Hemeolic

Migration

2010-07-19T08:49:00.000+02:00

is sometimes a necessity of change.

If you're out there, and I hope you are....

come and find me at http://hemeolic.livejournal.com/

Dipsosomnia

2010-07-04T15:14:00.002+02:00

The pain of sleep is not like any other hurt. It is a pain of you, yourself, an ache that's consuming, whole and undefined. A woman in a chaste night rail once asked me: You know when you're lying in bed, trying to fall asleep and you pull up short with a jerk like you're falling? Except you're not falling, you're just falling asleep? The pain of sleep is like that. Except you never fall. Wanting to fall you scrabble on your hands and knees and your belly to a cliff's edge, turn around and let your body slide over, feet, calves, thighs. But you grip tightly, tightly with your hands to a tree root near the precipice. Then you close your eyes and prepare to release, to fall, only to discover, to your horror, your hands have grown into the root stock. They are no longer yours. The processes by which your body works become disconnected and arcane, telegraphs with flesh wires, mechanical clocks buried in the sea, and you are are stuck and hung immobile.

The need for sleep is a discomfort that presses into your neck and abdomen, but mostly into your head where it swirls, inexorable and dangerous. You don't know which you want more: for it to leave you empty or take you over altogether. This is what dying feels like, you think and then think that can't be true, and then know that it is.

The pain of sleep is divided into two varieties: its lack and its threat of inconvenient arrival. One is a pillory, the other a room made of everything soft and pillowy: floor length drapes, the rumps of cats, banks of ferns, Turkish Delight (the Narnian kind), the thighs of voluptuous women, piles of un-spun wool. Your entrance is inevitable. For though you shut the door firmly during Shakespeare, Schoenberg, and stoichiometry, you'll find yourself a-bed inside as if there were never any door after all.

insupportable ephemera

2010-06-25T18:04:00.000+02:00

Upholstery porn. Wingtiped motorcars and backed chairs. Hot wave: hair, emotion both.

Innuendos accepted by e-mail. Fur tippets however, last practically forever, especially when Hollanderized.

The taste of frisson. Licking at a smear of strawberry, only to find it blood.

Defeat.

more?

Homes

2010-06-10T17:54:00.000+02:00

Empty houses are the best ones, or the ones built to resemble houses but filled with trains instead, or quaking puddings, or irate tortoiseshell cats, you don't know, do you, unless there's a peep hole for peeping inside. Also good are the houses that are too small to inhabit and filled with paste hams and forks with two tines or the ones that are too large and full of the dead. Also acceptable are those houses full of gloomth, locked doors, innuendos, taffeta, slow lakes and rattlings as well as the houses built in rib cages and filled with breath and dust and very soft couches of human flesh. Intriguing are those houses that are composed of nothing at all but are only spaces defined around a place where a house might exist or might be formed by the dueling reflection of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors, or merely someone sighing on the lintel, at last, at last, at last. In short an inhabitable house is best, more refined and elegant, just as fripperies are better uncosseted, marzipan uneaten, depths unplumbed.

Taking shape

2010-06-07T13:05:00.004+02:00

Yesterday you were turning bolts, building a bed for your lover to sleep in, plying pressboard into roses, into oak trees, into the tree house where Penelope and Odysseus, I'm sure, laid their heads between blackberry thickets and dusty silver olive leaves.

A black squirrel shocked me awake just now. It stood upright. You don't know what precariousness feels like until you stand on two feet.

There was nothing more hopeless somehow then a bottle dropped on the street. Laboriously filled with air (into bottle shape) and then water (into water shape), then abandoned with a thunk and a chug. A bottle filled now half with air and a spreading pool of water flattened into two dimensions, left to evaporate, shapeless now, into pools of air.

Penelope and Odysseus, they weren't afraid for their lives, and neither will you be when you hold that girl close in the indentation you pressed out especially for her. You will be satisfied and warm now with the hole that you have made, and then filled.

SF Novel of the Week: Winterize

2010-06-04T12:11:00.000+02:00

There's a new household convenience in town, inter-dimensional energy. Established 50 years ago, inter-dimensional energy is both safe and cheap. Many different dimensions exist at a single point in space thereby solving the basic problems of environmental control. An inter-dimensional fan creates a small hole to an area of eternal winter: boom! Instant cooling. Create a hole into some radiating geothermal tomb and you never have to pay another heating bill. Portals to wells of inexhaustible energy generate electricity. And small windowshade-like contraptions shines beams of sun into your room, evening during the deep chills of winter.

Enter our hero, a shlub of a junior vice president of marketing, whose job it is to sell these plastic appliances to consumers.
One day, while flicking on a switch, a voice speaks out of his "Extreme Winterizer X359." It's a scientist from one of those alternate dimensions warning him of the grave consequences of tampering with the folds of reality. They converse over several days forming a strange (and possibly sexual connection through the whirring stream of cold air). At last he is convinced of the danger to his planet. Faced with convincing the public that the products he once promoted will likely destroy both the known and unknown universe, will he take refuge in denial? Or will this middle manager embark on a crusade to save humanity?

Laws of Thermodynamics: III

2009-08-21T00:12:00.003+02:00

There Is No Zero

You cannot stop it. The city is there, full green in its many branches, hung bending and swaying with eagles, angles and headless knights. The river speaks in insalubrious innuendos. The stonemasons are laboring even now. After 300 years their hammers bang out persistence, gold spreading like a pestilence over the ogives, spilling onto alter cloths already heavy with dust. There is a place but it does not exist, a garden, with few doors but you may still reach it. Hidden behind bankers, retail junkies and sausage carts, you may find, yes you may try. It is a place of stillness where apples remain ungathered and old men sit upon the benches in checks while others mate in quiet corners without the aid of boards. And when one leaves, uncertain of her reception in the worlds of elsewhere, one may gather up a bit in her hand and put it in her pocket for a Wednesday. But that bit does not go with you, though you file it carefully away, For all flowers fade when plucked and become something altogether different, a remainder of what always was insubstantial, imperfect and gone.

Laws of Thermodynamics: II

2009-06-20T11:50:00.005+02:00

Entropy is Eternal

In a small corner of my mind hovel there is a stair, cobwebbed and nitered with stick figured cave paintings. At the bottom on the stairs a dusty office opens its mouth. It is the kind for shady autodidacts, unsavory cotton candy spinners and sculptors in folding chairs.

In a single filing cabinet there I keep my lexicons. They have labels, peeling and faded, the corpses of dead spiders and reams of hopeful, empty pages. I open a drawer and step upon hanut, karpousi, el routoubia, accablé.
It is a an unpleasant place. I visit seldom. And though I am turnkey of this prison, I demand nourishment of my charges even when they are crumbling dust or the frayed ends of cotton dissolving slowly in a vat of bleach.

