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Judith Moore's emotional life
Alone with grammy, death of a classmate, deep love of dog, a desperate writer, Thanksgiving for waifs, direct letter to reader
I sometimes likened myself to that figure in the glass ball, felt myself hermetically sealed within an unbreakable sphere, trapped.
Unafraid of Virginia Woolf
On the morning we met, he lit my cigarette and his, a nonfilter Pall Mall (you could still smoke then, at the library's front desk), with a quivering hand from which the fingernails were bitten back to the quick. He asked questions of me in short declarative sentences. Each question and each of my answers to his successive queries peeled back — with surgical precision — layer after layer of myself. He got to my calfishness.
Jan. 19, 1984 | Read full article
Postcard from Paris
And from the Latin Quarter to the Galerie Lafayette in Montparnasse to the quiet family neighborhood around rue Passy, I see Snoopy, the flop-eared dog in Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" cartoons. I see Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Betty Boop, Marilyn Monroe, Brando and James Dean. Continuous-loop tapes in some cafes play only American rockabilly or Motown or easy-listening tunes. In the supermarche, I see Kellogg's Corn Flakes. In the state-run tobacco stores, , Marlboros and Winstons are popular.
Aug. 23, 1984 | Read full article
The American Sunday
Larger cuts of meat — roast beef, crown rib, pot roast, leg of lamb, ham, goose, duckling, a roasting hen, a spring turkey, and fried chicken were served on Sundays. Individual cuts of meat — steak, cutlets, chops — were weekday fare. On Sunday the family shared one piece of meat. There would be mashed potatoes, gravy, fresh vegetables; in spring and summer, fruit salad, fussy gelatin molds, homemade yeast rolls, and in some homes, two desserts.
Oct. 25, 1984 | Read full article
The Weird conference is the banana peel on which WELL minds slip: "Pee Wee Herman Is My Spiritual Teacher," "Bulbhead Redux," "Effective Methods of Self-Mutilation," "Humans Lack a Breeding Season," "Weird Hobbies for Overcoming Ennui," Commies Choose Cocaine."
Why computer users go to the WELL
On The WELL I often feel immersed in that same atmosphere of intimacy that a letter creates and sense that presence of the human hand that a letter carries. But on The WELL, the letter arrives naked, without its envelope. It is addressed to anyone who finds it. (A book, of course, is similarly addressed, but you can't as a rule write back to the book's author, and in most instances the author hopes that you won't.)
March 1, 1990 | Read full article
One and Only
I gradually slipped family ties and substituted, for home, the life of school and playground and camp. I relished cooperative effort, was attracted to activity that called for a uniform. A man of my age, an only child, whom I have known since my late teens, spent his pre-college years in military school and served for 20 years in the Army. Not long ago when he told me, “I have always preferred barracks life, even to marriage.”
April 5, 1990 | Read full article
Garden of chessmen. Many grand gardens established in the heyday of Victorian and Edwardian England disappeared during and after World War II.
Eminent Gardeners
Brown claims that notion for this painting came to Sargent after he received a hard blow to the head while boating on the Thames; still light-headed, a vision came to him of massive white lilies growing under riverside trees lit by lanterns set out for a party. His friends, the Millets, took him home to the Cotswolds to recuperate, and there he began to set this vision down in the midst of the real-world Millet garden.
June 13, 1991 | Read full article
When the boys began to get in jams, Marie's letters didn't even hint at their trouble; and as scrapes turned into felonies, she still didn't reveal that anything had gone wrong.
Another Year Has Passed and We Are Safe and Sound
The letters Marie wrote, as year followed year, continued to portray her family life in the rosiest light possible. Her letters broke my heart but also left me feeling foolishly humbled. Because I knew Marie and I knew that from her perspective, what she wrote wasn't untruth or distortion, nor was she trying to hide from her readers the grief she and Bud suffered over their offspring's crimes and bad choices.
Dec. 12, 1991 | Read full article
John Cheever: "Scotch for breakfast and I do not like these mornings."
Suburban Journals
He is by no means always unhappy in his journal pages. He skates on the frozen pond near his house and observes that "in the pinewoods the last light flows like coals." He swims, plays scrub hockey, touch football, Baroque music on the recorder. He breeds black Labs, drives the Mack engine for the volunteer fire department, wins at badminton, prunes grapes, "feeds the tomatoes as well as the Swiss chard," and goes to garden parties.
March 19, 1992 | Read full article
My purse is so much part of me I’m surprised I don’t yell “Ouch” when someone bumps it. I’m surprised it doesn’t bleed.
