Sex: The Defining Line?

First, a note on the bedroom pictured – it’s from Philip Johnson’s “Glass House.” Johnson was a brilliant architect (think “Lipstick Building”) and a closeted homosexual for much of his life.

Speaking of homosexuality, how is it possible this week we went back in time? Georgia and New York courts did, at least. We’re still opposed to gay marriages (are heterosexuals actually threatened? really?) while the rest of the world forges ahead and gets over it.

In fact, civil unions elsewhere have surpassed such blasé ideas as simply giving the LGBT community an opportunity to publicly validate long-term unions … now, just about anyone can attach themselves to another person – regardless of their sexual relations–even if they have none. Gasp.

If we truly relied on “marriages” defining themselves according to whether or not folks were sexually engaged, I have a feeling a number of heterosexual relationships wouldn’t qualify anymore, if you catch my catty drift. I’m just sayin’ … things fizzle. People take “breaks,” have extramarital affairs, become asexual, etc. — so when the sex fizzles, does that mean marriages automatically dissolve too?

Which brings me to my next point: civil unions elsewhere have much broader parameters, “Any two unmarried persons who want to live together can contract a PaCS, on condition they share common housing and are neither direct ascendants or descendants (mother, grandfather or child), nor too close relatives (brother, uncle or niece).” No clause in there stipulating sexual engagement on a per annum basis … two platonic lifelong friends may enter into a civil union as long as they live together (& presumably take care of one another).

The definition of “family” just opened up, friends. Thankfully. Many folks without lovers & who have not had the best parents just collectively breathed a sigh of relief … and may now even be feeling their living situations are valid and viable without the push to get married for life. Indeed, there are other options~

These unions also seem to have more appeal to heterosexuals now, “According to a French Parliament report issued two years after the law’s enactment, apparently about 60 percent of Civil Solidarity Pacts were concluded by heterosexual couples.”

What do the unions ultimately provide? Well, “…the PaCS gives same-sex couples legal, fiscal and social advantages they never had before.”

And the overall effect of all this openness? Oh, something we could all benefit from, “… Despite the homophobic outburst it provoked, the PaCS unquestionably made homosexuality something ordinary.” In other words, an opportunity to finally just get over it.

Personally, I firmly believe the ongoing debate here in America is a ruse to keep us distracted from more important, life threatening matters, matters which are really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to considering the long-term effects of our country’s actions.

Does America really care if gay couples declare “we’re together”? I’m thinking not so much … but I’m an optimist.

________

And finally, speaking of positive things, “Play It Again” over at Dan’s spot — what a nice little note! Thanks, Dan~

9 Responses to “Sex: The Defining Line?”

And You Shall Know Me

By my poetry — the best way to understand me. La danza empapelada …

Other fine poets and artists at the Siren include:

* AnnMarie Eldon * Daniel Nester
* David Hernandez * Glenn Ingersoll
* Jenny Boully * Kathryn Rantala
* Laurel Dodge * Matt Hart
* Rachel Loden * Ryan Laks

___________________

“The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living that they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.”

— Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation

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In My Hot Little Hands

Sits a brilliant edition of the late works of Guilllaume Apollinaire, translated by Donald Revell, The Self-Dismembered Man. The poem below (sorry, the tabs are off) echoed the imagined gunners of Iraq in my head tonight … a good poem knows not the limits of man-made time.

[Oh, now I am adding text to make the poem start below the photo of Guillaume Apollinaire, who served his country’s war. Also, I drank a small bottle of Nama Sake made from organic rice that was given to me tonight. I’ve got mad hook-ups at the local sushi bar, if I spoke like my students. Which I do not.]

