"She was only 18 months old when she did it and she's two and a half now... The wierd thing is she never did a scribble quite that good again." --Simon Hughes in Border Crossings
Rather productive winter break (clean clean clean apt, bags of clothes to take out). Snow falls outside after a few mild days. This morning cat chases tissue paper mewling out her abandonment issues while I read Border Crossings, an article about gardens and the avant garde and theories of work/art/absence/silence/etc, story about bears.
Ridiculously busy, despite the headache about to head out for 3rd night in a row: Mercury for grilleds and gossip followed by A Bout de Souffle at the RPL; Jeannie Mah & Jack Anderson Reception/Panel at the Dunlop folllowed by Godard Project shorts by Filmpool; finally tonight Curtain Razors at Neutral Ground after a Saturday in the office/gallery.
My hour of you, my cursive thoughts, a pulpit beating under these ribs --Sina Queryas again
To arrive is practice, conversation or conversion, a story over a field My Sweet, of concrete or whispering, furrows of a path no longer, not Sure, was there, and snow combed in curlicues and dog ears a zigzag Through January. Sure you are witty, but are you any less romantic? In my remembering, I have undone all my beliefs, it is a luxury to lay Unencumbered here, or there, the bones flexed with tendons, the Spine like a seahorse, the heart far from a cliche unless beating is Innocent, though innocence is not as supple as you think, nor as flexible, Nor as perfumed, nor convenient, or even clean: between things regret Gathers force. I remember that day: it was cold and the coffee tepid.
excerpt, "Euphoria" Sina Queyras at poetryfoundation.org
Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft, mocking magnets, graphs, and maps— in a split second the dream piles before us mountains as stony as real life.
And since mountains, then valleys, plains with perfect infrastructures. Without engineers, contractors, workers, bulldozers, diggers, or supplies— raging highways, instant bridges, thickly populated pop-up cities.
Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen— crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us and when to vanish.
Without architects deft in their craft, without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers— on the path a sudden house just like a toy, and in it vast halls that echo with our steps and walls constructed out of solid air.
Not just the scale, it’s also the precision— a specific watch, an entire fly, on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers, a bitten apple with teeth marks.
And we—unlike circus acrobats, conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists— can fly unfledged, we light dark tunnels with our eyes, we wax eloquent in unknown tongues, talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.
And as a bonus, despite our own freedom, the choices of our heart, our tastes, we’re swept away by amorous yearnings for— and the alarm clock rings.
So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books, the scholars of oneiric signs and omens, the doctors with couches for analyses— if anything fits, it’s accidental, and for one reason only, that in our dreamings, in their shadowings and gleamings, in their multiplings, inconceivablings, in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.
"Dreams" Wisława Szymborska
Winter & romantic woes both give me horrid migraines, so while I know that last week was meteorlogical I really have no clue whether the nausea is due to the low barometer or my low heart.
Fighting it off after days of sweats & chills, throat hell, weakness, tea & soup, British period pieces & grisly mysteries, the battle nearly won, except for a trickle of constant sniffs, cat attacking the tissue box. A clean house, freshy laundered bedding, a full fridge after an outing for preposterous uppity groceries (kale, mushrooms, olives, avocado, chevre, San Pelegrino, espresso, etc). Not out at the zombie party, not my style, instead in bed with legs up the wall, reading new Sheila Heti:
My brain had not worried me when I was younger, but over the past year I had become convinced that I did not think as well as other people. No, that was putting it too gently-- that I did not know how to think at all.
My throat! My throat! My head! My heart... Another bout of hell throat, the technical term, made myself even sicker by going into work suppressing my primary ills by making stomach swim in non-stop lozenges, left at noon having got the essentials out of the way. Ran into the Lord on the way home, having a brief "Look at that beard! You have a ladyfriend and I have a best in sneakers but maybe we should revisit the sexy times?" mental lapse while wearing earmuffs and coughing up a lung in the cold. Slept the afternoon through, now soup & tea in sweaty sheets while watching Kids in the Hall and talking about period peices with a gal pal. Jane Eyre? Oh hell yes. This is a guarantee that my fever dreams will be about Dave Foley in corsets with the Lord locking ladies up in the attic.
