birdtongue

music

2008-07-14T10:47:00.000-07:00

half of the criteria by which one judges a coffee shop, at least in my mind, is its music. the coffee matters, but even a good cup of coffee can go sour if you're trying to read Wallace Stevens to Alanis Morissette's "Isn't It Ironic?"

I can appreciate working to a little bach or brahms... beethoven or any of the other b-named composers. nothing too in your face, nothing to tchaikovsky grandiose and sweeping. on the other hand, I was recently at a coffee shop (st. marks) which played neko case followed by edith piaf - I was in heaven. radio alternative is not an option. I'll walk out, I swear.

the coffee shop I'm working in now is cracking me up. the baristas are pretty punked out (pink hair, wallet chains, t-shirts with skulls), and the music... madonna, marvin gaye, that old 80's song from top gun, prince... every time a new song comes on I have to suppress a smile. the cuff doesn't quite match the collar, so to speak.

then again... who doesn't like madonna?

manos

2008-02-09T11:59:00.000-08:00

last night I went to the closing of an exhibition that was called, I think, manos. it consisted of boards which were mounted with old, old, old rocks (yes, rocks) that had been used once as tools for grinding and perhaps other things but I don't know what things, and then writing instruments (pens of some kind or other) and then poems between them, written with said writing instrument. I can't say much about the poems because honestly most of them were illegible (which honestly, I liked) but I can say that I put my hands up to the old rocks and imagined, for a moment, that the impression of the labor of the women who had been grinding day after day, generation after generation, was sucked up into my hand and travelled up my arm and wanted to get far into my body. like I always do when it seems as though the sad dead want into my body, I say "shhh and go" but this is a hard thing to do in public, so I just said "shhh" and blew softly into my hand as if to let go of all of their hard days for them, as if as if, all of their broken and hard hands whispered away.

joking

2007-10-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

so, this past week I attended the state book awards ceremony, an affair much like a wedding with prizes. anyway, one of the winners of such a prize, the winner of the nonfiction award (I think), read from her new award winning book. she read a passage about finding oneself or finding one's vocation, and in this passage she wrote about a teacher who taught her about rocks. this teacher said of one particular rock, "this one should be in a pageant." I loved it. it was the only thing I loved in the award winning passage. this woman talking about a rock as if it were a beauty queen. the audience laughed. she mocked the woman. the audience laughed. she mitigated her mockery with a comment about how at least she had passion. the audience laughed. I didn't laugh. I loved her. and I wondered why all this laughing, why affirm the obvious which is that rocks do not hold beauty pageants? I don't know. but I knew I couldn't laugh without turning something inside out. so I didn't. that's all.

lonely

2007-10-07T13:30:00.000-07:00

sometimes I think that being in one room while people laugh in a nearby room is one of the loneliest feelings in the world. you cannot laugh, are not invited to laugh. if you can hear the conversation around what they are laughing about, maybe you don't even think it's funny. that's another exclusion. or maybe you do think it's funny, and start to laugh, but stop yourself because it seems a little bit like eating someone else's dinner.

other days you laugh and it's no big deal that you're in the other room. you laugh as a subversion, like singing loudly in your car to pop music when you know the guy in the suv beside you is totally watching you rock out. you laugh even when the people in the other room have stopped laughing. you laugh yourself to sleep.

to the ladies false as the gorgeous poem

2007-09-05T11:18:00.000-07:00

is a line from lisa robertson's _the men_; I underlined it not because I think badly of the elegant ladies but because there is an indictment here of the elegant poem. a fine poem. a fancy poem.

(on another note, I never really liked the word "ladies" (laddies, I like). ladies drink tea in lieu of coffee, ladies handwash their hose and hang them delicately up to dry, ladies do their hair every morning, ladies go to cocktail bars where men in button up shirts say, "hello ladies" and they smile.)

nope. I don't want to be a lady. or a writer of gorgeous poems. or I do want to be a writer of gorgeous poems but what I have to understand is that what is really gorgeous requires the profane. I don't want to write a "lady" poem. Oh! a lady poem! that sounds awful. I want to pull my poem out of the earth and let the mud slough off.

Lately (after D)

2007-08-23T16:09:00.000-07:00

I listen to Kathleen Battle but would rather listen to Maria Callas, whose cd I can't find.

I eat couscous in honor of summertime.

The afternoons fill with storm.

Flowers in the park are huge and red and having bloomed.

My moods swing like fists in a ring.

I've become a lover of Norwegian humor (Elling!).

Writing is strange- is a stranger.

Nighttime visages I bring with me from dreams and misplace into my bedroom.

I'm glacially rereading Middlemarch.

My new neighbor walks around naked and invites a girl over who is also naked. They do things.

Fear and Trembling.

Children chase yellow busses; yellow busses chase children.

going to a town

2007-08-09T17:08:00.000-07:00

that is this town that is the town that rufus wainwright played in just blocks from my apartment two nights ago after which I have not stopped singing in my head and out loud his exuberant or melancholy or exuberantly melancholy songs. I think something broke open inside me that night and has stayed broken open. I feel all raw inside.

in other news, I read yesterday that there was a tornado in brooklyn. I hope people and people's houses and cars and my favorite taco stand are okay. also, and does a body need to say it? how surreal. really - it puts the elder french to shame.

oh I am delinquent

2007-08-09T17:07:00.000-07:00

and that is a sad thing.

from Rilke's Letters on Cezanne

2007-06-26T10:24:00.000-07:00

Ah, we compute the years and divide them here and there and stop and begin and hesitate between the two. But how very much of one piece is everything we encounter, how related one thing is to the next, how it gave birth to itself and grows up and is educated in its own nature, and all we basically have to do is to _be there_, but simply, ardently, the way the earth simply is, consenting to the seasons, light and dark and altogether in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel secure.

sounds and the city

2007-05-28T16:31:00.000-07:00

I don't think I'd notice it so much if those sounds which penetrated my apartment walls weren't so often siren sounds or fighting sounds or the beejees. the other night I wake up to a woman yelling "and you don't think I know you want to fuck me?!" and then this afternoon a woman yells "fuck you fuck your lazy ass" neither of which are pretty things to say and now a man sings along to disco songs of the late 70s which he will soon exchange for contemporary country.

don't get me wrong: I like living in a place with people and things; I'm not looking to go all hermity. but it's funny to me that it seems the more people there are in a space, the less they seem to care how they affect it. okay, okay. I'm generalizing and overstating. still, why can't people yell, "Happiness! Happiness!" or "you are beautiful as pictures!" nope. they yell about ugliness and fucking and it carries into my window I keep open for the breeze and my heart gets filled up with their sadness. but then, maybe that's how it's supposed to be; all this sharing of sadnesses. otherwise we'd have to bear it alone.

The Trinity was born
from what we know
of the bitter

symbiosis of couples.
Can we reduce echo's sadness
by synchronizing our speeches?

- R.A.

zs

2007-05-13T22:58:00.000-07:00

it's fast approaching midnight and sleep hasn't even begun whispering its sleepy hints to me, a side-effect of the fact that I no longer slumber through the night but like an infant wake up wailing through the walls.

well, okay, not wailing, but coughing in fits. it's a side effect of last month's infection, I think, that gathered itself into my chest. what this means is I've hardly slept through the night in weeks, so I find myself sleeping days, which makes me in turn unable to fall asleep, and then finally falling asleep, unable to stay there.

