“You writers and artists poop out and get all mixed up, and somebody has to come in and straighten you out.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them – always thinking people are so important – especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it – on the inside.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Last Tycoon
Twenty years ago, I could not yet hold up my head on my own, but was still rocked by Kurt Cobain’s death. Not, of course, because I cared (at the time) about him or his music, but rather because my infant heart could not help but feel the pain of my father. He loved Kurt, even if he didn’t particularly love Nirvana. At that time my dear old dad was still a young rebel rocker, an avid worshipper of Zeppelin & The Doors. It is from my father that I later acquired my intense passion for the Jehovah of music and to this day we share that love, but back then he was consumed by it, lived every moment in the name of rock. I have a blurry memory in my soul of my rough and tough papa after hearing the news: as his knees buckled, grasping the shirt sleeve of his vneck-to-the-belly-button-chest-hair-erupting-even-in-the-90’s-wearing-best-friend. To my dad, the death of one of his favourite musicians was equal to the death of a dear friend. This is why I remember the day, because it was felt so intensely and so significantly in my family, that it is as much part of my childhood as the day I learned to walk.
It is in honour of this bitter anniversary that I share the following lyrics about the “27 club” by a fellow singer/song-writer:
28 by John Craigie
Jim Morrison, Miami County Prison,
lookin’ out the window at the barbed wire fence
Singing ‘This ain’t for me, this rock and roll scene.
I should be writing poetry on a farm out in France.
‘Cause I can’t see through the darkness. I can’t feel no pain.
Seems you lose your spark when you achieve your fame.
I could start it all over, I could escape.
If I could only make it to 28
If I could only make it to 28.’
Janis Joplin, one foot in the coffin.
Left that field a-rockin’ and she walked on out the door.
She put her head in her hands, she said ‘I’ve given all I can.
I drain myself for these fans. I ain’t never been this dry before.
‘But Imma move out of this Chelsea Hotel, stop drinking all the time.
Stop blowin’ Leonard Cohen and listening to him whine.
Cause I know I am beautiful, I will prove it someday.
If could only make it to 28.
If I could only make it to 28.’
And Kurt Cobain sat in his shirt in the rain,
stomach full of pain, eyes growin’ dark.
He said ‘I’m losing control. Oughta move down to San Francisco,
light candles at all of my shows and switch to acoustic guitars.
‘Cause this world don’t need no more tension and hate.
Needs a reason for these kids to stand up and create.
And I could pull this trigger, or I could just walk away,
if I could only make it to 28.
If I could only make it.’
Katie Makkai “Pretty”
When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, “What will I be? Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? What comes next? Oh right, will I be rich?” Which is almost pretty depending on where you shop. And the pretty question infects from conception, passing blood and breath into cells. The word hangs from our mothers’ hearts in a shrill fluorescent floodlight of worry.
“Will I be wanted? Worthy? Pretty?” But puberty left me this funhouse mirror dryad: teeth set at science fiction angles, crooked nose, face donkey-long and pox-marked where the hormones went finger-painting. My poor mother.
“How could this happen? You’ll have porcelain skin as soon as we can see a dermatologist. You sucked your thumb. That’s why your teeth look like that! You were hit in the face with a Frisbee when you were 6. Otherwise your nose would have been just fine!
“Don’t worry. We’ll get it fixed!” She would say, grasping my face, twisting it this way and that, as if it were a cabbage she might buy.
But this is not about her. Not her fault. She, too, was raised to believe the greatest asset she could bestow upon her awkward little girl was a marketable facade. By 16, I was pickled with ointments, medications, peroxides. Teeth corralled into steel prongs. Laying in a hospital bed, face packed with gauze, cushioning the brand new nose the surgeon had carved.
Belly gorged on 2 pints of my blood I had swallowed under anesthesia, and every convulsive twist of my gut like my body screaming at me from the inside out, “What did you let them do to you!”
All the while this never-ending chorus droning on and on, like the IV needle dripping liquid beauty into my blood. “Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? Like my mother, unwrapping the gift wrap to reveal the bouquet of daughter her $10,000 bought her? Pretty? Pretty.”
And now, I have not seen my own face for 10 years. I have not seen my own face in 10 years, but this is not about me.
About men wallowing on bar stools, drearily practicing attraction and everyone who will drift home tonight, crest-fallen because not enough strangers found you suitably fuckable.
This, this is about my own some-day daughter. When you approach me, already stung-stayed with insecurity, begging, “Mom, will I be pretty? Will I be pretty?” I will wipe that question from your mouth like cheap lipstick and answer, “No! The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five letters.
“You will be pretty intelligent, pretty creative, pretty amazing. But you, will never be merely ‘pretty’.”
“In shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind, brooding and solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reserve the appointed order of their maker; I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?”
– Charles Dickens , Great Expectations
“With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
“I will love myself despite the ease with which I lean toward the opposite”
– Shane Koyczan
Books & Things 