MANifestRAYtion

I have always thought it an understating of us that women's bodies are referred to as being "hourglass". An hourglass is a hard thing. It is always the same. It doesn't move, except the sand inside - a depressing beige representation of the waiting nothing we're inching downward to. An hourglass is transparent. When you flip it, its form remains the same. It sits on a sideboard, a dead remnant.

For obvious reasons, Man Ray was more correct when he turned us into a viola.

A friend once gave me a card with a Man Ray photograph on the front and wrote inside: "To a very Man Ray girl". One of the best compliments of my life!

Joan

I love Joan Didion. Her writing is all hammers and nails. Bang bang perfect hard and sharp.

I wish she would come to my place for a cocktail and a smoke. She has one of those great old lady voices that make you wish you had five decades of cigarettes lurking in your throat.

Incidentally, I tried my first Old Fashioned this weekend, and I must say those Mad Men were onto something. I reckon Joan (Didion, not Holloway/Harris), would knock back an old fashioned like nobody's business.


“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget." - Joan Didion