Things that are new to my life (in the last year) that I really enjoy
Aquiring blazers and cookbooks
Cats (esp when standing on "hinders")
Gallery gals & library ladies (both on & off duty)
The one I like best (esp when standing in "pleased posture")
Montreal (the city I like best? More than Bayonne?)
Things in my life that have made welcome reappearances
Bangs
Wide leg jeans, sneakers
Owen Pallett & Sufjan Stevens
Olives, tartines with chevre & cucumber
Yoga
Seasonal reappearances that make the snow bearable
Mashed potatoes (now with Tikka Masala sauce)
Hot chocolate almond milk
Fiction binges & obsessions with Marian apparations
Constants I am always grateful for
Family & the best two gals
Music made with moogs
Poetry magazine
The latest issue of which bears a Giacomo Leopardi quotation "Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry." To which I reply with the words of Louis CK (I think?) "Everything is amazing and everyone is miserable."
Things I am saying goodbye to, for the season
Oxfords, cropped pants, flats
Oscillating fans
Walking
Finally, pessimism
Public transportation in this city
Events that spiral out of control
I am terrible at Christmas gifts
I cannot find any good looking boots with sensible heels. I am resigned to freezing my feet while treading safely in sneakers or warm feet in a pair of lovely flat boots that have astoundingly no grip whatsoever on the ice. Everyone is miserable, there have been no good boots since Homer!
Oh my eyes & brain/heart! The discovery of Bianca Stone's illustrations/images/etc or "Poetry Comics" at http://whoisthatsupposedtobe.blogspot.com/ has left me speechless with delight.
Danse dans la neige, 1948 photographs by Maurice Perron, gelatin silver prints Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec http://www.canadacouncil.ca/
Yesterday my boss told me that Francoise Sullivan, dancer, painter, sculptor, muse, fascinating figure, will be in town on Monday afternoon to celebrate the restoration of a sculpture for display and a fim screening, to which I cried No! because I had no idea and had scheduled a meeting at 1:30. I did not actually cry out, I made a disappointed face and sadly said "Oh I have a meeting at 1:30" resigned to my fate.
Yesterday I also ran into the one I like best. I have resigned myself to the fact (notion) that anything I interpret as interest is basic human decency, or simply the fact that he is interested in al things and people, just not me romantically.
So there's that disappointment as well. Oh well. It's missing out on making out, not an appearance by an iconic Canadian arts legend.
And you also make the case that catching a cold is not always bad news.
It gives us a chance to get off the merry-go-round for a few days. Because it causes malaise and it makes it so hard to concentrate, it's a way for the body to tell you to slow down for a few days. It's a chance for uninterrupted reading, which few of us get to indulge in the way we used to. The other possible silver lining -- and these are based on very tentative, preliminary epidemiological evidence that I offer with caution -- there were some results that came out of the studies on swine flu that suggest having a cold may actually keep flu at bay. This is controversial, but it is a possibility and scientists are looking at this now.
Or, if you have some variation of a cold or flu every two months, you look unprofessional as you hack & slouch your way through work or weak & lazy because you stay home and your head is too muddled to read so you watch an endless amount of bad movies on YouTube.
I am not a poet. I won't claim to have any of the drive the dedication required, nor any modicum of talent (I ramble too much, I rhyme all the time, I rhapsodize romance). Therefore I hate when I judge a poem as not good or not great or simply boring or I could do better. Because I could not do better. That is a boldfaced lie. I do not have a need to write poetry. However my need to read poetry is another matter altogether.
Consider: hierarchy of needs: food & water, shelter & sleep... hierarchy of desires: books and men, poetry and shoulders. Airy spaces, the quality of light, the surface of things, the right weight of fabrics. Coffee & tea, music, sculpture, installations, theatre, wine & vermouth.
