Series Notes Contact Rehearsal Hotel
Series Notes Contact Rehearsal Hotel
65.
a Blue streak /
A dry radius of quiet /
Lila Matsumoto
Matsumoto, circa 2026.
a Blue streak /
A dry radius of quiet /
Lila Matsumoto
A prose poem.
* * *
That is something one does not foresee in wishing to elude one’s traditions: that the threat, once its fangs are drawn, may become transfigured as intimacy, a frame of reference.
Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon (1970)
* * *
* * *
An excerpt (care of Monitor Books) ...
* * *
Goobers
Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber,
‘Sonata No. 5 in E Minor, C. 142’ (1681)
I hate arrogance, so it puzzles me now, as it puzzled me then, that I had travelled across Arizona with one of the most arrogant people I knew, whom I called my friend.
We had met through a woman who lived in my dormitory, who knew him from her Art History class, and who later fell into an unhappy relationship with a stockbroker. She introduced me to this person, whose imperiousness was immediately recognisable by his carefully pressed shorts. ‘They’re vintage silk grosgrain,’ he explained, when he saw me looking.
Shortly after this encounter he began leaving me copies of Artforum under my door with unmissable shows circled. When I saw him in the quadrangle or in the cafeteria he would descend upon me like an elegant cloud and give witty, bitchy commentaries about people we knew in common: his over-earnest roommate, crunching on carrot batons late into the night, the literature professor incurious about anything outside the long 19th century, that person in the moral philosophy seminar who talked over everyone. He called these people ‘goobers,’ a grab-bag term describing people who were, variously, literal-minded, lacklustre, hypocritical, or foolish. They were also, he noted, blind to his charms and oblivious to his outsized personality.
I was uncertain of his overtures to impress upon me his tastes in clothes (Marc Jacobs, Etro), literature (Sontag, Sebald), and dance (Martha Graham). I could not understand why he seemed invested in me, who did not conceive of likes and dislikes as ‘taste,’ but as an unorganised array of whims. But despite my doubts, there was a whiff of flattery and intrigue: why would someone so discerning find me interesting? Had I, without trying or knowing how, excelled at his quixotic game of sensibility; was I an idiot savant of refinement?
I could not deny that our friendship—which was what he called it, and what I accepted as the name of his project to culture me—felt like an eye of a potato: vaguely disconcerting, speedily sprouting shoots without me noticing.
That is why we were in Arizona a few months after we met, because his mother had procured tickets for a conceptual art installation in the high desert outside of Sedona. ‘We will go,’ he said to me one morning, and as I had no plans over spring break, I found myself in a plane seat, watching his fine head turn to me conspiratorially from where he sat ten rows ahead in first class; then later, in his mother’s Jeep on I-17, listening to his hands tap the steering wheel to Biber’s ‘Violin Sonata No.5 in E Minor.’
Next to the installation was a log cabin where we would spend the night. Under the right conditions, namely an incoming storm, there was a good chance that we would witness a natural phenomenon by which the charged particles above the metallic installation would produce blue orbs of light that would hang in the air like will-o’-the-wisps.
The log cabin was sparsely decorated and artfully arranged. On the beds lay woven blankets made by Navajo women from a nearby village, which I later learned fetched over $3,000 on the fine textile market. An austere bottle of milk stood alone in the fridge. In the freezer, which opened like a treasure chest, there were dark shapes labelled ‘Venison Burger.’
There was no storm. We defrosted the burgers and ate them on the doorstep facing the installation and the light of the village over 50 miles away. A dry radius of quiet.
At night I awoke to the sound of girls giggling next to my bed, behind the exterior wall of the cabin. They shuffled, scraped objects, and chattered, speaking in no language I recognised. Yet, however petrified I was by the alien noise, I decided not to go to my arrogant friend, because despite his impeccable taste, I knew that whatever was outside the cabin, roving and laughing with enviable glee—they were beyond his ken.
Order Matsumoto’s talk a blue streak from monitor direct.