Sighs of the Dakar Gunner

In the log dugout camouflaged by reeds
Alongside colorless north-facing artillery
I dream the African village
Where we danced where we sang where we made love
And made long
Noble joyful speeches

*

I see my father again who fought
The Ashantis
In the English service
I see my sister again with her mad laugh
Her breasts hard as bombshells
And I see
My mother again the sorceress who alone of all the villagers
Refused salt
Pounding the millet in a mortar
I remember something so delicate so disturbing
A fetish in a tree
And the double fetish of fecundity
Eventually a severed head
Beside a marshland
O pallor of my enemy
It was a silver head
And in the marshes
It was the moon shining
It was still a silver head
Overhead the moon danced
It was still a silver head
I ws invisible in the grotto
It was still a Negro head in the deep night
Resemblances Pallors
And my sister
Went off later with a rifleman
Killed at Arras

*

To know how old I am
I’d have to ask the bishop
So tender so tender with my mother
Like butter like butter with my sister
It was in a hut
Less savage than this dugout
I’ve known the hunters’ ambush in the marshland
Where the giraffe drinks with her legs spread wide
I’ve known the horror of an enemy who lays waste
The village
Rapes the women
Steals the girls
And steals the boys whose hard bottoms twitch
I’ve carried the administrator for weeks at a time
Village to village
Singing
And I was a servant in Paris
I don’t know how old I am
But at the draft board
They said twenty
I’m a soldier of France and so they bleached me white
Sector 59 in God knows where
Why is whiteness better than blackness
Why not dance and make speeches
Eat and then sleep afterwards
And we shoot at the German supply lines
Or at the barbed wire in front of the dogfaces
Under the metal storm
I remember a horrid lake
And couples chained by atrocious love
A wild night
A night of sorcery
Like tonight
Where many horrid eyes
Burst in the gorgeous sky

– Selected Later Poems of Guilllaume Apollinaire: The Self-Dismembered Man (translated by Donald Revell)

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Poétique Appliqué

Boiled down bits into basics — times two:

Amy King and Adam Fieled at PFS Post.

Julia Bloch and Amy King at Curve Magazine.

Both sites include two very different photos of someone I call “me.”

p.s. Last time it was the gays; what’ll be the distracting factor next? Oil and immigrants?

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What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Nothing against the new U.S. Poet Laureate, Donald Hall — I’m sure he’s due, well-qualified, palatable to the masses, etc. Alas, there were no worthwhile poets of the other gender available for the position? Any recommendations?

And I won’t even get into race … So without further ado, for the love of poetry:

U.S. Poet Laureate Timeline [1937 - 2006 = 36 Men and 8 Women]

1937-1941 — Joseph Auslander
1943-1944 — Allen Tate
1944-1945 –Robert Penn Warren
1945-1946 — Louise Bogan
1946-1947 — Karl Shapiro
1947-1948 — Robert Lowell
1948-1949 — Leonie Adams
1949-1950 — Elizabeth Bishop
1950 – 1952 — Conrad Aiken
1952 — William Carlos Williams
1956-1958 — Randall Jarrell
1958-1959 — Robert Frost
1959-1961 — Richard Eberhart
1961-1963 — Louis Untermeyer
1963-1964 — Howard Nemerov
1964-1965 — Reed Whittemore
1965-1966 — Stephen Spender
1966-1968 — James Dickey
1968-1970 — William Jay Smith
1970-1971 — William Stafford
1971-1973 — Josephine Jacobsen
1973-1974 — Daniel Hoffman
1974-1976 — Stanley Kunitz
1976-1978 — Robert Hayden
1978-1980 — William Meredith
1981-1982 — Maxine Kumin
1982-1984 — Anthony Hecht
1984-1985 — Robert Fitzgerald
1984-1985 — Reed Whittemore
1985-1986 — Gwendolyn Brooks
1986-1987 — Robert Penn Warren
1987-1988 — Richard Wilbur
1988-1990 — Howard Nemerov
1990-1991 — Mark Strand
1991-1992 — Joseph Brodsky
1992-1993 — Mona Van Duyn
1993-1995 — Rita Dove
1995-1997 — Robert Hass
1997-2000 — Robert Pinsky
1999-2000 — Special Bicentennial Consultants, 1999-2000: Rita Dove, Louise Glück, and W.S. Merwin
2000-2001 — Stanley Kunitz
2001-2003 — Billy Collins
2003-2004 — Louise Glück
2004-2006 — Ted Kooser
2006 — Donald Hall

In other news, Adam Fieled and I chat it up over at PFS Post. Live long and prosper, people!

3 Responses to “What’s Love Got To Do With It?”

Another Poetics?

