Saturday, March 20

This morning, I wondered if maybe I should have saved my little Tour of my Room for a day when I found I didn't have anything to write.

But so far, surprisingly, I've found I have a lot of Thoughts to share.

Especially when I first wake up. I've heard more than one person recommend meditating first thing in the morning, before your Monkey Mind has too much of a chance to get warmed up, but I find first thing in the morning I have the MOST thoughts in my mind, and—at least while in quarantine—it seems to help me to sit down and type some of those thoughts out first thing, and then sit down to meditate.

Maybe it'll change once I can leave the room and talk to Roman in person (hopefully this will happen—we don't yet know how the scheduled roof visit will work). I know that the solitude and the blog writing has encouraged me to keep a running mental commentary going on at times, especially in the morning.

Even when I talked to Roman for the first time (but not the last—we figured out we can call each other on our room phones) at a couple points I was aware that I was talking to him in the voice of this blog, which was odd. I guess I can't always turn that voice off...after all, I am the only person I talk to. Or I was. Before we figured out the room phone thing.

At Scott's recommendation, I started reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk, which has transported me to a frozen little hamlet in Poland. Yesterday, I was really struck by a passage in it. The narrator is considering one of her neighbors, who is a writer, and says,

In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind—that such a Person is not him- or herself, but an eye that's constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality—its inexpressibility.

Ooh, what a perfectly put thought. Slightly evokes Graham Greene's there is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer, but with different consequences.

Speaking of writing, when I was reading the book What She Ate, I was fascinated—and a little horrified—to learn about the writing style that Helen Gurley Brown pioneered as the Editor in Chief of Cosmopolitan. This is a long passage but, what, is this going to stray from the otherwise tight focus of this blog? Here goes:

One of Helen’s earliest and most definitive acts at Cosmopolitan was to seize control of the writing...Not until her second year at the magazine did she relax her personal grip on the prose and assemble a list of writing rules—sixteen pages’ worth, along with eight pages of clichés to avoid—and distribute them to her staff with instructions to wield them on every article that came in...Helen wanted prose that had been stripped to its essentials, and she deleted every word she judged useless, including “the,” “an,” and “a” if they appeared more than twice per sentence. Then, once the paragraph had been reduced to bare scaffolding, she added the accessories—chiefly ellipses, exclamation points, and italics. The voice that emerged became her trademark. “You and I are such old friends—ten years together now—that I have this odd desire to tell you about myself!” she wrote in a 1975 editor’s column. “I rise at 8:00 A.M., fix David’s breakfast if he’s in town, exercise for an hour and ten minutes (nothing interferes...I've only missed two days in eight years), dress, do my hair, makeup, arrive at the office at 11:00. Once there I usually stay—lunch, unless I have a business date, comes with me in a brown paper bag.”

Not everybody found this kind of prose as attractive as she did...Nora Ephron, who wrote for Cosmopolitan a few times early in her career, said it drove her crazy to see every story bombarded with “italics, exclamation points, upbeat endings, and baby simpleness.” But Helen cherished the way she sounded in print: she used this voice in all her books, and she was proud of imposing a literary style on Cosmopolitan that made it, she declared, the equal of any magazine in the country, including The New Yorker. “I would say the writing in Cosmopolitan is 60 to 70 percent of our success,” she told an industry publication. “It’s non-boring writing . . . and even if it happens to be about how not to have jitters on your first date, it is just as carefully crafted as a book about Henry Kissinger’s White House years.” True, books about Henry Kissinger rarely included terms like “pippy-poo” and “depthy,” which were two of Helen’s favorites, but she never apologized. As she told an interviewer from Playboy, “Let’s just say I’ve made a thing out of writing very girlishly.”

I find that pretty intriguing. I haven't read a Cosmo since I was fifteen, and I really never analyzed the sentence structure, but it's interesting to think you can create a style of writing that I think is fun to consume but...nutritionally void? Like the diet Jello Helen Gurley Brown so enjoyed?!

I'm kidding. I don't really think certain types of prose/media/etc are good or bad for you (or, I try not to think that way). It did make me think of Cat Marnell's writing style—I found the writing style of How to Murder Your Life pretty enticing and I couldn't always place why. Now I wonder how much of her writing style was influenced by her work in the magazine industry, and how much of that style was originated by Helen Gurley Brown?

Also, you guys, what if I wrote this blog in HGB's style?

Woke at 6:30AM—can you believe it?—the sun was up and everything! Had time for a quick shower and sent some texts. Breakfast was The Continental—toast slathered in peanut butter and a touch of strawberry jam. Heaven!

 

Anyway. In case you're curious, this threadbare 1970's polyester slip (that I've owned since I was thirteen) is what I wear most every day...

Unless I'm doing yoga, in which case I look super tough...

Look, I live in a room. Sometimes it's hard to come up with ideas
for pictures I can post other than meals

This is what I ate for lunch...

Spaghetti with tomato sauce, garlic bread, and salmon. Bizarre combination and way too
much food to eat, but the pasta wasn't bad.

And, oh yes, this is who I saw this afternoon!

Just after lunch, there was a knock on the door...and a guy wearing a mask handed me over a red wristband! Which means the first Covid test came back negative—and that means we can leave the room for an hour every day!

It's not Day Seven, so we couldn't go to the rooftop, but we could go to the garden on the ground floor. Which is just kind of a big patio surrounded by a fence, with chairs set up under tents to block the sun, and a few frangipani trees and palms planted around the borders.

It was very windy and very hot down there. And so exciting to be in a different setting!

I even put on a real dress

It was also so exciting to see Roman! We had so much to catch up on...which sounds hilarious and yet felt very true. The hour flew by.

It was strange to catch glimpses of things I can see from my balcony. The garden is located on the far side of Tower One, which is the tower directly facing my room (in Tower Two). Sitting at the base of Tower One made me appreciate just how much it obstructs the view from my room. And from where we were sitting, I couldn't exactly see the things that I can see from my balcony (the garden, the 7-11, the parking lots), but I could tell those things were very close by and the proximity to such famous landmarks was thrilling.

Wait, am I still writing like HGB? Or was Cosmopolitan just written in the style of a woman scribbling in her diary?

Anyway, for dinner I had a very good mushroom red curry with rice:

The rest of the day you can probably fill in—meditation, yoga, reading, Project Runway, emails & texts, etc, etc, etc.