Purses make boys nervous
Medicare cards, Social Security card, health insurance ID, bus passes, pill bottles, handkerchief, rent receipts, several business cards, a tumult of receipts, wallet, sunglasses, eyeglasses, a rhinestone necklace, cologne, folded dollar bills, grocery list, keys, more fabric swatches, letters, lipstick, blusher, powder, aspirin, address book, checkbook, eye shadow and mascara, ballpoint pens, Dentyne, clove Life Savers, threaded needle woven in and out a black felt square, silver compact, brush, comb, rubber bands, bus schedules….
Nov. 12, 1992 | Read full article
What, for Americans, most likely deters rabbit’s transfiguration into dinner is cuteness.
Recipes for an Overbite
Rabbit fictions permeate childhood: Br’er Rabbit, Potter’s Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, the Velveteen Rabbit, Hazel and Fiver and company in Watership Down, Bambi’s Thumper, Father Rabbit, Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit and March Hare. These fictional rabbits, turned to plush, comfort us in our cribs, soak up our nasty infant drool and insatiable infant grief. Add to these, cartoon rabbits: Roger Rabbit, Crusader Rabbit, Ricochet Rabbit, Matt Groening’s rabbits in Life in Hell.
June 23, 1994 | Read full article
Probably a minute passed, and Penny’s class started crying loud sobs.
Death’s Dirty Breath
My death waited around every corner. Every belching Fifth Avenue bus or speeding Checker cab might hit me. I hung back from open windows on high floors. I worried in the elevator that lurched up to our fifth-floor apartment that the cables might break and I’d drop down into the basement. I examined all my moles for black spots and my tongue for white coating. When I did Number Two, I looked into the toilet for blood.
Oct. 26, 1995 | Read full article
Author Moore with Lily
They Were Their Bodies
When bedtime came, we stood there with him, my husband and the girls and I, saying, “Up, Hugo, up the stairs.” Hugo did not budge. My husband said, “He’s probably sore,” and picked up Hugo, who by then must have weighed 20 pounds, and carried him upstairs. Hugo never, not ever, not once in the next 12 years of his life, walked either up or down those stairs. He was always carried. Always.
Oct. 31, 1996 | Read full article
Clockwise from top left: Luis Urrea, Sherman Alexie, Richard Wilbur, Stephen Dobyns, August Kleinzahler
Love Is a Great Subject
I mentioned to Richard Wilbur what Stephen Dobyns had said about poems that come from long relationships. Wilbur: “They’re likely to have both enchantment and a little bit of comedy in them. If there’s luck in it, they can still have a lot of the original enchantment. Sometimes one finds oneself writing poems about the limits of love; even good love, even a perfect marriage can’t do everything, can’t be a whole life.”
July 10, 1997 | Read full article
Next door, as days and nights passed, the fights intensified.
Reservations
The head of the unhappy couple’s bed and the head of my bed abutted on either side of our shared wall. The female half of the couple worked nights. She left about 3:30 in the afternoon and returned soon after midnight. Her leavings and returns were marked by slams of their door. If the male worked, he worked irregularly and at odd hours. He ran his television set during the day and through much of the night.
Oct. 23, 1997 | Read full article
How Far We Came to Be Here
I brought the green bean casserole. This is a disgusting dish, in a way, dependent as it is on canned mushroom soup, but I have always liked it because it reminds me of the Eisenhower years and Mamie Eisenhower’s bangs and Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers. It makes me want to sing, “O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.” Too, my mother made it for Thanksgiving.
Nov. 26, 1997 | Read full article
We sit in small rooms. We lean over notebooks whose paper not only is patient but also silent.
One way to Explain Bliss
Were we to meet, say, on a bench at the park, I would fall back on discussion about whether I might compliment the attractiveness of your dress. Maybe only once or twice, if that, have I gotten out of my mouth and into the ears of another person precisely what it is about which I am thinking and in the exact words in which I am thinking it. I am always falling short.
Jan. 8, 1998 | Read full article
So, there Grammy and I were, on a cold Monday afternoon in a hot steam-heated department store.
Shirley Temple’s Pencil
The salesladies screamed. One saleslady ran and got the supervisor, a skinny Italian with black currant-color eyes that beat Grammy’s eyes for piggy-eye squint meanness. She grabbed Grammy’s wrist, hard, and hissed, right into Grammy’s face, “Shut up, lady, shut up.” She got quiet, Grammy did, but she was trembling and shaking. Her face got that expression on it that I’d seen on crucified Jesuses in museum paintings. Grammy whispered, “I’ll take it” about the corset.
Dec. 17, 1998 | Read full article
Here's something you might be interested in.
