Dudes, my brain is fried. So fried I am talking like Spicoli and then thinking broccoli and then broccoli makes me think of trees and then did you know that the maple leaf is on the Canadian flag and that I am Canadian and oh yeah, pot is legal in Vancouver. Where the Olympics are. I am delirious, deleterious . . oh holy heavens someone come and put me out of my misery because now I am talking to myself in a broad Wisc-ahn-sin accent.
I’m going to do you a favour and skip over all the reasons why I am in this state and just turn the time over to Jude. You’re going to like her answers and, what’s more, she won’t take you on an ill-advised, manic ride of virtual catch-phrase. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some jokes to make in my Wisconsin accent, dontcha know. (Everything is funnier in a Wisconsin accent. Just ask my sisters.)
Take it away, Jude!
What are your necessities? The freedom to dream; a warm sun; the ocean; hope; travel; books that make me cry; romance; films that move me, that make me think; dance; a lover who makes me laugh; the Daily Puppy; penguins; an oversized cashmere sweater; the sauna; the abilities we take for granted: walking, running, talking, thinking; writing, of course writing…but none of these are half as necessary as Ken, the Love of My Life these past 11 years.
Nothing smells better than. . .hyacinth; freshly baking bread; Chinese laundries; chestnuts roasting on a cold day on a cobblestone street on the Left Bank of Paris; the melted gruyere atop the onion soup gratin at Balthazar; logs burning in a fireplace; a forest wet in the morning dew; pure vanilla extract; the drawn butter before I dip my lobster into it; the salt of the ocean waves sifted through palm fronds; leather; Chanel No. 5; the pages of an old, favorite novel; the freshly painted walls before you move your furniture into a new apartment; possibility, anticipation.
Nothing tastes better than. . .pear and gorgonzola; dark chocolate and raspberry; Chinese food and Coca-Cola; mango with sticky rice; champagne with a view of the Seine; squid ink pasta and bellinis on the Grand Canal; Ken’s warm cheek when I first wake; fresh-brewed iced tea on the beach; the macchiato at the café Fontana di Trevi in Rome; lobsterlobsterlobster!; foie gras with rose jelly; satisfaction; rose-mint lip balm.
Nothing feels better than . . . lying on the beach in a baking sun; a massage by Vladimir; sitting by a fire when I’m really cold and even when I’m not; riding on the back of Ken’s motorcycle over the 59th Street bridge on a mid-summer night, preferably beneath a full moon; arriving in a foreign destination; coming home; the crack in your heart when flamenco music reaches inside you; finding the perfect word, crafting the perfect sentence, paragraph, page…you get the idea (perfect until you read it tomorrow and realize your delusion); finishing a book and wanting to start it all over again right now; cooking a gourmet dinner for people I love and rendering them helpless to do anything but grunt with pleasure; putting on a dress that makes me look sexy and feel young; the happy fuzziness that happens three glasses into a bottle Chateauneuf du Pape; the inside of Ken’s embrace and the unconditional love communicated in his hugs.
I’d rather never relent in striving to attain my romantic ideals than settle or compromise those ideals.
If you could live in any other epoch, which would it be? 1920s—specifically, in Paris. I’d have loved to have been one of those reckless American expat artists drinking and cavorting and loving and, occasionally, writing.
What work of art or literature (a book, song, poem etc.) changed your life? Not a single one. Books more than anything, but they range from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Little Women and the Agatha Christies I read as a girl to my introduction to the stream-of-consciousness writing of James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse) to almost anything by Hemingway to Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (why we tell stories!) to Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses and oh, I could go on. Collectively, these books and many others have shown me what infinite possibilities live in language. Also, Rodin’s sculpture The Cathedral and the music of Simon & Garfunkel, but I won’t go into detail! (Suffice it to say, Kathy’s song moves me to tears.)
If you could jump into any painting, à la Mary Poppins, which would you choose? This painting called Le Lit (The Bed) is not typical of Toulouse Lautrec, but I love the intimacy of it. I’d have to not only drop in, but evict the young woman there now.
"Le Lit" c. 1893 by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Image courtesy of Musée d'Orsay
Want to read other fantastic answers to the Yell Softly Questions? Check out the interviews here, a fellow writer’s here, and yours truly’s here. I promise, no accents were abused in the answering of my questions.
Send your answers to me via email. You know you want to. I’ll even assign you a pseudonym if you’re shy.
Editor’s Note: Due to my frenzied (miraculously, non-drug-related) state of mind earlier, I failed to give Jude a proper introduction! Jude is a New York-based writer who has currently at work on her second novel. You can read more about her, as well as excerpts from her work, on her website ( Click here! )
