versification

emily dickenson writes: Mr. Higginson, Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? as a first gesture from writer to reader. I think it is a very beautiful thing to say.

sometimes I think when I was little something was taken from me, and in its place I got words that I could use to say secret things, to call to the thing that was lost, and the girl. even now, when I got to the page, it is with this idea that I'm returning something; that there has been an exchange of a sort, and I'm complicit in an economy I could never fully understand.

speech

did you know (yes, probably) that if you and I were to have a conversation, completely lucid, even simple, something about cooking tortillas or our childhood dogs, and we were to transcribe this conversation, and give it to a third party, say, someone named fred, fred might believe that you and I are actually insane; not because we're making him read a conversation about tortillas and dogs, but because the syntax of human speech is so radically different from the syntax of written speech -- we interrupt ourselves, drop thoughts, leave out articles, engage in serious parataxis -- we sound terribly unstable. I'm sure I've heard this somewhere before, but I've never seen it until today. I'm transcribing a conversation between m. robinson and p. auster, and I simply can't get over how two intelligent human beings can sound so intelligent and read so unintelligibly. I feel like my whole view of language is topsy-turvy! sideways! it's wonderful!

itemized

1. for all ya'll feeling blue about the evolution of your love beyond the shivers and shakes of new romance, here's some scientists thinking on it:

http://news.bbc.co.ukk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/health/4478040.stm

I love the neuroscience of love. it's my favorite of all the neurosciences except maybe that of memory, but then, the two are hardly extricable. I'm reading Love in the Time of Cholera just now, and it's funny to read the drama of love and then the chemistry of it, and realize that they are equally lovely in their own ways, and that they nod to each other but that neither constitute the whole beauty of the thing. or else, as this article points to a bit, the less beautiful, less overwhelming, lukewarmer bellies of love. there's a place for those too, in marquez and in the brain.

2. for all ya'll nagging me for a photographic image of my new haircut, here is me with my new hairs in a coffee place in chicago trying to dissuade the camera with my eyes from the picture snapping:



3. just now I'm going to get a big trash bag and collect a bagful of clothes and go sell them for the dough. I think it'll be good and cleansing. plus, at the moment my closet looks like it's masticating an overabundance of cloth, and I'd like to give it something more manageable to hold.

4. speaking of dreams (which I did), I dreamt sunday night that I had to rebuild the entire world. I looked out at a white space, and I chanted things, and suddenly there were shallow pools of water, and perfectly round continents, and I had put them there. this reminds me of my gills dream, in that there's a sense of construction after devestation. really, these are the hopeful things of my subconscious, or unconscious, or both. it makes me want to write a poem of hands.