I dislike it.

neighborhood

2007-04-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

I really like the man who works at the corner store. he is happy to shave a few cents off the price of my ginger beer or let me pay with a credit card for a $1.89 purchase even though there is a $5.00 minimum for credit card purchases, and he always changes out my $2 for laundry money on sundays, and when he does this, he smiles wide and tacks on "for you" at the end of his sentences, like "yes, I can change the money, for you" though we both understand that there's nothing special about me save the fact that I live in the neighborhood, and that his corner store is my corner store. this is why I like him. his regular indications that I am, in fact, his neighbor, which sure, translates into "semi-regular customer," and it's always good to maintain happy relations with the regulars, but still, there seems something else there, something underlyingly neighborly that, at the end of the day, is what places are or should be about, the places we choose to inhabit, settle into.

doctorfied

2007-04-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

just a note to say today I passed my defense, and it was good and joyful and we licked the flaming hoop of the dissertation until it smoldered and then it was over. I still can't perform open heart surgery or even fashion a decent splint, but gregory says I could save a poem's life in a pinch and we cried, "remove that metaphor, stat!" which at the time seemed very funny but really just shows that there're phds in lots of things, but there's no such thing as a phd in humor.

and the flowerbed

2007-03-13T17:25:00.000-07:00

happiness happiness. it is a strange and elating thing to write the last word of your dissertation, and feel it as the last word, and click the save button and then the little x of the word program and close your laptop and then be done. it is a strange and elating thing, even if the little dissertation isn't much to speak of, it's still mine and it still has its last word. and what did I do? I walked outside into the daylight with a just opened bottle of gingerale and I breathed. I walked. and I drank my gingerale and it was good.

of course, tomorrow I'll print it out and start tweaking away. but tonight? tonight, I'm going to drink mojitos!!!

making my own fun

2007-01-21T13:36:00.000-08:00

backflash

2007-01-13T10:16:00.000-08:00

this morning, in the midst of trying to think about something, someone, I thought about something else. I was climbing a rope and it frayed and then I climbed the fray.

I thought about, years ago, sitting on my old apartment steps with an old boyfriend; I was leaving him. I had a box of stuff (red wings from a halloween costume, some shirts, some trinkets) loaded into my car. the conversation we had that day revolved, not around the relationship I was leaving, but around the life I would live without him - he could understand my leaving only by imagining that my subsequent life would necessarily be magnificent, full of laurels and bright lights. before I left, he said something like, "maybe I'll see you after you take over the world." I also think now that I understood my leaving in those terms as well. I was going somewhere and I could not take him with me.

of course, the problem with those delusions of grandeur is that they are necessarily disappointing. what's more is that I realized that those specific delusions existed largely to help me extract myself from a brutal and withered relationship.

this morning I remembered that conversation and I glanced around my living room and thought that, years later and no laurels and no lights, how strangely contented I am with the life I've led since leaving those steps and that little town. I looked at the relics I've accumulated, my k. waldrop collages and my little postcard of a parked yellow car j'lyn gave me for my birthday and the pretty green vase joe brought me back from france and my rhode island license plate that I held onto for two years after leaving the state and my christmas tree I always have on the ledge between my book room and my living room and the stained glass windows I bought for david but never gave to him because it seemed too manufactured and the rocking chair I used to believe was haunted and the stacks of music I have near the stereo, none of which I had when I left georgia and the books and papers piled along the wall where there's space. and yes these things are objects but they are markers of a life, star-points in a constellation.

I thought about then and those steps and that leaving and I thought about where I thought I'd go and I thought about where I am and I laughed. it was a good laugh and long. the clock I bought a week after leaving that town in georgia made its ticking in the corner.

snowed-in

2006-12-20T09:42:00.000-08:00

it's blizzarding. and I'm home-bound when I should've been out-bound on a flight to georgia. and now I've got fears that there will be no home for the holidays, and I'll eat a can of soup next to my 1.5 ft. fake wallgreens christmas tree and will be a christmas sadsack. I know family is all complicated and most would rather eat a can of soup beside a fake tree than deal with the squawking birds of the family tree, but I had hopes for this year, hopes for peaceful bread-breaking and gift-giving, hopes for the birds.

I guess this means I'm a penguin.

scattered

2006-11-17T17:42:00.000-08:00

how many little lives we live in our little lives.

let me forget
let me be lost

I laid in the bathtub tonight listening to H.D.'s cracked and lovely voice reading to me her helen in egypt, and thought of H.D. imagining more lives for helen, and then of H.D. imagining. yesterday I thought of morning glories, what happy-sad flowers, and what a gesture to offer someone morning glories, like roses or sunflowers but sadder, to give someone a blue flower too delicate even to live. I thought of lots of other things besides, what engenders cruelty, emotional ahimsa, regret, fifties dialects, bathtub bubbles.

Ghost in the Graveyard

2006-10-12T10:35:00.000-07:00

I think it must be a strange time because tonight I looked down at my plate of ravioli and asparagus and thought I’m going to die – not because of the food at all but because I could not imagine myself living beyond that moment, or this moment, broadly. once when I was fifteen this girl Jackie read my palm and said there will be a moment when you will either die or not die. if you die, you will be dead very young; if you do not die, you will live to be very old. and somehow I have this feeling like I made a choice somewhere along the line and it was the wrong choice and now I’m going to die, because whatever life I’m living is not cosmically sustainable, and so now I’m waiting to either get to the living or suddenly expire, because somewhere along the line I made a choice and that choice meant early death so as long as I exist, the universe is all out of order. my death would really be a correction. which is not to say I want to die – I don’t. I just can’t imagine living, not a year from now, not ten years from now. a few years ago I came across a description of a neurological disorder wherein the victim believes him or herself to be actually dead, but not exactly a ghost or anything. it’s a peculiar disorder, and at the time it seemed far fetched, but not today. not so unusual today. have you ever felt like this? did you make it go away? I would like for it to go away please.

the world needs more nurses and other true stories

2006-10-04T12:13:00.000-07:00

like the little bear that ate fermented apples yesterday and stumbled into an elementary school. or how francis ponge made the pre. or how the aspen tree is, with regard to biomass, the largest organism on the planet, or how the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body. or the passagio can make or break your singing career. or blake drew pictures of himself naked. lots of other things too.

we get our bearings. we love and get our bearings. this little bird lost its bearings.

(pretty dead bird captured by j'lyn chapman)

a poem for my favorite flower

2006-09-08T15:54:00.000-07:00

Ah Sun-flower

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done;

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

--William Blake

cat cow

2006-08-29T14:25:00.000-07:00

observe: arched which way to say hello or nevermind. the growth of a posture spread into the hips spread into the left right of swagger saunter body wave hello to the world coming and/or going.

pretty line

2006-07-24T20:19:00.000-07:00

the sky is sad and beautiful as an extreme shelter. - baudelaire, waldrop trans.

worsening situation

2006-07-22T16:14:00.000-07:00

sitting on my bed, reading little JA's Self-Portrait book ("True, there are occasions/ For white uniforms and a special language/ Kept secret from the others. The limes/ are duly sliced" and I have genuine chuckling -- and say, look here! it's meaning!) the church bells a block away begin to chime, and I think wedding, and then they continue to chime, and I think, practice for a wedding? and now, three quarters of an hour, greensleeves, beehoven's ninth, and a few recognizable hymns later, I think someone's going to town on those bells, occasionally an out-of-tune-town, but to town, nonetheless.

murmurs

2006-06-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

sonnet - sonitus (from Dante's Latin) - murmur; little sound.

like whispering to yourself, or low to an intimate. I like how personal this etymology is, as opposed to "little song," which is cute and public or maybe domestic but hardly feels as private, and if the sonnet is "the first lyric of self-consciousness," then it becomes so fitting. I like the idea of a poem that comes to you like murmuring -- a very constrained murmur. like Donne's "I am a little world made cunningly" or Keats' "When I have fears that I may cease to be." in fact, thinking about it now, really from Petrarch to Donne to Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats, one finds all of these references in the sonnet to poetry rising from silence, stillness, solitude.

and since I'm reading so many sonnets these days, I'm adopting a theme sonnet (like a theme song, but without the singing):

Keen, fitful gusts are whisp'ring here and there
Among the bushes half leafless, and dry;
The stars look very cold about the sky,
And I have many miles on foot to fare.
Yet feel I little of the cool bleak air,
Or of the dead leaves rustling drearily,
Or of those silver lamps that burn on high
Or of the distance from home's pleasant lair:
For I am brimful of the friendliness
That in a little cottage I have found;
Of fair-haired Milton's eloquent distress,
And all his love for gentle Lycid drowned,
Of lovely Laura in her light green dress,
And faithful Petrarch gloriously crowned.

-- John Keats

what america looks like

2006-06-03T10:22:00.000-07:00

I went 1200 miles west and this is the kind of thing that I saw. and the lens through which I occasionally saw it.

because road trips, like other things, are always kind of about the rear view mirror, the train, the distance.

in this town called lovelock, maybe somewhere in utah, which claims the motto "lock your love in lovelock" and in which a local man called out from across the street, "baby, I wanna hold you nice and tight," which was just about the most romantic and creepiest cat call I've received in some time.

