Kate Bolick Chases Her Spinster Wish

I've been married for nearly 12 years, but I continue to harbor fantasies about how great it is to be single along with possibly overly fond memories of how much I loved my life when I was a modern-day spinster in my 20s and 30s.

Nobody cared whether I stumbled home drunk on a week night! I could walk around the apartment in my underpants whenever I wanted! (OK, I still do that now.) I could lie around in bed for hours and read novels on weekend mornings, eat spaghetti for dinner every night, take baths at midnight, and have long, involved phone conversations with my sisters and girlfriends to my heart's content.

Now, I've learned, I'm not the only woman with fantasies of spinsterhood. Kate Bolick, a New York-based writer and contributing editor to The Atlantic, has just published Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own, a personally engaging and thoughtfully researched book about her life as a modern urban woman who is sometimes "alone" without a man in her life, sometimes attached and always single by choice.

Kate Bolick, "Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own"

Bolick writes of something she calls her "spinster wish," which she describes as "shorthand for the extravagant pleasures of simply being alone." When Bolick was just out of college and journaling furiously, she covered hundreds of pages with all her tedious thoughts and feelings about the latest dramas in her  romantic life. But every now and then, when one of those romances had crashed and burned, Bolick would write about returning to the joys of spinsterhood: "Oct. 3, 1995: Ah, finally, W has left; back to my little spinster ways....Nov. 12, 1995: A long, perfect spinster wish of a Sunday, read all day, took two naps."

Now over the age of 40 and still unwed, Bolick has since seen more men come and go in her life, along with a marriage proposal or three, but she hasn't given up on her spinster wish. If anything, she has formalized her relationship to it with time and study, and now has a book to show for her efforts.

Some might describe the book as a would-be feminist cri de coeur. "The deeper question about women's relationship to conventionality might be why it's apparently a bigger factor for us than for men. For Bolick, the answer is fear -- her personal fear about becoming a bag lady or a cat lady, both living proof of what it means not to be loved," writes Laura Kipnis in Slate.

Others may see Spinster as a highly personal literary memoir, and indeed, I can't recall ever having read an analysis of Victorian women writers that segues into the hamster wheel of dating life in 21st-century New York. Heather Havrilesky in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, calls Bolick's book "an idiosyncratic journey through Bolick's decades-long exploration of how to live independently, with cues from an assortment of nontraditional women."

Those nontraditional women are five women writers, all of them bad girls by my reckoning, called "awakeners" by Bolick in a term she borrows from novelist Edith Wharton. In addition to Wharton, Bolick's awakeners are poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, New Yorker essayist Maeve Brennan, magazine columnist Neith Boyce and short story writer and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

It's entertaining to read about these five women's careers in the past century, and to learn of their struggles to juggle their personal and writing lives. (If you're familiar with this blog, you'll know that I love women in history who fought for their rights to live, love, work and party.) But the trouble begins as it becomes apparent over the course of Bolick's book that none of her awakeners fit the traditional definition of spinster: an unmarried woman.

In fact, all of Kate Bolick's spinsters were married, some for a short while and some for the long haul, but married nevertheless. And I predict that Bolick herself will be married at some point, and we'll hear about it on social media when it happens, as her critics feign shock! and scandal! when they report the news.

Yet her book is about spinsters, and so she engages in some magical thinking that extends to her apparent belief that everything happens for the best.

If your magazine gets shut down, as Bolick's did, and you have to move back in with your family at the age of 38 because you were stone-cold broke, why, it was meant to be on your magical path to modern-day spinsterhood! And if you then scratch together enough cash to move back to Brooklyn because you were bored being stuck back at home, and you land a new job plus a sexy younger boyfriend, well, who's to say that's not being a spinster nowadays?

Still, Spinster is a surprisingly compulsive read. It's confessional, brings historic figures to life, and is likely to remind any woman who reads it that we are all feminists if we have a pulse.

Laura Nyro Obsession

In my youth, I was never much of a groupie. Even when I was crushin' on David Bowie or Marvin Gaye, I didn't see the point of making posters or rushing to hotels for a glimpse or scheming to get into a show and sneak backstage. I was too shy, and the thought of collecting albums and studying lyrics and cover art embarrassed me. The closest I ever came to being a groupie was in my obsession over Laura Nyro when I was a junior high school girl in the suburbs of Chicago. And it was more of a private affair. My big sister had three or four of Laura Nyro's albums, and when I was alone in my bedroom, I would listen to Laura, memorize all of her lyrics, and learn to sing her songs note for note when nobody was home so I could really let those highs and lows fly.
 I emoted right in sync with Laura on "Wedding Bell Blues," "Brown Earth," "Stoned Soul Picnic," "Captain for Dark Mornings," "Upstairs by a Chinese Lamp," "And When I Die," "He's a Runner," and on and on. Never mind that I hadn't even been properly kissed at that point, let alone been in a relationship or gone to Spanish Harlem. No matter. With Laura, I felt and experienced it all: broken-hearted loneliness, tom cat love, day-fancy dreams, the taste of sweet cocaine and Christmas in my soul.