Laws of Thermodynamics: I

2009-05-14T20:52:00.001+02:00

The Conservation of Matter

Poof! I press my forcefield belt. Poof! a pride of lines is running through my head, a hello, a cucumber, a screwdriver, a quay-side walk, the waves are running in verses and those versus are Gertrude Stein. When I go to the cornerstore I ask for four bananas, a kilo of apples and a zucchini with alligator skin and there are returned to me these objects in exchange for my words. And also a hello, a goodbye, a smile. These are bonus and they are set into my shopping bag along with the edibles. A strange thing the immaterialitly of our exchange. My imperfect words, my accusative mangled into ablatives (ablatives do not exist here), the bits of seraphs stuck like flypaper to the palate and non-palatables shrink the shrinking dance of chocolate in hot hands, changing states from the slightly sticky state to the sludge state, primal, in the order of states. It's true thought that I am a lexical junk master. I am the spiller of marinara stains in the shape of small forlorn countries. I am the bunchbacked garbage woman all covered over with the detritus of broken chairs, faulty mirrors and rotting banana peels. You say 235 please, and I want to say that nothing has changed.

The Lusty Month of May

2009-05-06T17:13:00.003+02:00

CHAP. ХХV

How true love is likened to summer.

And thus it passed on from Candlemas until after Easter, that the month of May was come, when every lusty heart beginneth to blossom and to bring forth fruit ; for like as herbs and trees bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in likewise every lusty heart, that is in any manner a lover, springeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds. For it giveth unto all lovers courage, that lusty month of May, in some thing to constrain him to some manner of thing, more in that month than in any other month, for divers causes. For then all herbs and trees renew a man and woman, and in likewise lovers call again to their mind old gentleness and old service, and many kind deeds that were forgotten by negligence. For like as winter rasure doth always arase and deface green summer, so fareth it by unstable love in man and woman. For in many persons there is no stability, for we may see all day, for a little blast of winter's rasure, anon we shall deface and lay apart true love for little or nought, that cost much thing. This is no wisdom nor stability, but it is feebleness of nature and great disworship whosoever useth this.

Therefore, like as May month flowereth and flourisheth in many gardens, so in likewise let every man of worship flourish his heart in this world, first unto God, and next unto the joy of them that he promised his faith unto, for there was never worshipful man nor worshipful woman, but they loved one better than another: and worship in arms may never be foiled, but first reserve the honour to God, and secondly the quarrel must come of thy lady : and such love I call virtuous love.

But now-a-days men cannot love seven night but they must have all their desires, that love may not endure by reason; for where they be soon accorded, and hasty heat, soon it cooleth. Right so fareth love now-a-days ; soon hot, soon cold. This is no stability, but the old love was not so. Men and women could love together seven years, and no wanton lusts were between them, and then was love truth and faithfulness. And lo in likewise was used love in king Arthur's days. Wherefore I liken love now-a-days unto summer and winter. For like as the one is hot and the other cold, so fareth love now-a-days. Therefore all ye that be lovers call unto your remembrance the month of May, like as did queen Guenever. For whom I make here a little mention, that while she lived she was a true lover, and therefore she had a good end.

-Sir Thomas Malory in The Globe Edition of Morte D'Arthur, 1868

Train Problem

2009-04-23T20:53:00.004+02:00

I have cracked the nut of death and spilled its meat from the shell. It was simple really, like most problems when you see the answer. You see, I was riding the other day, rocking away in the only cradle designed for babes out of arms. Half dozing, half cats-cradling, and three quarters thumb-twiddling when it came to me; they told us to meditate on speed and distance, clocks and schedules and other improbables that only further prove that maths are a clownish science and not the provenance of travelers. But if we turned things inside out (like an orange) and I was riding time instead of it riding me (like a string-pulling doll), every stop would be another hereafter. Each Cottage/grove/forest/town/shady/village its own kingdom of heaven and hippie commune. All are equals in immobility, I thought and felt a goose walk over my grave or maybe it was a six-legged metaphor. We're on schedule for infinity, baby, and on this route the whistle stops are without number.

cattle and loveplay

2009-04-17T21:21:00.004+02:00

Call for me and I will tell you what I have learned, that we make an addiction of time and memory, eating and idleness. That chestnut leaves drape like the hands of effete gentlemen in the moments of their unfurling.

These are the days of softness and indolence. These are the days of rags and witches and ribbon covered flails. A candy-marshmallow-churning-bicycle whipped its way through the night forest. There are bells on the handlebars and I can hear it singing Shakespeare when it rumbles by.

Browsing through summer photos

2009-02-21T15:14:00.004+01:00

I find a fore-echo of my current life in a July trip up the Bosporus.

One can imagine that either the name of this shop is a result of the pure cosmic/linguistic absurdity of the universe, or that its owner is a Kafka scholar indeed.

And death to: folklore, Moravian-Slovak embroidery, Alfons Mucha and Old Prague sentimentality

2009-02-12T12:57:00.003+01:00

Long live:
The liberated word, the new word, fauvism, expressionism, cubism, pathetism, dramatism, orphism, paroxysm, dynamisn, plastic art, onomatopoesim, the poetry of noise, the civilization of inventions and of journeys of discovery!
Long live:
machinism, sports fields, Frištenský, the Českomoravská Machine-Tool Works, the Central Slughterhouse, Laurin and Klement, the crematorium, the future cinima, the Circus Henry, the military concert of Střelecký Island and in Stromovka Park, the World Exhibition, railroad stations, artistic advertisements, steel and concrete!

- from "Open Windows" a Czech "futurist" manifesto (1913)

Ode To Penis Enlargement

2009-01-28T19:31:00.003+01:00

sudden wanted
mischievous wood
keeping might make word.
satisfaction however
getting cousin near busy
word.

This all the reason you should need to occasionally check out your spam folder

Pretty Woman

2009-01-19T17:20:00.002+01:00

When I am sad, I hang a giant American flag in my room in this cold foreign land and break dance my heart out.

Tuppence for your thoughts

2009-01-14T19:36:00.002+01:00

We could grow old together, you know? But we would be the kind of elderly people that hold intellectual discussion on park benches in the gloaming. On separate park benches I mean because our love is of the mind only and actually we never speak, we just feed the birds in tandem. Dip and scatter, dip and scatter. The old rhythm sounds monotonous to the mothers pushing perambulators. The children are lulled instantly to sleep by the crackle of seed and the cooing of satisfied pigeons. But it's a sham really, a disguise for the intimacy of our conversation, the Morse code of our throws, the ping of a sunflower shell, the plink of millet and cracked corn that means, I have seen the truth today in a loaf of sliced bread and in the pattern of cracks on a white wall. We look down, gum our dentures further into our mouths and hum.

2009-01-11T20:39:00.002+01:00

For thirty-five years now I've been in wastepaper, and it's my love story. For thirty-five years I've been compacting wastepaper and books, smearing myself with letters until I've come to look like my encyclopedias--and a good three tons of them I've compacted over the years. I'm a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me. My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books, but that's how I've stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

-Bohumil Hrabal "Too Loud a Solitude," translated from Czech by Michael Henry Heim

New Andrew Bird

2009-01-04T15:52:00.002+01:00

This is so great. Now if only I was in a position to go out and buy the CD.

