'm thankful for the first gawker post i ever read, in the summer after my senior year of college, which contained a leak of a ridiculous listserve email that a professor at my college sent to his grad students. i'm thankful to remember the ridiculous professor, whose class i attended on the first day of my last semester even though i had heard bad things about him and didn't want to take his class because i needed another workshop to graduate and wasn't sure if i could get into the workshop i wanted to take.
i'm thankful to remember that when he came in on the first day, he was wearing a black leather jacket which seemed so pompous and thankful that during attendance, it became clear that because students had double registered for workshops, i would be able to get into the one i want and could give my slot to a student who wanted to take this class. i'm thankful that i was prepared to politely sit through the entire class session, but that when he realized that i wanted to take the other professor's workshop instead of his, the ridiculous professor folded his arms across his chest and insisted i get out and stood silently fuming as i, grinning, put my things in my backpack and got up and left. i'm thankful that i wasn't embarrassed and knew that he looked worse than i did in the situation.
i'm thankful to remember how that evening or the next day a girl i had a crush on posted on my facebook wall that she had heard through the grapevine that i had "stood up to robert olen butler" in his class and told me how cool i was for doing so. i'm thankful how happy i felt in that moment to have known that people were talking about me, that i was the subject of gossip.
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