April 16th, 2008

, Dear Albert,

I had thought of writing to Landon, but it seems I only really wanted to write to you.  The subject being this: "God its such a waste of time, isn't it?  Why bother?"  Can't we spend a bit of time without making love?  Its really never going to last.

The fact that you're the most beautiful man in the world is obviously enticing to me.  It also means that I will never dominate you, and therefore won't allow myself to be dominated by you (that would be disastrous!)  And this is a positive aspect as well.  However, the lack of danger is uninspiring.  And I'm sure there is a lack of intrigue on your part.  Your eyes are dim with subtle criticism and your demeanor is all self-indulgent non-committal.  It leads me to feel, "Why should I care?"

I won't blame you for any of this, and I'm sure you won't blame me.  When the pieces have scattered haphazardly, we will say to ourselves, "well, that was quite nice.  Oh my goodness, I ought to quit smoking."

Yours,

 Greta

….
Ah but see you've just written me.  And I can't even make myself write back to you.  You pretty angel of my darkness!  Why do I have to wait so long to find you.  A little momentum is all I need.  Thank you so much for the little vignette in the picture frame.  I ought to hang that on my wall right now.  It says, "Interjections are exclamations denoting any sudden emotion of the mind, either of pain, pleasure or surprise."  Of course it was meant to describe my demeanor.



Sunday April 20th or Monday perhaps, 3:17 am

, Dear Albert,

I feel like giving you a present.  Perhaps to make it.  I could invent a palindrome for you.  Might need to get some help on that from Adrian.  I would like it to say something about "Albert of the ancestral spirits".  Difficult.  

Albert a spirit of such ancestral gloomy happiness - happines sance stral spir it treb la

Nice one.  Hey not bad now.  I think I'll consult Adrian about this one.  He'll know just the thing.  I'll print it out with calligraphy on a very nice piece of paper with wonderful ink, etc.  How nice!

 Greta




April 21st, 2008 4:49 am

Dear Albert,

I'm going to go ahead and finish the drugs.

Greta




April 28th, 2008m 

Dear Albert,

The kids coming home sound like rain outside.  Or it could be raining.  It was very nice to see you.  And thanks.

Greta




May 2nd, 2008, Dear Albert, 

I am frustrated.  I was angry when Arnie told me that you were sleeping with men and doing heroin.  Not that I give a damn about that really.  But to tell you the truth I've been a little frightened that you've given me some horrible disease.  And I feel fairly sure that you wouldn't give a damn about that.  Am I wrong?  I feel your nonchalance is a cloak of uncaring.  It’s not ridiculous.  I wear these invisible clothes as well.

Well yes try your best to be bored.  I am sick of myself sometimes as well.

Greta


Poets are so often reflective, which is why
we hate them; we refuse to sanction them.
They do so much of it, and we need so little
of their silence.
 How can silence be so crowded?

For instance the man on the metro who swung
on his cane over my book to provoke me:
"looking at the bushman trances, are you?"
However not-worth-mentioning,
  it was just that

 refusal to ask him, in turn, for his life
 in the bush, living wild in his early days
with the oldest tribe on earth; he was probably
that very son of the Marshalls, the documentary

filmmaker, who wore khakis on the train
and a t-shirt, swerved off at Penn Station, knowingly
he had left me with a worthless anecdote.  Hopefully

my own chaotic silence is forgiven, thats all I want, I mean,
for that moment, time and time and time and time and time again.




April 9th, 2008, 

Dear big man on the cover of the Rem Koolhaas article called Bigness,

I threw you at Albert Herring-bone yesterday.  He thought I was trying to dismiss his education in the arts.  I can't believe they make art school students read about you!  I always want to ask you, what is the point?  But I know, I know, there's no getting answers out of you, you big lug.