I love the trash cans, like misfit children, stacked against the hills all rising spendor. as if they keep a secret from the natural world and the secret is that they have snuck in the most beautiful place and have been let stay.

and me, I was there too, in my silly sunglasses.

other beautiful things, of which there was such an abundance, that I could hardly begin to offer them all here.
if a tree falls in a forest kaboom!
yep, I'm still there. in america. only moved from beach to forest, and having moved silly sunglasses from face to head.
california sure is pretty. this was taken at goat rock beach, which has got to be one of the windiest places on earth, windier even than the windy city. so funny, how shore and not shore look so nice smushed up together.

springtime

2006-05-04T07:54:00.000-07:00

a pretty picture to share. that's all. I'm tired in all new ways. I'm so tired that if I manage to stay awake until 9p.m. tonight, I will believe myself to have superpowers. which, you know, I like to believe anyway, but I might manage a conviction supplanting hope.

moods

2006-04-15T14:24:00.000-07:00

today it is overcast and I feel overcast, as if a little bit I can feel the sadness of everyone around me who are so sad and it gets in my bones like it is my bones. I wrote a poem called discovery and I think it might be sad and maybe a little boring but then I always think my poems are boring. reading kathy acker this morning with coffee (are most written words boring in comparison?) I kept covering my eyes as if the book were a slasher flick and then since I kept doing that over and over again I decided the book might be a slasher flick, since very little else makes me cover my eyes, though I am a delicate flower, and delicate flowers rely on the obfuscation of the sun, not the hard noon light, lest the bright orange of their bright orange fade, lest they get so hot they bend under the weight of that heat and isn't that a kind of bowing? and don't we, even the delicate flowers, try so hard not to bow in the hard lights?

afterlife 2

2006-04-05T10:15:00.000-07:00

oh reaper how funny you've become. these shakes and big red light running trucks and dreams of worlds without. oh reaper I wish I could admonish you, but you're so pretty and sad come sunrise, with your face-wide smile and shiny dancing shoes. in our more intimate moments, I pull apart the bones of your feet, throw them into the air, then set about the puzzle. oh reaper I'll never grow tired of you always peeking at me from corners, hands full of bone and grass. we should grow old together, one beside the other, and wear the brightest red dresses and throw back our wild red hairs. already you think you love me and try hard to get close. I say a wedding with orchids, and then how near we'll be, and how far, and how then I'll keep my breath.

afterlife

2006-03-29T17:51:00.000-08:00

I had an imaginary near death experience last night. imaginary, because I'm pretty sure I wasn't so near death, that it was the grogginess of sleep and the remnants of dreams I can't remember that brought me the dread.

it's that I woke up, twice, my whole body shaking, my heart racing in the way that you can feel it pushing blood in all the big arteries. I couldn't think, except to think what was happening to me. in front of my eyes I could only see an amorphous red light. the second time I woke up I stayed awake until the shaking stopped and opened my blinds -- hoping that the light from the street would undo the red light, which it did. I kept thinking, I don't want to die. how silly is that? pretty silly. still, at zero o'clock in the morning, we're hardly responsible for reason.

this morning when I woke up, the first thing I thought was, I didn't die last night. and I was glad. and today I've felt very grateful, and alert, and a little like the grinch whose heart grows so many times in his chest.

and all the whos in whoville felt joy.

tales from tvland

2006-03-13T08:29:00.000-08:00

which is not a land I've been very tolerant of lately, mostly because I'm certain that except for a few guilty (yes guilty) but defensible pleasures, my brain gets mushier and number by the pixelated minute. everyone knows this, but a year-long depression has the occasional effect of making one more intimate with primetime than they ever really expected or wanted to be. one feels less alone with bright colors animated in the corner, and so now that said depression has abated, I've taken to reading (etc.) with the television on mute. this morning I had drinking coffee on the couch with yesterday's nytimes book review (a good one; a good paper this week actually, what with milosevic and louise gluck and zizek) and was feeling particularly, self-consciously and noticeably contented when I looked up at my muted colorbox and saw two men in suspenders, hammerpants, and tophats passing a barrel between them, balancing it on their faces, and suddenly mute just didn't seem good enough, and the colorbox lost its color. that is, it went off.

still, lest I get all militant about it, I should say that this past weekend, pbs was rerunning julia child's old french chef tv show, which was just a pleasure to watch (out-loud laughing pleasure), even if just for a few minutes while I was making breakfast. she looked so desperately uncomfortable, as did the camera -- maneuvers that we (until recently) could see on the ruckeyser business show where the man walks in to the set from the corner, as if coming in from off stage. so awkward and adorable.

so there's the good to redeem the bad. so much the way.

moody weather and crustaceans

2006-03-08T18:05:00.000-08:00

yesterday was spring time bona-fide with all kinds of hot and outside shenanigans, so much to make a sick person rise from her bed and court a sunburn with ardor, and today it snows so hard that I think a snowflake tore through my jacket into my sweater and made a home for itself in my belly button! I'm surprised it didn't run me through entirely!

and what all this means is hot baths and la boheme and candlelight. and probably theraflu, since I'm on a theraflu diet these days, and probably cough drops, the lemony kind, and fluffy robes, and rest.

and speaking of fluffy, check out this wonderful furry lobster!

nostalgia

2006-03-07T17:12:00.000-08:00

I found this poem, which I'd not read in maybe nine years, and then when I read it I remembered how much I loved it then, how I read it at night over and over and felt overwhelmed by it but also somehow calmed and also sad. even now, after years and years of reading all kinds of things, I still find it lovely and overwhelming and serene and sad. I think it may have to do with the parenthesis, the sideways, quiet tone of parenthesis, and the soft/hard of the knitted locks, the images of threshhold, the implication of working hands in a poem about losing the body. anyway, here it is, for to share:

The Last Invocation

At the last, tenderly,
From the walls of the powerful fortress'd house,
From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the well-closed doors,
Let me be wafted.

Let me glide noiselessly forth;
With the key of softness unlock the locks -- with a whisper,
Set ope the doors O soul.

Tenderly -- be not impatient,
(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,
Strong is your hold O love.)

- W. Whitman

sweet lovers love the spring

2006-03-01T08:11:00.000-08:00

yesterday was a day beautiful as lightning and nearly as warm. all the air smelled like new season and the city felt like it was meant to be endlessly strolled. there's nothing really to say except since all the flowers are confused and sleepily blinking, and these days I smell like roses, everything is abloom!

also and the opposite, I learned last night of an old television show called "industry on parade." just imagine.

boolean gifts

2006-02-24T08:32:00.000-08:00

every so often it is determined that we english grads need to refamiliarize ourselves with current search techniques and indexes, and so off we begrudgingly trudge to the basement of the library to dance with the search engines, and though mostly there's nothing new (under the fluorescent light or anywhere), last night's perusal did yeild a few interesting titles:

"A Sad Relation of a Dreadful Fire" (author: eye witness)

"Human Thighs and Susceptible Apes"

"Fix, Sex, and Cannibalism"

"Man Eating and Menace"

libraries are good. I worked in one in providence for a summer, and it was one of the best odd jobs I've taken on over the years... lots of sneaking into the stacks to read the sex books (yes I did) and old minutes of the republican party and whatever else struck my interest at the time, plus the daily reading of like 8 different newspapers, plus the disgruntled political chattering of the librarians. it was wonderful. maybe if this poet gig doesn't work out, which, let's face it... I'll take my place among the stacks of decimal'd orders...

lightningbug

2006-02-16T13:48:00.000-08:00

thanks to the generous lendings of friend g., I have now had the immense pleasure of peeking at firefly, mr. whedon's third television endeavor, and I am firmly convinced that the abrupt cessation of this miraculous little show is one of the sadder things imaginable for our sad tvland. in one particularly gripping episode, our beloved cap'm is tortured to death and then revived for more torture by a sadistic super-bad-guy, who cuts off his ear among other uglinesses, and when the motley troops of serentity (the ship) load up their guns to take the badguys by storm, I gotta say, I choked up a little bit. and that the next episode is all about our captain's bare naked ass (isn't that what it was about?) just shows the show's very fine range.

plus, you gotta love a show that makes, for its futuristic slang (in addition to the common introduction of chinese into particularly heated conversations), use of words like "shiny" and "humped."

this thing has got to be brought back. it's just too wonderful.

big love

2006-02-14T07:52:00.000-08:00

I feel like I give a fair amount of attention to affairs of the heart, here and elsewhere, and today is a day more or less set aside for these affairs, though yes of course I know about the flower companies, but I've always kind of felt like I could support any day that distinguishes itself for some expression of love. if I have a problem at all, it is that the love we are supposed to express is so strictly defined (super romantic love with lace and frills), which is silly, and which I think is the reason (and a fine one) our ire is collected against the day.

nevertheless..

