Marginal Pleasures: Doodling In the eBook Age

Writers are, first and foremost, diehard readers. We inhale books, salivate on certain sentences. Sometimes we even froth at the mouth when we encounter a particularly brilliant word–an enjambment of sense and sensibility.

Books, in one sense, are objects–ink printed on paper bound together and stamped with a stylish cover. But they’re also, particularly to us writers, worlds of words. They contain multitudes and, as such, are infinitely malleable. I don’t know a single writer who’s not an active reader, who doesn’t doodle in the margins, who doesn’t underline words she fancies, who doesn’t even–sometimes, impulsively–tear out pages that madden her.

I’m not adverse to ebooks. I don’t own a Kindle or iPad and I’m not about to buy either, but–but–I have been reading on the screen for some time now. Every evening, I email myself what I wrote that day, reread it at random, make notes in the cloud, as they say–a brilliant locution, that, I think, considering all it implies.

My biggest complaint about reading in the virtual age is that it doesn’t foster interactive reading. You can’t doodle in the margins. How will this affect reading in the future? Will the readers of tomorrow be passive readers? Will the next generation of writers be able to donate their marginalia to museums? We don’t know, but I, for one, am terrified of what will happen to literature–to life–without having that extra blank space on the sides of the towers of text. Where else will we readers let our minds meander?

Here, then, is a look back on some of the greatest margin-doodlers literature has produced.

Jorge Luis Borges

It is to that other one, to Borges, that things happen. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause, one could say mechanically, to gaze at a vestibule’s arch and its inner door; of Borges I receive news in the mail and I see his name in a list of professors or some biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; the other shares these preferences, but in a vain kind of way that turns them into an actor’s attributes. It would be an exaggeration to claim that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live so that Borges may write his literature, and this literature justifies me. It poses no great difficulty for me to admit that he has put together some decent passages, yet these passages cannot save me, perhaps because whatsoever is good does not belong to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and tradition. In any case, I am destined to lose all that I am, definitively, and only fleeting moments of myself will be able to live on in the other. Little by little, I continue ceding to him everything, even though I am aware of his perverse tendency to falsify and magnify.

“Borges y Yo”

 

Vladimir Nabokov

Whenever in my dreams, I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then — not in dreams — but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle-tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

Speak, Memory

 

Franz Kafka

The Court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and it dismisses you when you go.

The Trial

Samuel Beckett

Ah if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere, just enough to keep alight this little yellow flame feebly darting from side to side, panting, as if straining to tear itself from its wick, it should never have been lit, or it should never have been fed, or it should have been put out, put out, it should have been let go out.

The Unnamable

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bad Poetry, Mom’s Cancer: Notes Toward a Memoir

I started cleaning out a closet over the weekend. Digging through one of many unruly boxes filled with old manuscripts, I came across a story I wrote in grad school, a thinly veiled piece of autobiographical fiction, meant to be woven seamlessly into a grossly corpulent novel I later gutted and eventually abandoned, about my mom’s cancer. In 1992, when I was applying for colleges, she had a grand mal seizure one morning and was taken to the hospital, where she was diagnosed to have a grapefruit-sized tumor in her brain. While she was in a coma, I skipped school to spend the afternoons in her hospital room, reading Wallace Stevens poems to her out loud. I was in a big Wallace Stevens phase back then, one of my many cliched vices (Jim Morrison, Franzia box wine).

The story has a good ending. She awoke from the coma, had a successful surgery, endured a long, difficult recovery during which she had to relearn how to walk, talk, write, and just about everything else; she even started painting again (and, I might add, with the fervor of someone who must have felt she’d cheated death and didn’t have much longer), and today has been cancer-free for almost twenty years. What strikes me about those first days of her recovery were how vague and misremembered they were to me at the time. It seemed, back then, that I was eavesdropping on someone else’s life, and in a way, of course, I was. I wasn’t the one who was braving an impossible personal tragedy, and I guess I was envious: I wanted to be the one who was hurting, who had a story to tell. Of course I tried to tell her story, raiding her medical files, obsessively jotting down every last onomatopoeiac medical term, slowly accruing my own personal glossary of her cancer, the ugly vocabulary of her diagnosis–frontoparietal anaplastic oligodendroglioma–tick-tocking in my brain without ever exploding. If only it had exploded. Then I might not have continued to bang my head against the cinder-block wall of my frustration, unable to capture the captivity of her chemo in the disfigured stanzas I scribbled on the back of returned Spanish multiple-choice tests and coffee-mug-ringed napkins.