This video (by way of Kevin Thurston), “I Like Your Poetry,” endorses the title’s sentiment in a masculine display via the WWF. Less than two minutes and highly recommended.

On another note, I was thinking about thinking today. I was chatting with someone recently, attempting to discuss the importance of thinking as well as note how folks might not recognize it as a primary facet of our daily realities. Well, what I was trying to say won’t come out here any better, but consider the matter in terms of someone asking you how your day was.

“How was your day?” “Great! I broke old habits and thought in unusual ways today! I toyed with some concepts, and though I didn’t fathom replacements, I came up with new associations and found pleasure and different sense in them!” Um, not a typical response, right? Everything seems to exist outside of thinking (unless you work for a think tank — Ted M? Any thoughts?), which renders thinking, as an activity to be consious of and possibly guided, secondary or not even on the radar.

My rambling is elementary, but it’s also worth a note. Let’s look elsewhere for another perspective. Most people “know” Einstein was a genius. He gave us the Theory of Relativity! He could toy with complex equations and solve difficult math problems — and he also recognized that grappling with already known ideas and facts wasn’t enough; one has to think “outside the box” or beyond the known world (i.e “reality).

How does one go about such a feat? Simply put: Einstein didn’t just stick to the old equations scientists were already working with, manipulating them into various patterns, etc — he bent light, so to speak. Now how does someone decide the known/confirmed ways aren’t working and go about fathoming something inconceivable? I don’t know what paradigm shifts or displacement methods will work best for you, but Einstein annihalated time and made it spacetime, a relative thing, depending on where you’re standing.

John Ashbery wrote in an essay on Gertrude Stein, “Donald Sutherland … has quoted Miss Stein as saying, ‘If it can be done why do it?’ Stanzas in Meditation is no doubt the most successful of her attempts to do what can’t be done, to create a counterfeit of reality more real than reality. And if, on laying the book aside, we feel that it is still impossible to accomplish the impossible, we are also left with the conviction that it is the only thing worth trying to do.”

Oh, time to head out for dinner. Anyhow, you catch my drift. One poetic is breaking habit and daring to do the unusual and reaching into that black hole of impossibility to find what one might not know. Like killing time–not just in the “I’m bored” way but in the Einstein sense. Try thinking. Up something new. Uninhabited and out-of-bounds. Something not yourself. It’s not easy, but the effort just might pay off.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” –Albert Einstein

A Little Credit

Let’s face it: actors don’t have to do doo-doo. I mean, they have to pose and supply our pop-culture-hungry minds with enough visual fodder & personal drama to destroy small forests for Hollywood rags, and they act on occasion — but there’s no contractual agreement that requires them to also be socially-conscious citizens who will use their powers for good and not evil.

So whenever I hear of one of these pedestaled beings actually speaking out, or better yet, acting for the greater good (a good that extends beyond their own world, at least), I take note. I mean, imagine if glamour puss Paris Hilton used a tiny fraction of her celebrity exposure and financial resources to extend just a glance beyond her own mirror?

I think fondly now of Pamela Anderson on her anti-fur campaign via PETA … and yes, gasp, Angelina Jolie (click here for a brief list of her efforts) – I don’t have time to research it, but I understand she contributes some large percentage of her already rotund paycheck to assorted charities (at least, significantly more than most of the wealthy elite), etc. And then there’s Bono and a whole slew of others …

The point? Last night I caught ETown on the radio. They awarded Daryl Hannah their weekly E-chievement award, especially for her promotion of bio-diesel fuel. She spoke briefly but articulately about the benefits of the fuel, emphasizing the fact that this isn’t a future solution but that the capabilities exist right now. She explained that using this fuel emits the same dose of carbon dioxide as required to sustain the same amount of plants required to make the grease that runs the car. Whew. That’s a bad sentence, but it’s basically a tit-for-tat kind of equal expenditure vs. our own fossil fuel use that is just destroying the environment. Here, let Daryl explain.

When asked who she would like an audience with, Hannah said that she would simply like to speak to everyone, so that we would know how to get access to this fuel. She drives an old El Camino on this diesel fuel – information can be found at Grassolean.com.
Anyway, I’ve really got to run, but I just wanted to take note and make note. You go, Daryl!

