from the comments
This car is mad crescent fresh, I want this in baby blue with crushed diamonds up in the paint job. I want white leather seats, soft as silk. I want it. I am Johnny Depp flying across the desert at night, trying to get to Vegas and write my story. If I crash the first one I’ll buy another one, hell I might have two laying ar ound just in case I want to try and drive both at once like an old timey chariot race. One will be retrofitted for English driving practices, then I will stand, one foot on each of the doors, and drive two cars at once. Fly on, my blue steeds.
from the comments
It’s important to do good work. But also to be doing THE good work. And I don’t mean that in a religious sense (obviously, because when do I do that?) I mean that in the way that you choose your projects because you want the next door to be even more magnificent than the last. So, can you tell if one door might have a unicorn as opposed to a used car?
A New Favorite–Adam Robinson
Okay I found this guy’s book of poems– Adam Robison and Other Poems poems by Adam Robinson– in Marfa (no, I didn’t get the spelling wrong here) and as Cindy will tell you, I have not yet stopped laughing about things found in it. Here’s one with a sound that kills me:
Steve Reich Hears a Pentecostal Preacher
it’s gonna rain hew
it’s gonna rain hew
it’s gonna rain hew
it’s gonna rain hew
it’s gon rain hew
it’s gon rain hew
it’s gon rain hew
it’s gon rain hew
it’s gon fwip
hitsit’s gon fwip
hitsit’s gon fwip
it’s gon fwip
it’s gon hitsfwip
it’s it’s heep
if heep it’s heep
if heep it’s rain
heeit’s rain heeit’s rain
rain h rain h rain h raib
sgon! ifraib sgon! ifraig sgon!
raigsgon sgon sgon rai
sgon r sgon ra sgon r sgon rai
it’s g fwip
it’s g fwip
ifsy g fwip
he rain
he rain fwip
herain
herain
Not all of the poems are like this one, but risk abounds throughout. He’s a person who realizes that sometimes the only way to make a poem is to kick the shit out of it, and then sort of prop it up there and step away.
A Wall that Could Be a Road
Bits
Desert
There, it was only place that could
claim purpose, and it didn’t.
Art
Start again, start again, start again.
Look at starting. Look away.
Start again.
Record
That sound–a limb moving in
light wind, faintly touching
shingles on the roof.
It’s drawing.
Drought
The bird compared its feet.
What I Just Heard
from outside, in the dark: a very small child saying, insistently, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you….”
My Favorite Katherine Anne Porter Story
Keep Fuck Alive
Just now I told Cindy of my desire to post something about how angry I get when I watch a film on cable and find that its language has been sanitized–and of course she instantly gave me this title.
Isn’t it nice when a favorite film appears on cable and you can just watch it, even though you have it on a DVD? I like it when this happens, but the moment I see that the language has been changed so Betty can read her bible while watching–I turn it off and put the original in. For instance, we were watching Kill Bill the other evening, and they not only changed the language, they changed images as well: “I’m Buck and I like to Fuck” was changed to “I’m Buck and I like to…party,” and the keys to the “Pussywagon” read “Partywagon.” Let me spare no time in telling you of my contempt for people who will seize upon proprieties of “bad words” while caring not a jot about films featuring the patriotic bombing of grass hut villages.
I seriously think I want to become more active in initiating a backlash against the easy moral high ground claimed by people who don’t typically look closely at the grounds for anything other than their own gross appetites and spiritual cliches. People who tend to object to nothing but “bad words” are the people who will go see an art film and shit themselves with peeve because their limits were not consulted before creation and distribution.
I see students often now who trot out a practiced grimace when a literary work contains the word “damn” or “hell.” How long before the word “Pregnant” again becomes “in the family way”? I have had students object to the word “slavery.” But they balk when I ask whose interests are most served by not mentioning slavery–those who were victims of it or those who would just as soon have nobody reminded of the fact that it was ever present in America?
Language cleaners would do well to note that complete success, on their parts, would simply result in a new set of forbidden words. Humans need the opportunity to transgress, and they will find it. And an age-old inspiration for this is the feigned blush of the righteous.
Racists now in need of a new set of jokes
If your heritage is non-African, you are part Neanderthal, according to a new study in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Discovery News has been reporting on human/Neanderthal interbreeding for some time now, so this latest research confirms earlier findings.
Dear Clusterflock
86-ed?
Dear Clusterflock
Which three people from the wide world, living or dead, would you name as collectively representing your hopeful view of yourself?
I haven’t settled on my three yet, but I have three I would apply to Cindy: Gertrude Stein, Frida Kahlo, and Joseph Cornell.
An Uncertain Green
Spring, and the discovery that my coat was ten sizes too large. I knew the different rooms of it. A cavern of wet wool in rain. For months, there under a bridge, I could raise my arm from water and drink at my own breast.
I built nests for birds and waited, on into summer. A wasp examined one made of chopsticks and watermelon rind. A possum peered into the tangle of licorice and bright finishing nails. Then a mockingbird settled in a china cup set in a cat’s ribcage. I fought sleep.
A windy, no-thought day. Calculated my heart rate by barest touch of teeth. The city employed its vehicles in miniature vistas. A man came with the mood of one checking on some report of me. A patch covering one eye; his other gazing as a whale would a moment before slipping below. He must have seen no cause.
How then to populate a day with color, in rain, without bringing a bowl for the fire of it? The sea at this city’s edge marks a kind of hollow, always seeming to say we should be amazed by any dry land. The sharks at the aquarium rasp their gray skins against my sense of water, watching a vision of watchers. So, bird, come to my eye beak first—swim into me, find that avenue that falls through autumn to black bones where perch the reasons.