Life like an animation, maybe

2009-01-04T15:40:00.002+01:00

If there was film in our fingertips we could conduct an orchestra of live long days. Yes, I can see it now. Beautiful as god's breath they swirl out, those multifaceted heartstrings, shimmering coral, theophosphatic blue, knitting into a scarf of recollection, reality, the stuff of dreams, the stuff of now. Always behind the snapping beaks of scissors angling downwards, their beady eyes a fulcrum with destruction as its apple. But we would always outrun their greedy mouths. Oh that this twisted mind should be mined! I want it to delve deep and for that ore to be inexhaustible, to put the vor in voracious.

A Book of Hours: Hymns to the Goddess of Unreality

2008-12-16T18:48:00.001+01:00

Pray eight times each day. Repeat.

Matins

Lauds

Prime

Tierce

Sext

None

Vespers

Compline

Whoso List to Learn Pro Tools

2008-12-07T14:50:00.003+01:00

Had better have more patience than I do mostly but at last it's coming along. I set myself a silly project so that I would have something to work towards and lo, after some procrastination and crashing through the forest, it has come to fruition. Some mix levels could be better but on the whole I will call it a good first effort.

Winter

2008-11-20T21:39:00.003+01:00

The storm bashing its head outside my window is heavy with innumerable small deaths. I imagine the rain as a fleet of kamikaze droplets. Each dashes its insides to pieces against the glass leaving watery entrails smeared in rivers that slide and then run to the ground. Hard by in the woods full of the nodding of albino reads there are imaginary Squirrel Nutkins tumbling freely inside a cold coat made of winter. It is buttoned with the shells of chestnut and acorn, lined with decayed mushroom's chitinous rinds and stuffed full with the withered hands of dried leaves.

Museo Nazionale del Cinema

2008-10-28T20:17:00.005+01:00

Strange it is to wake up in a dream but perhaps stranger still to enter one while still walking in the waking world. I had a similar feeling, a cousin trice removed maybe, when I stepped indoors that I was not setting foot indoors as much as in doors, I mean into the interior spaces that are at once an expression of the exterior space and not their opposite at all. Giggling fingers were turning like butterflies beating their wings through twisting paths of time, leaving Rorschach impressions on the walls. They spoke in strange languages but not to me. A gigantic lizard loomed on a launching pad to the night sky, open mouthed and comical as a bumpkin in a barnyard. And I was not afraid but entranced by its strangeness when it leaned down to kiss the top if my bent head. And there too was a daguerreotype of a leopard wearing breeches and I saw you (yes you!) rowing the gondola in the magic lantern full of gilded light. Walls spoke and moved and on a tawdry bed or red velvet I slept, awoke with the memory of dreams erotic and terrible and then forgot that I had slept at all.

And so it doth today

2008-10-16T20:51:00.003+02:00

There was once a strange meeting on a beach where rain made abbreviated rivers to swell the waves.
And we there were luminous too though ill-content for we found ourselves in a hole created by our own weight. All the water in the world was at our feet but, Tantalus like, it could not give us to drink or ever mount high enough to buoy our floundered corpuses out of the depression, nor bear us upside down, like a snuffed candle, going out with the tide.

Lvice

2008-10-12T11:16:00.003+02:00

Something leonine is stalking through the meads of summer. A giant apartment complex lurks on the edges of the suburban savanna and saliva drips from its gills. It is baked, beached and chlorinated, longing for rain or for (a) pride to come devour it whole.

In another life it was a teaming commune, an Amazon of Amazons, a multiverse of human verses where people grew tall and strong without fear. But that was long ago.

But I should therefore put these living fantasies to wrest and lay my head on some moist Austrian hillock where cotton shrouds and grass stained knees are the gifts of childhood. There is contentment writ large and full in the mist of late morning. The pyparii are turning golden on the tree stems preparing themselves for palimpsest and girls of 16 are pages to write on.

Prague Groteque

2008-10-01T04:08:00.002+02:00

The fun house's up the hill but not nearly as creepy as one would hope. There are smiling children and ice cream cones where rictus devil's dung should grace their young tongues. Only the labyrinth of mirrors manages not to disappoint. Base desires decorate the wall here and series of homunculi parade around, their heads distended and genitals exposed. One cannot but suppose that it is fitting that the stomach be so belled and gaseous and that the arms are shrunken in proportion of to our thoughts. The glasses are old and wavery, like flutes spilling over with too much champagne, that is if the champagne was laced with paragoric, sidling into your bowls and turning them into glaciated flows. Under the light there a blond child gazes at her aqueous hair flaring into an areola. She looks like carillions should look, if carillions had a youth and the youth wore patent leather.

Re-reading The Pillow Book

2008-09-27T18:42:00.003+02:00

{146} Things with terrifying names-
River deeps. Mountain caves. 'Scale board' walls. Iron. Clods. Thunder-not just the name, but the thing itself is extremely terrifying. Gales. Ominous clouds. Comets. 'Arm-umbrella' rain. The Wilds.
Robbery is terrifying in every way. Violent monks are very terrifying indeed. So are Kanamochi. Living spirit possession. The snake berry. Devil fern. Devil vine. Thorn bushes. Chinese bamboo. Roasted charcoal. A bull-demon. Anchors-the sight of one is more terrifying than its name.

{242} Things that no one notices-
All the inauspicious days. The aging of people's mothers.

Sei Shonagon

Arias of Love and Death

2008-08-13T13:49:00.004+02:00

I've read some of these before but this poem seems particularly well suited to being rendered as a comic. It's got that nice narrative-sketched-so-perfectly-in-a-few-brief-lines form that the two media so obviously have in common.

If Dr. Seuss was 23 and lived in a brownstone in Williamsburg, he might sound like this.

The waker goose; the cuckoo ever unkind; the popinjay, full of delicacy

2008-07-28T06:19:00.007+02:00

Black clouds are in the east like an ominous Parliament of Foules. And I've got my impermeables ready for the downpour. Hunkering down is like returning to the same sweetness seven days a week or sticking your face into an upturned umbrella, dark, stuffy and comfortable.

But woah Nelly! I'm at it again. Brains unwinding like a spool or thread or a skipping record, "sometimes behave so strangely" (ad infinatum). I'm old behind my time in the ways of you post-modern performance artists and post-post modern hunky-a-burning tire boys.

Instead of living outright, I dream I am a superhero's slave. Black cape, bondage gear and the rest. Top spin on the table during a convocation of murderers. I will kill you with the extreme end of my knife-blade fan.

How d'ye do, Lord Turing?

2008-06-05T18:30:00.001+02:00

On this day 175 years ago.

Pean

2008-05-29T03:18:00.000+02:00

Oh you, Warm Winds blow me to the Dog star and there, staring Sirius and tired, make me a crown of Cassiopeia threads. I'll dance Sursaute d'Allemagne around smoking mineral springs and inhale your oracular fumes.

While you were in the bathtub I was out howling at the moon.