There is nothing so upsetting than _______, _________ poems packaged in a slick that bothers my fingers-- I'm talking to you revamp of __________, I don't like change and the only poems I think I like in this issue are the __________'s. I think I like them, I'm not stamping my feet in the magazine shop clutching the issue to my chest until I get home, I'm not rolling any one line round and round my brain and tongue, I actually rolled the entire MAGAZINE, not newspaper, into my bag and forgot about it until just now.
Maybe I simply hate everything about this issue because I am (simply) in a foul mood today? This is not a blog, this just a journal because I have realized that I can no longer fully truly write on paper anymore and I do not know how to fix this (boldfaced). What I mean to say is, tell me about this grey sulk, this slow sick feeling like weak tea or wet socks, yet hot like jealousy, like a sweater unraveling faster and faster as I pull at what started as (simply) one small loose thread:
I went to the library where I coudn't find anything rien du tout and where usually the gallery has just consistently great shows except our city has been taken over by art commissioned to celebrate the sports team centennial so I just didn't bother to go in.
After a day where work made me inexplicably grumpy for no damn reason, events and events and a knot of stress over tomorrow night's.
And running into the one I like best after the library and mall made me a bit upset, maybe because I don't like unexpected things even though it was expected if I could only remember what day of the week it is or even just thought back to something he said earlier in the day.
Or because I had just braved the mall to try to find thin gloves or mittens but all I found was nothing but disappoinment. Like in the romance department. Make outs and fall mittens without sequins, too much to ask for? Possibly, that's what poetry is for. Also, it seems as if the romance department is a section of The Bay, but even if it was I bet it would be "Sometimes I look at this pair of mittens and I think they are just as intrigued by me as I am by them" but face it I am hallucinating. Mittens will never return your affection. Mittens are just too damn interesting and intelligent for someone who compares people to winter accessories and mixes her metaphors and meanings like the worlds worst bartender.
And the cat just knocked over a dish of hairpins all over the bathroom floor. The other night she broke a small mug I adored.
So while I am sometimes most of the time unbearably positive and esctatic and nervous with delight, I am now sulking like a brat beacuse I can't find a single new poem that makes me lose my mind and I just had to throw the __________ down because the texture is making my skin crawl. Also what I really wanted was the new issue of the __________ but it isn't in yet. It too apparenty has a redesigned cover but it looks nice and as long as it doesn't get a petroleum slick finish, we will be okay. Everything will be okay. Maybe you should just get some sleep, you cranky petulant pouting child?
The other night, I cut through the park on my way home in the early evening, an older man biked past me, then turned round. "Can I ride beside you?" He inquired. "It's not a good idea to walk alone." No, but thank you, I'm fine, I smiled curtly and continued walking, trying to keep brusque from my voice and brisk from my pace. " He continued on his way at a slower pace looking back every now and then, waited at the exit to ensure that I made it through alive. As he rode off, leaving my safety to the cars along the street, I felt bad for my horrified first thought of "So that's how I die."
This morning, I bundle breezed through the park, grey water and grey tights, past the buildings and green spaces the City Beautiful as referenced at Friday's panel. And then the one I like best, on his bicycle, with mittens and scarf and a hair cut. He used old fashioned expressions ("Good gracious, is that this week?") and continues to steal my heart to the point where I am walking about my blood and lungs powered not by biology but blue green grey eyes. So that's how I die.
The new Paris Review will have Lydia Davis & Frederick Seidel, so there's also that. Look, it's Fred Seidel on a motorcycle! The internet will always have what I need!
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Last night I went to a panel talk/opening reception. The Toril Johannessen peice above has nothing to do with the show (natural Forms, reflections on representations, the artifice of nature). However, last night involved logical acts being disrupted by thoughts of "love" as I ran into the one I find intriguing and he left the conversation & room he was in to talk, saying that he had wanted to mention the show to me earlier in the day but here I was of my own accord while I blathered on about how much I loved this one peice and too many sweaters and then I just abruptly said "Well, I'm going to head in" and took a seat in silence for five minutes before the talk started while he went back to mingling with people. Smooth moves! Especially leaving before the reception party which he was dj/vj'ing started! Good times! Wouldn't it be nice if social anxiety automaticaly meant asexuality and aromanticism?