But that was what I did, in my attempt to take her pain away from her: I wrote and rewrote the same fucking poem, the words rearranged, maybe, but the crushing boredom of cancer infiltrating every other line.

I tried writing from her perspective–

I can hear my
husband in the next room watching afternoon basketball when

the phone rings at least five
times and I stumble over to the bathroom door and yell
for him to answer it as I clutch the towel
tight against my body

and I created characters who had the same brain cancer–

They stab my hand with the IV and I feel the hot rush in my veins
and I close my eyes and see white moving dots
like a kaleidoscope but then they go away and everything’s dark.

–but I felt trapped, distant and emotionally disemboweled. I created characters who had the same brain cancer. I even wrote from my own perspective–

I sway shivering over her
cocooned image & watch
deadpan in our
telepathic language
bodies stilled
eyes locked

–but “her / cocooned image”? “Bodies stilled / eyes locked”? Who the fuck was I kidding? The answer, of course, is that I was fooling myself, although I didn’t know it back then. All I knew was that I didn’t like writing about my feelings–I didn’t even know what my feelings were. And, in a way, still don’t. That’s the problem: years have passed, wounds have healed, but I never got a good grasp on the reality of the experience, not in those trite poems or the energetic yet stilted fiction, filled with sterile terminology and overzealous descriptions of MRIs, I later wrote in grad school, like the piece I found in the closet this past weekend. I used to think the more I write about it, the more it will make sense. The more I think about it, the more I will understand. Right? Wrong.

In the decade since grad school, I have written well over a thousand pages, only an embarrassing few of which have been published, the vast majority deleted, redacted or used as kindling, but I haven’t devoted even one single page to the most traumatic event in my life. Why? I suppose it was a conscious decision in the beginning, possibly a reaction to something an old literary hero told me. Quoting an essay T.S. Eliot wrote, he told me I needed to stop writing pretty little sentences and instead focus on the meat and potatoes of the story. It’s good advice, I think, possibly the single most profound writing realization I’ve been forced to make and one I eagerly enforce upon every budding writer I encounter, if given the chance, although I’m quick to point out that my old mentor didn’t exactly follow his own prescription, so. But why avoid my mom’s cancer? Why continue to write fiction, instead of hopping on the memoir bandwagon? I certainly enjoy reading other people’s memoirs, even the one published by my equivocating former mentor. In the months leading up to this past weekend, in fact, when I cleaned out the closet and rediscovered Mom’s cancer, I have been on something of a memoir-reading kick. I’ve reread memoirs I cast aside when they were first published, like Donald Antrim‘s The Afterlife, a pinnacle of the genre, I think. And Sarah Manguso‘s The Two Kinds of Decay. And not only “disease memoirs,” either: I’ve also plowed through the buzzed memoirs that came out this year, notably Half a Life by Darin Strauss and Revolution by Deb Olin Unferth, and Geoff Dyer‘s Out of Sheer Rage, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Into the Wild, and Born Standing Up, and Lit, and pretty much anything else by Mary Karr, and How Fiction Works by James Wood and Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith and…and one of my all-time favorites, a book I try to read once every other year, The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. Anything that’s not by Augusten Burroughs: that’s been my dictum. Heck, it’s possible I enjoy reading memoirs more than I enjoy reading novels these days, although that, I’m afraid, has more to do with frustrations I have about my own fiction than the form in general. Novels–and novel-writing–are doing just fine. Just ask Jonathan Franzen.