Anyway I hope I didn't make him jealous or anything.  You have a way of blocking the limelight.  When I spend time with you my head gets caught in all the heavy overhanging clouds.  I can't make out anything clearly, can't make sense of reason when I'm expected to read all this nonsense.  And you're the biggest nonsense of all!

But I'm so glad you've been around so much lately.  As confusing at it all gets, it’s so nice to have your warm, thick muscles gently wrapping the cords of my brain, all night long.

I know you're leaving but I also know you'll always be there.  At least I'll have a little time for myself now.

Next time, baby,

Greta



Dear Albert,

Don't call me anymore.  You're insulting.  It’s annoying.  Not even Lawrence was so annoying.  And he had a good excuse.  Or so it seemed.  Childhoods are involved in really and totally unapproachable good excuses.

Don’t make love to me at all for god’s sake, having so many other, better things to do.  

Greta




Dear Albert,

 I am writing too much.  I don't want to see you anymore if

 1. you do heroin 
2. you sleep with boys. 
3. you do both. 

Okay.  How about this:  I don’t want to see you anymore if:

1. you don't know where my fucking drill is.

Fine.

You're top notch.  You really are.

But why are our outings so boring?  It just doesn't make sense taking into account that I find you very intelligent in a rare way.  I'm not saying you're rare, you have very rare intelligence as far my encounters go, brain-wise, as in pure-brain-wise.  

So yes, I think when we go out on the town its a little boring.  And I think you agree.  So I thought I wouldn't call you unless I had something lovely to do.

Its as if the night were made of spectral-images that do not actually exist.

But at age ninety, god, science and money allowing, I promise I will live in illusions, much stronger than now.

Much stronger than now! Greta





May 20th, 2008, Dear Albert,

I was very annoyed by you at times at well.  But I never acted the disciplinarian.

Here's what you can do for me:

1. Buy me a ticket to the sound, a vacation for the weekend, for us, all alone, at the cottage.  So that I can refuse it.
2. Hop in a cab with a basket of flowers and candy, headed uptown.  So that I won't be home.
3. Give me a call.  I'll drop the phone in the toilet.

Love,

Greta



May 23rd, 2008

Dear Albert,

Well I realized that one shouldn't call someone 15 times in a row.  I had a talking-to from a friend.  That was my consultation.  What-what?  I didn’t know.

Love,

Greta




May 23rd, 2008, Hey pretty baby.  Messed things up but still wanted to give you a kiss goodbye.  So I called you last Wednesday before running away from the city.  I had to get out anyway and something crazy came up.  I might be a week and a half in but could stay til September, weird, I don't know yet.  I'll miss you!

Greta


May 28th, 2008

Dear Albert,

My mind has cleared.  I had a beautiful day.  I wanted very badly to lie to you and tell you  that I would be in Venice for a long, long time.  But it was a lie, a desperate ploy to feign uncaring.  Because honestly I've been out and about in the city so much recently and I've thought, by god I hope I run into that boy.

But of course when I'm not sleeping with someone—you for instance—I'm out and about and feeling very alone and wonderful.  I've seen a few other people.  One is fine.  Still.  Not quite as intoxicating as you are, maybe, almost, maybe, who knows.

I very much hope that I don't have to start another letter-writing program, darling—so soon.  All I know is that no one has made me desire to create a brand new gmail draft as of yet.  "Letters that will not be sent."  The darkest and most memorable moments are hidden in those.  Sometimes, perhaps, they contain the thing that should have been sent.  But I imagine that’s not very often the case.

Yes, its true, my mind has cleared.  I took the spaghetti-mess and turned it into rays of sunlight.  I mean I straightened out the knots somewhat.  In Kristeva's book (and she's very complimentary towards her obviously self-inspired main character) Olga is a series of explosions.  That is, the energy moves outwards.  And I have been a series of implosions.  Without realizing it for all the dust.  It comes from my anxiety.  Anxiety + imagination instead of imagination + love.

It has so much to do with the way one speaks to oneself.  To look on death with love.  To look on love with death.

