October 2010
4 posts
When Tweets Become Blog Entries
Summer:
Trafficking in exclamation points and bold, point pens.
Fall:
Burrowing between ellipses — breathe one, two, three. Forget me not…
April 2010
1 post
January 2010
2 posts
Bodies
My blood is autumnal but my body follows summer’s dogma: boardwalk wood dashed with salt, bleached white houses and tanned, weathered fingers like the rings of a tree inside the curve of my pale, stockingless leg, the red moon chased down by the thunderstorm at high tide, pruned fingers with the nails bitten off, the ocean playing the chameleon of mother, father, lover, womb….
My...
Sleep-waking
“Perhaps is has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you dont understand, but in the dream it feels as if it has some enormous meaning - either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you...
November 2009
2 posts
2 tags
5 tags
Once Upon a Type
I knew that I had grown up when I finally stopped dreaming about you.
When I was a kid my parents had tried telling me that you weren’t real. They even took me to a therapist to have my head shrinked, but he only gave me some candy to nibble on and chucked me under the chin — “Only one at bedtime sweetheart, but keep that fairy dust in your eyes or you’ll become an old sucker just like me.”
But I...
April 2009
9 posts
Sketching in Crayon
A model gets on the 4 train at 59th. Her feet are flat plains in shoes that don’t give an inch, her hair is pulled from off her face into an effortless chignon. She flips through her portfolio, chewing a finger eagerly as she takes in the show — the nymphet, the siren, the sun-streaked smile of Abercrombie & Fitch.
Three white women in their mid-20s shift their weight back and forth on...
Thoughts On Kevin Smith And His Scantily Clad... →
I Really Don't Want to Be Known as "That Girl Who... →
Madame X - A Bar Review Post-Mortem
“But I just don’t understand why you don’t want to paint me anymore,” wailed Madame X to John Singer Sargent.
“You are no longer new,” Sargent replied, as matter of fact as a brush stroke. “I told you to stop with the slip of your dress strap. That alabaster shoulder, Amelie, was everything.”
“You weren’t the only one who wanted...
6 tags
Icicles by Cynthia. Meter from me. Sybil.
“I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.“ - Vladimir Nabokov, The Vane Sisters
2 tags
A Ghost Story Out of Season
1.
The house at the end of the world was like a sad wedding cake in lavender stucco, but for years, the ghost whispered, it had reigned over the lavish seaside community, dignified in forest green.
When I first came you singled me out, told me stories. You showed me where you had undressed Marilyn Monroe, who had made love to you in the servants’ entrance because she had wanted to get her...
5 tags
Hey "Lost," I Think I'm Breaking Up With You
Your season by season episode guide and thinly veiled allegory all in one:
Season 1 - Spring:
He was the crazy transfer student who materialized out of nowhere and before you knew it the two of you were playing hooky and taking long walks on the beach. He hit you like a train (or even plane — ahem) wreck, except that it felt kinda good.
And then it got better. In fact, you just danced...
March 2009
17 posts
4 tags
Burlesque! Bombshells!...Bridezillas? →
I met super star burlesque performer Angie Pontani and wrote about it for chicktellectual.com
9 tags
No Exit
I envied the fans’ reverence at a Morrissey concert tonight the way that I once envied my childhood Catholic friends who had me over for Christmas and consumed the body and blood of Jesus Christ on Sundays.
“Daddy, do you believe in God?”
“No, darling.”
“What about heaven?”
“I don’t think there’s a heaven. But we can celebrate...
3 tags
Brooklyn IS the New Manhattan: Restaurant Specials... →
3 tags
Receeding
There is nothing like a really bad recession to give one a sense of bona fide entitlement.
Lunch hour, midtown: Anthropologie makes no concession to recession. Women cluster in midwestern corsages, idling in home decor for an aromatherapeutic infusion before plucking gingham dresses to lift to lilting frames. It’s Little House on the Prairie couture with a slightly higher thread count,...
2 tags
3 tags
98.6
Fever fits me like a favorite, worn-in blanket. Normally my body temperature rests at one and a quarter/ one half degrees below normal (in inverse proportion to my height, which alternately slouches and stands at 5’6” 1/4/1/2) so that a spring breeze can chill my naturally good temper and a sheet at night becomes my best ally in the full thickness of a summer heat wave.
The sickness...
4 tags
7th Grade
…the lost year, the broken year, the dead zone — an endless expanse of fake grass at Tavern on the Green and a round of croquet with the one other “poor” kid who holds the spiked, pink drink for me. We stagger upwards towards the holding line in a game of bourgeoise red rover…
1 tag
A Thought on Dating
The Meal as a centerpiece to courtship spells recipe for disaster.
Yet that’s how it always begins: a stray streamlet of sauce on chin, crumbs nesting on lap, and ultimately, financial negotiation.
1 tag
Twitter-twitches and Turrets
Madness, spiraling upward:
LeonoraHelenaCreeping feeling that I may have a long-winded prose style. Numbers descend rapidly — heart accelerates — approaching less than zero…3 minutes ago from web
LeonoraHelenaI also have nightmares that I have started a Twitter account and begin posting with rabid, ADHD-induced compulsion.7 minutes ago from web
LeonoraHelenaI have nightmares...
6 tags
Conversations with a Sociopath
Like Cincinnatus C. I keep wondering when the axe is going to fall.
Everytime I pull my hair back I tease fate, flaunting a bared nape. “Her neck is so swanlike,” they have all begun to say.
Cincinnatus used to waste his time wondering about when it would happen too:
“So it may be tomorrow morning?” he used to ask.
I know I am guilty of something terrible because I feel guilty...