New York Tendaberry

Only twelve years old, I knew Laura was all mine. There was one precious time years ago when I saw her perform at Ravinia Park, outside of Chicago, on a rainy night, when mud-sliding philistines rode the muck on their bellies as if they were at Woodstock instead of a performance by the greatest singer-songwriter the world has ever known. Oh yes, she was mine alone.

Then last Thursday night, I attended "New York Tendaberry: The Iconic Songs and Life of Laura Nyro," in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and I learned that I was far from the only girl with a passionate Laura Nyro obsession back in the 1970s.

Here was producer and host Louise Crawford, of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn fame, who put the evening together, standing before the tightly packed crowd at The Old Stone House and revealing that when she was twelve, she listened all the time to "Eli and the Thirteenth Confession," enthralled with its deep magic. And her big sister and friends were so cool and in on the Laura Nyro experience that saying "Eli's Coming" was code for "I'm about to get my period."

Tripping Down the Side Streets

In my Midwestern suburban youth, Laura Nyro also was the start of my New York obsession. Laura was the prime example of New York womanhood to me, tripping down the side streets all smoky eyes, wild brown hair, hoop earrings, gypsy bangles, lipstick on her reefer waiting for a match.

There stood Louise on Thursday, one of how many thousands of Laura lovers, still crushin' on her almost twenty years after her death, reading the poetry of "New York Tendaberry," and now that I'm a grown woman and living in NYC myself, it felt like home: "Sidewalk and pigeon. You look like a city. But you feel like religion to me."

Thanks, Louise, for bringing back the iconic songs of Laura Nyro with brilliant interpretations by artists Erika Amato, Debbie Deane, Amy and Andy Burton, Jennifer Lewis Bennett, Tim Moore, Ina May Wool and Nancy O. Graham. (And a special shout-out to Don Cummings, whose "Poverty Train" was a knockout.) The evening ended with a stunning video by Mary Bosakowski and Kristin Lovejoy, shown at Laura Nyro's memorial service back in 1997 and including personal footage of Laura speaking to the camera about her life.

Since Thursday's performances, my entire vinyl collection of Laura's albums has been in heavy rotation on my stereo here in my Brooklyn apartment. I'm remembering what it feels like to lift a record needle and put it back on a track over and over again. Remember that? I'm gushing, I know.

I own my Laura Nyro love proudly. I guess I'm a groupie after all. So to end it on a special note for all you other insiders, maybe you've already obsessed over every single YouTube video starring Laura Nyro, including, of course, the Monterey Pop Festival performance where she blew everybody away with the sweetness of "Wedding Bell Blues" and the intensity of "Poverty Train," and mistakenly believed the crowd was booing her when in fact they were loving her and calling out their appreciation but she couldn't feel it because she was just such a special and tender artist with an unparalleled sensitivity, though if she only knew how much she meant for me, personally, during my own very sensitive growing-up years when she showed me what it is to be open to an honest and true creative experience, and how I wasn't alone, and in fact she gave so much to so many of us in pain or passion or trouble or sadness or joy, then she wouldn't have been so timid about giving herself to an audience because she would have felt deeply how her songs and lyrics and musicianship went out into the world and changed it in a very real way and we will always always know and remember and cherish her from a respectful distance so as not to drive her away but in love and awe.

Dr. Zhivago: A Movie Plotline Made Unworkable by Digital Communications

Lara (Julie Christie) and Dr. Zhivago (Omar Sharif) foursquare each other in Moscow and realize they've just left restaurants on the same street!

He texts her from the tram.

"Hey! Whassup? Did you just come out of the Social Democratic Pierogi Bar? I think I saw you!"

"No way! lol"

"Where u at now?"

Lara speaks.

"I'm on the tram, standing right behind you."

"Cool. Let's get a beer."

Don't Tell Me About the Queen of the Night

In June, I'm going with some friends to attend a performance of Queen of the Night at the Paramount Hotel in NYC. Shelling out $200, and I have no idea about the show's theme, who's in it, who wrote it, how long it runs or anything else about the production. Apparently there's food and drink involved, so I don't have to eat before the show.

Oh, and there's this photo I saw in The New York Times of a beautiful woman wearing a headdress:

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

But other than that, I don't know a thing about Queen of the Night. Nada. And please don't tell me about the Queen of the Night. I don't want to know. "Immersion theater," meaning shows where you, the audience member, are pulled into the production by the performers, and you walk amongst them and the set and the props, is a very personal thing and can't really be explained. You interact with the show and feel yourself becoming part of the performance.

I've done this before at Sleep No More and Then She Fell, voluntarily wandering around in a state of confusion, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. It's the best.

At Sleep No More, an entire four-story building on the West Side has been taken over by the show. Somebody told me that the old Twilo nightclub used to be there, but now it's called the McKittrick Hotel, and it's the site of a nightlong mystery theater where performers rush around dancing and stripping off their clothes and washing off blood in the bath. I've heard the show is partially based on that Scottish play by Shakespeare and partially based on romantic mystery films of the 1930s, which sounds fine, but I've been to Sleep No More four times now and I still don't know what the hell is going on.