4 Responses to “A Little Credit”

The Most Emily of All

I’ve always liked the Irish. Flirted with the Irish like the one on the right (The Master), though that’s not going anywhere — on either side. Nothing wrong with that …

Even dated an Irish for a small spell – though that might be the last. Still chat with an Irish poet, who is now an American too.

Speaking of the Irish, having just finished a lovely crab cake lunch with my high school teachers, I’ve returned home to crack open The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry (1967 – 2000) to see what nourishment such women might provide. The first one I’ve opened to, Medbh McGuckian, has already floored me (haven’t read past her yet), and so I decided to spend some precious nap time re-typing, not one, not two, but three of her poems out for you (don’t forget, I’m enjoying a brief vacation, gentle reader). I type for you because it’s important to share in this commercial world of ours and because it looks like each author presented has at least twenty poems to read apiece, a substantial amount of work for an anthology (American anthologies often give about five poems, and that’s if you’re a namebrand poet).

There is something to be said for the poet who can appear to write pretty lyric poetry with enough twists and turns that convey a sense of power in the feminine — and unsettle rather than comfort the reader (I’ll also include one about a lover for those who require drama). Strangely, her unsettling does comfort me, and so without further ado, I type out for you (for starters), Medbh McGuckian’s poems (if these are representative of what I can expect in this book, I’ll keep you abreast of further discoveries):

Slips

The studied poverty of a moon roof,
The earthenware of dairies cooled by apple trees,
The apple tree that makes the whitest wash …

But I forget names, remembering them wrongly
Where they touch upon another name,
A town in France like a woman’s Christian name.

My childhood is preserved as a nation’s history,
My favourite fairytales the shells
Leased by the hermit crab.

I see my grandmother’s death as a piece of ice,
My mother’s slimness restored to her,
My own key slotted in your door–

Tricks you might guess from this unfastened button,
A pen mislaid, a word misread,
My hair coming down in the middle of a conversation.

***

The Sofa

Do not be angry if I tell you
Your letter stayed unopened on my table
For several days. If you were friend enough
To believe me, I was about to start writing
At any moment; my mind was savagely made up,
Like a serious sofa moved
Under a north window. My heart, alas,

Is not the calmest of places.
Still it is not my heart that needs replacing:
And my books seem real enough to me,
My disasters, my surrenders, all my loss…
Since I was child enough to forget
That you loathe poetry, you ask for some–
About nature, greenery, insects, and, of course,

The sun–surely that would be to open
An already open window? To celebrate
The impudence of flowers? If I could
Interest you instead in his large, gentle stares,
How his soft shirt is the inside of pleasure
To me, why I must wear white for him,
Imagine he no longer trembles

When I approach, no longer buys me
Flowers for my name day … But I spread
On like a house, I begin to scatter
To a tiny to-and-fro at odds
With the wear on my threshold. Somewhere
A curtain rising wonders where I am,
My books sleep, pretending to forget me.

***

The Most Emily of All

When you dream wood I dream water.
When you dream boards, or cupboard,
I dream a lake of rain, a race sprung
From the sea. If you call out ‘house’ to me
And I answer ‘library’, you answer me
By the very terms of your asking,
As a sentence clings tighter
Because it makes no sense.

Your light hat with the dark band
Keeps turning up; you pull it right
Down over your head and run the fingers
Of your right hand up and down
In a groove on the door panel. A finger
Going like this into my closed hand
Feels how my line of life turns back
Upon itself, in the kind of twilight
Before the moon is seen.

A verse from a poem by Lermentov
Continually goes round
In my head. A full ten days
Has elapsed since I started my
‘You can go or stay’ letter, increasingly
Without lips like the moon that night,
A repercussive mouth made for nothing,
And used for nothing.
Just let me moisten your dreamwork
With the lower half of the letter,
Till my clove-brown eyes beget a taller blue.

Medbh McGuckian

—from The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry (1967-2000)

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Vita is Life in Latin

It is a well known fact that Virginia Woolf wrote her gender-bending novel, Orlando, as a study of Vita Sackville-West in the waning part of their romantic relationship (they remained steadfast friends until Woolf’s death).