I've been thinking lately about the few lines re: love in rilke's eighth elegy, where he writes, "Lovers (were not the love one there/obstructing the view) draw near it an marvel" [snow translation] and the beloved obstructing a kind of transcendental understanding (as does human consciousness, I think rilke suggests, as both fail to consider the expanse beyond a self), as if love could exist more purely if we did not so doggedly attach it to the one who perhaps inspires it. there's something kind of compelling about this idea.

so, here's where I'm at. :-) yea transcendental undefined love. the beloved, all beloveds (sisters, lovers, friends, strangers), however, are not obstructions so much as they are like trees or prarie grass or plastic bags, and love is ideally like wind, which one doesn't really see until it collides and moves our beloved plastic bags or swishes our hairs as we stroll. there yes, always, even if as just potential, and then visible, observable by what we love.

that's all.

if writing should laugh, not weep

2006-02-08T15:37:00.000-08:00

Then, so that he would be a good rider (especially of horses) all his life long, they made him a lovely big wooden horse, which he made to prance, jump, canter, charge, and dance all at once, as well as walk, pace, trot, gallop, amble and go the pace of a hobby, a hackney, a camel and an onager. And he made it change the colour of its hair, as monks change their chasubles, depending on feast days: bay, sorrel, dapple grey, rat colour, roan, cow, speckled, skewbald, piebald, white. And he himself, using a big beam set on wheels, made himself a hunting horse, and another one from the beam of a winepress for everyday use, and from a great oak a mule with a horse-cloth for his bedroom. And he had ten or twelve more for relays, and seven to act as post horses. And he had them all sleep next to him. [Raelais]

(do I even have to say that I most love the hobby horses sleeping next to the giant boy, hobby horse nighttime snuggling)

things I like today

2006-02-06T12:14:00.000-08:00

- that slaughter is laughter with an s.

- that once upon a time, meteors were called exhalations.

- that the joplin line I've liked so much all these years, I am as constant as the northern star, is extracted from julius caesar, and is one of the last things he says. his constancy, we are to believe, is what in part makes him a tyrant (quote unquote). for joplin, it is the material of a good love. and for someone else, love is tyranny and shakespeare and joplin are bedfellows!

filled

2006-01-29T19:45:00.000-08:00

I was thinking today, watching a man at st. marks write page after page of poetry (handwriting it), how strange it is that we call this person in this moment prolific. wouldn't it make more sense to call a person so filled with words pregnant, and women carrying children in their bodies prolific? one day I'd like to meet my beloved lifemate on a streetcorner or in the park and say, love of my life, I'm prolific!

in other news that was never news, my dreaming inspired me, unconscious, to bite my tongue. that's how I woke up this morning. having clamped down on my own tongue. do I need to say ow? yes, I know I'm a little obsessed with the philomela myth, but really this is going too far.

or else my dream mind is seeking an advising position.

demanding. assuming.

more on love

2006-01-24T15:44:00.000-08:00

st. Augustine says something like, Amo: volo ut sis (I love you: I want you to be). I like this, it is more generous than Sappho's conception of love as so entwined with desire, making an object of the beloved, disinterested in the beloved's will except as it affects his or her gain or loss. but then, both conceptions, augustine and sappho's, assume that there is no mingling, and I think of good love as something like volo ut sis with mingling.

nightlife

2006-01-24T07:59:00.000-08:00

lately my dreams have been full of metals, like the monster with the metal face who I had to fight with a pitchfork (to kill him, I had to stab him in the heart, but he blocked all of my attempts, and I ended up stabbing him in the neck, which made him laugh at me with evil metal laugh while I tried to pry his head off), and then last night the cityscape that had me walking along a narrow metal bridge with a bruised rubber ducky in my hand. these are unsettling dreams, dreams where I'm lost or confused or disappointed or disappointing. and though my waking life seems contented enough I wonder at my deeper mind, which is clearly less satisfied.

and speaking of satisfied, or not-satisfied, I haven't had hot water in five days. five days! in january! that's just wrong.

winter after all

2006-01-19T07:46:00.000-08:00

where in the hec did all this snow come from?

why joss whedon is still my favorite, part 5

2006-01-15T17:06:00.000-08:00

the puppet show! smile time!

angel: I do not have puppet cancer!

spike: you're a wee little puppet man.

evil demon puppet: we eat babies' lives. and uphold a certain standard of quality edutainment.

puppets! it just kills me! :-)

words, words

2006-01-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

in response to thank you, how did we get from "you're welcome" to "no problem" to "you betcha"? of course I've heard the mannered elderly harp about how ungracious "no problem" is compared to "you're welcome" and so far as convention goes, yes it does seem a little less gracious. but then, what do we mean by "you're welcome"? I always thought it kind of meant, "you're welcome to inconvenience me," in which case that sounds far less gracious than "my pleasure" (it is a pleasure to help you) or even "no problem" (it has not been a problem to assist you), though the latter is certainly less elegant.

but "you betcha"? what does that mean? you bet you can count on me? asking for my help is a gamble? it's so silly! and yet suddenly it seems everywhere!

speaking of linguistic convention (cough, ahem), I've also been very pleased lately (you betcha!) to be reminded of the fact that english used to have both a formal and informal second person address. we've now, as our convention, adopted the formal as our only, with "you." "Thou," what we think of as this archaic, stuffy, king james phenomenon ("How Great Thou Art" is suddenly less grand) was the familiar, a father to his daughter, a lover to her lover, a boy to his pet kind of a thing.

I like to think that some old elizabethan is peering down on us from the heavens, in stitches, as we formally address max the family dog as if he were a priest, or that we are so respectful in our post-coital reveries. it's also funny to imagine that the reason we've inherited our single form of address is because as victorians we were all so stiff we made formality a convention that has undone itself.

yep. you bet.

play on

2006-01-10T08:43:00.000-08:00

I'm reminded by a classmate that the science times reported, a year ago, that astronomers "had convincingly seen, in the patterns of galaxies across the night sky [as opposed to the day sky?], the vestiges of sound waves that rumbled through the universe after the Big Bang" and "stars and galaxies tended to form along the ripples of the sound waves where matter was slightly denser, and the pull of gravity slightly stronger."

music of the spheres? no, very different, but still, I love this idea of locating sound in the biggest quietest space we know, and that this one event our genesis is ages later making noise.

do scientists know why gravity is stronger where there is sound? why matter is denser there? I would like to understand this, and not just for the beauty of the thing, though that is there, but because it seems like something to understand.

"I would not think to touch the sky with two arms." Sappho writes but thinking makes it so.

wine-oh

2006-01-04T18:59:00.000-08:00

drinking wine from a box makes me feel a little greco-roman, or else another time of yore when fermented grapes met oxygen through a spout. it makes me happy, like puppies but less jumpy.

in other news, I'm as tired as a one legged kitten in a bike race.

that's pretty tired.

home sweet home

2005-12-20T07:38:00.000-08:00

that's all. just home.

still thinking on it

2005-12-17T09:43:00.000-08:00

I realize that marquez is not the man we think to go to for the verisimilitude (though I imagine he'd protest, "why not!?!"), and the argument could be made that if there is an element of magical realism to this book it would be in the countless manifestations of love -- violent love, filial love, dull love, young love, old love, surprise love, tired love etc., love actually being the thing most magical and real, and that the book is concerned with giving life to these manifestations... I understand this... and I'm not beyond reading the rape scene as metaphorical or even imaginable if unlikely... none of this actually settles me, but I want to be fair and acknowledge it.

quest' amore

2005-12-14T19:11:00.000-08:00

"And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?" he asked.
Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.
"Forever" he said.

ends the love in the time of cholera book, a pretty beautiful book with a pretty beautiful ending that kind of reminds me of the end of the princess bride only, you know, with radically different though no less mythic and way older characters and a touch less hilarity (but a little hilarity).

