Yesterday Laynie Browne and Bernadette Mayer read at Segue. I forgot to take out my notebook during Laynie’s reading, but I loved that she was reading from a book called The Desires of Letters that was a response to Bernadette’s The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters. She ended her reading with a “micro-play” that she had written collaboratively with Bernadette, enlisting several readers from the audience so that the room had a kind of quadrophenic effect. It was splendid.
So was Bernadette’s reading. She read some epigrams, and a long piece she had read at the Guggenheim, and selections from the new complete Studying Hunger, and some hypnogogic/hypnopompic writing. I wrote some lines down:
My mind’s become digital. Oy vey.
shoelessness and paleontology
philosophy and clams that live
an appropriate sense of wonder
my dog Hector never wore shoes
Philosophy chicks kiss better than paleontology chicks
What does “actually” actually mean?
What does it mean for a soul to have no shoes? Does it mean my soul lacks support?
Maybe my soul needs an inner sole.I always thought the soul was a giant communion wafer in the middle of your body.
Was that my sleep or everybody’s?
Time is getting more animal
Tjere is a monkey in the parking lot. Oh boy. I can’t predict everything.
There is something peculiar about the girl. Besides being me, she may have only one eye or something.
Ocean: not a good name.
Aggressively soothe the butter
I feel like naming some druids.
The collision of hemisected man and woman.
Xerox half of $45.
Need during school lunch song
penis and embassy
like twisted-up slinkies
chicken with many-colored O-shaped flags
Listening to her I was once again aware of how crucial her writing and thinking have been to me. Happy birthday, Bernadette: you are a Titan.
Otohime 