The point of the show, as far as I'm concerned, is to:

• explore dark rooms enveloped in a moody soundscape and a peculiar smell of incense
• happen accidentally upon a large dinner party in a ballroom with a cast of handsome, despairing characters who all seem to hate and mistrust one another
• open drawers in ancient wooden desks that contain bits of hair and hospital reports written in spidery script
• try not to bump into any of the strangers that are wandering around with me (did I mention that all audience members must wear Commedia dell'Arte masks?)
• eat penny candy out of giant apothecary jars, and 
• follow a woman I believe to be Lady Macbeth up three flights of stairs to her bedroom

John Singer Sargent's 1889 painting of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth

When I went to Then She Fell, my friend led me into the theater building blindfolded, and by the end of the evening I had played games with a white rabbit, drunk tea with a mad hatter and brushed the hair of a pretty girl in a blue dress named Alice. Don't ask me what it all meant....Well, I guess what it meant was that once upon a time, a New York woman ventured out into the night for an immersive theater production and came away having lived a personal experience that engaged all five of her senses.

I love a good story. And after years of seeing plays, watching movies and reading books, if a talented theater company wants to offer me an intriguing assortment of people, places and things to become absorbed in, I'm happy to tell myself a story of my own devising, even if it is non-linear and makes no sense to anybody but me.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Novel

Going to England for Christmas on Wednesday. Yay! That's where I was inspired to start writing my first novel. It's an inspiring place.

Here's how my novel begins -- and it draws on a lot of the "bad girl" research I've done over the years about women in history. The first draft is nearly finished. Yay! Perhaps in the new year I'll get back to blogging. Perhaps...

 Inga’s night had been restless, and she was glad when the morning light through their tiny bedroom window grew bright enough to allow her to get up. She rose as Mike slept on, and she crept down to the kitchen and dressed as fast as she could. It was a good thing he was sleeping so deeply after his night out. Finishing up with the packing had been easier.

She found a wet, sour-smelling washrag in a corner of the kitchen sink, and though it didn’t matter anymore, she poured fresh water into an empty dishpan, added some soap and a capful of bleach. She threw in the rag, gave it a swish and a scrub, and hung it to dry on a peg next to the sink.

Turning away from that final chore, Inga pulled on her coat and searched in the left pocket for a small jar of Imogen’s fancy French hand cream. She unscrewed the silver lid and applied a generous dab to her rough hands. As she smoothed the cream into her skin, she gazed into the middle distance, then pulled a handwritten note from the right pocket and placed it on the kitchen table.

December 21, 1918

Dear Michael,

I am too young for this. I’ll always love you, but I am leaving. Please don’t try to find me.

Love, Ingeborg

She bowed her head over the table, pressing her palms against the oilcloth that she had bought all those months ago with her pin money and paused a moment — no, several long moments — eyes closed. A shadow crossed her face.

Inga took a deep breath, straightened her back and opened her eyes. She walked to the hall closet and pulled out a large leather valise, Imogen’s valise, which Inga had been hiding for several days.

Grasping the handle with both hands, she heaved the overpacked bag out the apartment’s front door, shut it quietly, and took care not to make too much noise descending the tenement’s creaky stairs. At the landing, she peeked out the entryway window at the patch of sky above the buildings of the Lower East Side. The weather was clear, and the snow had melted from the sidewalks of Rivington Street.

Inga stepped outside. She struggled down the stoop, crossed Norfolk Street, and began her journey north with small, slow steps, dragging her bag behind.

There. Now she was gone.

Why I Write

I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because I want to split infinitives only when I intend to break the rules.

I’ve been infected with the writing sickness since childhood, and it has only gotten worse as I’ve grown older. As I write this, it’s Sunday morning at 11:48 a.m., and I’m feeling guilty because I haven’t written yet today. I went to the farmers’ market instead of writing early, breaking my promise to myself that I would put in two hours of work.

Back before the sickness really took hold, it was enough for me to go to the farmers’ market of a Sunday morning and feel virtuous while buying locally grown vegetables and learning how Brooklyn composts. But now my writing sickness is in full flower, so here I sit repenting for my sin, delivering forth words like counted beads on a rosary.

I’ve heard some people refer to the sickness as “feeding the monster,” which reminds me of that 1960 cult movie directed by Roger Corman, "The Little Shop of Horrors," about a sad-sack gardener in a flower shop, Seymour, who has inadvertently created a Venus flytrap hybrid with an insatiable taste for human flesh. Seymour starts out by nourishing the plant with his own blood and eventually ends up murdering people to feed his monster, Audrey Jr. (named after a girl who works with Seymour at the flower shop). With every feeding, Audrey Jr. keeps growing bigger and bigger and more out of control. It turns out that she has the ability to speak, and she makes constant demands: “I need some chow!” and “Feed me. Feed me! FEED ME!” That pretty well describes my relationship to the writing monster I’ve inadvertently created for myself.