though I'm not sure what to do with things like his description of prostitutes as the "night birds of emergency love" which is a stunning figuration and yet romanticizes something that I imagine was not in the nineteenth century (is not now) all glorious debauchery and a happy celebration of an economy of desire. the women of the book who don't want to be seduced by such and such a man are "haughty" and rare, and the men are never really critiqued for their lack of invention in bed or an underabundance of tenderness, or "meager" package (as a woman's "meager bosom" is considered a defect -- I notice this criticism for not totally disinterested reasons!). a rape victim falls instantly in love with the man who attacks her, who forces "passion" upon her. I don't know... the book is written exquisitely (see again the night birds of emergency love, the parrot that squawks "every man for himself!", the ending) but I have to confess that I kept thinking where he was most romantic his verisimilitude was most questionable, and as a reader I'm not sure what to do with this.

speaking of love, I also now love the unicorn whale (narwhal whale has a unicorn horn on its head). it's at least in my top five favorite animals (mammalanimals). kualas and penguins are up there too. in a beautiful act of naming, the inuits call this whale "the one that is good at curving itself to the sky," and according to the newspaper a man named mr. rosing says, "often one can see a male and female shoot up from the water, trembling, belly to belly," which is just as pretty a description of animal love or people love for that matter as any I can most immediately think of.

now enough of all this mushiness! time for a martini and a bath!

random thoughts

2005-12-13T12:55:00.001-08:00

ecstasy: from a word meaning displacement. when we find ourselves no longer in ourselves. we think of pleasure, but from the root we could imagine daydreaming as a kind of ecstasy, or reading, or watching movies, tv, etc. cooking could be an ecstatic moment. I would like to have half a waking day of ecstasy and half a day grounded in real living attention. this sounds very good to me.

suffering: to be under a pressure. to endure from under that pressure. we push up, work against the force of suffering, of course our emotional endurance expands, like every day walking with a hundred pound weight on the body... given enough days, that weight will be hardly weight at all. and then maybe the weight is gone, we manage to shed it somehow, or it dissipates the way suffering sometimes but not always does. when our nemesis throws an eighty pound weight at us to knock us over, we laugh at our nemesis, mock our nemesis, call our nemesis baby names. granted, we might expect our posture to be a little warped from all those pounds, but we've gained as well as lost. note: if I'm okay with suffering for this reason, it comes with the stipulation that I'm only really okay with my own. I don't believe this excuses the imposition of suffering on another person. I'm not evil or anything.

here's something random: I'm trying to make scarves for my baby sisters, but I can't seem to remember how to do it well, and so I'm wondering: is it better to give terribly deformed scarves to your sister at christmas or no scarves at all? it is worse to make them pretend not to be horrified, or to let them know that you, sadly, tried but failed?

tis the season...

winter

2005-12-10T11:28:00.000-08:00

so denvertown is only sporting the remnants of a real snow -- some ice, some white stuff piled up in yards from the cleared street, that kind of thing. but since it seems new england just got pounded, and this morning I found myself typing up this poem, I thought I'd share it for my dear ones who can see nothing or feel nothing but the onslaught of snow. it's from mr. lerner's first book:

*

The sky narrates snow. I narrate my name in the snow.
Snow piled in paragraphs. Darkling snow. Geno-snow
and pheno-snow. I staple snow to the ground.

In medieval angelology, there are nine orders of snow.
A vindication of snow in the form of snow.
A jealous snow. An omni-snow. Snow immolation.

Do you remember that winter it snowed?
There were bodies everywhere. Obese, carrot-nosed.
A snow of translucent hexagonal signifiers. Meta-snow.

Sand replaced with snow. Snowpaper. A window of snow
opened onto snow. Snow replaced with sand.
A sandman. Obese, carrot-nosed. Tiny swastikas

of snow. Vallejo’s unpublished snow.
Real snow on the stage. Fake blood on the snow.

*

wild night is calling

2005-12-09T18:17:00.000-08:00

but it's definitely calling someone else.

my wild friday night will consist of work, laundry, cookie baking (yes, again), making my family christmas presents (I'm so poor; christmas threatens to be pretty embarassing with regard to my gift giving capacity), and probably watching old episodes of sex & the city. so for all my dear beloved friends who are out painting the town various shades of red, my spirit is with you, but the details of my life are elsewhere. and for my friends (you know who you are) up north, my thoughts are with you too, as you manage and love and endure the pretty white storms.

outbound

2005-12-05T08:54:00.000-08:00

to the hills! to the tops of the hills! to the tops of the hills from where all the houses look like fireflies in the valleys! to the fireflies below! to vacations!

versification

2005-12-02T22:47:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-02T14:54:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-29T11:24:00.000-08:00

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.

fort da

2005-11-25T12:33:00.000-08:00

ever since I can remember, I had dreams of a tsunami apocalypse. my father and sisters and I would stand on the coast and watch the wave rise and wash over us. a few years ago the dream expanded, and I would keep dreaming after the wave would hit us and drag us under into the ocean. once under water, I would realize I could breathe, that I had gills and fins and could live in the ocean. I would swim around and show others how to swim, find ocean villages, etc.

about a year ago, my mom and I were sitting at the kitchen table, and she starts telling me of this dream she's had ever since my sisters and I were born. in the dream, she's standing at the top of a cliff, and there's a tsunami in the distance, and my father and sisters and I are standing on the beach, and she knows we will die, but she thinks that if she tries to save us, she will die too, and so she decides to save herself, and she sits up on the cliff and watches us get swept away. and I felt peaceful, like God wanted it to happen that way, she said.

so I guess if this cosmic coincidence has any roots in the real world, I'm glad I get gills and fins; I'm glad we are adaptable that way.

introductions

2005-11-18T20:06:00.000-08:00

I don't like it when men walk around with one hand in their coat pocket. it makes me wonder if they are keeping their hand on a gun or other weapon. it makes me think they want to be tough and manly looking. probably they have a plastic g.i. joe or a top that they fondle in their coat pocket for security. probably they're only cold enough for one hand.

I like apple cider and sometimes apple cider with caramel.

I like coptic book binding because it takes a bent needle and exposes the knots. stitches made with bent needles make for stronger, naked binds.

I have better telephone conversations when looking at a lit candle. when I was little I used to think I could learn concentration skills by staring at a lit candle for a very long time.

I think, literarily, we're living in a new medievalism. we cobble, collage, re-create rather than create; we don't believe in real creation. we scavenge the dry bones for something worth breathing a different life into. we wonder sometimes if we should be doing this or the other thing.

I put cilantro on everything. Even eggs. Even potatoes.

When I watch movies, I don't just feel suspicious of the movie, I think in my head, "I'm suspicious of you, movie" in those exact words like I'm talking to it rather than taking it in.

I bathe with lavender salt and piano music and grapefruit soda (drinking the soda, not sitting in it).

Probably that's all the introducing I can do today. Probably there's not that much more to tell.

the roadpatcher

2005-11-16T11:02:00.000-08:00

walking to school today I came across this amazing contraption, the roadpatcher, which looks like a truck with a giant tar-spitting snake-monster head. I took immense pleasure in its bizarreness. I even skipped a little on the sidewalk, getting close enough to it to see the black stuff its metal mouth was emitting.

for a second I thought I was inhabiting a world with real scary monsters, and it made me very happy, but actually I am just inhabiting a world with potholes and roadpatchers (potholes are bad, roadpatchers are good).

even-ing

2005-11-15T16:48:00.000-08:00

the moon is huge tonight, and pale, and low over the buildings of downtown, and my kitchen smells like sweet and cinnamon, and everything that is happening is really happening, regardless of what I or anyone else might say about it.