Rosa est rosa est rosa

2008-05-20T20:29:00.003+02:00

May is a lusty month and now it has almost in the Ram it's entire course y-ronne. In my experience, these days are commonly packed with disbelief and that y-ronne amok-ness that comes with the first smecking of summer: a relief and a source of frantic anxiety all it's own. And occasionally I feel wondrous in that true slapped-by-a-Deity sense that comes with spring time when everything is impossible and you're sure that flowers are steaming in color. Isn't walking out the door in a way like being shocked by multi-lingual homophones (who knew that "one" and "very" would cross the Arabian Gulf into a Czech-Arabic delicious mouthfeel pronounced trippingly on the tongue?) or is that just me?

“A process of self-obliteration conducted by an effort of the will. Pleasure bordering on almost unendurable ecstasy. ...”

2008-05-06T21:50:00.001+02:00

Tobacco's in the Persian slipper along with some harder narcotics.

(Aorists on the brain. Sackbut. The fall of the Scythian)

I take lessons from a craggy man in the lost art of forgetfulness.

(Hemlock umbels. slithey toves. Mongol 'ordes. Naru.)

We learn: Thoughts are paper cups (so facile to crumple and throw in a bin) and each meme an island in the archipelago. Letting go is as easy as being swallowed by the sea.

(Hashassination. Timesis. You abso-fucking-loutely sometimes behave so strangely)

But there are long establish trade routes and every skein of Lorbarnery silk has a name.

I am a poor student.

I'm happy you don't like me

2008-04-27T21:10:00.000+02:00

Still here, and semi-animate in a nudibranch sort of way.

I apparently needed two months to recover from a month of poetry.

But here I am again with attendant trumpets and swords a-waving.

It's not even May but things are hot and lusty already. Perhaps the heat will drive me to prosery. It is a thing devoutly to be wished.

Day the penultimate

2008-02-29T06:00:00.001+01:00

Walt Whitman- "Glimpse"

25th day methinks

2008-02-27T05:53:00.000+01:00

John Donne - "Elegy 19" (excerpt)

Day the whatever

2008-02-26T05:24:00.002+01:00

Oscar Wilde- "The Grave of Shelley"

Out in the long grass I am peering moodily into a limpid pool. There are faces in the water and dandies lurking in the shrubbery.

Oh and there's R on the avenue furtively groping some faux-Praxitelian marble. She looks adorable, don't you think?

My locus amoeus is now complete.

Day the 21st

2008-02-23T02:18:00.004+01:00

John Ashbery - "The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers" - I

To my sadness I could not present the poem in its entirely but you can find it here.

And please note, if you will the cross-cultural poetic transposition on stage left.

We are such clever children and we aim to please.

Next door, R gives us some aphorisms to love by. I'll pack them in my bag when I go wandering.

Day 19

2008-02-20T04:14:00.003+01:00

H.D.- "At Baia"

Flowers and letters that say nothing and imply everything and love that acts upon objects rather than people. It's like a love affair done up as a still-life in oil, utterly beautiful and tragically immobile. An enthusiastic osculation to you, Hilda.

And a double whammy from R who plucks from her own field of blooms some Marvell and Blake for your enjoyment.

Day 17

2008-02-18T05:47:00.002+01:00

William Blake- The Sick Rose

Day 15

2008-02-17T01:01:00.001+01:00

Andrew Marvell - The Mower to the Glo-Worms

Poetry for a summer's night but we're still languishing in February. This is the next best thing I s'pose.

R lilts Armantrout in Translation, which, with her cryptic taxonomies, is sorely needed.

Day the 13th

2008-02-15T03:10:00.002+01:00

But again a day late.

R is experimenting in onomatopoetic stasis. Listen closely and you might hear all afternoon the gramaphone.

Rae Armantrout- Covers

A happy Lupercalia to you all.

Day 11

2008-02-12T06:13:00.000+01:00

Wallace Stevens- "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock"

And R continues her round of soporific stanzas here. Listen, sleep, weep or maybe both together.

Ninth Day

2008-02-10T17:06:00.000+01:00

Actually, I'm a day behind. Sorry, my tender flotsam, but another post tomorrow je vous promis.

Now enjoy--

Elizabeth Bishop-- "The Electric Storm" (with attendant crashings in the background and dramatic hesitation)

And R somnabulates a lovely berceuse next door.

Day the 7th

2008-02-08T04:33:00.000+01:00

creeping stealthily with eight-toed paws--listen here to R's mellifluous growing.

And now for something completely different.

John Keats - Lines on the Mermaid Tavern

Cinqieme Jour

2008-02-05T22:46:00.001+01:00

Charles Baudelaire- "Sed Non Satiata"

We thought you'd enjoy at least one day of la poesie fracophone. Listen in to R's most skillful venery and stay tuned for a compliment to M. Baudelaire tomorrow.

a bien tot, mes petits choux

___

Later:

Thanks to my partner in crime for providing a translation. You're right darling, the words are too delicious not to be appreciated by non Francophones. I am shamed in to doing likewise.

In (mostly acurate) and literal translation

Sed Non Satiata- Never Satisfied- or as one translation has it- Unslakable Lust

Strange deity, brown as the nights,
whose scent is mixed musk and Havana,
work of some obi, Faust of the savanna,
sorceress of ebony thighs, child of black midnights.

I prefer to faithfulness, to opium, to the night
the elixir of your mouth where love pavanes
when my desires, towards you, set out in caravan
your eyes are the cistern where I drink my cares.

By your great large dark eyes, sighing out your soul,
Oh pitiless demon! pour on less flame upon me.
I am not the Styx who can embrace you nine times.

Alas! And I may not, licentious Megera,
in order to break your spirit and put you at bay,
in the hell of your bed become Proserpina.

Please see here for more accomplished versions.

Day 3

2008-02-03T21:39:00.000+01:00

in homage to Dorothy Dunnett and Johnathan Rys Meyers

Thomas Wyatt- "They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek"

Just a reminder, we haven't set the agenda for the rest of the month. Your poem-ry ideas are still welcome!

Day 1

2008-02-01T08:26:00.000+01:00

W.H. Auden- "What's in your mind, my dove, my coney."

The voice distortion frightens me. I sound rather like a 2-pack-a-day woman or like some aggrestive tibe of phlem has colonized my throat. Perhaps I'll try to achieve the same effect again with Baudelaire. I'm just learning, Chickadees. Bear with me.

PS: I think I should note here that Miss. R convinced me we should post our first read of each poem. My radio producorial skills cry out for editing but you're getting it here raw.

Poem-ry

2008-01-21T09:28:00.000+01:00

The incomparable Miss. R has once again sucked me into her Charybdis of literary shenanigans.

Please do contribute suggestions here or there to brighten my dull February, darlings.

Doggerel, Seuss or Donne. My sponge-like brain welcomes them all.

wet dream

2008-01-17T15:03:00.000+01:00

Last night I'd hoped for oneiric copies of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili clustered flapping around dream towers like a parliament of tumescent fools (beans? birds?)
(What do you think: Would dream books of dream books cancel each other like doppelgangers or only move on into infinity?)

