24 Random Things About Me

1. I remember learning to walk. I remember the surge of fright I had at the idea of moving to the other side of the room. Much like the fright that prevented me from learning to drive. And then I moved to the other side of the world


2 When I was five I found myself alone and face to face with a spider as big as a lumberjack's hand. I killed it with my chalkboard. Its extremities were visible beyond the chalkboard's ends.


3. I learned the word "melancholy" from a Batman comic book. I confessed my love of the superhero by spelling his name in front of my class on local television, thinking that no one else would break the code. The gotcha journalist was Bozo the Clown. I still hate clowns.


4 My teacher was annoyed when upon our assignment to write a paper on a king I wanted to write on King Arthur. The next year we had to write on a marine animal and I decided on mermaids. I spare you her reaction.


5 I was so very shy at this point that I had a hard time lifting my head. Then I was enrolled in theatre. I am still at heart extremely shy, despite finding people interesting.


6 As soon as I was aware that there was a sea and countries across it, I wanted to live far away. It started with fairy tales


7 I miss spanish moss, and afternoon thunderstorms. And basic instinctive kindness.


8 I have always loved stories of outlaws. I would play with my barbies outlaw scenarios across the reconstructions South. The Barbie town house was the plantation


9 My grade school was on an old plantation


10 When I went to Venice for the first time in the aftermath of 9-11 I was hit and stunned by the familiarity of the scented salted heavy air like home. And the feeling of waves in your bones as you drift to sleep, like when I was a child after a day in the waves


11 I have done the Viennese waltz along the Savannah pier.


12 I once lost a shoe on New Year's Eve while in a horse drawn carriage.


13 I once sang jazz standards on a billiard table


14 I was once flown to Halloween party in a private plane. My costume was Mata Hari.


15. On my adoptive mother's side of the family are the Donner's of the Donner expedition, which I think speaks volumes as to why I ran away from home. The same line is related to the Carvers, as in George Washington Carver, who sent him to school. My mother always explained this relationship of enslavement and kidnapping to this adopted child as that he too was "adopted" and so I always felt more related to him than to any other family tree figure.


16. I left the country once and for all, by pure coincidence, on the Fourth of July.I could think of no finer way of celebrating the last Fourth of July than by fireworks at Versailles


17 There's a bit of a royalist in me, somewhere, but I have judgment enough to be wary of this. The fleur de lys moves me. I used to enumerate the lineage of the French kings as a way of counting sheep


18 Swallows and housemartins play chicken with my window and I can stare at them for hours as they swirl and dive, of a summer's evening. I can hear birdsong returning by season, and it's like running into an old friend. They are my favorite neighbors.


19 Because of the above, though I live without a refridgerator, shower, toilet, hot water, in 16 square meters, I feel in the lap of luxury.


20 I prefer Simone Martini to Giotto, Titian to Michelangelo. I feel that the Florentines, with their cultural hegemony ,are overrated. The working title of my dissertation was Avenging Venice.


21 I feel that history and poetry are far closer to one another than either are to novel writing, as you must incorporate the ellipse, the unknowable. I feel even more so that art history is poetry, in that only in such dense wordchoice and placement can we be interpreters of a dead and non-discursive idiom. I sometimes feel that I am resurrecting.


22 I believe in laughter as a way to break open the truth to its kernel, to its essence. Humor is linked to the Koan


23 After wanting to become a nun as a child, I flirted with the idea, in college, of becoming an Anglican priest.


24 I still wonder about the facts concerning mermaids.