Seymour confronts the insatiable Audrey Jr. in Roger Corman's "The Little Shop of Horrors"

When I was younger, I didn’t know what to write about, and I thought the whole trick to writing conformed to that old cliché: the sudden flash of inspiration. When inspiration struck, I told myself, I would finally write story after story, book after book. In the meantime, I read story after story, book after book. The narratives that appealed to me most involved runaway girls, sneaky free spirits setting out on adventures, strangely solitary girls making their way alone in the world. Pippi Longstocking sailed the high seas, Harriet the Spy hid in dark corners and wrote unsparing critiques about the people around her, Wanda Petronski told her rich classmates that she had one hundred dresses at home even though she wore the same faded blue dres to school every day.

I suppose you could say that even then, my subject, which falls into the easy categorization of “bad girls,” had already found me. My recognition of it, though, didn't strike in a sudden flash. Bad girls crept up on me slowly and steadily, especially when events in my life went wrong, and now I find that the subject is an eternal spring, the one true thing that compels me to write and keeps me writing. I’ve got a couple of novels and short stories in progress, and they’ve all ended up sharing the theme of runaway girls who do wrong.
In another “Why I Write” essay, George Orwell says that he, too, fed a wee monster that grew bigger when he began to write in earnest. As he describes it, as a boy he seemed to be making a descriptive effort almost against his will, under a compulsion that came from outside.

“For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf’, etc. etc.”
Orwell says there are four great motives for writing: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. Orwell chose politics as his subject, or rather, the subject chose him. Yet even the author of those great political novels Animal Farm and 1984 admits that anyone who examines his work will see that when it is “downright propaganda,” it contains the sort of literary aesthetic that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant.

“I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood,” Orwell writes. “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself."

I, too, love scraps of useless information. Indeed, I suspect that it’s those very scraps that motivate me to write more than anything else. I hang on to those odd little pieces of information, those forgotten moments that no one has any reason to remember, fleeting feelings, random thoughts….and I try to call attention to these scraps that speak to me.

Some time ago, when I spent the greater part of a year at the British Library “looking up the dirty parts in old books,” as I liked to tell people, I stumbled across a volume in the rare books reading room, written by an unknown author and published in England in 1804. Titled “Eccentric Biography; or Memoirs of Remarkable Female Characters, Ancient or Modern,” it credits the French courtesan Ninon de Lenclos with owning a favorite small dog named Raton, “taperly and elegantly formed with yellow hair.” This Raton was Ninon’s constant companion and reflected or mirror his mistress’ dainty? appetites wherever she was invited to sup.

“She placed him in an elegant little basket near her plate, and he was literally, her officer of health,” wrote this English author from 1804. “He maintained most strictly that regimen of his mistress, which preserved her beauty, good humour, and her health, to the advanced age of nearly a hundred years. He did not suffer her to make use of coffee, of ragouts, or of liqueurs. Raton suffered quietly to pass him the soup, the boulli, and the roti, but if his mistress seemed inclined to touch the ragouts, he growled, fixed his eyes upon her, and sternly interdicted the use of these enticing dishes….When the dessert came, however, he sprung quickly from his basket, gamboled on the cloth, paid his compliments to the ladies, and received in return for his caresses a few macaroons, of which two or three satisfied his appetite.”

I have never known quite what to do with Raton, but on several occasions, I have tried to introduce both his gamboling ways and the author’s foreign manner of speech into some piece of writing I was working on. Orwell points out that “all writers are vain, selfish, and lazy,” and I’ll agree with him on the first two, but not the third. Writing is work. Finding a place for Raton and making his appearance seem natural and inevitable is a struggle.

“One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand,” Orwell writes, turning to that useful metaphor of the insatiable monster. “For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.

So yes, the need to be heard is a good explanation for why I write. I was the youngest of four kids in my family, after all, and talking on paper lets me express myself without teasing or interruption.

But to my mind, the greatest explanation involves the mysterious relationship between me, the writer, and you, the reader. Who are you? Why do I need you to understand why I write? I believe the answer lies in my simple desire to entertain you with a good story. At its best, storytelling allows both you and me to experience the loss of self. “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality,” as Orwell puts it. “Good prose is like a windowpane.”

Hannah Horvath's Twitter Feed

OK, it's time for a meta-critique of Hannah Horvath's Twitter feed. Both of them -- the real Hannah and the fake Hannah. Plus the Twitter account of Lena Dunham. It's time to do a meta-critique of that, too. For those of you who are new to this, I'm talking about Hannah Horvath, the lead character of the HBO TV show "Girls," as played by Lena Dunham.

So here we go.

Our subjects of study are three Twitter feeds as follows: 1) the "real" Hannah, as in the one in the show itself, wherein the fictional character as of Series 1 is a simulacrum of a real 24-year-old girl living in Brooklyn; 2) the "fake" Hannah, as in the fake Twitter feed that somebody, possibly HBO, created to promote the show; and 3) the human being Lena Dunham, who is now a rich and famous star writer-director-actor and I think producer, yes, almost assuredly producer in addition to writer-director-actor. I don't want to google it right now, but you can pretty much assume she is a writer-director-actor-producer.

The Real Hannah

The real Hannah Horvath fancies herself an essential writer for her time. "I think I might be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation," she tells her parents when they tell her they're cutting her off because she's been sponging off them for too long and it's time for her to get a day job.

