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Novels by Mary Marcus
New on the Blog
Mind Over…
I’ve been doing something like a meditation practice for a long time. I say something like because, although I’ve read plenty of books on the subject from different disciplines, and have a yoga practice of long standing where the meditation aspect often enters in, I’ve never formally studied with a teacher the way one is supposed to do if one is to learn something as esoteric as meditation. This prejudice against taking instruction on meditation is completely capricious, as I practically live at the nearby yoga studio here and even more so home in LA where the drive is far less picturesque. (It’s hard to imagine somewhere with worse traffic than LA: but that’s East Hampton, Amagansett–never mind the other hamlets in this region known as the Hamptons–in July and August.) I guess this is my karmic debt alas. For a while, I was going to do TM because everyone who does it, swears by it, and I liked the idea of twice a day for twenty minutes but I didn’t like the way I was hounded online after just one little cyber inquiry. I could mention a few other meditation cults I’ve contacted throughout the years, and I can genuinely say the same thing: not only did the usual fear of turning my mind over to the authorities enter in, I felt I was being marketed to. I was pitched morning noon and night if I inquired just once. And If I inquired twice, I was asked for my phone number, a credit card and a firm commitment. Consequently for at least ten years, I’ve settled into my...Goodbye Uncle Bob!
On Tuesday of this week, my son and I drove to Jericho, New York and finally emptied out and closed down the storage unit that had been acquired don’t ask me how long ago, because no one in my husband’s family was willing to part with the fifty years of paintings, letters, notebooks, and the rest of the detritus of my father and mother-in-law’s apartment on West 77th street following her death. What is it about old crap that reaches out its dusty moldy fingers and puts the vice grip on the sense of reason? I must have that ugly old photograph. I cannot live without that business letter from 1957. The trips people could have taken for what we spent! The fabulous clothes, the wonderful dinners! The massages, the Italian leather shoes, the cashmere! What might have been and what have been point to one end: what idiots we were. My son and I, however now have the moral high ground: we did it! We closed down the money pit. As recently as last summer, my husband and I had set forth with a rented truck and a firm resolve and left Uncle Bob’s Storage Unit facility with an empty truck and mutual anxiety attacks. These old possessions and the memories they elicit are so debilitating. My son had warned me on the morning we set out: “We might not get it done today, and you can’t just throw away something without vetting it with me! Otherwise, I’m not driving you there!” “Okay,” I said. And I wondered if this was going to be A Visit to Uncle Bob’s Redux, but at least we had not rented a truck. We were driving in my son’s great...Lost in Lexicon
I was in a conversation Sunday morning with a very hip forty something entrepreneur. He used the word curated seven times. I’ve been hearing the c word bandied about for a few years now. Everything is curated! Once upon a time there was the curator and the collection. As in art with a capital A. Now Whole Foods is curated. And one curates one’s clothing. I told my friend Laraine the echt dog walker, she should say her pack is carefully curated. It is! Urban English, while wily, entertaining and certainly hip, is a language remarkably imprecise. Also, I never get it. I don’t know if this is because I don’t spend enough time online (it seems to me, I spend my entire life online). Or because I’m just plain dense. Also, I’ve never understood no matter how many times someone explains to me or I look up, the word inchoate. I know what it means. I just don’t understand it. I could never, for instance, use it in a sentence. If you use a word, you have to understand it. How about that schadenfreude? The inimitable German one-word marvel that says it so much better than envy, jealousy, or hostility. Shadenfreude, the joy we feel in another’s misfortune, is in itself a little work of art. My cousin Melissa Marcus, a French scholar and translator of Isabelle Ebherhardt, sent me a poem the other day—Boketto—in the Japanese language, to stare out of windows without purpose. Now that’s a beauty. Uxorious is not an especially pretty word or one heard all that often out there in our carefully curated...
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