Woolf was probably better able to scrutinize Sackville-West as a character and bring Orlando to life as West began to disappoint the Bloomsbury novelist by having affairs. Nonetheless, the love between them ultimately never suffered.

Orlando is a testament to Woolf’s literary talents as well as her devotion and acuity of observation where Vita was concerned. Both novelists inspired each other’s writing in ways that their novels recount for us now.

Vita wrote to Virginia, “This is perhaps not what you call an intimate letter? But I disagree. The book that one is writing at the moment is really the most intimate part of one, and the part about which one preserves the strictest secrecy. What is love or sex, compared with the intensity of the life one leads in one’s book? A trifle; a thing to be shouted from the hilltops. Therefore if I write to you about my book, I am writing really intimately, though it may not be very interestingly … But you would rather I told you I missed Potto and Virginia, those silky creatures … and so I do …” ["Potto” was Virginia’s pug.]

Likewise, Woolf’s novels often deal with life directly (fiction being truer to life), and so on this gorgeous day in Baltimore, I offer up one more excerpt from Orlando to send you on your way:

“Let us go then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the plum blossom and the bee. And humming and hawing, let us ask of the starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on the brink of the dust bin, whence he picks among the sticks combings of scullion’s hair. What’s life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life, Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard …”

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Today’s Excerpt Brought To You By “America”

Jean Baudrillard took a trip in the eighties, a drive across the U.S. He wrote a book, America, about his trip. What follows is an excerpt just for me and you:

It is not the least of America’s charms that even outside the movie theaters the whole country is cinematic. The desert you pass through is like the set of a Western, the city a screen of signs and formulas. It is the same feeling you get when you step out of an Italian or a Dutch gallery into a city that seems the very reflection of the paintings you have just seen, as if the city had come out of the paintings and not the other way about. The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and move inwards to the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards to the city. It is there that cinema does not assume an exceptional form, but simply invests the streets and the entire town with a mythical atmosphere. That is where it is truly gripping. This is why the cult of stars is not a secondary phenomenon, but the supreme form of cinema, its mythical transfiguration, the last great myth of our modernity. Precisely because the idol is merely a pure, contagious image, a violently realized ideal.

They say that stars give you something to dream about, but there is a difference between dreaming and fascination by images. The screen idols are immanent in the unfolding of life as a series of images. They are a system of luxury prefabrication, brilliant syntheses of the stereotypes of life and love. They embody one single passion only: the passion for images, and the immanence of desire in the image. They are not something to dream about; they are the dream. And they have all the characteristics of dreams: they produce a marked condensation (crystallization) effect and an effect of contiguity (they are immediately contagious), and, above all, they have the power of instantaneous visual materialization (Anschaulichkeit) of desire, which is also a feature of dreams. They do not, therefore, feed the romantic or sexual imagination; they are immediate visibility, immediate transcription, material collage, precipitation of desire. Fetishes, fetish objects, that have nothing to do with the world of the imagination, but everything to do with the material fiction of the image.

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Dirty Little Country Band

In 2003, Natalie Maines of the now-notorious band, The Dixie Chicks, said some pretty benign stuff about Bush, primarily that she and her bandmates were ashamed that the U.S. president was from their home state of Texas — on the eve of the Iraq invasion. Her remarks led to some heavy-handed response, including FBI-deemed credible death threats and a publicly-organized campaign to damn the band’s cd sales forever.

Maines’ comments rippled through the world of country music, one of the largest genres sold in the world — not just in the U.S. — in a telltale way. How could anyone in country music say something even remotely derogatory about any Republican, especially Bush? Mainstream country music is the popular culture flag for conservatives across the nation. All conservatives and even Democrats publicized their support for Bush when they signed an open-ended check for war that continues to draw on and deplete any future resources we stored up under Clinton’s rule. And so in the face of tremendous flak, the girls apologized and retreated and continue to be maligned.