Text message from the best, "booking tickets for Montreal, do you want to come?" Just a day after I had memory swoons of all the places I love, just after I had a jealous swoon at lunch as we talked about E's move for grad school.
I spent all day preparing minutes for meetings, drinking weak tea, wearing wet shoes and wondering if I was getting a sore throat. While daydreaming la-la, la-la, la-la-la. I took some breaks and liked these articles
(No uploads of last night's set yet, this works tho)
Hands down the most amazing performance at Folk Festival was Patrick Watson. I suppose the insane amount of touring they've been doing in the last few years has lead to this absolute perfection, from engaging, humourous and honest stage banter to amazing, trancendent, forceful songs. The simple beauty of the album versions gives way to magnificent expanses of sound. I may be biased (I think the drummer is an unbearable fox, a veritable tree to climb) but the drums on "Beijing" live took an already great song to a whole other level. Though Patrick's voice and piano... I was almost in tears for "A Man Like You," though it may have been a C'est pas moi je le jure! flashback. Even after the closing set by Buffy Sainte Marie, I was still elated and buzzing from Patrick Watson. I couldn't sleep, just watched YouTube videos until I finally drifted off an hour before my alarm went.
(The entire weekend was just a delight, daytime lounges at the workshops and teaser concerts, BD Willougby and Belle Plaine hometown hero fantastic, working in the Gallery's ATC tent while listening to Buffy host the Metissage workshop session (K embroidered the Festival Logo on a card, I made shoddy musician pop-art trading cards cut out from the program, Buffy was petite and amazing), street vendor food (curried chickpeas and vegetables, ice cream, iced tea, fries with vinegar), lots of entertaining Francophone bands in the mix, Calexico were a bit underwhelming on Saturday night but entertaining at thier host workshop on Sunday morning, I spent all of Saturday night on the blankets and chairs area but was front row standing/dancing -or more of an instense swaying shoulder shaking- for Patrick Watson. Best of all, no sunburns and minimal mosquito bites despite so many hours spent in the park.
How does one sway and shake appropriately while seated indoors? Patrick, you are a mad genius. Robbie, I would like to build a house in your branches. I don't know what that means, but it should be interpretted as both tender and tawdry. Finally, Mishka and Simon, you were also both great, please save the ancient harmonium. Oh boys, thank you for being one of the best shows I have seen in a long long time. Enjoy your break from touring, record that new album soon, be well among your friends and family, and come back down the western road within the year please or playing shows when I am back in Montreal (Librissime! Unicorn! Gallimard! Drawn & Quarterly! Fuschia! Juliette et Chocolat! Fries with mayonaisse! Galleries everywhere! Efficient public transportation! Be still my heart!)
From yesterday's NYTimes and spreading fast through every poetry site:
in “Nox,” Ms. Carson takes the premise of translating a single classical poem as the basis for highly personal and multifaceted reflections. And Mr. Mitchell here works in a genre that Cunningham generally avoided, the male-male duet, and uses movements (falls, acrobatic floorwork, dramatically charged interlockings) that depart from Cunningham’s wide lexicon.
Speechless. Be still my bones my heart my breathless breaking desire for everything coming together.
Love is either of two kinds: for something or for everything.
The first kind, what we might call 'romantic' love, is the bringing-forth of a world assuming the mark of the non-being of the supplement of the disjunction between the two.
The second kind, what we might call 'perfect' love, is the bringing-forth of a world assuming the mark of the indifference, even to fundamental ontological difference, of that which anonymously 'calls non-beings as beings.'
Because the first kind is founded on the non-being of the supplement of the disjunction between the two, and the second kind is founded on indifference, even to fundamental ontological difference, we are right to think that both kinds are not, though real.
Where and when these two kinds inevitably become incommensurate, only subjection to the latter offers gladness, while only subjection to the former 'abolira le hazard.'
