W rencontrez

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

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

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)

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

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

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)

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

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

The Magician's Alliance...

It does exists!

Fever Dream

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

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

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!

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!

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

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!

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

Bildungsroman

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?

!!

This is cornstarch and water

I watched it and looked very much like a codfish.

A Scandal in Bohemia

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

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.

Excitement

!!!

All in favor? I

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

watch the video

He looked like a secret

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.

Shall I compare thee? (there is none)

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

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

We are brilliant shining gods.

Mon coeur est une grenouille

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)

Let it be known.

I require many bananas.

Resident New Yorkers take note.

Reading with the ears

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

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)

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.

That is all.

an excess of gravity

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!

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.