At the start of "Girls," the real simulacrum Hannah writes personal essays and works as an unpaid intern for a literary agent in the hopes that she'll get a publishing deal for her memoir. She also tweets as @HannahHorvath (see shitty You Tube screen grab below). The real Hannah's Twitter analytics are completely, hilariously out of whack: she has 26 followers, she is following 902 tweeps, and she has tweeted 4,140 times; i.e., she has a negative follower ratio by a very large margin.

Real Hannah Twitter Feed

When we see Hannah clacking away on her keyboard in Season 1, Episode 3, she is busy tweeting something intensely personal, as in "you lose some, you lose..." as she's thinking about a fight she just had with her sort-of boyfriend. Five hours earlier, she had tweeted, "just poured water on some perfectly good bread to stop myself from eating it. ate it anyway. BECAUSE I AM AN ANIMAL." The tweet before that one, written 13 hours earlier, says: "how often do you think a guy is looking at you with love eyes then realize he's special ed/traveling with a caretaker. I've done that thrice."

Clearly, Hannah is desperate for attention, but it's a Twitter #fail. Her tweets have garnered her followers at the rate of 0.006% per tweet. (My quick calculation, which is probably wrong, because I'm better at qualitative analysis than quantitative, but this number helps me tell a convincing story so I'm keeping it.)

What should real simulacrum Hannah do to fix her bad ratio? According to Buzzfeed's top 10 tips on getting more Twitter followers, if you want to be popular on Twitter, you should care just enough and not get obsessed: "Obsessing over your follower count can drag it down, especially if you let that show through your tweets. (Complaining about not having more followers is never a good look.) Also, when you obsess, you’re more likely to tweet dumb things out of obligation. It’s OK to just step away from the computer sometimes!"

The Fake Hannah

Upon further inspection, god knows who created the fake Hannah Twitter feed (see below). HBO? A fixated fangirl? The Hannah Horvath @HannahHorvath_ Twitter profile claims that it's not affiliated with @HBO or @girlsHBO. But then the profile also provides a link to hbo.com/girls, so god knows what's going on.

Anyway, somebody from April 13 through April 22, 2012 posted 24 tweets on @HannahHorvath_, quoting funny lines from the show. The very first tweet on the fake Hannah Twitter feed is identical to a tweet in the simulacrum Hannah's Series 1/Episode 3 Twitter feed ("just poured water on some perfectly good bread to stop myself from eating it. ate it anyway. BECAUSE I AM AN ANIMAL"), which feels very meta to me, a layered palimpsest of destroyed and rebuilt culture-content reflecting the reification of the real in a commercial context. It's no coincidence that this fake feed appeared around the same time that the show premiered on HBO on April 15, 2012.

Fake Hannah Twitter Feed

The fake Hannah's analytics are impressive for a Twitter feed that lasted merely 10 days. In that time, fake Hannah posted 25 tweets, followed 197 tweeps (a subject worthy of an essay in its own right or at least a very long footnote) and gained 11,727 followers.

That's an impressively positive follower ratio. This Hannah is not desperate. She's a pop culture commodity.

@HannahHorvath_'s final tweet, posted on 22-April-12, reads: "'You want me to call you?' #mistakesGIRLSmake. #GIRLS." The penultimate tweet, posted 15-April-12, reads "I'm 24 years old, don't tell me what to do," followed by a bunch of promotion-worthy hashtags. It was retweeted 68 times and favorited 21 times -- not a bad showing at all for a fictional character who is allegedly desperate for popularity.

The Human Being Lena Dunham

Which brings us to the human being Lena Dunham, whose 6,517 tweets have won her an algorithmically exponential 1,128,538 followers as of 11:46 a.m. ET Saturday 10-Aug-13 (see below). The human being Lena Dunham, meanwhile, follows just 413 tweeps, many of whom -- like Lena Dunham herself -- have blue ticks against their names, indicating Twitter-verified accounts "used to establish authenticity of identities on Twitter," meaning rich and famous people.

Lena Dunham follows actor Maggie Gyllenhaal, sex columnist Dan Savage, Eat, Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert and Planned Parenthood. I haven't figured out yet how to see whether they're following her back, but I assume they are.

Her followers include a lot of nobodies who go by their first name only, including Bethany @BethanyLois 85 (who has tweeted 3 times, has 6 followers and is following 73 people), Nella @nella1704 (who loves animals, reading, Green Day and Gwen Stefani) and Kashmir @faggotmaria (11,156 tweets, 184 following, 234 followers, sample tweet: "I just went around and followed celebrities because, why not").

Lena Dunham Twitter Feed

To get personal about this, I'll just say that at my job, where I'm a web editor, I run one of my site's Twitter feeds, which explains why I've studied how you do Twitter. In my personal life, I have a lame-ass Twitter feed, @joycehanson, with 308 tweets, 136 following and 136 followers.

So yes, I'm one of those tweeps who gets all matchy-matchy with the analytics and carefully avoids looking too desperate. Plus, I can't think of anything interesting to say. I tweet about my blog posts and Yelp check-ins, and try to get clever on rare occasion -- "Today, I'm working at home, on drugs. Benadryl and Ibuprofen can be taken together as cold medicine, apparently" -- then feel embarrassed about self-revelation and stop tweeting for several weeks.