Lila Matsumoto’s publications include Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water (Prototype, 2021), which was commended for the Forward Poetry Prize and recommended by the Poetry Book Society, Urn & Drum (Shearsman, 2018), and The Very Nature of Materiality is an Entanglement (In Other Words, 2024). She plays in the band Food People and teaches creative writing and poetics at the University of Nottingham.
Back to Rehearsal.
* * *
Goobers
Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber,
‘Sonata No. 5 in E Minor, C. 142’ (1681)
I hate arrogance, so it puzzles me now, as it puzzled me then, that I had travelled across Arizona with one of the most arrogant people I knew, whom I called my friend.
We had met through a woman who lived in my dormitory, who knew him from her Art History class, and who later fell into an unhappy relationship with a stockbroker. She introduced me to this person, whose imperiousness was immediately recognisable by his carefully pressed shorts. ‘They’re vintage silk grosgrain,’ he explained, when he saw me looking.
Shortly after this encounter he began leaving me copies of Artforum under my door with unmissable shows circled. When I saw him in the quadrangle or in the cafeteria he would descend upon me like an elegant cloud and give witty, bitchy commentaries about people we knew in common: his over-earnest roommate, crunching on carrot batons late into the night, the literature professor incurious about anything outside the long 19th century, that person in the moral philosophy seminar who talked over everyone. He called these people ‘goobers,’ a grab-bag term describing people who were, variously, literal-minded, lacklustre, hypocritical, or foolish. They were also, he noted, blind to his charms and oblivious to his outsized personality.
I was uncertain of his overtures to impress upon me his tastes in clothes (Marc Jacobs, Etro), literature (Sontag, Sebald), and dance (Martha Graham). I could not understand why he seemed invested in me, who did not conceive of likes and dislikes as ‘taste,’ but as an unorganised array of whims. But despite my doubts, there was a whiff of flattery and intrigue: why would someone so discerning find me interesting? Had I, without trying or knowing how, excelled at his quixotic game of sensibility; was I an idiot savant of refinement?
I could not deny that our friendship—which was what he called it, and what I accepted as the name of his project to culture me—felt like an eye of a potato: vaguely disconcerting, speedily sprouting shoots without me noticing.
That is why we were in Arizona a few months after we met, because his mother had procured tickets for a conceptual art installation in the high desert outside of Sedona. ‘We will go,’ he said to me one morning, and as I had no plans over spring break, I found myself in a plane seat, watching his fine head turn to me conspiratorially from where he sat ten rows ahead in first class; then later, in his mother’s Jeep on I-17, listening to his hands tap the steering wheel to Biber’s ‘Violin Sonata No.5 in E Minor.’
Next to the installation was a log cabin where we would spend the night. Under the right conditions, namely an incoming storm, there was a good chance that we would witness a natural phenomenon by which the charged particles above the metallic installation would produce blue orbs of light that would hang in the air like will-o’-the-wisps.
The log cabin was sparsely decorated and artfully arranged. On the beds lay woven blankets made by Navajo women from a nearby village, which I later learned fetched over $3,000 on the fine textile market. An austere bottle of milk stood alone in the fridge. In the freezer, which opened like a treasure chest, there were dark shapes labelled ‘Venison Burger.’
There was no storm. We defrosted the burgers and ate them on the doorstep facing the installation and the light of the village over 50 miles away. A dry radius of quiet.
At night I awoke to the sound of girls giggling next to my bed, behind the exterior wall of the cabin. They shuffled, scraped objects, and chattered, speaking in no language I recognised. Yet, however petrified I was by the alien noise, I decided not to go to my arrogant friend, because despite his impeccable taste, I knew that whatever was outside the cabin, roving and laughing with enviable glee—they were beyond his ken.
Order Matsumoto’s talk a blue streak from monitor direct.
Lila Matsumoto’s publications include Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water (Prototype, 2021), which was commended for the Forward Poetry Prize and recommended by the Poetry Book Society, Urn & Drum (Shearsman, 2018), and The Very Nature of Materiality is an Entanglement (In Other Words, 2024). She plays in the band Food People and teaches creative writing and poetics at the University of Nottingham.
Back to Rehearsal.