stirred up

I need to read more poetry. I want to read more poetry.

There are all of these things that "need doing" or, and, that "need becoming." And I am entirely unsure and this is what grips and wrings my stomach only to hang it limp and damp over one of the many rungs of my lower intestine.

And! We are going West. West! To another place I've never been with, I'm told, weather like you wouldn't believe and people to hate and envy and sneer at just like New York except "well, it's different" as several people have said. And of course it is and isn't. But the air there will carry smells within it I've never smelled before and likewise I will inhale winds that have never plucked an eyelash from the bridge of my nose to carry it to a sea I have never tasted. What salt.

Really I've got to start writing that book proposal but don't know where to begin. Part of me might not even want to do so: it's like I've written a book but the book's not the thing, the introduction, the pitch is the thing, and pitch I must.

Along these lines I am just nervous. Feeling nervous. You know that grind, that wheeze in your stomach, coming up through your throat and making you sneeze and cry (but not because of the sneezing). It's one of those "attitudes" one tries to learn her way out of through metered and pointed attempts at training and restraining her senses or her sensibilities. Which of course is futile to a certain end: complete control. But this is not even what I want. I do not value control in this way, as such. Much more it's breathing and moving to forget. Maybe not to forget: to minimize through dispersal. "To make trivial." Without lying to yourself, of course. Without denying the fact.

I write this now in large part because I've been checking my best friend's weblog obsessively since the end of last month, hoping for more words and words of her own since she'd been posting poems for National Poetry Month. So, she wrote; so, I am.

And really I don't know if I need to go on any further just now. Do I say this every time? Do I end this way always?

Reading the long-form prose-and-poetry of Ronald Johnson has ultimately affected the way sentences form in my brain. Certainly the way they sound as I type.

I need and want to read more poetry.

now

Omar the cat wedges his body between my left thigh and the couch cushion, rolling over every once in a while to adjust his arms and head. His ears flick with my keystrokes. The gray of this early afternoon light turns all color in the apartment one shade darker. Or is that lighter, more pale, less vibrant, pastel.

Two overripe bananas sit atop six or seven underripe bananas next to a pineapple with punky green hair and scabs with spikes for skin. It's jaundiced. Gone a little peachy-pink around the edges.

I've also bought beets for the first time in a long time, if ever, and I do not know if I am allowed to eat the leftover leafy shoots. They're so beautiful I can't throw them in the bin.*

Well and then there's the work that I have to do always all the time: apply for at least one job today, keeping up that standard for however long it takes, until the soul I don't have would be crushed if I did have; draft letters of inquiry and statements of purpose for potential employers and literary agents, most of whom will never respond; finish, polish the manuscript, add the bit about nag champa stuck in the car dashboard and also that conversation at the end of a dimly-lit sushi dinner with Mandy; decide whether or not the research essay might be published in an academic or research journal and deal with the coinciding self-deprecation that comes with offering one's (written) work as worthwhile, publishable, relevant, even of consequence; and all of those other not-so-important errands, like a passport and fingerprinting and graduation tickets with cap and gown, that sit in a wet and stinking pile in the corner of the room, their stench a gross reminder of the young (hardworking) adult's growing list of utterly stupid responsibilities and requirements...

This fulfills some need. To write in this online journal. Almost as if reporting my life to friends and strangers in code, in code. Or just for myself.

*yes, says the internet, they are edible

from 'light & shadow'

            [Anne Waldman]

            Rest you by this various planet

            or lounge in the sky lounge

            be my guest I'll take you there

            & introduce you around & show

            you the sky ropes & the

            city maps and the world as

            flat as a map and the world

            as round as a lively face

            with head & atmosphere

            and the sky as breath and the river

            as chant and the sun as aria

            aria for breathing and for loving

            aria for the dancing light & shadow

            light & shadow upon the dancing globe

            light & shadow on the child's arms

            in a park under trees & towers,

            light on the fresh canvas, the painter

            on the roof of West 21st Street

            under thoughtful shadow,

            shadow on spoons in the metal drawer

            the zebra plant yearning for light

            light for the eyes of Beethoven, shadow

            inside the piano, mellow now violent

            shadow out of the piano, power in the

            light of the violin, sweet strings of light,

            shadow under my desk, big black boots in winter,

            light through friendly words

            on shadowy telephone wires,

            light in health & shadow in health,

            illuminate moon rocks! knowledge from shadow,

            light from darkest handwriting, print as light

            and white paper, shadow [...]