Now there were all sorts of contradictions involved in this public fiasco, the least being that they were criticized for not supporting the troops in Iraq even while their song, “Travelin’ Soldier” (a romanticized account of serving one’s country in Vietnam and a woman’s recognition of such nobility), was the number one country song in the world at the time. Go figure. And the band’s message may not have been tremendously sophisticated or complex, but it was offered up in the face of huge public scrutiny and at a cost that the Chicks’ production company, I’m certain, abhorred. The song, by the way, dropped to number sixty nine within a week or two, due to patriotic fans calling their radio stations about these traitorous women. That’s the kind of energy that backs Bush.

Now how do we get that kind of immediate mainstream response to the loss of lives, Americans’ and Iraqis’, to date? How do we get people to demand an exit plan? It seems like it might be in all of our best interests, even if we’re “smarter” than mainstream America, to be concerned with public opinion, and even invested in it — especially during this time of war.

And so now, the prodigal daughters have returned after a long period (in the record industry) of downtime with a new album, “Taking the Long Way,” just out today. I have done all things wrong for a sophisticate: this southern girl bought the album online and is waiting to hear what news these Texans have opted for in their latest songs. Something tells me mainstream America may be catching up and the responses might not be so anti-Chick this time around.

5 Responses to “Dirty Little Country Band”

Dances with Mannequins

I handed my grades in yesterday. Today, I’m trying to figure out where to begin again. I’ve got a pile of books and chaps to read, submissions to weed through, emails to answer, my own Dusie chap to finish, and a day full of sun before me. There is a “yay” welling up within there somewhere~

This morning I watched a PBS talk show with guest, Francis Fukuyama, and decided I will read his new book, AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy sometime this summer. A very articulate Fukuyama is considered something of a turncoat by the neoconservatives as of late, and may seem like a dangerous entity to that camp now. And I am terribly uninformed as usual, so why not?

In other nice news, Kate Greenstreet included me in her fun project on first books. Read my answers here along with responses from writers, Shanna Compton, Andrea Baker, Stacy Szymaszek, Tony Tost, Brian Teare, and Jen Benka.

Happy summer, everyone!

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Graduation Day Adjustments

Caution: the following excerpts do not do justice to the scope and magnitude of David Foster Wallace’s very practical advice to liberal arts graduates and the rest of us. Please feel free to click on the link and read his proposition in its entirety:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. […]

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about. […]

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. […]

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

….Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

…The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. […]

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The Da Vinci Code

Folks are abuzz about this book & film — what am I missing? Did Da Vinci leave some cure in code for remedying hunger or preventing war? A recipe for sharing the wealth? I’m clueless about the premise and too lazy to look it up … someone …?

I will admit though, I’m one of those people who will see this movie in celebration of the semester’s end. I ought to be embarrassed by my lust for the fanatical fantastical. But I’m not, Hugh. Jackman. It’s like candy for the mind — too sweet & sour shortly but nice at first, claws and all.

I met Mark Lamoureux last night, among other noteworthy individuals: poets and musicians and whatnot. The two beauties pictured above are Gina Myers and Gabrielle Torres, editors for The Tiny. Thanks to them for a terribly festive night. I’m still recovering. And I still blame Shafer.

If any of my Children’s Lit students happen by, your photos appear after the poetry photos here. Just scroll through –> seek and ye shall find.

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Minor Miscellany

Tonight’s tune: Nick Drake’s “Which Will” — quite lovely (30 second excerpt here, though the entire song is most gorgeous and somehow necessary).

DVD to be acquired: “A History of Violence” starring Viggo Mortensen, not a bad poet. Thought-provoking film, moreover. A trailer and an “exclusive clip” can be viewed here.

New to my reading list: Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace — I’ve never been interested in his fiction, but after a quick in-store scan, these essays picqued my curiosity — and they’re sustaining my interest so far (no real time to spend with them yet though until the semester’s glorious end). From the Guardian Unlimited, “...these pieces, previously published in Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Gourmet magazine and the Atlantic Monthly, explore three broad themes: language, literature and US society.”

Also, Bob Marcacci’s been posting some interesting pics from Bejing lately. Poetry happens everywhere — even now.

[p.s. Thanks, Chris Murray for posting my poem. Thanks, Sip’N-Stars for posting my poem.]

