10.12.15

in the closest brush with the methods of marie "life-changing magic of tidying up" kondo i'll likely ever have,* i've been reading and divesting myself of books i brought home from the office and shelved years ago. one, a jack nicholson biography, gets rolling with some bleak notes about his love life:

After 1974,** with one or two exceptions,*** [Nicholson] never played a purely romantic lead. And in real life, while women continued to be a source of both pleasure and pain for him, true love was something he could never fully accept, believe, or trust from them. His seventeen-year relationship with Anjelica Huston, the woman able to get closest to him, was a series of hellos and good-byes, angers, frustrations, and, on both their parts, infidelities strewn throughout their time together. It is significant that in the end they both wound up alone.

i just finished anjelica huston's second memoir, is the thing; she was widowed in 2008 when her husband of 16 years (the sculptor robert graham) died of a horrible blood disease. in the absence of this weird month-spanning head cold i'd yell about bad biographers here for awhile; instead i will but say that it's a shame i can't leave books unfinished, and that i'll try to spark joy in you by following up with additional sins as i read them.

speaking of head colds, i ran a half marathon with one yesterday! that was alright when we were scrambling to get up, out of the house, and down to the staten island ferry before the sun came up; as when i worked in an office and had to train in the morning before heading there, i was so sleepy and groggy that i barely registered the inelegance of the hour. coughing my way across staten island was less of a treat, but i can blame my unimpressive time on illness instead of the late nights i spent writing and concertgoing last week, and that's something. either way, i have a medal and the reptilian contentment that accompanies it. i don't think less is more, as warhol said; more is better.****


*unless you count when my thoughtful friend lesley konmari'ed the living daylights out of her place in brooklyn and i inherited a bunch of her clothes, which was indeed magical.

**(the year in which nicholson learned that the woman he'd believed to be his sister was actually his mother, and that his "mother" was in fact his grandmother)

***as in as good as it gets, for which he won one of his three oscars.

****..."big paintings cost more than little paintings, and magazines pay by the word."