I should get an old rickety guitar and sing songs on it.

firecoal chestnut-falls

2005-11-14T17:27:00.000-08:00

6:27 p.m. and the snow falls down. the weather, and everything under it and around, makes a little more sense. I'm going to bake cookies now.

a case of the mondays

2005-11-14T10:55:00.000-08:00

I'm super mopey this morning like the sky with the clouds that want to snow but can't quite yet because other weather conditions are not right and I want to say I reject this morning with all its attendant muted light I spit upon it I will not bake it cookies not even bad ones I tell it it should have stayed in the womb of midnight and not met me suddenly with the material remembrances of yesterpast that unfortunately were utterly and deliriously happy and now all the morning just says my god how I miss that and us like that and I'm just waxing nostalgic and I should stop and return to work because that's what I've got now and it's good but still how many hours until the sky will snow down on us.

puppy love

2005-11-13T21:27:00.000-08:00

holy cute puppy in the times. this is a puppy that makes me want to move to new hampshire and find a little house with a fireplace and a big back yard so the cute puppy can run around all day and then sit by the fireplace with her head on my lap while I listen to music or read poems or not poems or watch late night tv. but then, I've kind of always wanted that, so I guess the cute puppy just reminds me that I've kind of always wanted that.

which reminds me that on my way to the underwear store today that rolling stones song came on that said I can't always get what I want even if its a cute puppy and big oak trees and fireplaces but maybe I'll get something else that's even better because I need it or something.

hmmmm.

earlier this week I was hand washing tempermental sweaters and I left the laundry detergent on the floor next to the shower. every time I'd go into the bathroom I'd get annoyed with myself for not putting the detergent bottle back in the cleaning stuff closet. then tonight I went to wash my clothes and couldn't find the clothes-soap. I looked in the cleaning stuff closet and the kitchen cabinets before I found it on the bathroom floor where it had been all week.

what I got to wondering was how many things are like that. these things that bother the hell out of us sitting in the middle of our otherwise clean floor until we get so used to looking at them that they become completely assimilated into our expectation of what lies behind whatever door. in a way, this is comforting. that we are such adaptabled creatures. adaptable but lazy. lazy and oblivious. nevermind. it's not comforting at all.

cute puppy though.

if we don't learn from history...

2005-11-09T06:19:00.000-08:00

again! I forgot to wash the conditioner from my hair! again!

from Hopkins' Journals

2005-11-06T17:50:00.000-08:00

Hawk, is to sell about the streets. I had imagined this to be derived from the bawling or screeching the hawkers made in proclaiming their wares, to hawk meaning to make a noise in the throat, as before spitting. But Kingsley uses a word to hawk of birds in sense of to move up and down in a place, to haunt. The above sense may be derived from this. He also uses a verb to hawk in a sense of to harry and with this perhaps is connected the bird hawk.

Note on green wheat. The difference between this green and that of long grass is that first suggests silver, latter asure.

Moonlight hanging or dropping on treetops like blue cobweb.

(Observe that motion multiplies inscape only when inscape is discovered, otherwise it disfigures.)

What you look hard at seems to look hard at you, hence the true and the false instress of nature.... Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is....

(and what I love is the idea of an inscape and also a habit of noticing, of constantly describing the world to oneself but in such a way as not to occlude attention, but enhance it. also, not the least bit Parnassian.) :-)

lover's angel told the captain's man

2005-11-05T17:46:00.000-08:00

We know little but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, that ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

--Rilke

how much more difficult, then, to not love when love has burrowed deep into you. though I guess it's more difficult to love if by love you mean to bear love, not to exalt in it. if love were a skin, and we were reptiles, leaving it on hot stones at midday, already feeling the new skin up against the ligaments, how much less weight we'd bring to bed with us at night. but we're not reptiles, and the skin of love is not skin at all, but blood, and we carry it with us, feeling at times like we are little else.

mallowy red of sunset and sunrise clouds

2005-11-02T09:35:00.000-08:00

this morning I woke up to all this pink light. winter dawn in my morning windows is red, red like brothel light red, a both comforting and disorienting wakeup nudge from the cosmos.

other mornings I've been groggy and delirious, so delirious in fact that I regularly have been forgetting or failing to wash the conditioner from my hairs, and so I dry off, get dressed, put on makeup, jewelry, etc., only to discover that my hair is filmy with residue and I have to stick my head under the tub faucet for rinsing. this, like the newspaper, is exasperating.

but really, with freshly percolated coffee, what does red light and filmy film matter anyway? it's all about the folgers moment, except with a guatemalan medium roast and without the dark haired broad shouldered man smiling sleepily next to the folgers can. which frankly I'd rather prefer. I don't like strange men in my kitchen.

news that's fit to print

2005-10-30T20:11:00.000-08:00

there was a great picture of vladamir putin in the times this morning. he looked like an incredulous turtle.

and he says things like I don't want to say that your opinion means absolutely nothing to us and that we want to spit on everything... . it was good reading. and by that I mean entertaining. also I learned about the book that says that women are supposed to be like cats and that men like shiny things and that's how you make one love you. the whole thing was very exasperating. like listening to my mother only it was in the news.

ah well. I'm sure there was actual news too- stuff about indictments and supreme court justices and hurricanes. but somehow I feel a little grateful for the sunday fluff. takes the edge off.

no rest for

2005-10-29T21:40:00.000-07:00

the wicked the sick the girl with stung eyes the planets the skittish the jacked-up the jack o lantern the quick-draws the burrowing animals deep in the mines the romantic the despotic the western man in his time the husler savant the lover the other the bird falling out of the sky

eros the bittersweet

2005-10-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

what the lover wants is to be the beloved.

uhhh...

2005-10-19T13:17:00.000-07:00

that was supposed to be funny. kind of.

tao te ching

2005-10-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

I've been reading about inaction lately, and have determined to instruct my will on compromise. since my will is not a fan of compromise, I will force it into a state of inaction until it learns this lesson. from now until my will succumbs, I am a motionless object -- force must be applied to move me.

good eats

2005-10-16T19:35:00.000-07:00

saturday mornings while I drink my coffee and eat my scrambled eggs and read my skinny saturday times, I usually watch pbs cooking shows. they're not so good as the food network cooking shows, but you can occasionally pick up a neat kitchen trick (how to squash garlic with the side of a knife, for example), or inspiration (cinnamon ice cream, tofu kabobs).

even with that education though, and my vegetarian times subscription, I still made myself a dinner tonight of fake chicken nuggets with ketchup and mayonaise all mixed up (kinda pink). it was good. like kids food good. because every once in a while, the saute and the puree should be forfeited for the cuisine of youth.

for desert, strawberry ice cream. :-)

unbirthday

2005-10-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

upon reconsideration...

autobiography of red

2005-10-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition.

Lo soleils plovil

2005-10-10T08:26:00.000-07:00

8-10 '' of snow here, even with the leaves still orange and red, snow collecting inside just carved pumpkins, pulling down branches all heavy and wet. does it feel like, to anyone else, that there's something vaguely apocalyptic about the natural world these days? and I mean this in the least pathetically fallible way possible, really. all this flooding and quaking and burning seems a little over the top, even for an old school vengeful god.

and unrelated, I think I'm going to stop sleeping with sleeping pills. even with 8 full hours, purple circles beneath my eyes and heavy lids through morning, and a little too much grog for my liking. I know they are well meaning, the sleeping pills, but I think I'm going to have to reassert my will over the gods of insomnia. or, you know, try.

a chinese proverb

2005-10-09T17:29:00.000-07:00

let us live in interesting times.

like flowers, but not

2005-10-06T11:54:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to lie. pleurisy hurts. today it feels a bit like I've spent 24 consecutive hours having been pelted by large stones in the exact same place over and over again. I'm sick enough of fuzzyhead too to have stopped taking vicadin for a while. last night I carried on a conversation with D. for almost an hour, and I remember now we talked about aristotle and "meat" in different languages, but frankly the memory of it kinda feels a little like a tristan tzara experiment. and what a shame too, since I think I'd like a clear remembrance of a conversation about aristotle and meat.

back to the doctor for me for now. more later.

overheard

2005-10-04T11:29:00.000-07:00

"nations dogs dangerously underpetted, say nations dogs."

"no he didn't mean that! if he'd meant that, he would have used words that meant that!"

"after clinging to their foreclosed chicken ranch for two years, two women gave up the fight and killed themselves and all their pets just before the marshals seized the property" (adapted from A,W,P).

we concede now "a history of ability for a history of volition."