A year and a half ago, I started a new book, a novel. Unlike my first book–and the two that followed and were widely rejected–this new book is written in the first person. It’s funny, I used to avoid reading novels written in the first person, because I thought, wrongly, it turns out, that they all sounded the same. And I definitely avoided writing a novel in the first person, because, I think, I needed to distance myself from those embarrassing, cliched poems and stories about my mom’s illness, and doing so would only dredge up that earlier failure. But who’d want to continue a legacy like that? It’s possible, of course, that I am only continuing the failure, and this new book, like its bastard brethren, will also be turned down around town, but it’s OK. It might be the first step to writing that book about Mom’s cancer.

Yoga Sonnet: A Poem

Legs forked upside down bicycling the air,
Hands craned and arched–a stilled Tonka–your
Spearheaded head radished, shot back
In these awkward, torqued semi-spasms
That keep pressing your poised nose
Down drilling the wooden, recently redone
Floor. Its geometric body snaps shut. Sure,
Killer, it takes getting used to–your own
Body–the elastic stretching, pants plastic
And girdling your beer-a-day potbelly, its
Discombobulated quasi-Cubist fit. It
Hurts, but a good hurt: just a sec more…
The snapping turns to a backbreaking split,
The inside camouflage, the liquid melt.

The Silence of Silent Film

Sadly, one of my professors at the University of Chicago, pioneering silent-film theorist Miriam Hansen, has passed away, far, far too young. Her work proposes a new take on cinema and theories of modernity and mass culture, or what she calls the notion of “vernacular modernism.”

Last year, she taught a PhD seminar on the “fate of cinema in the allegedly ‘post-cinematic’ age.” Pretty heady, but totally fascinating, stuff.

Writes Hansen, “From Hollywood musicals to museum shops, from advertising to the fringes of the popular music scene, the icons of high modernism have been disseminated and recycled, disfigured and reinscribed.”

Here’s one of her lectures (via U of C’s Film Studies Center).


Evolution of a Novel’s Open

Sometimes, a lot of times, actually, when you’re writing fiction–long or short, but especially long–it seems like no matter how much you write, you’re not writing the right thing. You’re writing yourself in circles, in fact, slowly driving yourself–and everyone around you, whether they signed up for this nor not, more likely the latter–bat-shit crazy.

Case in point: I recently spent upwards of three years writing a novel that, I don’t think, ever got into the right place. Or maybe it did at some point, but I still changed it, a word here, a sentence there, until I’d mangled it–or maybe, I don’t know, there was a progression, and what I ended up with was, in fact, better than how I began, in the beginning.

This is what I began with (after at least three dozen revisions, by the way):

It  was a fine spring morning, overcast and cold, but then every morning at Whistling Pines Senior Living Village was cold in one way or another. Bernard parked himself on a bench by the grease Dumpsters, too close to the security cameras for comfort. At Whistling Pines, someone was always watching, and even if he hadn’t triggered the motion-detector flood lights he had plenty of reason to worry. You couldn’t venture off-campus unsupervised without special permission and that meant paperwork and Bernard didn’t have time for that, not today. Today he’d need every extra second, and according to the clock at the Lutheran church across the street it was already a quarter to 4 am—still early, though you could never be too early. That, in any case, was how Bernard looked at it: the earlier he started, the sooner he’d get going.

That, at some point down the line, became this:

It was a fine spring morning, overcast and cold, but then every morning at Whistling Pines Senior Living Village was cold in one way or another. According to the clock at the Lutheran church across the street, it was a quarter past 3 am—early, certainly, but Bernard was on a big top secret mission and he didn’t want to waste any time. So if he was sitting on a bench out front wearing only a nylon anorak pullover, then he’d just have to make do with that, and that was OK with him, so long as he also had the Army-ordnance binoculars he’d used overseas during the war. And sure enough, there they were, slung from his neck, right where they were supposed to be. Just in case, he parked the ’nocs on the bridge of his nose and adjusted the scope, inadvertently zooming into a blurred nipple, part of the illuminated bus-stop ad for breast-cancer awareness. Even after all this time they worked great, and that was a huge relief, as was having Esmé’s old herringbone roll along suitcase, currently nestled between his legs, empty now but by this time tomorrow morning, who knew, it could be full. That was how Bernard looked at it, in any case: you never know when a little extra space might come in handy.