Instead there were vampires.

But not the "Crime, horror, bitey people and shagging, by God" variety, nor yet the worn velveteen and aphrodisiac-laced spittle kind. These were frightening in the way that only things half-seen can manage.

Sensibly, I locked the door of my neighbors house, ran for the linen closet and hid among the cerements.

Pillow book

2008-01-17T10:10:00.000+01:00

Things to be avoided:

Water mills of effluvium pouring like Gin into a prostrate and sodden Gargantua.

Empty and full.

Empty and full.

(His mouth is becoming a round of snoring and scum in burbling parallel.)

Things to be eaten:

Madelines.

And Heartsring plectrums.

Things to be adored:

You

W rencontrez

2007-12-26T13:55:00.001+01:00

In the neighborhood of St. Lazare, humming a line leaked from Dowland, I met you on the street. A Cuban hairdresser warned me in no uncertain terms of your approach but, fool that I am, I grew distracted by brooms and erotic trimmings and paid her no mind.

But how strange it was! You'd cut open your knee on a cobble thrown through 1968 and into this day, to that precise instant, when you could fall, wilting into my arms. You licked blood from your hands with a patient tongue and I pulled out an embroidered hankie.

Sixpence and silver. There were prickles lighting the sky and I had been expecting you sixways, I now realize, though the last place for an unexpected meeting is Paris.

As like as Siamese peascods we were and half as green. I invited you into a steaming tea shop run by a wartime bride with carrot top hair and bad teeth. She spoke execrable French, which flattered me exceedingly, and cooed over us with hard biscuits and sticking plaster.

We slouched in our chairs and sipped the teeth-rotting brew. I told you fairy tales about marionette shows, enchanted photoplates and Stendhal's Syndrome. We marveled at the lines in our palms, glancing furtively at their well-tooled embroidery, and feared to press them together. As if we might find witches hats there, tesseracts or some uncanny meanderings of a future tense.

Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja

2007-12-17T08:56:00.000+01:00

The scene: A small kitchen table with checkered cloth. Two small and furry creatures argue back and forth. The table is strewn with house plants, sealing wax and a golden record circa. 1977

Monologue 1 (in a furry and distressed tone):

They told us growth was like an aubergine, difficult to pronounce, but beautiful to behold. But I have partaken of that tender vegetable, darlings, and found it nightshade.

And I am flummoxed by the impossibility of being interested in normalcy for more than the time it takes to twirl a lock widdershins. I would much rather be exploring (with recent linguistic acquisitions and with minatory exposition to my poltroon brain), the realms of hey-nonny-nothing.

This eternal parturience wearies me sore.

alack.

Let me be that I am and I will a contented shena maydele be: variously (though not exclusively) a born again birdwatcher, thoughts floating even keeled through night drives and into the sunset.

(Enter a bear. It eats the creature in three bites and smacks its lips.)

disconect the dots OR what I tried to say

2007-11-21T04:59:00.000+01:00

Memory mansions and rabbit holes seem like inversions of each other but really they interrelate beeeee-utifuly (the world upside down, the world inside out, the world upside-in?) and in ways so mazey and intestine that only a fantasamagoria of media starts to get at the heart of them.

But I truly fear that considerations keep me from the full exploration of the same consideration. That and exhaustion so deep it feels like a slow conversation with the different states you are in--am I like this? (like this, like THIS?)

Suggestions for a sestina on electronic despair:
failure
permanent
sorry
error
box
daemon

And were DOES that daemon reside? He's in there for sure though I've never dared to lift the lid. Schrodinger would have a hissy fit I'm sure.

A Cat with Hands (or some minor archana)

2007-11-12T10:16:00.000+01:00

I owe kisses to my daring cinematographer who slashes me with jagged shadows and brings passing street lights to streak against the taxi windows. Some 3rd rate cortex homunculus now has decided that all streaky greys are unbelievably alluring and the park bench denizens are disguised Lotharios trapped into their own circular plot lines. I'd smack him if I could, but you see, he's a bit too small for smacking and much too slippery.

Morose contemplation suits you, says my reflection and I tilt the hat veil sideways and shrug on an overcoat in faded mauve.

The poetics of nightwalking are my smoky oblation and they burn up unwritten into the air: Please, you un-unknown Gods, bless yourselves in whatever way you know how and keep reality far, far away from us.

This way I forget that most times I stay in, dress up as the Page of Cups and doze.

Sturm und Drang

2007-10-22T12:04:00.000+02:00

Grey shapes are emerging from dusty corners and the city looks unexpected and unwholesome in the rain. October mystery is my favorite kind and each year I manage to forget its allure. It's a fortunate amnesia leaving me continuously and vertiginous uneasy-- but in a pleasant way, you know.

Its also pleasant when Books speak and when authors you admire take words from your mouth decades before it occurs to you to spend hundreds of hours figuring out how to say them.
And well too, Mr. Crowley I remember the feeling of ineffable sadness when, turning the orange inside out like your precocious Giordano, the world came bursting forth, real and mutable. The crystalline beauty of narrative of course became trapped in the pulpy innards behind peels that no girl of 10 or 80 could hope to penetrate. Le sigh.

Fortunately for all some happy things came out this week too.

Doina

2007-10-01T08:38:00.000+02:00

Cluj is home to red pigs but also angry doughnuts. And although I've wanted to visit Romania now for many a year, I never dared to hope that the trip might include hot balls of dough dripping sour cherry innards. By strange and yet appropriate co-incidence, back in P-town, there are also eccentric anthropomorphic doughnuts. And were they to each to grow several miles tall and exchange blows in the middle of the Atlantic (or perhaps Central Asia), might I not then taste their soft fried flesh in unison as it rained down in surgery violence? Mmmm. It is a future devoutly to be wished.

In the Night Kitchen (restless stirrings)

2007-09-20T10:45:00.001+02:00

Someday I'll write a twilight book and it will be morbid as Gorey, as predictably Gothic as Lewis and incandescent as Sendak.

And I can only hope and fear that one day, indeed, I will be ridiculous enough. Then I'll pontificate on how web structure revolves enraptured with itself into something like a Donne-ish conceit -- mirrors of meaning within a constant sphere. All created especially for me. Delicious. I shall eat my rich pastes of peanut butter and landscapes of archaic meaning and then smear them sticky-fingered over page after page, branding each with my image and trailing blue linkage into the hinterlands.

Aperture

2007-09-14T11:35:00.001+02:00

The air is soft at midnight (that's an as-yet-to-be-written Mary Higgins Clark, eh?), even the unromantic and ragged arborvitae look grainy and delectable and there I am smacking my forehead and grinning. The girl was wearing a BLUE dress. And it was FLOUNCY and full-skirted. This being 1956 or some other such frivolous year, it didn't seem important at the time. But there was also cabinet of curios, which finally led to the obvious conclusion, slow in coming, but inescapable once apprehended, that vision is just a series of small openings: irises, key holes, eyelids, rabbit holes, peep holes (the pehpole we see though (them), snicker). These are the means we use to walk though walls, doors, tesseracts and the like. For this fable and also Little Red Riding Hood, thanks, delightfully creepy man.