Basically, I'm another nobody. And I am now following @lenadunham.

Come to a Bad Girl Blog Reading on Aug. 1 in the East Village

You're invited! Please come to a Bad Girl Blog reading this Thursday, Aug. 1, 7:30 p.m., at the Identity Bar & Lounge. This is an open mic reading that features four top-rated "Silver Tongued Devils," and I am one of those devils!

I'll be doing a mashup involving this blog post -- Bad Girl Blog: Timothy Leary: She Comes in Colors -- 
plus a bunch of other stuff about rich old hippies, sex and drugs! Wow! If you're in NYC this is your big chance to support the downtown open mic storytelling community

Details here:

Rimes of The Ancient Mariner” Recurring the first Thursday of every month in the basement lounge at Identity Bar      511 E. 6th St., between Avenues A & B              www.identityloungenyc.com/ Open mic signup at 7 p.m. Fifteen open Mic slots plus four featured performers. Curtain up at 7:30 p.m. sharp and runs to 10:30 p.m. 21 and over only $7 Admission  Please arrive early so we can start promptly at 7:30 p.m.

Women of Mystery and Unknowability in the Age of Google

Professor Stephen Hawking, the excellent quantum physicist whose job it is to uncover the secrets of the universe, recently told the New Scientist magazine that women are a complete mystery to him.

"In an interview with the New Scientist magazine to mark his 70th birthday on Sunday, January 8, he was asked: 'What do you think most about during the day?' to which he replied: 'Women. They are a complete mystery,'" The Telegraph reported back in 2012.

This is as it should be. I've been thinking lately about unknowability in the age of Google. Now that everything in the universe seems to be knowable these days, I believe that we should all seek out complete mysteries just so we can contemplate them. The goal is to retain a sense of incomprehension and wonder in the face of the unknowable. I think this is how some people, me included, might describe the God experience.

Currently, I'm reading two novels that have sat on my bookshelves for years, knowing nothing about the authors and their historical context. I am actively resisting googling them or asking my friends on social media whether they've heard of the novels and what they think about them and their authors.

I hesitate to even name them here on my blog. Oh, OK, I will, you've twisted my arm. They are The Secret History by a woman named Donna Tartt and Que ma joie demeure by I think a French, or maybe Italian, author named Jean Giono. (Not to be pretentious, but I was a French major in college and every now and then I like to read in French to keep my French up. Same way I like to listen to French radio and watch French movies.) But I'm not going to provide links to Amazon or anything. If you really want to learn more, you can look them up yourself. It's quite easy, as you well understand. All you have to do is copy, paste and google, and go down the rabbit hole of knowing.

Every page of an unknown book is a slow revelation. And it feels so personal to me, unconnected to the rest of the world, as I read each word and line on the page as they reveal themselves and I find a way to attach meaning to them.

The fact is, I am a web editor. It's my full-time job. Throughout the work week, I scour the internet for story ideas, I publish my content in our CMS, I create weblinks, I run our site's Twitter feed, I make new friends and followers on FaceBook and LinkedIn, and I post my photos on Instagram just for fun. My company pays for my online subscriptions to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Oh, and I've been blogging here at Bad Girl Blog since 2006.

Basically, I am a paid online knowability expert, which must explain why, in my information-exhausted downtime, I  fantasize about unplugging and romanticize the mystery of the unknown. Just the other day, I read this guy about how he left the internet for 25 days, and I thought he sounded like kind of a jerk, but then I realized that I'm kind of a hyper-connected jerk myself.

Which is why I try sometimes to engage in experiments where I don't understand what the hell is going on -- maybe I'll drink a couple of martinis, or I'll go to a night of Sleep No More at the McKittrick Hotel, or I'll take a walk in the dark, or I'll have a digital-free day or weekend or vacation. I guess I'm trying to get back in touch with my younger, pre-internet, pre-cell phone self, when I went traveling through Europe for a year with a pack on my back and no easy way to get in touch with anybody back home. (I'll always cherish my memory of calling home from a booth in the main post office in Paris, and bursting into tears when my stepmom answered the phone.)

When I was even younger than that, a kid in the single-digit age group, I used to love this band called The Association, and they were a happy pop group who recorded magical tunes that were played in heavy rotation on AM radio. One of my favorite Association songs was called "Windy," and I would be thrilled when it came on the radio, and I'd conjure up all kinds of half-baked ideas about the glamorous grownup boys who were singing and the mysterious girl they were singing about.

Recently, I made the mistake of searching for The Association videos on YouTube. Spoiler Alert: Here's what I got -- which is all the reason I need to keep on actively resisting knowing too much about the world, especially when it comes to pop culture.

Daguerreotype Bad Boy

No, this photo isn't from the latest Tommy Hilfiger men's fashion marketing campaign. This is Lewis Thornton Powell, one of the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination, colorized and waiting to be hung on the gallows. During his military trial, his lawyer begged the court for leniency, saying he was insane: "He lives in that land of imagination where it seems to him legions of southern soldiers wait to crown him as their chief commander."

