Would you believe that I actually LOST your telephone #?? It was
\non an envelope, an empty envelope, pre-addressed to the telephone
\ncompany, and I of course used that envelope to pay my telephone
\nbill, not thinking at the moment that your phone # was on it, but
\nmaybe thinking that I would remember to write it down elsewhere,
\nwhen I had a moment or two to remember. Life is so confusing, so
\ntired and disjunct that I am surprised little things like this do
\nnot go wrong more often.<\/p>\n
You will be pleased to know that I was at last able to procurea
\nbook of poems by Jacques Prevert. What can I say? They’re
\nstrange, they’re lovely, they’re fun and loose, tainted by slight
\nmadness. He seems to use the image of little birds quite often,
\ndon’t you think? I wonder if the stuff sounds the same musically
\nin English as in French?? Thanks for suggesting him to me. You
\nknow, I saw the book at the store one day, didn’t have enough
\nmoney with me to get it, so I went back the next day, and they
\nwere almost sold out! JP seems to be a hot property around here.<\/p>\n
I have practiced myself dumb this holiday weekend (is it also a
\nholiday for you?). I am preparing a new program that I will play
\nat wealthy people’s homes and apartments for their private
\nparties. I understand that they basically throw money to the
\nwind at these events, and would not think twice to pay me some
\noutrageous fee. I am anticipating a second pay-raise in the
\ncoming two or three weeks, and hope that I will be able to move
\nto an apartment on Park Avenue by mid-June. It is all I really
\nwant right now, to live in a quiet, lovely neighborhood, not this
\ngateway to hell that I live in now. You say I should not become
\nrich, but I say that I must, I must become richer than all the
\nindustrial nations combined, if only to make up for these early
\nyears of my adulthood which have been so less than glamorous, and
\nwhich have not created in me the idea that I could achieve any
\nother people’s respect, not even my own. I mean sure, I love
\nart, music, poetry; I understand the most obscure allusions,
\ncomprehend the most discursive outlines — but when will I be
\nable to explore these matters with any level of legitimacy? When
\ncan I do thus without sounding like a babbling parkbench
\nimbecile, singing one song while my radio plays another? Does
\nthis make any sense to you?<\/p>\n
It is Monday, May 31, 1993. Memorial Day, so I am at home. The
\nweather is so-so, so I probably will not venture outside too
\nmuch. I don’t like holidays. Do you?<\/p>\n
I listen to my Marlene Dietrich recordings in a different way
\nnow, now that I have shared one of them with you on the telephone
\nat 4:00 or whatever time it was in the morning your time. Music
\nis to be shared, I think. It really is a social phenomenon,
\nisn’t it? I mean so little music is itself memorable, but the
\ncircumstances under which it was heard are most clearly recalled.<\/p>\n
I just finished breakfast of strawberries and coffee. It is
\nstill early, and I am hoping to clean this apartment once and for
\nall, and do miles and miles of laundry, too. The summer is
\ncoming, which means that the hours at work will relax quite a
\nbit, as they do around Christmas. I have a tremendous
\nopportunity at work to make a strong impression on my bosses and
\non the executives upstairs. I am exploring the possibility of
\nincorporating Avon into the interactive, high-definition
\ntelevisions of the future. No one else in the company is doing
\nthis, and in fact I don’t think any of them even know what I am
\ntalking about when I tell them that one day you will be able to
\nselect a movie from a list of thousands right there on your TV,
\nand one day you will be able to play video games from a network
\nservice as you would do today with an in-home game system.
\nPeople dismiss me, can’t identify with what I am saying, are not
\neven able to take notes on what I say because it’s so foreign to
\nthem. It’s like trying to tell someone in 1850 that one day
\nthere will be a box which transmits visual images of the day’s
\nevents right into your home. Sounds ridiculous, I admit, but
\nit’s kind of frustrating to see that a company with the resources
\nof Avon is not already actively seeking out every conceivable way
\nto keep itself from going out of business.<\/p>\n
Well, I am ranting a bit here, and I am becoming a trifle
\nfrustrated with this dumpy computer into which I pour these
\nmid-morning thoughts, because it is an old, obtuse thing which
\nbecomes slower and slower the longer it remains turned on. I
\nwrote my last letter to you on the computer at work, which is
\nactually not a whole lot faster than this one…<\/p>\n
Tell me your telephone # again, won’t you? Please..<\/p>\n
So I think I need to go, need to do laundry, sweep this floor
\nthat lies beneath the chair on which I sit at this time. Need to
\nthrow away 4 weeks worth of New York Times, useless wires and
\ncables that litter the place. This could be a droll, empty day,
\nlike most holidays. Hope your Monday, May 31, 1993, was pleasant
\nand remarkable in some way.<\/p>\n
Octagonally,
\n-mt<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I knew her through the Minitel, available in New York as “Aline”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-6s9","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24809"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24810,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24809\/revisions\/24810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}