On Sex
If two bodies each assume the mark of the non-being of the supplement of the disjunction between the two, then this supplement can infinitely converge through them. This is what we might call 'the truth of sex.'
Though sex is something else than its truth, we must hold onto its truth, that we might encounter our beloved honestly, in our vulnerability, our finitude, and contingency, or however, to infinitely converge upon infinity and freedom together.
On Money
Representations of 'sex' often make a mockery of sex, and representations of representations, and so on, would have it that there is nothing but representation. We might call these representations 'money.'
Money reifies itself as it encourages the minimal resistance necessary for its reification. We must not identify ourselves by it, and this may even mean democratically, as rights against this or that, and soon.
On Death
Because it does not represent absence as absence, money makes a mockery of death. Money replaces the endurance of death as a possibility in the being that is itself for itself only by this endurance: Human Being.
Death, as a possibility, must be endured as our supreme challenge. Being toward the end of our being is a possibility that must be cultivated to the extent that we refuse it for eternity, where we always will have been.
On Friends
Because a relation to our own death is impossible, and the endurance of our own death as a possibility is not only our supreme challenge but also how we are ourselves for ourselves, we must enter into a relation with our own death by the death of the friend. The death of the friend also opens us to the alterity that calls us into question and open us to community.
The disjunction between friends is not supplemented, and we befriend in the friend the enemy they could become, so that by friendship we meet our own isolation, which, precisely, we cannot be isolated to meet.
On Family
If 'romantic' love is supplemented disjunction, and friendship is unsupplemented disjunction, then family is where disjunction is altogether unclear. Even where we might be disjunct from family we remain conjunct as they become the object of desire within us.
On Home
Home is where we are always going anyways so that the question of being-at-home is the question of that which keeps us homeless.
If being-at-home means the fourfold preservation of the fourfold: earth, sky, mortals, and the divinity, then that which keeps us homeless would be something like a modern city: in its destruction of the earth, in its concealing of the sky, in its unhope in the divinity, and in its forgetting of mortality.
In something like a small town, bringing the presencing of the fourfold into things, that is, being-at-home, is much more possible. In small town Midwest for instance, it is more possible to set the earth free into its own presencing because there is earth, not garbage. It is more possible to receive the sky as sky because there is sky, not skyscrapers.
It is more possible to wait for intimations of the divinity's coming and not mistake its absence because one can hear its silent call, not the stupid clamor of traffic. It is more possible to initiate our mortality because the earth, sky, and the divinity may presence, and because while in the packed metro one may know about the certainty of one's mortality, when at home in this way, one is certain about it.
(From Plan B magazine a long time ago?)
Saturday, July 17, 2010
After a week of feeling like a terrible excuse for a human being, the aches and pains are starting to break away, brain fog clearing. The sky is grey and cool with windows wide open for the breeze. Hot coffee and blog reading breakfast, listening to Haruka Nakamura, making plans for the day such as dishwashing (after a week of weakness good god does the sink stink) and giving up hope on lunchtime avocado (which overnight became a cat toy).
Yesterday: productivity, Gala Art Auction planning & envy (as in I will never be able to bid on that, glee over the artist donating the piece, etc) reading the new issue of Poetry at the bus stop (esp Pinsky's Robot libretto, Anthony Madrid's "In Hell the Units are the Gallon and the Fuck" (with the eyes of Athena, and the hands of a destroying eagle) and a poem about Hart Crane & Frank O'Hara, Kenneth & Barbara, etc etc.)
Sometimes I listen to contemporary music and thunderstorms. Slept the weekend through, sore and muddled attempt at work in the morning, a summer flu, returned home fever napping, waking up gasping for air and water mid afternoon. Now waltzes from the speakers and rolls in the distance, blinds rattling in the wind and my bones creaking.
Until further notice, a lack of poetry reflects a total immersion in Frank O'Hara still "the air the stumbling quiet of breathing/newly heavens' stars all out we are all for the captured time of our being" Despite three days sleep I can barely hold up my head my hands, maybe I will sleep on the couch out of these sickbed heat sheets?
