The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits

Author:Heidi Julavits
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

Today I tried again to read the Goncourts. I know I said I’d definitively given up on them, but this is the beauty or the lameness of me—there’s no shortage of second chances. Every petty, embittered person should want to date me. Every petty, embittered person should write a book I hate because I’ll keep trying to read it.

It has been a few months since I gave up on the Goncourts; today I thought about them, Maybe they’d changed. Or maybe I’d changed. I reread books to measure my degree of difference from myself. During my twenties and thirties the book I reread most often was a biography by Jean Stein, edited with George Plimpton, called Edie: An American Biography. Edie Sedgwick, often described as “one of Warhol’s factory girls” (this is my description—a shocking number of people do not know who Edie Sedgwick is), lived a fast, sad life, dead at twenty-eight of a drug overdose. Despite my PhD-level familiarity with all extant images of Edie Sedgwick, the images that appear in my head when I think of her are two: (1) with a peroxided pixie cut, doing a ballet move atop a coffee table in black tights; (2) head cocked like a cute dog, hair long and brown, looking up at the camera, wearing a flowered, normal dress. Between those two images exists the identity spectrum she traveled during her life, though this does not take into account certain images further out on the spectrum, for example, stills of her topless and drugged out at the bottom of an empty swimming pool (from the film Ciao! Manhattan), or shots of her immediately following the Chelsea Hotel fire, her burned hands wrapped in dirty gauze, looking like a boxer wearing too much eye makeup and also, though not by human forces beyond herself, defeated.

I first read Edie in college. My roommate found a copy in a dingy, low-rent part of Vermont, a part that hugs the railway lines and the river, a part where it is always, psychically speaking, mud season. Among the old towels and the kitchen tin she found this book. It was out of print. So far as we knew, there was only one remaining copy in the world. My roommates and I all read it. We all wanted to move to New York and be lauded and exploited by an artist and wear black tights and little else. Ambitious though we were, this one time we dreamed about becoming famous for having produced or accomplished nothing.

Also, Edie and I shared a birthday. This coincidence was the equivalent, in my mind, of a knighting; clearly, I was destined to be Edie’s successor. This also meant Edie, like me, shared a birthday with Hitler. Somewhere within our essences, the ones determined by constellations, we might harbor a dormant evil. A mutation of circumstance could set it off. Could we safely endure for a lifetime without waking it?

Edie maybe didn’t think so. I felt it was important to study her and to learn, perhaps, how to better cope with our cosmic birthday inheritance.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.