I found this bad boy on my new Tumblr obsession, My Daguerreotype Boyfriend, which is,  as MDB tags it, "Where Early Photography Meets Extreme Hotness." Basically, it's hot guys you will never meet because they died years ago. But at least you can enjoy looking.

I've come across some daguerreotype boyfriends in the course of my own Bad Girl research. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, for example:

What about you? Have you ever had a crush on a dead man? The first time I experienced it was in college, when I was watching James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause," and realized, "Wow, I'm totally in love with this guy, only he's too old for me. And he's dead." But it didn't stop me from wanting to watch his movies. History is funny that way -- you can reach across the decades or the centuries and feel that you have a personal relationship with somebody you can never possibly (and might not want to) meet.

A Day at the Baths

Written on Jan. 26, 2013
Remember Empress Theodora of Constantinople? No? Ex-prostitute/alleged nymphomaniac, mistress of Emperor Justinian, used witchcraft to get him to marry her, ruled together over the Byzantine Empire in the 6th century? Ring a bell?

I’m thinking about Empress Theodora today because she loved extravagant baths: slaves oiled and washed her body, groups of small children massaged her with their tiny fingers, odalisques played the lute as she swam about in a dreamy haze, etc. In her time, a "porphyry shaft" (whatever that is, sounds dirty) bearing her statue stood in the public courtyard of the Arcadian Baths overlooking the blue, blue sea.

Illustration by Jon Lai at http://jlai.carbonmade.com/

Now, I understand that the Arcadian Baths were known for their external splendor and their internal luxury, and that sounds lovely and I would like to go there myself someday. But seeing as how I live in 21st-century Brooklyn and am here on a cold winter's day wanting a bath now, and aside from which the Arcadian Baths fell to ruin centuries ago, I’ll settle for a visit to Brooklyn Banya, located only a few blocks from my apartment.

External Splendor

Brooklyn Banya, “The Best Russian Turkish Bathhouse in Brooklyn,” is a great place to steam and sweat the winter out of your bones. I’m not a public baths virgin – I’ve experienced the Korean Paradise Sauna in Chicago, where naked ladies scrub each other's backs, as well as the Moroccan hammam of Agadir, where half-naked Berber attendants stretch you out on a stone slab and clean you with argan-oil soap – and Banya is right up there with the best of them. (I’ve also toured the ancient Roman baths in Bath, England, but only managed to dip a hand in one of the pools.)

To get to Banya, I walk to the corner of Coney Island Avenue and Church Avenue, turn right at Rocky's Pizzeria, head down CIA past a discount liquor store and the Halal Gyro Café to an oddly styled 1950s chalet constructed of brick and painted concrete blocks. Inside, I pay my $25 to the Russian hostess, who gives me a locker key for the women’s dressing room upstairs. Banya is open to men, women and children, and everybody showers and changes into swimsuits before going down to the baths.

The great thing is that you don’t have to bring anything but $25 and your swimsuit. Banya provides everything you need: soap, towels and slippers. But I brought my own flip-flops, which is allowed. It’s all very casual. You can just be yourself! In a very watery environment!

Internal Luxury

Banya is not a “bath” the way you’d normally think of a bath. 

For one thing, there are no tubs like you have at home, obviously, but big pools – a hot whirlpool and a cold pool where you can go for a mini swim. Then there’s the dry sauna, the wet sauna and the steam room, not to mention a freezing cold pull-chain shower for the toughest people or a temperature-controlled shower for scaredy-cats like me.

They’ve also got a full restaurant at Banya, right next to the pools, where they serve vodka along with home-made pickle plates, borscht, blintzes with caviar and a big piles of garlic potatoes and dumplings. Oh yes, this is public bathing in the grand Russian style. Or, you can be straight-edge clean and eat nothing and just drink water and/or Banya’s special black tea made with honey and cherries.

What I love about Banya is that it’s a real Brooklyn mix of people – so aside from white ladies like me, there are real Russians, local families with kids, hipsters, middle-aged men with big bellies and hot chicks in string bikinis.

Rest assured, it’s all very clean. The Banya website insists on this: “The facilities are very clean – the cleanest of all the Banyas, and the staff works really hard to keep it that way. We take great pride and care in what we do.” And I can tell you from personal experience that the pools are full of chlorine.

“At some point in the sauna, you will see people beating one another with leafy birch branches. This is normal, enjoyable, and also supposedly increases circulation,” the Banya site explains. “It definitely exfoliates. If you want, you can buy a birch branch for $20 and beat your friends with it. We sell them at the front desk. Or you can get a real treatment from our “PLATSKA MAN” for $30.”

Did I tell you this place is awesome!??!

Dreamy Haze

I do believe I saw the PLATSKA MAN in action – at any rate, there was a fit guy in a speedo and a flannel cap who had a woman laid out before him in the wet sauna, and he was swishing and slapping and pressing a big bunch of birch leaves all up and down her body.

As for me, I just did my own thing, unassisted. I started with the hot whirlpool, then moved to the cold pool for a refreshing dip, then entered the wet sauna where I saw the PLATSKA MAN, continued with a cold shower, then on to the dry sauna, where I stretched out on sweet-smelling wooden planks, then cold pool, hot pool, dry sauna…. 