A fine book by Robert Coles
I just finished The Call of Stories:Teaching and the Moral Imagination, and I recommend it.
I love this passage:
At one point he (William Carlos Williams) reminded us that an important part of our lives would be spent “listening to people tell you their stories”; and in return, “they will want to hear your story of what their story means.”
Straight Description
Had to cut roots to reach level. Had to dig down around them and under them before using the chainsaw; an instant’s contact with dirt will dull the teeth. I cut the ropey arms and tendons of them. Made a pile of curves and hairs. They had grown around a concrete pier and pushed it up like a molar sensing the absence of an opposing tooth. Used a heavy-gauge pipe as a fulcrum lever to exrtract it. Blunt cylinder of stone. And in the hole a spiral of roots, going round. A woven thought of going around and of squeezing. Of expulsion. Of giving birth. But the tree was gone, and the embattled pier as well.
What the six-year-old came to the door to tell me
Somebody put toilet paper in our trees! The dog loves it.
Morning Wood
I’m rebuilding our deck. I thought it was going to be a simple re-surface job, then saw that the base needs to be redone as well. Yesterday two tons of wood and concrete mix were delivered. I had to bring it all into the back yard from the alley. I haven’t started yet this morning and it is already hot.
A wonderful Jack Gilbert poem
I found this while Cindy and I were searching for various Japanese words related to kinds of beauty. This poem seems to be an illustration of the language we were swimming in this morning.
A Favorite Book of Stories by Lydia Davis
I have been reading the brief stories of Lydia Davis with pleasure for years, and one of her books I keep coming back to is Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. Here is one of the stories in it that I have read often enough to hold now in memory:
Happiest Moment
If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.
I hesitate to spoil things by speaking of what I love about this piece–but since when have I been able to keep quiet about such matters? I love the way the question is never answered–but is. The question evolves in the way that all stories do, given that connections between readers is what makes them live. We write about what matters to us; but who is the author of that? Even in the making of stories we are walking through the lives of others and finding our own words there. We are made of stories. And sometimes a very brief story can open upon the largest understanding we may hope to hold.
Poem of Questions
How strong is the beauty that calls to you?
Does anybody hold it always as a guide–or
is it the search that is required of us? Is there
rest in beauty? Or does the best of what we may
know require battering waves? Times we have loved
brought to ruin, and new times asking: How will I
rise to take my punishment, so that love
will again name itself the only path?
We turn to the dark for an end;
we walk out of it by knowing we have loved.
A fine article by Neal Pollack on self publishing
…in today’s NYT:
In addition to a great many bad books lost to the sands of time, there’s also a long history of successful self-published authors getting big deals with major houses. Today, though, self-publication crackles with possibility as never before. Witness the March news that the thriller author Barry Eisler had backed out of a half-million-dollar deal with St. Martin’s Press, his new publisher. He’d decided that he could, over time, make more money publishing without their help. Conversely, young Amanda Hocking, she of the vast success generated from self-publishing nine e-books, accepted a seven-figure advance from St. Martin’s, the same publisher that had just lost Eisler. Hocking issued a sassy statement that she was tired of answering e-mails all the time and just wanted to write.
Quote out of context
In an effort to salvage at least something from their mishap, many farmers are now feeding the messed-up melons to fish and pigs.
Gene Harrogate?
Overheard
In line today at the Fiesta Mexican grocery store, a woman behind me answered her phone:
Hello?
…..
Buying charcoal.
…..
Charcoal.
…..
The brick shit you cook with!
………………………………………………………………..
Also, the man in front of me was wearing a white lab coat and a tie. and he looked exactly like Burt Lancaster when he was playing Elmer Gantry. His purchase? Two cans of vienna sausage and two Cup-Noodle soups. He paid with a credit card.
Flannery’s beer finds
You would think it would be an old guy like me giving my daughter tips about good beers–but for a while now it has been the other way around. She says, “Try one of these.” I take a sip and think damn, and I’ve been drinking that other shit.
Masks and Time
I found a wonderful little book at the used books place yesterday: Mexican Art: From the Beginnings to the Olmecs, Bernard Noel, Tudor Publishing Co., New York, 1968. It has many fine plates that I find somehow more pleasing because they are presented in black and white. The one above is a Guerrero mask. The text is wonderful too. Here’s a bit I read to Cindy yesterday as one of those things that confirms aspects of her fine knowledge of Mexican time:
The pre-Classic period began with the expansion of agriculture; it was a formative period during which societies organized themselves and invented a religion, which became more and more complex. This religion was fundamentally a worship of time. All agricultural societies have more or less deified time, but the Mexicans refined infinitely on this conception. It was not an abstract entity for them; it was bound to space and with it formed a unique substance which went through an endless cycle of birth, growth, decline and rebirth according to the pulsation of a rhythm that man maintained but did not control. Without man, time would have perished, so man had both to understand and foster it.
So you didn’t like it?
I love it when reviewers of poetry books just go all out with the invective. This review of a Robert Hass book contains a wonderful response to a passage:
The second volume, Praise, now reads as a primer in late-seventies period style, the kind of laid-back beach koans that led people to believe Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” was a good poem. There are more berries, more naming of flowers, more embarrassingly tin-eared warbling in the demotic:
It is different in kind from a man and the pale woman
he fucks in the ass underneath the stars
because it is summer and they are full of longing
and sick of birth. They burn coolly
like phosphorous, and the thing need be done
only once.
—From “Against Botticelli”Does ass fucking really require such a high-minded justification? Upon being told someone is fucking someone else in the ass, has anyone ever responded, “What! Why?” I regret to inform the reader that Hass goes on to compare this sex act to the sacking of Troy.
(Thanks, Rick S.)