Judith Moore's emotional life
Alone with grammy, death of a classmate, deep love of dog, a desperate writer, Thanksgiving for waifs, direct letter to reader
Judith Moore's emotional life
Alone with grammy, death of a classmate, deep love of dog, a desperate writer, Thanksgiving for waifs, direct letter to reader
I sometimes likened myself to that figure in the glass ball, felt myself hermetically sealed within an unbreakable sphere, trapped.
Unafraid of Virginia Woolf
On the morning we met, he lit my cigarette and his, a nonfilter Pall Mall (you could still smoke then, at the library's front desk), with a quivering hand from which the fingernails were bitten back to the quick. He asked questions of me in short declarative sentences. Each question and each of my answers to his successive queries peeled back — with surgical precision — layer after layer of myself. He got to my calfishness.
Jan. 19, 1984 | Read full article
Postcard from Paris
And from the Latin Quarter to the Galerie Lafayette in Montparnasse to the quiet family neighborhood around rue Passy, I see Snoopy, the flop-eared dog in Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" cartoons. I see Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Betty Boop, Marilyn Monroe, Brando and James Dean. Continuous-loop tapes in some cafes play only American rockabilly or Motown or easy-listening tunes. In the supermarche, I see Kellogg's Corn Flakes. In the state-run tobacco stores, , Marlboros and Winstons are popular.
Aug. 23, 1984 | Read full article
The American Sunday
Larger cuts of meat — roast beef, crown rib, pot roast, leg of lamb, ham, goose, duckling, a roasting hen, a spring turkey, and fried chicken were served on Sundays. Individual cuts of meat — steak, cutlets, chops — were weekday fare. On Sunday the family shared one piece of meat. There would be mashed potatoes, gravy, fresh vegetables; in spring and summer, fruit salad, fussy gelatin molds, homemade yeast rolls, and in some homes, two desserts.
Oct. 25, 1984 | Read full article
The Weird conference is the banana peel on which WELL minds slip: "Pee Wee Herman Is My Spiritual Teacher," "Bulbhead Redux," "Effective Methods of Self-Mutilation," "Humans Lack a Breeding Season," "Weird Hobbies for Overcoming Ennui," Commies Choose Cocaine."
Why computer users go to the WELL
On The WELL I often feel immersed in that same atmosphere of intimacy that a letter creates and sense that presence of the human hand that a letter carries. But on The WELL, the letter arrives naked, without its envelope. It is addressed to anyone who finds it. (A book, of course, is similarly addressed, but you can't as a rule write back to the book's author, and in most instances the author hopes that you won't.)
March 1, 1990 | Read full article
One and Only
I gradually slipped family ties and substituted, for home, the life of school and playground and camp. I relished cooperative effort, was attracted to activity that called for a uniform. A man of my age, an only child, whom I have known since my late teens, spent his pre-college years in military school and served for 20 years in the Army. Not long ago when he told me, “I have always preferred barracks life, even to marriage.”
April 5, 1990 | Read full article
Garden of chessmen. Many grand gardens established in the heyday of Victorian and Edwardian England disappeared during and after World War II.
Eminent Gardeners
Brown claims that notion for this painting came to Sargent after he received a hard blow to the head while boating on the Thames; still light-headed, a vision came to him of massive white lilies growing under riverside trees lit by lanterns set out for a party. His friends, the Millets, took him home to the Cotswolds to recuperate, and there he began to set this vision down in the midst of the real-world Millet garden.
June 13, 1991 | Read full article
When the boys began to get in jams, Marie's letters didn't even hint at their trouble; and as scrapes turned into felonies, she still didn't reveal that anything had gone wrong.
Another Year Has Passed and We Are Safe and Sound
The letters Marie wrote, as year followed year, continued to portray her family life in the rosiest light possible. Her letters broke my heart but also left me feeling foolishly humbled. Because I knew Marie and I knew that from her perspective, what she wrote wasn't untruth or distortion, nor was she trying to hide from her readers the grief she and Bud suffered over their offspring's crimes and bad choices.
Dec. 12, 1991 | Read full article
John Cheever: "Scotch for breakfast and I do not like these mornings."
Suburban Journals
He is by no means always unhappy in his journal pages. He skates on the frozen pond near his house and observes that "in the pinewoods the last light flows like coals." He swims, plays scrub hockey, touch football, Baroque music on the recorder. He breeds black Labs, drives the Mack engine for the volunteer fire department, wins at badminton, prunes grapes, "feeds the tomatoes as well as the Swiss chard," and goes to garden parties.
March 19, 1992 | Read full article
My purse is so much part of me I’m surprised I don’t yell “Ouch” when someone bumps it. I’m surprised it doesn’t bleed.