Which, in turn, became

It was a fine spring morning, overcast and cold. Then again, every morning at Whistling Pines Senior Living Village was cold in one way or another.

Bernard parked himself on a bench by the grease Dumpsters, too close to the security cameras for comfort. At Whistling Pines, someone was always watching, and even if he hadn’t triggered the motion-detector flood lights he had plenty of reason to worry. You couldn’t venture off-campus unsupervised without special permission and that meant paperwork and Bernard didn’t have time for that, not today. Today he’d need every extra second, and according to the clock at the Lutheran church across the street it was— It, actually, was too blurred to make out, so he set his old Army binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the scope: 0400 hours—still early, though you could never be too early. That, in any case, was how Bernard looked at it: the earlier he started, the sooner he’d get going.

Which then became

Their last morning together dawned overcast and cold. Then again, every morning at Whistling Pines Senior Living Village was cold in one way or another.

It’d been another long night and Bernard was glad to be outside in the brisk mid-March air, a welcomed change from their cramped corner unit, where he’d left Esmé. Heartlessly, he worried, not that there was anything he could do now that he was parked on a bench by the grease Dumpsters, too close to the security cameras for comfort.

At Whistling Pines, someone was always watching, and even if he hadn’t triggered the motion-detector flood lights as he slipped out the side employees-only entrance he had plenty of reason to worry. You couldn’t venture off-campus unsupervised without special permission and that meant paperwork and Bernard didn’t have time for that, not today. Today he’d need every extra second, and according to the clock at the Lutheran church across the street it was— It, actually, was too far away to make out, so he set his old Army binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the scope: 0400 hours, on the dot—early enough, though you could never be too early. That, in any case, was how Bernard looked at it: the earlier he started, the sooner he’d get going.

And then:

Their last morning together dawned overcast and cold. Then again, every morning at the Whistling Pines senior living complex was cold in one way or another.

Bernard parked himself around back, on a bench by the grease Dumpsters, too close to the security cameras for comfort. At Whistling Pines, someone was always watching, and although he’d so far avoided triggering the motion-detector flood lights, get caught venturing off-campus unsupervised and the punishment could be severe: revoked solarium privileges, or worse, a week-long ban from Egg Island.

The stench from the Dumpsters aside, he was happy to be out and about, even if all he had on was his Sit and Be Fit parka, a comfortable but ineffective shell against the gale-force wind coming off the staff parking lot. At least he’d made it out, and just in time, too. Any minute now, if not already, the alarm clocks would go off, and throughout Whistling Pines his fellow residents and in some cases friends would despite their various infirmities somehow athletically spring up from their hospice beds, strap themselves into their mobility scooters, and begin the complicated process of primping and preening for Prom Night, one of if not the highlight of the Whistling Pines social calendar, alongside opening day of the five-day Mah Jongg World Series—though to Bernard, Prom Night was nothing more than a pain in the neck.

On top of which, he’d stayed up late last night. And the night before that. And the night before that. In fact, every night since Esme’s third chemo cycle had started. Because she couldn’t sleep, therefore he couldn’t sleep. Usually, reading to her did the trick. So long as it wasn’t the funnies. The funnies were her reading material of choice, and they succeeded in distracting her from the chemo, though mostly because she devoted what little energy she had to coaxing him into a full-scale dramatic performance, replete with funny voices and cartoon genuflection. And since that only pepped her up (and him, too; seeing her pepped up pepped him up in turn), and since Dr. Gasson had laid down the law, and this time around, at least, Bernard intended to comply, he was left with less stimulating fare: last Sunday’s real estate supplement, on the surface a humdrum read but in the end he hammed it up and it knocked her right out, after a listing for a 3br/2ba single-family townhouse a block from the lake, perfect starter house for a young, motivated family or family-to-be. WIC to die for! Just in case, he forged on and finished the entire thing, having always liked snooping on other people’s lives, anyway. Then, in strict adherence to the doc’s orders, he retired to the pleather La-Z-Boy recliner, which he’d outfit with a seatbelt salvaged from their old Buick—the idea being, if he were strapped down, then he wouldn’t pace; and if he didn’t pace, then he wouldn’t wake her. In all, it was an eyesore, a ramshackle bit of engineering, especially considering his tenure in the R&D department at Midland Ferris Industries and before that the United States Army, Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), 214th Detachment—but it curbed the pacing, if not the frenzied agonizing about the disappearance at sea.

