Month: March 2011

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Dans le metro. Il y a un fragrance unique a Paris ici, comme burning dust, un peu douce et familier. Aujour d’hui je ne rien q’une flaneuse. Pas de travail, pas d’angoisse. Tout le monde a l’air insouciant et cosmopolitain. Je veux rester ici longtemps. Mon francais est execrable, mais n’importe quoi. C’est vraiment mieux que new york ici. Que peut on faire?

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Yesterday we went to the musee de la mode. We saw an exhibition of wooden toys, animal art, and fashion from the 1980s and 1990s. We went to a chic bar called Angelina and had hot chocolate and a chocolate eclair with Jamie. Then we came home and ate dinner and watched tv. This morning we did yoga. Now we are at the market. I am drinking orange juice. My dad’s friend Marc is drinking white wine. My mom is drinking coffee. Nada is drinking mint tea. So is Marc. My dad is drinking orange juice. We are drinking all these things outside the bar. The weather is not really good. I’m happy that Nada is staying here.
We saw a female pit bull dog in the bar sitting next to the chair. She looks patient. We are going to a Chinese restaurant with some American students from south Carolina tonight.
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Location:Rue des Margottes,Montreuil,France

reading report: marinovich/coolidge

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SUCH a great double bill at the poetry project last night.  I had never seen Filip Marinovich read before and he was great!  So great!  He was wearing, for no explained reason, a navy blue bathrobe.  Beyond just reading his poems, which were marvellously expressionistic, almost Mayakovsky-esque, he DECLAIMED them.  They were full of political satire, faux-serious and serious-faux references to mythology, daring hyperbole, and beatific lyric force.  He opened the reading by holding up what he called a poème concrete, a t-shirt with two crossing words (COOLIDGE ROCKS), and ended with a gorgeous poem for Akilah Oliver. Some choice lines:
service without bile
service with satori
lungs turning gelatinous and coated with disco ball mosaic
summoned the spoogey bird
I am only a bowl of milk in your shade, lapped at by snow cats, salty, salty
there is no anti-matter bird laying a black hole in your blood
O Nancy Pelosi I miss you come back!
I am not a fairy
not not a fairy
and I love my lady
investigative milky cartoons
the Bach violin monster
tearing your ears apart
Clark Coolidge is simply the most sublime of all living poets.  I want to have his voice reading his poetry piped into my head 24/7. It’s a flow of impeccably syncopated constant astonishment, and it’s super-funny, even he was laughing at his own lines, and I love that, his delight so palpable, why can’t more writers take delight like that in what they do.  Streams of names, abstract expressionist painter names, other names, as music, and rhyming couplets popping up here and there.  I caught a few of the minnows in the stream:
we had a date to watch the rabbis fight
I wish childhood hadn’t been so fissionable
a nautilus in a sheepshank vest
turn the crank one day and the entirety of Amos ‘n’ Andy comes out
You start again with every noodle
hit the nebula with a stick
An incoorect music clouds the air
back when I thought the best breasts came in cones
zombie opens umbrella
still no meat
poet writes an ode to a piece of kelp
this poet is no help
music’s a kind of crystal mayonnaise
are you acquainted with the VOICE family?
all forest rose up from the original bean
a promise like a silk cosmos
corn is not my friend
glass isn’t either
next he visits a pimple, I mean a kitchen
he needs to go, so he develops zebra legs
maybe he needs a quick infusion of lore
amazing how many husbands there are in the world –
tugboats, too
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I would always say, call her, call her
but he wouldn’t call her
not even on her birthday
maybe he called her once a year
he never sent her presents, but I did
she told me he never talked to her
about why he was so angry with her
she wished he would talk to her
she and I communicated better than they did
if there was a thank you note or email to write
I wrote it, not him
and yet when push came to shove
she believed his untruths
even though he had a pattern of lying
and said she would “defend him to the death”
putting a much more martial and aggressive
face on what should really just have
been considered a tragedy
she attacked me in the middle
of my brokenness, at the nadir
of my vulnerability
and called me names
saying that I was the only one to blame
(not even he would have said that)
for what had happened
and only believed his skewed narrative
of victimization, as if he had no
agency or responsibility of his own
she said these things
despite my traumas
and the indignities
I have suffered at his treatment
as a woman
I thought she would have
more understanding
well
if people want to live
in denial and delusion
I suppose that is their choice
but I will no longer
have any part
in it

random lines from recent readings

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a little stimulation causes the line to break

toast qua toast

~Norma Cole

green flames/red flames/ white flames

black wool rainbow

an old hippo on the bank roaming at night

pure mental milk of the word
all that opens the womb is mine

~Yedda Morrison

I was standing on the corner when I heard my bulldog bark

brown babies can’t have monkeys

~Douglas Kearney

lawsuit mullet

owners in pants personally pounding

a bird commercial

explain fantasy flowers

supreme swing of testicle

~Josef Kaplan

Psyching up

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For Paris. Here are some things I want to do there:

Go to the montreuil hammam with Stacey

Go to the palais de Tokyo

Maybe visit the dog and cat cemetery in asnieres

Visit the musee de la mode and the musee gustave Moreau

Eat moules frites, falafel, salade au chevre chaud, and duh almond croissants…Drink chocolat

Wander in large old department stores

Go to markets

Obsessive & copious photography

Revisit the belly dance stores in Montmartre, the Oum Khalthoum cafe off the rue Mouffetarde, l’institut du monde arabe, and Monoprix, Monoprix, Monoprix!

What else should I do?? I only have six days there.

And I will be there without my erstwhile parasite, whoopee!

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1.            passively resists fulfilling routine social and occupational tasks
2.            complains of being misunderstood and unappreciated by others
3.            is sullen and argumentative
4.            unreasonably criticizes and scorns authority
5.            expresses envy and resentment toward those apparently more fortunate
6.            voices exaggerated and persistent complaints of personal misfortune
7.            alternates between hostile defiance and contrition
8.            Ambiguity or speaking cryptically: a means of creating a feeling of insecurity in others.
9.            Chronically being late and forgetting things: another way to exert control or to punish.
10.            Fear of competition
11.            Fear of dependency
12.            Fear of intimacy as a means to act out anger: often cannot trust. Because of this, they guard themselves against becoming intimately attached to someone.
13.            Making chaotic situations
14.            Making excuses for non-performance in work teams
15.            Obstructionism
16.            Procrastination
17.            Sulking
18.            Victimization response: instead of recognizing one’s own weaknesses, tendency to blame others for own failures.
19.            excessive sensitivity to setbacks and rebuffs;
20.            tendency to bear grudges persistently, i.e. refusal to forgive insults and injuries or slights;
21.            a combative and tenacious sense of personal rights out of keeping with the actual situation;
22.            tendency to experience excessive self-importance, manifest in a persistent self-referential attitude;
23.            preoccupation with unsubstantiated “conspiratorial” explanations of events both immediate to the patient and in the world at large.
24.            Superficial charm and good intelligence
25.            Unreliability
26.            Untruthfulness and insincerity
27.            Lack of remorse and shame
28.            Poor judgment and failure to learn by experience
29.            Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love
30.            Specific loss of insight
31.            Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations
32.            Sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated
33.            Failure to follow any life plan.

dreams

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Trying now to wean off benzos again, and sleep more or less naturally with just magnesium and 5-htp.  This I have done for two nights.  I wake up twice in the night, it’s true, but manage to coax myself back into sleep.  I tell myself, this bed is so supremely comfortable and safe, and the cats are so sweet.  This morning I even overslept a little, not too much, dreaming that my boss had given me an assignment to oversee and host a visit by the Miami Dolphins to my school. They all for some reason wore deep blue.  Is that their real color?  Why a football team?  The dream took place in some huge old building in the countryside, rather like the buildings in Tess, which I just finished watching in real life last night, except that wherever I was was warmer than England, and warmer than NY is right now.  I kept going into different parts of the building to use the bathroom.  Through offices, to use the bathroom, maybe even to take a shower?  The offices were elegant and filled with rustic antiques.   I had an apartment in one of these buildings.  Just at the time I was supposed to welcome the Dolphins, I was in my apartment… a man had come through the window. (They were beautiful mitred windows looking over a sunny estate.) He was a composite of two men I have been on dates with.  In real life, my experiences with these men have been asymmetrical.  One of them projected on me, felt more for me, than I for him, and our communications ended unpleasantly; with the other (I suppose) I seem to have felt more cathected than he … sigh.  And oddly, too, there are some similarities between these two men, both physically rather small, both intense, both performers, both with connections to Japan, so it interests me that they fused into one in the dream.  The lover’s identity in the dream was similarly ambiguous; he may have even been masked.  We were having sex in the dream, and somehow there was a “video” of the encounter.  I knew that I had to be at the auditorium to welcome the Dolphins, but instead I was having sex with this guy.  The team was not coming for a game but rather for some kind of welcoming ceremony at the school auditorium, or for a theatrical performance perhaps Anyway I ignored my responsibilities.  After my lover left, I showed up at a restaurant where my boss and some of the team officials were sharing a meal.  I’m sure I was flushed.  I wasn’t scolded, but I felt guilty.  I remember trying to explain myself to my boss, and for some reason, she seemed to understand. I anyway enjoyed the wish fulfillment part of the dream and wonder, am I getting my mojo back?
Ah…and the night before last… I dreamed I was in “Bangkok” with some students.  It wasn’t exactly Bangkok.  It seemed more like Hong Kong, but OK.  We went to a restaurant that specialized in noodles.  It took me a long time to decide what to order.  The menu was terrifically complex, with lots of photos, and everything looked good. After we wandered on the streets, going our separate ways.  Shopping.   I ran into one student in an alley of shops.  I remember trying on coats (this is why I think it was not Bangkok, really, not so many coats there):  one was made of a kind of glossy brown fabric with huge puffed-out sleeves, with slit pockets.  Also furs.  I can almost remember the textures and colors and fabrics of these coats, and the fact that some of them were in plastic bags like one gets at the dry cleaners. I suppose this dream is not at all interesting to read.  I apologize for that.  I am interested in how sensuous it was:  the taste of noodles, the feel of the fabrics, the look of the signage of the city…