Purses make boys nervous
Medicare cards, Social Security card, health insurance ID, bus passes, pill bottles, handkerchief, rent receipts, several business cards, a tumult of receipts, wallet, sunglasses, eyeglasses, a rhinestone necklace, cologne, folded dollar bills, grocery list, keys, more fabric swatches, letters, lipstick, blusher, powder, aspirin, address book, checkbook, eye shadow and mascara, ballpoint pens, Dentyne, clove Life Savers, threaded needle woven in and out a black felt square, silver compact, brush, comb, rubber bands, bus schedules….
Nov. 12, 1992 | Read full article
What, for Americans, most likely deters rabbit’s transfiguration into dinner is cuteness.
Recipes for an Overbite
Rabbit fictions permeate childhood: Br’er Rabbit, Potter’s Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, the Velveteen Rabbit, Hazel and Fiver and company in Watership Down, Bambi’s Thumper, Father Rabbit, Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit and March Hare. These fictional rabbits, turned to plush, comfort us in our cribs, soak up our nasty infant drool and insatiable infant grief. Add to these, cartoon rabbits: Roger Rabbit, Crusader Rabbit, Ricochet Rabbit, Matt Groening’s rabbits in Life in Hell.
June 23, 1994 | Read full article
Probably a minute passed, and Penny’s class started crying loud sobs.
Death’s Dirty Breath
My death waited around every corner. Every belching Fifth Avenue bus or speeding Checker cab might hit me. I hung back from open windows on high floors. I worried in the elevator that lurched up to our fifth-floor apartment that the cables might break and I’d drop down into the basement. I examined all my moles for black spots and my tongue for white coating. When I did Number Two, I looked into the toilet for blood.
Oct. 26, 1995 | Read full article
Author Moore with Lily
They Were Their Bodies
When bedtime came, we stood there with him, my husband and the girls and I, saying, “Up, Hugo, up the stairs.” Hugo did not budge. My husband said, “He’s probably sore,” and picked up Hugo, who by then must have weighed 20 pounds, and carried him upstairs. Hugo never, not ever, not once in the next 12 years of his life, walked either up or down those stairs. He was always carried. Always.
Oct. 31, 1996 | Read full article
Clockwise from top left: Luis Urrea, Sherman Alexie, Richard Wilbur, Stephen Dobyns, August Kleinzahler
Love Is a Great Subject
I mentioned to Richard Wilbur what Stephen Dobyns had said about poems that come from long relationships. Wilbur: “They’re likely to have both enchantment and a little bit of comedy in them. If there’s luck in it, they can still have a lot of the original enchantment. Sometimes one finds oneself writing poems about the limits of love; even good love, even a perfect marriage can’t do everything, can’t be a whole life.”
July 10, 1997 | Read full article
Next door, as days and nights passed, the fights intensified.
Reservations
The head of the unhappy couple’s bed and the head of my bed abutted on either side of our shared wall. The female half of the couple worked nights. She left about 3:30 in the afternoon and returned soon after midnight. Her leavings and returns were marked by slams of their door. If the male worked, he worked irregularly and at odd hours. He ran his television set during the day and through much of the night.
Oct. 23, 1997 | Read full article
How Far We Came to Be Here
I brought the green bean casserole. This is a disgusting dish, in a way, dependent as it is on canned mushroom soup, but I have always liked it because it reminds me of the Eisenhower years and Mamie Eisenhower’s bangs and Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers. It makes me want to sing, “O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.” Too, my mother made it for Thanksgiving.
Nov. 26, 1997 | Read full article
We sit in small rooms. We lean over notebooks whose paper not only is patient but also silent.
One way to Explain Bliss
Were we to meet, say, on a bench at the park, I would fall back on discussion about whether I might compliment the attractiveness of your dress. Maybe only once or twice, if that, have I gotten out of my mouth and into the ears of another person precisely what it is about which I am thinking and in the exact words in which I am thinking it. I am always falling short.
Jan. 8, 1998 | Read full article
So, there Grammy and I were, on a cold Monday afternoon in a hot steam-heated department store.
Shirley Temple’s Pencil
The salesladies screamed. One saleslady ran and got the supervisor, a skinny Italian with black currant-color eyes that beat Grammy’s eyes for piggy-eye squint meanness. She grabbed Grammy’s wrist, hard, and hissed, right into Grammy’s face, “Shut up, lady, shut up.” She got quiet, Grammy did, but she was trembling and shaking. Her face got that expression on it that I’d seen on crucified Jesuses in museum paintings. Grammy whispered, “I’ll take it” about the corset.
Dec. 17, 1998 | Read full article
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