Even now, hours later, outside and free to pace about at will, his mind still raced—not, however, through the dark alleys of what might or might not have happened to Franklin. Instead, why hadn’t he taken the time, this morning, to nuke a Hungry-Man Salisbury steak? The cafeteria wasn’t open, and with Prom Night preparations already underway, who knew if it would open at all today. And Bernard’s stomach was growling, meaning that in a half hour he’d start to feel faint. Some mornings, when he felt adventurous, he hiked over to DonutWorld. Of all the plentiful fast-food establishments in the mega mall by the commuter train station, DonutWorld was the best bet, hands down—and Bernard, a breakfast aficionado, had done an extensive taste test. Best of all, DonutWorld was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Then there were DonutWorld’s French crullers, a smidge heavy on the icing but who didn’t like icing? Top that with a hot cup of Sanka, and Bernard would be good to go.

But then what? Spend the rest of the afternoon at the mega mall, waiting for Prom Night to wind down? How would he know it had winded down? Even if he’d remembered to bring his portable gizmo, odds were Esme wouldn’t answer the phone—couldn’t answer the phone; and if he called the switchboard, he may as well turn himself in and face the consequences of going AWOL. And what about Esme? She’d wonder where he’d gone off to, and why, and what had she done to cause him to leave; and when he’d explain that he was on a mission to find her a special surprise, and that he couldn’t tell her, she’d look at him with her sad, disappointed eyes, and maybe cry—to the bedridden, a trip to the mega mall was exotic and exciting, on par with a romantic weekend in Paris.

And what time was it, anyway? He couldn’t stay out back by the grease Dumpsters all day. Sooner or later, one of the security guards, in the middle of his or her morning rounds, would spot Bernard and approach and question him on the spot. Why aren’t you inside? Don’t you like Prom Night? Everyone likes Prom Night! And because no excuse would be a good excuse—it was Prom Night, after all; nothing else mattered—his best bet was to get a move on. Not that he had anywhere to go, now that his and Esme’s old bungalow, located in the sprawling and, of late, sought-after Springfield Creek Estates subdivision, had sold last month.

If Bernard had his wristwatch with him, if he hadn’t second-day-mailed it to himself for his birthday, which in fact was months from now, not today, then he wouldn’t have to resort to his trustworthy old Army binoculars, which were still slung from his neck, right where he’d left them. According the illuminated temp/time clock at the Lutheran church across the street it was 28 degrees Fahrenheit and 0500 hours—early enough, though you could never be too early. That, at least, was how Bernard liked to look at it: the earlier you started, the sooner you got going.

And, finally, finally…

Something else he had been meaning to tell her? He loved her hair. Not at first, or rather, he had always thought she had attractive, full-bodied hair. But one day, the day Franklin was born, in fact, when he walked in and saw her holding their first child, he noticed, as if struck by some metaphorical lightning, that she had the most astonishing hair. From then on, he monitored her management of her hair, which he found, without fail, to be aggressive and resourceful. One day she wore it pinned in a stately updo, and it was lovely. The next day she had bound it back, cinched with a ribbon, and it was lovely then, too. He particularly liked it when she did very little to it, when she let it go about its natural, unruly self. He had been her TA in Fundamental Mathematics, and he had noticed her hair at the time, and here he was sixty-eight years, two children, one grandchild later, alone, it occurred to him, from here on out, and he wished he had appreciated her hair more. What was it about her hair, exactly? He was sitting, opposite her, in the pleather recliner she insisted not be moved to their assisted-living place and he had no idea why, all this time, he had neglected to tell her he was fascinated by her hair. Once, at someone’s wedding or funeral, he couldn’t recall, he noticed that she had, all of a sudden, gone gray, and it was the most incredible thing. She, as was her pleasure, spent hundreds of dollars coloring it back to its youthful shade of chestnut, and now he wished he had told her how viscerally he had loved the gray of her old age. There were other things he had loved about her, and other things he wished he had told her with more frequency, of course: her laugh, how kind and even-tempered she had remained during the raising of their children, how little she had complained about her cancer. But now that she was gone, the one thing he wished he had told her more often was that she had, he’d always thought, the most beautiful hair.