Mati Klarwein, 'Real Estate' (1978) via

"hello"

To commemorate the death of Roger Ebert the interminably bedroom-voiced Terry Gross is replaying an interview she had with him in 1984. We've moved on to a pre-recorded live interview with Ebert and Gene Siskel from 1996 - Ebert's talking about "the mystery of memory and of longing" in his favorite speech in a film of all time, from Citizen Kane of course -  in front of an audience and she's just asked him, "The first film you actually remember seeing in a movie theatre?"

"Well," he says, "it would probably have been a Disney picture, and the one that stands out for me, for the emotional impact, was Dumbo." Something more about motherhood, misplaced laughter, and parental loss. Something about the inappropriateness of that scene - which I can really only understand as the uncanniness, the implicit horror of loss.

Everything's writ to be excoriated!

There was just a cat on my shoulders, digging his too-long claws into my skin (my fault, my fault) and purring wetly into the back of my head. Now he's lopped himself on my left arm and partway on the mousepad. He's so warm.

Apparently Apocalypse Now was one of Ebert's favorite films. Perhaps he and I both had such a hard-on for Brando not just in that film but - "spine-tingling, I mean literally, I mean, not figuratively but real tingles," Ebert says.

Wonder what else we had in common. Flying saucers? Peanut butter?

An unpalatable distaste for "tolerance"?

//

Anyway, I've submitted the thesis for review and will defend May 8th and I cannot wait for that. Really it's all I've wanted to do besides write my book and the manuscript's far along and I'm glad for this month to write and edit and preen more; in fact I'm using the defense date as a sort-of further deadline to have a submittable version of the book. To get me a literary agent. Perhaps I'm jinxing myself by saying committing it to paper virtuality but well who really reads this but a few of my best and most interested friends. Maybe some strangers. I hope so. Anyway, yes, I am happy and excited and overflowing with anticipation and pride, yes pride, and humility about it all.

I'll be doing readings. Bluestockings and hopefully fingers-crossed Postcrypt Coffeehouse.

Toes-crossed. Eyes-crossed. Wires.

until further notice

-- on hiatus --

to answer your question:

in response:

i Saw

A mother and daughter, the first in a tie-dyed bohemian skirt and the second in overalls, each wearing sandals, each with shoulder length hair thinning at the roots that hung in strings falling loosely around their faces - their hard faces. Each had a head like a ball of yarn stuck to the end of a knitting needle. Pin-cushion eyes and mouths without smiles. They spoke in French. Mother would say something to daughter as they leaned up against the blond wood panelling of the bakery where I sat, writing, watching them. Daughter would say something in turn and they'd uncross their arms, thin as spokes, and walk up to the display case so quietly. What to get, one might have said. I don't know it's all looking so good, the other. Their posturing, their movement, the shape of their spines - twinned. I thought of the girls in the hospital who'd learned to dress like these women, in airy and ill-fitted dresses and skirts and shirts underneath spacious hooded cardigans, the bodies in them underfed and floating freely as if in a vacuum, hardly hidden but in disguise. It's despicable to know such signs of malnourishment with such familiarity. Even more so to have once worn them myself, to have seen them in countless others, several of whom remain hospitalized, chronic. Thin.

After twenty minutes the mother and daughter had chosen a breakfast cookie, split it, and afterward asked for the full list of ingredients at the counter. The daughter wrote them on lined paper, one after another, as read to her by the boy who'd served them in the first. They left.

Lucien Clergue

de me tuer tout de suite

(thank you, Roland)

(and, yes)

sneaked (!)

(Waterhouse, Mariana in the South)

A preview of my thesis-writing. Still not working as much as I should, but I am writing, and reading, reading. The following comes from a section about the Institution, post-diagnosis. Unsure of the tense. Unsure of the voice, but, there's something there there:

I never understood drugs – which is to say I’ve never taken them – but that was all before close quarters and after learning of several plastic-bags’ worth of secret vomit. Before, I cringed to think of needles mapping-up veins, hands, elbows, feet; I imagined bottles and tin cans distending a multitude of stomachs, miles of bloodways clogged with ether and dust. Detox, I’m discovering, never knows difference, doesn’t care for it. I watch many of us shake during communal daydreams. My hatred and misunderstanding give way to pity, then shame. Our collective sickness stops up my nose and solders my esophagus at the mouth-end. Constant and willed self-conditioning delivers and keeps us here, biology finally asserting itself over our scheming minds, and all of us, the addicts, liars, cutters, bingers, purgers, restricters, depressives, insomniacs, over-exercisers, children, girls, old women – all of us then suffer bodily and beyond any sense of will or direction. We have been wrong. Mind is matter; control provokes atrophy. Duped by consciousness.

Do tell me. You know...what you think. 

my home

let this be my home 

for all the rest of my evers

photos 1-3, 5-7: Ryan Muir for NPR (here)
photo 4: Megan Barron (here)
more: Brooklyn Vegan (here)