Meanwhile, after work at one gallery I stopped by another to finally take in the Cynthia Girard installation/exhibition. Slightly surreal paintings and poetry (and a performance I missed) inspired by folk art from the permanent collection. But because sometimes I am a lazy agoraphobe, instead of going to Nouveau for the summer show reception, I go home and watch this on the internet over and over
Reinita amarilla, termina en el charco (2006) is a composition originally composed for harpsichord, bass viol and recorders (on this occasion the harpsichord is replaced by a keyboard and the viol by a cello). Reinita is inspired on Couperin's "Le Parnasse", Murakami's "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle", biwa music and a selection of japanese avant-pop/rock. The title means: "Little yellow queen, winds up in the puddle".
“To me, this is one of the primary duties of a curator, i.e. care of a collection, and it is this definition that is reflected in most of the AAMC’s programs and initiatives. As a curator who has made a long-term commitment to one institution (25 years), I find inspiration and renewal in returning to the collection over time. Conservation is only part of this story, and I find I am always learning more about artworks (and their meanings) from physical evidence as well as from research. This is very different, I think, from the definition of ‘to curate’ as a form of enlightened sampling.”
"these new uses of ‘curator’ take the term out of the rarified and push it into the wider populace, encouraging visitors to create experiences—virtually or otherwise—in which they might gather stories, share expertise and create meaning within a defined community that we may not have envisioned. As we encourage others to take on some of our traditional responsibilities, we are infusing these skills outside of our field. If we don’t embrace this sharing of expertise or encourage more user-curated experiences, how long will we last?”
Jenny Holzer sneakers and Joy Division tights. What is the world coming to? Why do I want them so? What you have is more than enough.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Swealtering paresseuse in place of patriotism. Thoughts of mother, brother & motherland (& father's iPad, dinner last night in the childhood home, valley summer). Back in the city, long weekend of our native land, the cat naps in front of the oscilating fan while I watch 9 hours/episodes of Mad Men Season 3. Blinds drawn, underwear & ginger ale. The summer issue of Art Forum, pages sticking to my fingers. Back to Sterling Cooper before the fireworks begin.
I have just violently sliced my pinky while dishwashing. However, there is a new Muhly blog post to read, in which he announces this wonderful bit of news
Well, yes! How grand! September with bells on! However to contiue with the negative:
Lesson Learned: One should not use a phone that mysteriously loses battery power, receives texts the day after they were sent, and now often resets itself to January 1, 2004 as an alarm clock unless one enjoys waking up off schedule.
9-5: Red Sneakers was in for the briefest of hours, I spent most of the day in some form of a meeting or other and yoga was cancelled. At Staff, I amused the troops by cheering "Yay-- wait, what, no!" to the good for C/ bad for me news that he has gotten a better position.
Lessons All Over the Place: Continuing to use a mug with a broken handle is about as wise a choice as using a dying cell phone as an alarm. Serves you right.
It should be noted that the more I look at the word, the more I think "brie-fest" as it were a celebration of soft cheese. Delicious.
(Sadly, nothing is better than Biarritz & Bayonne. While Mad Men starts up soon enough and I've started drinking the odd Coke now and then, this year I will not spend the summer in my beloved pays Basque)
"Having a Coke With You..."
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
Schuyler started a whole New York School binge. Except now I am ansty for Mad Men to start up again, having started Frank O'Hara. Here, "Meditations in an Emergency"
Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.
However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.
My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I’m curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.
Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)
St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.
Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.
“Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.
I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.
The only thing better than a babe with a bicycle is a blond with a dog. This picture of Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear, barefoot on a deck with a massive puppy is exactly what the inside of my head looks like.
Instead of dwelling, I am reading James Schuyler Other Flowers which is all
and who are you, which Maple are you I mean, the one who curves its leaves like hands, disclosing pink palms...?
and
Look, I can't go on standing on one foot waiting for a moon to rise. Goodnight, moon.