A bravura opening, from our new Nobel laureate

The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa, begins thus:

That was a fabulous summer. Pérez Prado and his twelve- professor orchestra came to liven up the Carnival dances at the Club Terrazas of Miraflores and the Lawn Tennis of Lima; a national mambo championship was organized in Plaza de Acho, which was a great success in spite of the threat by Cardinal Juan Gualberto Guevara, Archbishop of Lima, to excommunicate all the couples who took part; and my neighborhood, the Barrio Alegre of the Miraflores streets Diego Ferré, Juan Fanning, and Colón, competed in some Olympic games of mini-soccer, cycling, athletics, and swimming with the neighborhood of Calle San Martín, which, of course, we won.

Extraordinary things happened during that summer of 1950. For the first time Cojinoba Lañas fell for a girl-the redhead Seminauel-and she, to the surprise of all of Miraflores, said yes. Cojinoba forgot about his limp and from then on walked around the streets thrusting out his chest like Charles Atlas. Tico Tiravante broke up with Ilse and fell for Laurita, Víctor Ojeda fell for Ilse and broke up with Inge, Juan Barreto fell for Inge and broke up with Ilse. There was so much sentimental restructuring in the neighborhood that we were in a daze, people kept falling in and out of love, and when they left the Saturday night parties the couples weren’t always the same as when they came in. “How indecent!” said my scandalized aunt Alberta, with whom I had lived since the death of my parents.

The waves at the Miraflores beaches broke twice, the first time in the distance, two hundred meters from shore, and that’s where those of us who were brave went to ride them in without a board, and they carried us a hundred meters to the spot where they died only to re-form into huge, elegant waves and break again in a second explosion that carried bodysurfers smoothly to the pebbles on the beach.

During that extraordinary summer, at the parties in Miraflores, everybody stopped dancing waltzes, corridos, blues, boleros, and huarachas because the mambo had demolished them. The mambo, an earthquake that had all the couples-children, adolescents, and grown-ups-at the neighborhood parties moving, jumping, leaping, and cutting a figure. And certainly the same thing was happening outside Miraflores, beyond our world and our life, in Lince, Breña, Chorrillos, or the even more exotic neighborhoods of La Victoria, downtown Lima, Rímac, and El Porvenir, where we, the Miraflorans, had never set foot and didn’t ever plan to set foot.

And just as we had moved on from waltzes and huarachas, sambas and polkas, to the mambo, we also moved on from skates and scooters to bicycles, and some, Tato Monje and Tony Espejo, for example, to motor scooters, and even one or two to cars, like Luchín, the overgrown kid in the neighborhood, who sometimes stole his father’s Chevrolet convertible and took us for a ride along the seawalls, from Terrazas to the stream at Armendáriz, at a hundred miles an hour.

But the most notable event of that summer was the arrival in Miraflores, all the way from Chile, their distant country, of two sisters whose flamboyant appearance and unmistakable way of speaking, very fast, swallowing the last syllables of words and ending their sentences with an aspirated exclamation that sounded like pué, threw all of us Miraflores boys, who had just traded our short pants for long trousers, for a loop. And me more than the rest.

The younger one seemed like the older one, and vice versa. The older one was named Lily and was a little shorter than Lucy, who was a year younger. Lily couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old, and Lucy no more than thirteen or fourteen. The adjective “flamboyant” seemed invented just for them, but though Lucy was flamboyant it wasn’t to the same degree as her sister, not only because her hair was shorter and not as blond as Lily’s, and because she dressed more soberly, but also because she was quieter, and when it was time to dance, though she also cut a figure and moved her waist with a boldness no Miraflores girl dared attempt, she seemed like a modest, inhibited, almost colorless girl compared to that spinning top, that flame in the wind, that will-o’-the-wisp that Lily became when the records were all stacked on the automatic changer, the mambo exploded, and we started to dance