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Let the Healing Begin

As per Ms. Hamm’s request for an update: “Frankendog” has arrived home today. Nothing wrong with her eyes (the flash did that), but the staples running down her chest seem a bit off… Nonetheless, she’s better than when she left. Dr. Indrieri cut her open and fixed her up right.

We are accepting cards, notes, and anything to aid further repair here.

Too tired for much else. Except to say (unrelated to the dog), the sappy idealism in this Ray Lamontagne song, “Forever My Friend,” crept into my drive home and is enough to make one heartsick. Which is why I love it — tonight.

One Response to “Let the Healing Begin”

Summer Venture

Gerard Smith (from TV On the Radio – tho I’ve known him since his subway days) picks out and plays my new-used guitar. I’ve tooled around for years, but this resolution carries me for a few hot months: by my birthday, I’ll have a song ready to serenade you all with.Any requests?

p.s. Todd, trivia for ya: guess who passed on the first CocoRosie dub, straight back from France, before it (and as a result) became La Maison De Mon Rêve?

8 Responses to “Summer Venture”

I Discovered The Knife Today

Ana posted a cool song with accompanying video, which prompted me to seek out more of The Knife. I watched a few, but when I hit this one above, “Pass This On,” I was floored. This is just about one of the best videos I’ve ever seen on YouTube, and I’ve seen a lot of videos. Two seconds shy of four minutes isn’t enough. Really. It’s gorgeous.

This video is the kind of moment that makes even pessimistic-me think Stephen Hawking needs more glimmers of hope in between his days when he claims in “Life in the Universe“, “… The time scale for evolution, in the external transmission period, is the time scale for accumulation of information. This used to be hundreds, or even thousands, of years. But now this time scale has shrunk to about 50 years, or less. On the other hand, the brains with which we process this information have evolved only on the Darwinian time scale, of hundreds of thousands of years. This is beginning to cause problems …

We certainly can not continue, for long, with the exponential rate of growth of knowledge that we have had in the last three hundred years. An even greater limitation and danger for future generations, is that we still have the instincts, and in particular, the aggressive impulses, that we had in cave man days. Aggression, in the form of subjugating or killing other men, and taking their women and food, has had definite survival advantage, up to the present time. But now it could destroy the entire human race, and much of the rest of life on Earth. A nuclear war, is still the most immediate danger, but there are others, such as the release of a genetically engineered virus. Or the green house effect becoming unstable.”

Something about the people in that room above counteracts this certainty of our aggression, at least, for some … Here’s another version if you can’t get enough, though it doesn’t top the posted one.

Peace out.