Per Aspera ad Astra

2005-10-04T09:45:00.000-07:00

ad astra per et cetera.

here at the quiet limit of the world

2005-10-03T08:18:00.000-07:00

it's over. the relationship I mean. at least in its proper form. it feels a little right now like I've just watched a/my severely crippled child die, something to grieve and grieve hard, but at least she's out of pain and everything else they say about that kind of thing. but then, I think, maybe the relationship had to die so that he and I could live, and live in each other's lives in a more (not less) meaningful, if ill/un-defined way, and more meaningful for that lack of definition. because now there's no fear (this was my fear) and no artificial obligation, only a history and affection that touches a kind of transcendency.

still, I'm deeply sad. it's been ages since I've felt this sad. but when I have my moments of breaking through the sadness I feel still and calm and consoled a little by the fact that, in a time where I feel more lost than maybe I ever have, I was still willing to risk the one thing that meant everything to me, and willing to risk it for its own sake. and that's not nothing.

la saletta

2005-09-12T20:31:00.000-07:00

so if I go to a coffee shop, and they play all the music on my little music shelf, from the cure to the flaming lips to the postal service to nick drake to nina simone, does this mean that the coffee shop has very good music, or that my personal soundtrack is a coffee shop soundtrack?

that's my riddle. it's hardly click and clack, but it's all I've got.

butterbee

2005-09-08T10:36:00.000-07:00

a bee is buzzing at the window by my head, rolling itself into the glass, like knocking to get out, feeling with its feet for air. it's not going to happen this way. it has to go back to see the actual opening to the left of the window. you can't just push through like this. at the sill of the window, three bees are are still on their backs. a spider has built a web around one. they beat themselves to death on what looked like open space.

which makes me think: maybe I should find a less buggy place to get coffee in the morning.

giving me pause

2005-09-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

you know that it's been a while since I wrote a poem in here, but now I have to, because I've been reading this manuscript called blue and red things by laura solomon, and page after page I'm finding myself a little breathless in the reading, so I want to share.

First Visit to Fire Island

The shore
as day and sun bore on
became to our alarm
smaller, larger
then smaller
again.

We wore
giant black sunglasses.
Surely it were these
that kept secret from us
the water.

****

also, I've been doing yoga, which has been very good, and I feel strong and centered, except for that one time I fell out of crow pose, fell on my face, and then busted out laughing, breaking not just my own concentration, but that of my instructor and nearest fellow yoga-ers.

also, there's a chance I'll be learning how to pole dance soon. go body! woo hoo!

Oz

2005-08-24T10:42:00.000-07:00

back in denver and feeling simultaneously like I've been gone for years and also like I never left, because things are still so much the same here, except a few people, myself included, are shifting abodes. the mountains are still purplish and the sky still crazy blue and I'm still overdosing on buffy the slayer of the vampires which I watch at night until I'm too tired to think about anything but crawling into bed, and I do this because I think if I crawl into bed before this tiredness, it will be too sad because sunshine isn't there too, and I'm not a girl who much enjoys the pre-bedtime weepiness, which is not to say I've not indulged and over-indulged in the past, but still..

last night I went to a small wine bar with a friend, and we had long talks about intimacy and pornography and fantasy and power (oh all of my favorites). what was said is the winding of three discursive hours, and I've not wholly processed it all yet, though I'm pretty sure we ended by saying, goddamn this is complicated or some such thing, remarking on the web of logic and illogic we'd spun between ourselves. our bartendress brought us free wine and free cheese and bread and fruit, and partly I think this is because she caught pieces of our discussion, and probably she liked the conversation we were having, or at least that we were having it, and these things were a kind of offering.

it was good.

otherwise now, there is reading to do and packing and moving, and all the stuff of relocation.

my favorite. :-)

2005-08-18T10:28:00.000-07:00

I leave the city soon, after a summer of all over. I plan, really I do, on starting regular posts again.

I hope you are all well.

2005-06-20T19:32:00.000-07:00

today I told a friend that sometimes you have to be secure enough in a relationship to disengage -- if for some reason disengagement is required by circumstance. it sounded practical, all with the realism and grit. then tonight, for reasons I can't quite locate, I remembered something: how much of love is about focus, how much love is sustained by focus, is made new by it and made substantial by it and real by it. maybe these things don't need to be mutually exclusive, but I remember now a different respect for attention. not as the narcisistic obsession of adolescent love, but as the way we combat the numb that too often gets mistaken for comfort.

oh yes. and I've been watching scary movies all night and I'm alone in the mountains and the dogs are barking. all I need now is a storm.

2005-05-11T11:23:00.000-07:00

Ode to a Lightning Post:

Oh, lightning post. This is your ode. I found you in the evening, awash with a pour yet to come, and while you could have been made dry by the lightheat, your wetness kept returning the current to your body. I took you home and made you soup. All that weather surely bore you under it, and so I tucked you into bed and prayed for your wellness.

Oh, lightning post. Lightning post. I was the bride of quietness, nightly ravishing. You were my husband, parched tongue; to fill and be filled. Lightning post, where have you gone? Lightning post, you have always been possible.

2005-05-11T11:15:00.000-07:00

To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it,

To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,

It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible.

(Wallace Stevens)

2005-04-07T13:36:00.000-07:00

conversation overheard in my office this afternoon:

G: That's a good chapter. Fucking clever. And if it's not fucking clever, it's at least giving clever kissy lips.

P: I'm thinking about you, cleverness.

the office is not good for working, but it is good for a chuckle.

2005-03-30T13:43:00.000-08:00

Robert Creeley died this morning. I didn't know him very well, but I do remember that he was always generous and kind, and never lacked for energy to talk about art and poems. I know a lot of people are sad now, and I am sad with them. The last time I saw him he said he was happy, and reflected a lot on his life as a writer, and told me and lots of other people the funniest thing about being a poet: he said, writing is easy. If you think it's difficult, you're probably doing something wrong.

which I still don't know how to take, but I believe that he believed it, and that's good enough.

This is circulating, emails and blogs and stuff. It's lovely and I thought for the hec of it I'd post it again:

John Ashbery introducing Robert Creeley-

"Almost fifty years ago Robert Creeley and I sat almost side by side at Harvard in a course on the eighteenth-century English novel. Not quite together, since the students were seated alphabetically and between us was one named Berlin. We never spoke -- Creeley was much too forbidding-looking for me to attempt that, and perhaps I was too, but one of my keener lesser regrets is that we never sat down together and thrashed out the relative merits of Pamela and Joseph Andrews. At any rate, Creeley -- we also participated in a poetry workshop where the future novelist John Hawkes was also a student -- was a memorable presence on campus, though he didn't stay there long. Later on when one heard of him one realized that one knew one was going to all along.

I don't remember Creeley's poems in the workshop and wish I could forget my own, but we may well have realized then that we were on opposite sides of the poetic fence: me so European and maximalist, influenced by Auden and Stevens; he so American, with perhaps an Asian conciseness gleaned from Pound, stemming obviously from the Pound-Williams tradition to which Olson's presence would soon be added. Yet I've never been able to think of Creeley as a minimalist, which some have called him. If cramming as many possible things into the smallest space with no sign of strain or congestion is minimal, then maybe he is a minimalist. But what strikes me most about his poetry is a sense of richness and ripeness, beautifully contained in a vessel which was made to order by the circumstance of writing the poem. As he writes in "Some Place":

I resolved it, I

found in my life a

center and secured it.

And lest we misinterpret his accuracy for pride, he adds farther on:

There is nothing I am

nothing not. A place

between, I am. I am

more than thought, less

than thought.

No one, I think, has ever stated what it is to be a poet more cogently and, yes, more succinctly than Robert Creeley. But his succinctness is like the unfettered flashing of a diamond."

-- John Ashbery, introducing Creeley at a reading at the NewSchool in 1995. Copied from Ashbery's Selected Prose (TheUniversity of Michigan Press, 2004)

2005-03-26T12:12:00.000-08:00

the very very good news is that lauren's surgery went well and they're crossing their fingers that they got it all. lauren says there's been surprisingly little post-op bleeding and they're giving her good drugs. so things are going as best they can in the department o' cancer.

I hope all this is over.

as for me, I'm a few days into a wicked cold and a week into spring term. it's wintry here, snow coming and going throughout the days.

which reminds me: funniest thing last night:

I was at a four way stop waiting for the light to turn when this man comes up behind me. I notice him looking at me and fully turn my attention to the passing cars (as not to invite conversation). despite my very attentive car-watching, he says, "did it snow today?" which isn't funny unless you know that the day before there was no snow on the ground and when he asked me this question there was about 3 inches. I said, "yeah, a few inches," at which point I guess he realized how odd his question must have sounded. I turned back to watching the cars. "I took a nap" he said, by way of explanation.

of course.

a few moments later he ran out into traffic to get away from me and the awkwardness of our exchange. he crossed the street safely but without a light.