…. somewhere along the line I slipped into a dreamy haze and time passed unnoticed as all stress and toxins left my body….

All of this built up to the final finish: the steam bath. Which, to tell you the truth, scares me a little bit. I went to a party at Banya once, and a man I didn’t know followed me into the steam bath and propositioned me even though we couldn’t see each other through all the steam, so that was a bit strange, and I left before getting the full benefit.

But this time I was with my husband and only unsure about whether I could cope with the intense steam cloud of heavy wet eucalyptus-scented heat that comes blasting out of a vent at timed intervals. I did cope, and it was lovely. And then we agreed that we were hungry, and not for borscht or dumplings, so we went home, limp and relaxed as two blissed-out ragdolls.

It was just as brooklynbanya.com promised:
After all the sweating and relaxing walking out of the Banya, feeling ten years younger with skin soft and smooth like babies, you will promise yourself to come back.

Timothy Leary: She Comes in Colors

I'm wandering pleasantly through the wilds of Timothy Leary's The Politics of Ecstasy this sunny Sunday morning, trying to put together some narrative that makes sense. I don't know if it's the writer in me, or if this is the way everybody's mind works, but I'm always seeking a story that fits, no matter what elements get mashed together.

I suppose I came to this place because I recently read Oliver Sacks' personal history "Altered States" in The New Yorker, where he describes his self-experiments in the chemistry of chloral hydrate, morning glory seeds, morphine, LSD and various other druggy concoctions during his years as a medical student:

"I recall vividly one episode in which a magical color appeared to me. I had been taught, as a child, that there were seven colors in the spectrum, including indigo....I had long wanted to see 'true' indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964 I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium). About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, "I want to see indigo now -- now!

"And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: it was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, that Giotto spent a lifetime trying to get  but never achieved --never achieved, perhaps, because the color of heaven is not to be seen on earth."

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

Never having taken LSD myself, I became interested in learning more about the experience -- not by taking it, though who knows?, that may happen someday, but by reading up on it. For a few years, an old book has sat on my shelf, picked up somewhere, perhaps a Brooklyn stoop sale, and left unread: The Politics of Ecstasy, by Timothy Leary, Ph.D., a collection of essays written by and about the Harvard professor who spent the 1968 San Francisco Summer of Love defending his psychedelically assisted research into the inner spaces of the human mind. So this weekend, I finally picked up the book and started to read an essay titled "She Comes in Colors," which turns out to be the transcript of an interview Playboy magazine conducted with Leary in 1966.

Basically, the dude dropped a lot of acid. A lot.

"The lesson I have learned over 300 LSD sessions, and which I have been passing on to others, can be stated in 6 syllables: Turn on, tune in, drop out," Leary told Playboy. (Which means that he must have taken many more trips between the interview and the time of The Politics of Ecstasy's publication in 1968.) Click here for archive.org's complete transcript of the interview.

I was especially interested to learn what Prof. Leary has to say about LSD, women and sex. It's a mixed bag of drug-tested experience, scientific wisdom, unfiltered thought and a sprinkling of sheer nonsense that sounds dated.

For example, I now know that in a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman can have several hundred orgasms! I also have learned that every woman has built into her cells and tissues the longing for "a hero, sage-mythic male, to open up and share her own divinity." Plus, LSD is a powerful panacea for impotence and frigidity, "both of which, like homosexuality, are symbolic screw-ups."

‘She Was All Women, All Woman, the Essence of Female’

But Leary was a brave thinker, a man ahead of his times in many ways, who pressed forward without shame in his belief that LSD opens a person to the fact that "every man contains the essence of all men and every woman has within her all women."

There’s a funny passage in the interview where Playboy keeps asking Leary variations of the same question, which is whether it’s easier for a guy to pick up chicks while tripping. The doctor warns against it, saying that on LSD, her eyes would be microscopic, and she’d see very plainly what the guy was up to, coming on with some heavy-handed, moustache-twisting routine: “You’d look like a consummate ass, and she’d laugh at you, or you’d look like a monster and she’d scream and go into a paranoid state."

Leary recalls an LSD session with his wife, Rosemary, when their eyes locked and she pulled him into the center of her mind, where he experienced everything she was experiencing. There's real beauty in his telling.

As he looked at her face, it began to melt and change.

Dr. and Mrs. Leary

“I saw her as a witch, a Madonna, a nagging crone, a radiant queen, a Byzantine virgin, a tired worldly-wise oriental whore who had seen every sight of life repeated a thousand times. She was all women, all woman, the essence of female – eyes smiling, quizzically, resignedly, devilishly, always inviting: ‘See me, hear me, join me, merge with me, keep the dance going.’”

Mrs. Leary was all women to her husband. He had no need for a constant, ever-changing parade of young female flesh, he told Playboy. During the six-year period of his extravagant, promiscuous, unchaste use of LSD, Dr. Leary was faithfully monogamous. “The notion of running around trying to find different mates is a very low-level concept,” he said.

There's something sweetly old-fashioned in his fidelity to Mrs. Leary. Say what you will about him -- and plenty of criticisms have been lobbed at him -- Timothy Leary was a man who clearly loved and cherished his wife.