Big Reveal

2007-09-12T13:44:00.000+02:00

The Magician's Alliance...

It does exists!

Fever Dream

2007-09-08T16:08:00.000+02:00

Antrozous Pallidus has a strange musty odor that I never smell in dreams. For a while I was walking, eating delicious meatballs (though how one can eat delicious meatballs and not smell delicious meatballs is a mystery that needs fathoming) and bushing away curtains. And IT came in a rush of art deco trains, the things that are the same, the things that are inevitable and the the things that are immaterial MUST enjoy cohabitation (else why should they nestle so close and comfortable?). There is warm filling in my strongbread life but it accompanies golden apples and other dangerous things, like words I didn't know I had forgotten (tintinabular!). I take the books too seriously and fall ill from excesses of meaning. The D. Lit. looks grave(n)ly: a worsening case of exphrasis.

He Threw a Rock and Told me to Go Fuck Myself: On Conversational Etiquette in Foregin Climes

2007-09-03T14:37:00.000+02:00

Language may be an insurmountable barrier during your travels. You could be a mumbler. Everyone abhors a mumbler.

Bow politely before speaking. Unconditional surrender to violence will disarm even the most hostile speaker.

Remember: magniloquence is to be avoided when meeting chicken dealers.

Packets of tea and other soft objects will benefit from squishing. In cases of extreme compression they may be used to make calming infusions. In this way, you can stupefy those that thwart your dealings.

Stock profanity is unoriginal. Try to cultivate the creatively obscene. It will make you friends wherever you may fare.

Alarmists, agoraphobes, those who fear lisps, catamites, the parsimonious, the newfangled and frumpy should stay at home.

8 Year-old boys carrying stones should not be approached at all.

Moonstruck Madness

2007-08-29T10:30:00.001+02:00

Lunar eclipse yesterday and lycanthropy tomorrow. Could this get any more foreboding?

Strap on your prescience goggles, kiddos. I'm hording my crystal balls for star gazin'.

It's here!

2007-08-26T02:04:00.000+02:00

please, read, listen and contemplate at your convenience.

I'm never one to toot my own horn (in fact I fear the muscle strain) but I think it's pretty nifty.

Thanks to our fearless leader R and her cohort X for being the evil (yea, again!) masterminds they are.

Er zol vaksen vi a tsibeleh, mit dem kop in drerd!

2007-08-21T06:47:00.000+02:00

District-ites have been onioning these hot months (yes, both in smell and in aspect, my tender little bulb). My floor is full of sweaty peels dehydrating under the jet of the air conditioner. Late at night, (compelled by Al Gore or some other shadowy, yet corpulent, enviro-hero) I am shamed out of sleep to flick off the icebox and lie oozing dew into the floral bedspread. The heat keeps us wakeful and surreptitiously we put sticky fingers into our pits and sniff away, some Mary Catherine Gallagher with hay fever. Sometimes this does this trick and smell of fresh sweat stupefies us back into slumbers redolent of boiled cabbage. Other times though, we lie awake just inhaling and trying to tell the difference between our pungent bodies and the fulsome air.

But ah, tonight: glorious time warp to some 1920's April. The sidewalk was sepia with a dash of rising mist. And I looked to find trench-coated men peering into vegetable beds. Sadly, I fear all the noir detectives have moved on to sunnier climes.

A Pretty Skin to Wrap a Hobbit Princeling In

2007-08-14T10:11:00.000+02:00

Miss R is something like the Lady of Comfort and Tears, only up the nefarious a few jots and remove the evil. There are caged things that she feeds most tenderly in her Brooklyn apartment, like imperious felines and a collection of hungry literature.

The weekend started with the exploitation of several parks. We demanded grassy submission and received back late 90's rock and a Reconstructionist Bat Mitzvah. Ah well. Close enough.

Later we chose gellato over Henry Darger and I though the trade a fair one for a summer's day.

Back home in the Batcave I wear NY sequins in a tawdry ruff. It's dirty, cheese-smelling and occasionally frighting but I've high hopes for its potency as a talisman. I fear succubi and wendigos during the cold DC nights.

Kusturica-ism!

2007-08-10T13:36:00.000+02:00

It's like a microcosm of his entire world. I'd move there in a heartbeat.

Bildungsroman

2007-08-07T13:04:00.000+02:00

Do matchsticks have souls? How about spice racks, beans (animus/esprit/pneuma/ruach) or flying machines? These are questions for Muppet wranglers and all other purveyors of semi-animate flesh.

Slowly it becomes clear that sprouting pricks out tattoos of fascination. All is brief pain (winds of discontent?) and blurred ink.

I apologize. If I am cryptic it is only because I cannot satisfactorily understand these things myself.

Perhaps you would care to take a stab?

!!

2007-07-25T13:19:00.000+02:00

This is cornstarch and water

I watched it and looked very much like a codfish.

A Scandal in Bohemia

2007-07-24T12:03:00.001+02:00

I have crossed the mountains and left behind the disheveled women, chaise lounges and shindigs under the midsummer sky. The exchange seems a shoddy one (all I've gotten in return is dawnlight and cramped fingers but one must take one's pleasures when and where they're offered I suppose).

Returning from Bohemia is rather like time travel. It starts out with a walk around the block and then suddenly you've entered a gaslit street populated by strumming guitars, All-Stars and mango gelato. But this is a place that only exists in moderist novels (things about things about things) and the dreams of epic poets (read: lotus eaters) and soon enough you've returned to the ordinary detritus of retro-spandex and all other un-romantic things.

And what is it about those bohemians anyway? Perhaps we envy the ease of their transgressions, the sleek way that they outrage by simply slipping into a room or running roughshod armed with silk parasols and grease paint. And I know we all wish (or at least I do) that rebellion could be still be contained within a pair of exceptionally well-tailored trousers. I've been asking myself these questions forever it seems but --- practicing professional indolence on the sidelines--- I always seem to forget to answer through the haze of Madeira and cigar smoke.

On the airplane our attendatrix/trice/something is talking overly fast: "pleaseturnoffallelectronicdevicesbeforelanding" and I briefly consider my brain as a piece of electomagnetic machinery and wonder how it would look-- grey and sticky most likely-- if I placed it carefully under the seat in front of me. Probably then I'd loose all sense of propriety, scandalously place my seat back into some fully recumbent position and wait expectantly for the landing.

A lesson in toadstools

2007-06-22T12:02:00.000+02:00

Cascara Troll: brown hair (a bit frizzy), hazel eyes and a left foot with four toes. She likes to eat collage-ruled paper and lie on her belly waiting for rain.

2007-06-15T10:19:00.000+02:00

Excitement

2007-06-14T11:38:00.000+02:00

!!!

