I Am in Love with a Dead Woman

But have you seen "Vampyros Lesbos"? Go rent it now, if you have not. See left, if you need a reason. Maybe my favorite thing about that movie (besides Soledad Miranda, who tragically died in a car accident at age 27) is that it seems to run with English subtitles while dubbed from Spanish (Portuguese?) into German. The basic story of a voracious vampiress luring hot chicks to her biting mouth is besides the point, clearly. A highlight is the afflicted blonde in a room in a "private clinic" on some unnamed Turkish island who feels (nay, agonizingly experiences) everything the vampiress does out in the world. We see shots of this locked-away writhing blonde with little context. Delicious, incongruous psychosexual candy in a mesmerizing film with a sexy, long-dead, undead villain.

Onward. And less-lasciviousward.

Read "My Father's Suitcase" by Orhan Pamuk in the New Yorker this week.
It's one of the most honest assessments of why a writer writes I have ever read.

Here:

"Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy."

I think this is honest and jaded but full of childlike trust, too:

"For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, own them, and make them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing.

…When a writer uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he is aware of it or not, putting great faith in humanity."

And then there is this passage, which basically sums up better than I ever could what I worry over as a reporter and sometime-other-kind-of writer, like a stone I have worked a groove into with my tired, constantly rubbing thumb:

"The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is."