Which is better than dwelling on the heartswell of desire that flooded the banks of my brains as I nearly walked into you, the tears in my eyes as I passed our watering hole, shook in my shoes on the walk home, partly in the present hot sun & rush hour traffic, partly in the memories of cool 2 am your hand hot on my neck & legs. Goodnight, Lord, goodnight my kitten, my pup, my dear, my laugh, my lust, my last gin & tonic, my only madness.
Drizzling and cool on my last day of rest & repose. Woke early to odd dreams and birds screeching. Drank my coffee while reading Anne Carson's Nox. Ran errands, inevitably running into people I know (wish I lived in an anonymous city, that would please me immensely). Now laundry & ironing while watching 1967 Avengers episodes with endless Earl Grey. At the library I found the following:
Which I have been wanting to see forever, mainly because I wish I looked like Rita Tushingham. Tonight I will watch it with fish & chips. Anglophilia, ahoy.
the river deepens, thickens—it is night and now I am able to see your torso, white and glistening, move above the black element— I see your mind too—its small fire-like net of kindling—its trap of thought—I have a raft a drowned man left behind—I’ll blow it up and follow you, your wading path, your marvel through here—as through my own mind’s riot of rivers still you steal my heart
the birds and I are restless—awake—alone—raw’s the hour dawn— I hear the stream break across the rocks in rapid white bursts of brisk explosions— I hear the shrapnel-like voices of the birds constellate and swarm— mute it for me with your presence, with your step come here, see my ax—touch the path I carved
it is midnight, but I have found the lamp of the forest left on, always left on—this waterfall—its surge—its white wattage lights the hall of woods— the rock’s moss—the stick paths—this lamp left on does what you once did—my missed one—come again— annihilate the dark
you know I love the damaged thing—and so I send this petal to you—torn debris—taken from the other morning glories of the mountain side— this half-face, ripped—I send it from where I wait for the wind to bring me more wild flaws—to fold into your letter
this new phosphorescent dark drugs me now— more awake, more alive— everything here buzzes, in this forest after-hour, in this black-light— the leaves are amplified and the bamboo thatch is a wired wall—it is not you this time—my black drop of dew—not us—this time—but an airy phosphorescence is the drug
Julia Gfrorer (http://www.thorazos.net) writes and draws: absurd scenarios involving James Bond, Doctor Who, St. Francis of Assisi, Lancelot, Wolverine, and naked scrawny ladies among other things. After my own heart.
While this CD is not thier best (Sympathique, Hang on Little Tomato, Splendor in the Grass), I can remember my absolute glee over this image, wondering what they sounded like, deciding that no matter what they sounded like, it must be awesome. A few years later, Pink Martini and Blossom Dearie the soundtrack to: Oxford shirtsleeves rolled up, cropped black pants and ballet flats through the park on summer mornings. Sunglasses and alternatives to swearing, dodging the sprinkler system. Oh you, oh swoon, I'll hand out the champange while you play the standards. One glass of water and one cup of tea while I type, tapping my feet and shimmying in my seat.
"You look like the 1950s!" Exclaims my coworker, "I bet you have a basket on your bicycle!" Yes, I do.
In the moment, it is impossible to conceive that we will ever feel differently. At the moment, Red Sneakers is not any sort of grand exorcism, but I like him, and I think I am somewhat/finally over The Devil.
Everything happened as it should happen. After all the want: realization, heart break, and realizing that it really never would have really worked. It was time that I was in a relationship where I liked the fella more than he liked me. He was settling for me, interim girl, someone available and doting and good enough for now; as such the gander finds her goose, has a taste of her own medecine, etc. "The nearly right/and yet not quite/in love is wholly evil."
This morning: nesting in bed with new year's Moleskine and a bowl of coffee, watching Dream of Life. Later today: braving the cold for backgammon and eggs Bennedict with an old pal.
Last night: a comedy of errors which left us freezing running around Pilot Butte. But once we called the right number, got the right code to the garage, found the right spare key to the house, all was delightful with hot tea, hot gossip, long chats and gift giving.
This year: my horoscope seems to say I will get over him, hallelujah.
Well, yes! How grand! September with bells on! However to contiue with the negative:
