UGH
Ugh.
Stomach flu.
Gary too.
Bananas, saltines.
24 hours of nauseated suspended animation.
Missed my own reading:-(
Month: March 2004
MARCH 27
STEPHEN RODEFER and NADA GORDON
Stephen Rodefer is the author of Four Lectures, VILLON by Jean
Calais, Passing Duration, Left Under a Cloud, Mon Canard, and many other notes & tones. He is on the outside of the inside and at the center of whole shebang. Don’t, Miss!
Nada Gordon practices Poetry as Deep Entertainment. She is the author
of V. Imp. (Faux Press), Swoon (Granary Books), Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms? (Spuyten Duyvil), and Foriegnn Bodie (Detour). Her fleeting and contingent musings can be found at http://ululate.blogspot.com.
@ the Bowery Poetry Club
308 BOWERY, JUST NORTH OF HOUSTON
SATURDAYS FROM 4 – 6 PM
$5 admission goes to support the readers
Curated by Dan Machlin & Charles Borkhuis
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Join us later for a party for the readers
at Charles Borkhuis’ pad
104 E. 4th St, – D1 (betwn. 1st & 2nd Ave.)
Springy
Silky hirsute plunge, a mouthed apricot kernelling the loops inside a listless tongue. Its swollen fever mauve as pollen, lit globes of syrup movement spin so fast I’m going to fall off the wonder horse’s magic brainstem again. The pseudo-electric lights there like morays and heart’s heaving blizzard effects a blizzard of cilia and algae struck to a wandering hand — whoops! whoops on the wind, gripping what’s being ridden to starry deeps, strummed as a hinge, thrummed through bilkings and coughs and furtive imagined sacs of milkweed seed.
Boobie water gun
dicky sipping straws
peckertoss
peni-nails
“Do you have milk?” says the pretty ingenue to the jockey erect on his teed, spine as straight as desire is a ruse for life as it can only be lived e to make throaty signals to drummers covered with almond powder and farfisas swirling on the pendulous sac. Fish eggs! Fish eggs! Flickering lustre! The strudel’s on the bottom and the pie in your hair, nipping at the flared lips of the stallions sensibilities. Woo! Woo! Woowee! Empurplement. The short lives of lilies and their saffron stamens — oops — I got it all over my nipple again in the broad distance I call “gentle” or “glorious” or “I really shouldn’t jinx it” depending on my lord’s mood, his apple-y stomach stroked with gel like something burned from the inside out: spilled milk, spilled milk, spilled milk. Nandi the cow lies down on the rose petal, the houri emerges in musky garments, pink and blue birds flutter in mating.
Mr America Walking Pecker
dickyboppers
strawberry pulsabath
dick through the head
Spring! Kiss me, sweet William, bright orange egg, flicker, flicker, little snail, flared out like adrenaline rubbed all over with lanolin and fur. Sparking crevices and full bursting to a droop. Sea of mung, ornamental pepper, weigh down the bee-loud trellis with your frabjous jamjar hand!
koochie pencil sharpener
amazing growing pecker — from wee wee to whopper!
SHRUG
IF CRITICISM = I’s clutch, I’s certainty/ highchair/satellite from which to view a skyscraper énorme in the dead center all the way up lots of men in it talking
in suit-and-tie metaphors, in food (canned fruit cocktail/cut-up hot dog) metaphors, in tool metaphors, in mottoes, in future metaphors:
Mr Pug: “At their best, criticism and art do a lively square dance, one frillier-dressed [which one? depends.[. separate, reversing positions, do-see-doing, even occasionally touching hands…”
count West-West: “Criticism = a funnel for verbal energy that’s a reaction to. Meaning writing too. Acting as a banging on logical confines. I think about it all the time, even at work.”
Ms. Anti-Parallax: “Part of the earth is green and part blue. I clap my hands over Jameson’s ‘properly’ tin ears. In a dusty office, I proofread essays about sonnets.”
Professor: “Why this awkward admixture of colloquial and lit-crit talk?”
Ms Anti-perfection (squalling):” It’s the figurative polylogic I perceive through. My head screens work(s) with lots of different codes BLAT BLAT BLAT. In academia I’m an artistic specimen slushing around on the algae water of a slide. I try to speak and out come multiple spheres…”
count West-West: “Criticism = search for method. In it I look to justify practices, find new practices, expand perceptual and conceptual realms (in which terms = buying power).