All in favor? I

2007-06-07T09:13:00.000+02:00

I call this meeting to order--will the exchequer of the "e" please rise? Yes, you. The Citizen Masters of Phonological Order my require gags. Yes? Thank you. And the superlative umlaut can remain meekly in the corner, please. Now Let the disruption begin!

Fur itt wus upoon thes di wee deklare tee disuloosun uf standarised orthowgrffy. Leet all leeters ruhn apon tee hurth und bee free.

And all the small orthographically challenged children rejoiced for this was not their fate. And oh how beautifully the vowels ran amok and there were superlative stops hard upon every ending.

We are expos-ed

2007-05-22T11:17:00.000+02:00

watch the video

He looked like a secret

2007-05-20T02:57:00.000+02:00

The Prydain Chronicles (5), Time Cat (1), The Marvelous Journeys of Prince Jen (1), The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian (1), Ms. Switch (3), Vesper Holly (many). From here I can measure my childhood. Thank you.

There it is! It's a man.

2007-05-17T10:35:00.000+02:00

Shall I compare thee? (there is none)

2007-05-14T09:47:00.000+02:00

You know that time when you're too clever for your own good? Skipping down the street, disdaining to bend and smell the roses (the salty ones, my dear and the dishwater too). Waggling a finger at the sky and writing ironic poetry about drugstore epiphanies. And croquet players are warbling and you are seeing only yourself reflected in a thousand bending leaflets. And this summer day is for you. Created, molded really, into sumptuous curves that wonderbra-like (lift and separate, my little cream puff) counterfeit whatever is lacking. And you're ready to cry on the shoulders of strangers. You're ready to bring down sparrows with your tongue. Ready for skunkwhispering (what's the scent on the wind?) and whistling in the dark. These are your esoteric skills. That is your avocation.

Alter-Egotism

2007-05-07T20:55:00.000+02:00

When I met my roommate Michael's friend Dana, she was helping to hold up a quarter-mile long sign. The sign had the names of all the US soldiers that had died in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the day of the Peace Rally on the Mall and Dana and her friends had driven all the way from West Virginia with a nun, the sign, and hand-made drums.

Later I found out that she edits a zine.

This is my contribution.

Yours Truly,

The Mighty Snork, Mistress or Frippery who's Aegis is Whipped Topping

Super Secret Alter-Ego

Yes, we all have one lurking within. Some of us may be more in-touch with this declarative-sentence-making, large-object-scaling, bizarre-spandex-wearing side of our personally. Others may need a little more help. To find the Super Secret Alter-Ego that's right for you, I suggest this handy, semi-mystical method.

Simply put yourself into a light trance. Take the index finger of one hand (Warning: left-pointing may skew your Alter-Ego towards the sinister). Close your eyes and run your finger up and down each column in turn until the power within bids you stop. Do this three times, until you have three separate names (one Title, Provenance, and Aegis). Then combine them using the formula below. And Viola!

Please remember to use your Alter-Ego for good (non destructive evil is probably acceptable too).

Title + Master/Mistress/Protector/Bane of + Provenance -- Aegis

Title:
Potentia/Potentior
Rapscallion
Absentia/or
Flagrentia/or
The Masticator
Formidable Fiend
Malevolentia/or
Anachronistia/or
Randamonia/or
The Great Doodler
Cranium
The Mighty Snork

Provenance:
Cruciferous Edibles
Biodegradable Cleaning Products
Those Who fear To Speak In Math Class
Lords of Hopscotch
Arcane Vocabulary
Pulchritudinous Sofas
The Six-Fingered
Tax Attorneys
Pahoehoe (Ropy Lava)
Lovers of B-Grade Action Flicks
Kitten Kissers
Cheese Mold
Daring-Do
Differentiating Homonyms
Frippery
Baubles

Aegis:
Giant Herring
Wombat
Magic Marker
Chiffon
Eraser
Whipped Topping
Bucket
Elbow Grease
String
Leeks
Lichen
Man-hole Cover

Mockery is the greatest form of flattery

2007-05-02T17:32:00.000+02:00

We are brilliant shining gods.

Mon coeur est une grenouille

2007-04-30T20:55:00.000+02:00

Hello, blue, blue, blue. The skirt people are flapping their petals today but hey ho I am sunburnt, and stay-at-home and throaty. There's an amphibian working its way up from some subterranean hidey-hole and I don't think he wants to make friends. Go flip in the sun like a banana pancake was the advice and bake, bake out the ill like so many batter bubbles rising up to the surface until at last...go to. I am done.

Froglegs are for a summer day, all crispidy and tender. Were it not for unfortunate associations with class hegemony, I'd gobble them up right quick.

Suspiciously delicious (a suspect novelty)

2007-04-24T09:05:00.000+02:00

Let it be known.

I require many bananas.

Resident New Yorkers take note.

Reading with the ears

2007-04-21T18:19:00.001+02:00

It's been a few days since The Books took the stage here in DC but I still have flashbacks in vivid color and gyrating shapes. But maybe that's because I'm still trying to get my head around the experience. To see them live was more surreal than I imaged: notes struck, voices spoke from the corners of the room and in the center two men with a cello and guitar seemed to hold completely still, the center of some sort of muti-media tableau vivant.

It helped too the the audience was completely mesmerized by the beautiful, odd videos broadcast in counterpoint to the music (these were unpolished footage, most often straight out of arcane training video, home movies and cable public access, rearranged into careful collages) I remembered to glance down at the stage all too seldom and I could easily imagine that the musicians sneaked in their playing between beats, waiting for all heads to turn away before they moved their fingers.

This isn't to say that the concert wasn't amazing; it most certainly was. Listening to The Books comes in fits and starts for me and I hadn't had such a fit for a while. Revisiting the songs again re-awakened my wonderment that such artifacts of strange audiophiliac creation exist at all. I genuflected to their delicacy and to the painstaking hours that have gone into their construction. I hope to one day make sometime half so lovely.

Musee du printemps

2007-04-10T01:43:00.000+02:00

The sky is opening here and things are beginning to die. The store mannequins, realizing that theirs is a sedentary lot, take leucadian leaps into vats of soup. It might have been delicious but their decapitated plastic corpses didn't harmonize, you see, neither with the oregano, nor the savory and thyme. They only floated aloof and greasy, a meal for the millers and the gobblers, oblivious, maybe, to all beauty.

And I wonder about the nonsensical connections between things. Why Auden means a bread with cranberries, and what Lincoln has to do with feeling flesh ripe, coarse, and unhomogenized under your fingers.

And then again.

Romance has stumbled its way out the door after a long and painful hangover --it was that party the summer before I reckon--- but not in the way that you'd think. Climbing over Lust, Hopeless Sensuality and the D-grade action flicks on the threshold, it takes one shuddering breath and then promptly goes back to bed.

Walking with my weekly onus of garlic, fish and courgettes I find the time to a form a passing crush. Yes, you with the worn shoes and well brushed greatcoat. What do you know about all this?