2005-03-22T16:27:00.000-08:00

the details of moving are the details of finding the necessary: grocery, hardware, coffeehouse, auto repair shop, library, people to talk to amicably, etc. the difficulty of moving is something else. I think it has to do with discovering yourself in a place, discovering your mood and routine and figuring out how to be you but in a whole new context. last week I had the sudden impulse to put in my ella fizgerald cd and make dinner and sing loudly and gutty to "how long has this been going on" and "please be kind," and man oh man was it just the right thing to do, and such a me thing to do that I couldn't believe that I hadn't done it earlier. there was a time where this kind of dinnertime solo performance was at least a weekly occurance, if not thrice weekly.

that's been the hardest thing in some ways. and probably it shouldn't be that hard to remember that you to sing along to old jazz standards or dramatically mouth the words to verdi's operas or find a script and imagine yourself playing one of the characters and read the entire script only saying "your part" outloud. why should that be hard, especially when you've been doing it your whole life?

I don't know. maybe it has nothing to do with moving at all, but just with not finding time to indulge in yourself (which is not to say eat lots of you-shaped cakes, though you could do that too). but I think that there's something truly jarring about relocation, so jarring that it kind of jerks us out of ourselves for a time, forcing us to wander around until we find our way home.

(note: I went to visit sunshine and he's still very much sunshine but then, he tends to be very much himself and that's the thing above all things I find most good about him. as for the city, it's a good city, a city I should be more in. it's got very good pizza and walls under walls and if you drive a short ways out it's got cows. and if you're me it's got sunshine too which means all sorts of things that are good for the (body &) soul.)

2005-03-15T14:26:00.000-08:00

I think I get the pins and needles expression now, except probably the expression means that you're sitting (or standing or laying) on pins and needles, and for me it's all on the insides and less painful. like a slight whole body vibration that starts from the spine out. and even though it's vaguely uncomfortable, I think it's probably a good thing to get your body revved like this from time to time, because it reminds you what it is to feel this way, which is not nothing, which is actually something and more than one might think.

27 hours just about and I'll be in the city. a boy outside my office is singing 'here comes the sun' and I'm positively giddy about it. omens. amens.

2005-03-14T10:51:00.000-08:00

sometimes I think we are like the great and powerful oz, impressive and smoke so long as the machine stays behind curtains and then when pulled aside a little bobbling and embarrassed, but did you see that machine? which produces smoke and mirrors and a booming certain voice but is quite a machine really. there's even a whole city, a beautiful and shiny city, built around the illusion of the ponderous and mystical head.

and when they come, gingham and tail and rust and all, a small crew of searching misfits, we are aphasic with humility and we give them what we can which maybe should have been the whole of it from the beginning and tell them not much more than what they already knew and that is to close your eyes and trust your manolos and anyway, we're never precisely where we think we are, even if we're awake, or almost waking.

2005-03-13T14:05:00.000-08:00

from Woolf's "Kew Gardens"

she saw them as a sleeper waking from a heavy sleep sees a brass candlestick reflecting the light in an unfamiliar way, and closes his eyes and opens them, and seeing the brass candlestick again, finally starts broad awake and stares at the candlestick with all his powers.

***

I think it's a beautiful description of attention as attention occurs, which seems to be what I'm thinking about these days anyway, and whether we now are sleeping, or all liminal, and if we are sleeping, or even hypnagogic, then who is doing the watching? who are the ones paying attention? and as much as I really truly want to say, it's me! I'm an attentive one! I know that it would be a sad kind of lie, and not one I want to tell.

the snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort needed for climbing a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which vibrated with such an alarming crackle when touched even by the tip of his horns would bear his weight; and this determined him finally to creep beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved high enough from the ground to admit him.

I think I'd rather be a snail than a sleepwalker, slow though it promises to be.

as for noticing, I was right about denver smelling like laundry, as that very day was the first day the buds came out on the trees, and buds as everyone knows smell like laundry, or at least laundry smells like buds. no matter now though, the ground and limbs are covered with snow, and for a while.

in other news, I'm making burritos tonight. I'm slowly and happily re-watching the last season of sex and the city to prepare myself for my ny visitation. I'm making a new syllabus, and deciding what to teach and why, and this is hard because this is a literature class, and perhaps the last literature class that my students take, and I want them to leave with something, some kind of crushy love or regard. I worry about sister lauren, who is sick in a way my mind can't seem to understand. I went to a moroccan restaurant last night where I ate barefoot and with my hands only and was lectured on the relationship between vegetarianism and orgiastic rites. and in 3 days I go to ny. in 3 days I go to ny. in three days I go to ny.

2005-03-10T15:05:00.000-08:00

this morning it was spring, I swear, and the world smelled like laundry and sweet and sour sauce and chlorine, but in the best possible way, and then winter came on again, like the arm of an arm wrestler that's been letting the other guy think he's actually winning for a while and I can only hope that soon the springtime arm will find his last minute inspiration (eye of the tiger not debussy) and put that big muscled gray sucker down.

and if you're thinking, didn't that girl just a couple of months ago talk about how -- even insist that -- she needed the winter? she would like to say that that was when winter had a new smell and it smelled like cotton and chimneys and anyway it was snowing then, and it only teases with snow now.

but I fully expect new york city to be dead of winter time and not thinking about spring so much, and I don't mind that because I like a city that can commit. and anyway, cold can be as cold as it pleases I don't think it holds a cloudy candle to my sunshine, who can make any weather just about the right one.

2005-02-26T09:39:00.000-08:00

my lists, which are my days. otherwise, chaos.

things to do today:

1. write 5 pages of paper
2. grade final casebooks (my students' massive research papers)
3. talk to sunshine
4. clean for dad's visit
5. have girly night with friend j'lyn.

things to do tomorrow:
1. watch mclaughlan group on pbs over coffee and oatmeal
2. write another 5 pages of paper
3. finish grading casebooks
4. either talk to sunshine or wish I were talking to sunshine
5. clean for dad's visit
6. go swimming in the pool

things to do monday:
1. read nytimes
2. write final 5 pages of paper
3. read rhetoric theory
4. class
5. read magazine article, sleep.

2005-02-15T09:20:00.000-08:00

a quote from my hometown senator, mr. zell miller:

"Who in his right mind would want to go into debt for the privilege of reading Beowulf when he can make $30,000 a year in air-conditioner maintenance right out of high school?"

and just when you think I'm going to say something snarky I'm going to consciously avoid the snarkiness, and say that the man just may have a point. at least, he's not pointless, even if he's not literary (although we all know him to be, if nothing else, biblical). I figure this just proves what I've always suspected -- that this girl is not in her right mind. this girl's mind is, in fact, so left behind it's pratically rapturous. mister miller's musings also remind me that it's been a really long time since I read the beowulf, which when I read I remember being only vaguely excited about, since I was just discovering uncle walt and cousin eliot, and beowulf seemed, if I recall, so last millenia.

on a less literary note, there's a computer clustering system (?) called beowulf that I vagely remember from my linux days. and while I cannot say with any certainty why this these clusters are named for the old hero, it seems a good enough name, full of spit and vinegar and whatnot.

I was thinking about saying that it'd be sad if the hackers of yore hadn't read the beowulf and gotten to name their clustery thing after it, but then I thought that ulysses is a fine enough name, maybe even finer for a cluster (since he pretty much always had sailors following him around) -- still, it occurs to me that heros, even those with the entourage, are somewhat solitary and probably should have their names attached to something more along the lines of penal confinement (sadness) or a lightbulb, or a mountaingoat, or a mountaingoat made out of lightbulbs.

a day after reading senator zell's quotable quote, I discovered that he was, for some time, an active member of the georgia endowment for the humanities. apparently, he didn't like the beowulf then either.

snark snark snark.

disclaimer: as I'm always yammering on to my students about taking quotes out of context, I feel compelled to note that I got this quote from another someone quoting and I'm entirely oblivious to the context. for all I know, he was just about to say, "and this is why we should fully fund students of the humanities -- so that they don't have to go into debt for the privilege of reading beowulf."

there. I consider myself disclaimed. yep. yesirree.