~~

12 Responses to “I Discovered The Knife Today”

For Every Alibi …

An Antidote appears … Adam Fieled finds a few over at Stoning the Devil today,

” … Amy King stands out from the post-avant pack, because she has achieved a very difficult feat in this book, Antidotes for an Alibi– somehow, she has taken the conceptual assumptions of post-avant and humanized them, made them intimate. Her poetics foregrounds the human and the humane; yet her writing avoids overt attempts at transparency and is free of clichés … ”

~~~

5 Responses to “For Every Alibi …”

Cinephrastics

So I picked up this handmade chapbook the other day after a reading at St. Mark’s Poetry Project with the 21st century title, “Cinephrastics,” by Kathleen Ossip. I want to call these succinct poems “Impressions” (”phrastics” are, I believe, descriptors) as they were written after the author, in some cases, forced herself to see films she would not have typically selected. They are not reminiscences nor summaries of the films, but rather, they seem to be oblique commentaries that are keen, rife with awareness of the world they, and we, exist in. For instance,

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS

The price of real estate burns us all.
Replete with symbolic capital,
we conjured a chatelaine, brunette,
her silverplated scissors hinting
at replenishing the irises,
long-bearded and brown and spooky, and
the debate a hip one, phrases like
ice. Came a warm night, we were as gods.
But a sulky night, puke moon, horndog.

One can nearly smell the SUVs and gas grills in the backyards, while Hollywood dresses up the scenes with hipster angst in the form of a lovely, but pseudo-darkened, Gwenneth Paltrow. That’s Luke Wilson, post long, brown beard. The allusions are there, but the impression Ossip delivers is more sophisticated than a film review, more multiple in its read or “rendering” — and conclusion. From mice to men, gods to horndogs, let the silverplated cutting begin …

Let’s try another, since even a mini-review really is about tempting you to the poems with the poems:

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Not so far from a Marc Jacobs
perfume ad. However, give me
Tokyo and Elvis C. and I’m
contended. Sex symbol =
Pizza face? Girls get younger and
younger; this, too, a threat. The dark
outside is genderless. Shadows
whisper from the monoliths, shells
open. I would like to be in
bed with some congenial person.

And curtain. All that I remember after seeing the film of the above title was that I had to strain to suspend disbelief the entire glossy, superficial time, “not so far from a Marc Jacobs/perfume ad”, in spite of liking Bill Murray as an actor. Alas, friends have told me that in the online dating world, women need to be at least ten years younger than the men they “are seeking.” I didn’t believe this until I saw an ad for a speed dating night at a restaurant on Long Island — the age ranges differed for men and women coming to the same meet, and guess who had to be at least five years younger? “The dark/outside is genderless.” Indeed, it should be, it even could be, as might the hope for a congenial person. I’d take the authentic Tokyo and Elvis C. over the ad anytime, too.

It’s also fun to read the poems of films I haven’t seen yet. In fact, it makes for an even broader engagement since I don’t have the shadows on a screen to attach the poem with. Ossip’s Cinephrastics stand firm away from the screen, while the titles conjure beyond their origins. I wasn’t going to post more of the work and take the fun out of your experience with Cinephrastics, but I will end with one that supports the preceding claim, while additionally noting how nicely made the chap is, complete with what seem like lovely lithographs printed on thick, textured paper. For more info on Kathleen Ossip’s chap, go to Horseless Press here. I haven’t seen the following film, and the poem itself makes me wonder if this would be Wittgenstein’s style if he had selected the poet hat for himself:

THE SORROW AND THE PITY

Reality — truth, call it — has a most
interesting texture. It is not slick
nor rough. Not velvet. It neither casts down
nor buoys up, but settles, unnoticed.
We summon reality by being
quiet. We don’t impose something extra
on it–we might call that judgment (signaled
by adjectives). It’s not easy to be
quiet beyond a certain duration.
Thirty seconds is a lifetime of ash.

~~~

Now for your cluster of quotes for the day and one more final recommendation:

“Picasso said, ‘You see, the situation is very simple. Anybody that creates a new thing has to make it ugly. The effort of creation is so great, that trying to get away from other things, the contemporary insistence, is so great that the effort to break it gives the appearance of ugliness.’”

–from “A Transatlantic Interview 1946″ in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein (Black Sparrow Press)

Does it mean this, does it mean that, that’s all anybody wants to know. Fuck them, darling. I say what any decent poet would say if you dared ask him to analyse his work: If you see it, dear, then it’s there.

– Freddie Mercury

…[But] they can’t kill music. God knows, they’ve tried. But music always wins. As long as there’s kids coming up that have a passion. All the bean counters in the world can’t kill that. You know? You just can’t. They can try, of course, to feed you the most puerile, benign horse manure, but some kid’s going to come along and demand something more than that.

– John Hiatt

~~

And a couple of poems I found the other day by a young poet, whose work, upon further googling, hits home for me. She should contact me if she happens upon herself here along the way:

Immigrant Song #6

Here’s a candy dish shaped like a rooster.
And here’s the collection of cubic zirconium.
The extended family is four-leafed, curled
up on the Goodwill couch. Avoiding the bottoms
of teacups, gazing at the laminated blackbirds,
the sundials, the red wooden eggs.

Immigrant Song #12

My real language is made up of death-shaped consonants.
I keep them locked in a concrete box in the back of my
roped throat. Forked tongue, mentholated song. Bird
feathers glue-gunned to the edges of my passport.

–Daniela Olszewska (as published in Melancholia’s Tremulous Dreadlocks)

More of her stellar poems recently appeared in La Petite Zine.

~~~

2 Responses to “Cinephrastics”