Editor: “Non-critical people have no right to expect anything better of the world. But they’re no stupider than the people who think the frames they’ve built (no matter how artfully) can substitute for the picture — as if the picture didn’t always demand its own frame!”
Professor: “Someone’s said that before. Doesn’t it all just come down to an equivalence of onions.”
[as published in Ottotole sometime in the late 80s.]
Maxi or Mini for spring???
Naturally, I prefer maximalism to minimalism, but either, as a “position,” is a cliche.
If it’s going to be minimal, let it be dark and wry.
If it’s going to be maximal, let it be fabulously self-conscious.
As I said long ago, I believe in oscillationism.
Not to be confused with isolationism.
Although there’s that, too.
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I haven’t blogged in ten days, it’s still snowing. I won’t have it, I tell you.
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Poor Dante.
Dante had a haematoma — a big swollen blood blister — on his ear. We took him to the vet to get it operated on. When he came home, anaesthetized, his ear full of brittle stitches, he was so out of it he couldn’t close his jaw, or jump on the bed, or, for some reason, put his head down and close his eyes.
I don’t know how people can actually be parents, given how heartbreaking the suffering of a pet is, and human children seem to fall ill even more than feline ones, it seems.
When Gary and I leave the house Dante has to wear an “E-collar” — I had to explain to the receptionist at the vet that “E” stood for “Elizabethan.” He doesn’t look at all courtly in it — more like a depressed mole. He can’t judge depth or distances in it, and he keeps his poor head down most of the time. It seems he’s getting used to it, but it tears me and Gary up.
The vet scolded us about Dante’s weight (almost 23 lbs! two cats in one!) so we have put both beastlets on a serious diet. I am full of the worst kind of remorse for letting him get that way in the first place. I’m glad I’m not a mother with a supersize gelatinous bubblebunch french-fry gobbling American child.
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Keeping some things to myself. I’m busy. I like music. I like music a lot. I have a lot to do. What do you want? It’s Friday. The cats are sleeping.
Read the story of Purim here.
The Glory of Brooklyn
Brooklyn was in its fullest glory yesterday, a rare shiny day after a bravely slogged-through winter. While Gary finished drawing the invite I ventured out, new IPod (now dubbed “Habibi”) freshly loaded with music from South Asia and the Middle East, to get the bus to Brooklyn Chinatown.
The B16 bus, which stops a block from our apartment, traverses most of 13th Avenue, the main drag of Boro Park. Boro Park is one of Brooklyn’s “throwback neighborhoods ” — there, I feel as if I have been thrown back several decades in history. It is populated mostly by orthodox Jews, and the shops (whose names all seem to be terrible puns) sell judaica, stockings with seams, wigs, and kosher comestibles.
This Sunday was special, because not only was the weather friendly and luminous, but it was Purim as well! Purim is, roughly speaking, the Jewish Hallow’een. Children and adults get dressed up in silly costumes (which to me is especially interesting given that orthodox Jews have to wear what is to me an odd costume every day — in fact I often fantasize about wearing a (male) Labuvitcher ((sp?)) outfit on Hallow’een, complete with beard and circular mink hat).
Some of the costumes I saw from the bus window yesterday:
an adult man dressed in a NY Yankees uniform, with the Yankees logo painted on his bearded face
Hello Kitty
a jester
a smiley face
a tiny little (scary) Bozo-the-clown
a super-fat person
a kid in a red fez
a teenage girl wearing something shocking pink and a shocking pink pillbox hat
lots of kids dressed up as old people
and of course all the characters from the Purim story — lots of little Queen Esthers, King Ahaseuruses (sp?), and nasty nasty Hamans with big moustaches.
88888888888888888888888888
I’m certain that if I were a real Jew Purim would be my favorite holiday.
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The bus took me to Chinatown, where I ate fish and rice and string beans for three dollars, then went on a little shopping spree, all the while listening to Geeta Dutt and Nagat and Egyptian dance remixes.
With a fabulous pair of black Mary Janes with six inch platform heels, an embroidered skirt, some chicken legs, spinach, and long purple eggplants, I returned home in a kind of bliss of overstimuli and multi-culti-inundation.
Brooklyn ZINDABAR!
oh dear, oh dear, oh dear
Otohime 