Sublime

From the start, The Dresden Dolls functioned in an artistic community that depended on messy exchanges of goodwill and the swapping of favors.

They had me as an audience; they did not also deserve my sympathy.

Sometimes she took odd pictures. She wrote strange things down. She collected scraps of stories and inexplicable memorabilia that appeared to have no purpose. There seemed to be no pattern or theme to her interest. She had no set task, no project. She was not writing for a newspaper or magazine, she was not writing a book or making a film. She paid

“Damn,” I said. I thought about how Megan and I, according to the lifestyle marketing biographies the sales team had invented, were “Style Eccentrics,” meaning that they could not predict our shopping habits. One day we would buy a coat at the Goodwill and the next day a Chanel blouse. We were unfavorable as consumers, impossible to pin down, and I

gyre

Maria Popova,

schadenfreude.

mollified,