On that note I hope to get the part as a dead Victorian lady in the torture-chamber mortuary scene for a National Geographic documentary.

And on another note, i found the most beautiful Craigslist ad in the world, look here:

I have two roses that are about 10-15 years old. They dried on the vine so to speak and are still in the original vases. I am afraid to touch them for fear that they might shatter into dust. They have been and still do just sit in two different vases on a shelf and collect some dust. Unfortunately, I am moving and need to do something with these. Fearing that they will shatter if I jostle them too much and being unable to do much else with them, I'd like to find a way to permanently preserve them. So, I had the idea of encasing them in glass or plastic, much like a prehistoric insect might get suspended in amber. I was thinking that if they could be preserved in glass and then the glass cut into a smooth cylinder around them, they then could be displayed on a mantle without the vase. So, I'd like to have both roses put into clear glass or plastic about 4 inches in diameter and about a foot tall with the rose suspended "in mid air" in the middle and do this for both of them. P lease let me know if you have ever done this before and reply with pictures. These roses are quite important to me and I don't want them damages in any trial and error experimental procedures.

Considering that these roses need to be very carefully hand carried, anyone that isn't in lower Manhattan shouldn't bother to apply as I'd imagine you'd need to walk it back to your place or take a cab.

Isn't that marvelous?

 Greta
 
June 6th, 2008, Dear Albert, I stepped on your toes (literally and accidentally).  Was I drunk?  I mean I must have been out of my senses, out of my bodily senses! because I really didn't notice at all.  It was a lovely party, for the release of Sssssssssssssssss magazine. I wasn't bored like you said.  I was amused.  And if you want an excuse then I’d gladly admit to being exhausted.
 
So let me continue on:  I stepped on your toes.  And then you kicked me in the shin.  And then I kicked you in the shin.  And then you kicked me in the shin again.  And then I ran to the bathroom.  And then I ran into you in the doorway and then I slapped you on the face.  And then you slapped me on the face.  And then we were sullen and went home where I dug myself in the pillow.  And then we had sex, which you finished behind me with such gusto and which apparently wasn't very emotionally ameliorating for you, because afterwards every touch I gave was like a slap to you.  So you got angry and turned away.  And apparently I kept slapping you, although I had no control over the distinction between a slap and a caress.  I persisted.  "He must see that I mean to be kind," I thought.  And then you ran away behind the black curtains.  And I wept.  I woke up and all of your alarm clocks were going off.  I deleted my number from your phone and yours from mine.  I later felt guilty and put my number back into your speed-dial #7, without a name.  I couldn't figure out how to work the blackberry.
 
Later I left a message on your phone, admitting that the two of us really don't get along.  But you are a strained issue, a piece of dissatisfaction for me, which is the grain of desire. Greta




June 7th, 2008, 

Dear Albert,

 The draft letters are even more important once you are gone.  I'm sure you are not gone completely.  I hope we will inevitably meet as friends, but our time as lovers was short-lived and strange.  And I will not miss you as a lover now.  So our last night was a solidification.  It solidifies something that would never have an explanation.  You are strange and selfish.  I am a distracted prankster, merrily dissociating myself.

The challenge is that every day become a happy process.  My failure with you does leave me nostalgic (especially to the tune of nostalgic music ... "whenever she's feeling empty... whenever her face is frozen, unable to make it anymore... her shadow is always with her... her shadow can always keep her small"  ... okay, a bad song, okay, but I’m listening to it now).   Every day is a little progress.  Regrets are very weighty.  When you realize that not everything will happen to you in the future, that some things have already happened, that some things will never happen—there's not enough time—that’s when I become wistful, regretful.  I blame myself for failing to provoke the beautiful multiplicity of infinite reality.

Now I am sitting in a hot apartment with two fans blowing.  Pulp is playing at this very importune time.  It’s so inappropriate for a lovely Saturday afternoon.

I'll miss something,

 Greta

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