Up chin, down chin (an extra-literary exercise)

2007-03-17T20:13:00.000+01:00

Small tasks are comforting. They are quiet in their forgetability and their ability to offer a correct answer in a mode of life that most often demands interpretive dance, conundrums and all of the above. The small task can be closed, can be right, can be a perfect quatrain and still leave room for the interliners of thought and the vagueries of intertextuality.

Thackery, Gorey, Satrapi, Powers.

She had written down the date in her pocket-book of the day when she dispatched it. To her son's guardian, the good Major at Madras, she had not communicated any of her grief and perplexities.

In the small task you can meditate on a glance. Shift eyes your to the left, close and then open and send out semaphore that takes the slow train (the one that delivers the mail to Fossil, Medina and Mist along the way) before arriving at the recipient's back and crumpling to the floor. Oh well, here comes the next creased dollar, the next Naugahyde bag and pulpy codex. Ad infinatum circulation. Closed system. Plastic and tape. Close the pages. Tuck it in. It will keep until tomorrow.

2007-02-14T04:52:00.000+01:00

That is all.

an excess of gravity

2007-01-25T23:36:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I think about vaulting endlessly through the air. I am a rag doll or a 100 pound gymnast and my backflips are phantasmagoric pinwheels. I'm not sure what these visions mean. Perhaps they are just a way of moving widdershins. Maybe I'm trying to draw a map with the soles of my feet. Or maybe I just want to be in two places at once.

Get thee to a mulberry bush!

2007-01-12T00:01:00.000+01:00

It came to my attention recently that there have been many blog-worthy events in my life of late. And perhaps there are, but as is often the case when the truly, disgusting, ridiculous or dramatic enters your my, it leaves me tired/jaded/sick of the whole damn business. So, I'll encapsulate the current saga in my house with this innocent haiku instead. Ahem!

Urination on
the coffee table clogs my
my inbox with outrage

There, done. Let's instead talk about being able to go to the Textile Museum at 1pm on a Thurs. and reap the not inconsiderable benefits of unemployment. Today I actually had the presence of mind to enjoy the sweetness of cold hands, warm ears and the reaches of the urban unknown. I also reacquainted myself with the delicate intricacies of warp, weft, tweed, ikat, mordants, twinging, carding, spinning and backstrap looms. On fabrics like these, you can measure time in inches and image that a coating of skin from calloused fingers, an invisible embroidery, is still caught in the threads.

Oh that I too lived on the razor edge of time!

2006-12-29T02:34:00.000+01:00

So, it's been a long time, I have no apologies to make. Only .05% percent of the possible monkeys are bothering to read me anyhow.

So, what have I been doing, you ask? Or perhaps you don't ask but merely look at me balefully and smirk. But I ignore such rudeness and tell you have I have been maddeningly non-busy. Stupefyingly slothful. Lasciviously leisurely, er, strike out that last one. In other words, I'm reaping the fruits of my colleagues, hm, strike out that one too, and experiencing a week where most of the work has been done before hand and, as a temp for only a week, long term projects are sort of untenable and I'm still spending 9 hours a work. But, as usual, I complain unnecessarily. I'm happy to be working and I've gotten to do fun things like play with audio and know that it will actually make it on the air with my greasy thumbprint thuramagicaly transmitted from the mouse as a meticulous impulse to the audio represented in the third degree as little waves of varying frequencies and amplitudes. Damn, it sucks to think too much sometimes.

There are other good things. I'm rooming with one of the other 10 people on this earth who owns the Labyrinth soundtrack and we both share a propensity for absurd foreign movie and complex ambient indi music. Who'd have guessed?

I'm also reading an damn good Sci-Fi novel by the feminist, sort of post-modernist author, Joanna Russ. At least that's my description from the one other novel I've read by her. The cover is almost a parody of itself and, from the choice of subject matter, the illustrator didn't read beyond the first 20 pages. A woman clad in a pink (of course) short (likewise) dress that is riding sexily up her thighs is plunging a large harpoon into something like a cross between a codfish and a bar of Irish Spring soap. It's caption "The Adventures of Alyx: The swashbuckling saga of Alyx--woman warrior on the razor edge of time!" shout, "I was short of cash and I had to whore out my writing talents." But this is merely the publisher's attempt to conceal its remarkably palatable innards--chewy, with hints of coffee grounds, blood and a musty finish.

Oh, and there are sparkly pillows on my bed, even though the comforter currently resides in some suburban UPS retreat, taking the waters no doubt. Hmmm.

2006-12-11T05:49:00.001+01:00

Unease

2006-12-11T05:49:00.000+01:00

I want my life to be poetic, poignant and easy. I also want to fly Orion's Belt like a kite on a very long piece of string.

Here in Santa Barbara, the succulents are generating giant white stocks that are bigger than the entire plant. They genuflect gracefully and remind me inevitably of large white phalli. What if humans could project out appendages bigger than their bodies? Blahhhh. Sorry I asked that.

Disturbing thought for the day number two: have you ever noticed how a single grain of white rice looks a lot like a larva? Needless to say, I have.

2006-11-20T21:52:00.000+01:00

I don't know that anyone's reading this either...but check out the NPR interns' blog!

http://interneditionfall06.blogspot.com/

There's great stuff on there and few comments.

Coming soon from me, a scintillating article on Sticky Shed Syndrome.
You wouldn't miss it, would you?

Pandemic of oddities

2006-11-19T03:51:00.000+01:00

Too much has happened to be able to write about it. Give me a couple of weeks and then maybe...

In the meantime enjoy this:

LOS ANGELES, Nov 15 (Reuters) - When Tom Cruise marries Katie Holmes this weekend, like many a devout Scientologist, he may promise to provide her with "a pan, a comb, perhaps a cat."

in my meantime I've been finding out exciting things like the meaning of "fc"
to drivers during the Cold War.

Also:
I'm mildly obsessed with the gothic and grotesque, an admission that shouldn't come as a surprise to any of you. After reading some Hoffmann and then pondering the impossible existence of sugarplum fairies in a certain ballet supposedly based on his story. I settled on a solution: a global plot by the manufacturers of tutu voile. Actually, the real story is rather interesting. And predictably, it took Maurice Sendak to bring the cloying holiday sweets back into the grotesque realm of distended bellies and gaping mouths where they belong. This, as any Jewish child knows, is the real meaning of Christmas--and most other holidays too for that matter.

Still life in red

2006-11-12T19:20:00.000+01:00

Color palate for the weekend:
Inflamed trees in scarlet and ochre like some giant James Ladavour painting are now dripping into gloom.
But yesterday I was one of these ladies. I basked gratefully in rolled up jeans and firmly believed that turning trees from green to gold is an exothermic reaction. Madam Butterfly frolicked down the Mall from 12' high speakers and Falun Gong demonstrators (entirely oblivious to any speck of irony, I should add) performed something like Chinese Opera in infinitely slow and beautiful motion.
Across the room from the green ladies, their sisters were not so favored. Trapped indoors and hung as paragons of art, they only told me that women look better immobile.

the anxiety of creation (with attendant lyres)

2006-11-12T18:50:00.000+01:00

We'll see how this goes.