6 tags
Rejection Letters: A Practicality
Today I received two rejection letters which may exemplify the astute teachings of a Gotham Writers’ professor about the hiearchy of rejection letters. Since both were from the same person at the same publication (although he dons two distinct titles at different email addresses) we can employ some scientific methodology by eliminating the variable of personality — “Oh Leonora,...
7 tags
Rejection Letters: A Theory
A Gotham Writers workshop teacher brought a bunch of his rejection letters to class once. He explained that there is a whole caste system of rejection letters from publishers. They range from the Real, Bona Fide Rejection — often printed on a form letter and addressed to Whom It May Concern — to the You’re Not Really a Reject, You’re Practically On the Waiting List!...
7 tags
A Different Shade of Strange
I Took the Blue Pill…
…Because everyone really prefers a juicy steak to steaming veggies and gruel. Jonny Von Golden has directed two new films — Fatale and Real Gone — for blue pill junkies.
Each film plays with the pause right before the montage of a delicious dream sequence threatens to break into the nightmare’s undertow. He and co-writer/ co-producer...
11 tags
Binary Colors
Kate Winslet fans pre Revolutionary Road; Kate Winslet fans post
Puppy love; Catty claws
Vamps and vaudeville; Twilight trolls
Prometheus saves mankind; Neo sighs: “Woah, dude”
Jolie in Gia; Brangelina
The Tao Te Ching; Yuppie Yogis
The Gilmore Girls; Gossip Hurl
Real men have eyebrows; Tweed-Clad Tween-zers
Gen X; Gen Why?
Gemini; Gemini
3 tags
When Godot is a No Show
9 tags
You Know You're A Post-Modernist If:
1. You drop the words “self” and “other around a lot in conversation, whether it be when questioning your existential place in the universe, drinking at the local pub or chatting with your dental hygenist.
2. When thinking about the concepts of “Self” and “Other” you tend towards capitalization.
3. You are your own Other.
4. You have all of Samuel Beckett’s plays...
3 tags
Five Reasons to Write a List for McSweeney's
1. Writing a list takes less time than writing an essay, a story or a novel. You can even do it while cooking spaghetti. See, I’ve already finished 1/5th of my list. 2. If you’re a girl or have any anal-retentive qualities whatsoever, writing a list is as second nature as well, writing a list. (Not to mention making tautological statements in parantheticals.) 3. If your list...
February 2009
15 posts
When I Was A Teenaged Witch
The morning commute is still a bitch even if you are the most powerful witch in high school. The subway rocks her back into dreams still fresh with the scent of nail polish and séances. Hair is light, light brown — not blond, not gold — and as oily as cheeks flushed pink with the obnoxious blush of fifteen. Her face flushes through too, forming a tender promise to the future.
She’s...
Women - I
Her body slithered up into a perfect S shape into a waist that was Audrey Hepburn small. Daddy long legs slide up an a-line skirt up to her armpits, a thick mass of chocolate hair curling slightly at the ends past the tiny dimple in her back.
What did this creature’s face look like? I looked for a clue from the one man she passed on the subway platform, but he didn’t look up from his...
9 tags
Love and Marriage
Another typical evening at the big house. Seems like Jove was going to come home again smelling like lady luck and the sweet smell of rain on wet grass. Juno whips her pet prized peacock Argos into a full length ball gown before supper could even begin to simmer in the kitchen (glazed Titan pork and liver, sunny side up). Drinking her Bellini at the great table spanning one mile each way from each...
3 tags
The Time Traveler's Dupe
You would never think to look for a wormhole on the Upper East Side but when I walked into The Bar it was hanging there patiently like a welcome sign penned in an expensive whore’s pink cursive. It hangs in front of the bar and the random bookshelves where you bought me the first drink as I came to meet you shaking from across the room. It hangs in the backroom where the calligraphy bleeds...
Tainted Love
I was five and he was six. He was a tow-headed wonder boy who lived in my building and would skulk about the courtyard like Pip in search of Stella’s fairy dust.
The cherry colored balloon enticed with “POP ME.” Inside I had written a note: “Eye”— with badly mascaraed, pounding lashes — “Heart” – in crimson crayon, the harlot’s leer – “U” – the illegal turn of the...
Lunch Hour
Pretty people and overweight people and ugly people and every-people all over the place flock to the big-time for the midtown monster sushi lunch special fix. Big sweaters recline awkwardly on chairbacks during a watery post-lunchtime cocktail — big women in big coats dip into the openings of plastic shopping bags — men with thin arms play at dousing their fingers into soy sauce and then knaw at...
Mad Girl's Index of Definitions and Terms
“Disqus, 1. A cunning pun-dification hybrid of both “discuss” and “discus.” Discus (verb), the sport of throwing around a circular disk with certain diameter and weight requirements (see discus, noun), is suggestive of the sport of discuss(ion) as well as the competitive and potentially volatile nature of blog discussion and commentary in particular.
“Disqus,...
4 tags
Hamletizing
Hamletizing is something that a Danish Prince, J. Alfred Prufrock and I all not like to do a lot of but do a lot of anyway: — “Did I just see my dead daddy’s specter or do I need to get my royal head shrinked?” ”Do I kill his killer or skulk and soliloquize to stage left?” —“Do I dare to buy some Rogaine or let my bald spot grow like an...
Flight School
All the cool kids got their launching licenses at 16. The really precocious ones, the ones who smelled like private school cardigans and clove cigarettes, they were launching at 15. She had privately dared on 15 but the mission was aborted when the dorm mistress caught her sneaking out of her room with a stolen spacesuit. Somehow the time when the mere thought of heights made her dizzy had gone...