Author: Nada Gordon

These are some of the people I got to see, meet, and hang out with on this trip:

My mom
Elia Haworth
Eve Haight
Konrad Steiner
Jim Brogan & partner
Ailene & Ryan
Liza & Dave Bobrow
Juliana Spahr
Charles Weigl
Bill Luoma
Sasha
Alli Warren
Brandon Brown
David Brazil
Sara Larsen
Rob Halpern & Lee
Robert Kocik
Daria Fein
Steve Dickison
Barrett Watten
Kit Robinson & Ani
Alan Bernheimer
Melissa Riley
Erika Staiti
Kate Pringle
Brian Ang
Suzanne Stein
Lauren Levin
Dan Fisher
Andrew Kenower
Stephanie Barber
Lindsey Boldt
Steve Orth
Cynthia Sailers
Susan Gevirtz
Nick Dorsky
Melia Franklin & children
Astrid Al Mklaafy & Kaatje
Stephanie Young
Joseph Mosconi
Rita Gonzales
K. Lorraine Graham
Mark Wallace
Vanessa Place
Teresa Carmody
Christine Wertheim
Brian Kim Stefans
Aaron Kunin
Andrew Maxwell
Ara Shirinyan
Matt Timmons

and this is only a partial list! I am so fortunate to know such fascinating and lovely people.

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Last day here. On BART. Bright shiny sun through the window here at West Oakland. Didn’t they use to call it pretentiously Oakland West?

Trying to psych up now for my return to bleakest Brooklyn and probably snow. Envisioning the apartment and my greeter cats. Nemo will want to be held a lot, will cling to me as I walk from room to room. The apartment will be very warm. Trips are bookends to eras of experience. It is important to sometimes go away. I always love how I see my space and my possessions anew when I get back from a trip. The volume and variety of my wardrobe especially always astounds me, like, is this really all mine? Part of the psyching up is remembering ensembles to wear in winter’s most severe frigidity.

There will be parties and poetry duties and prospective partners to follow up on, and job things to sort out, new students and a new course to plan and all these things will make the winter go faster. Or so I tell myself. I’m dreading the potential dread, the empty nights and void-feeling…

But since the dread is only potential and not real, maybe I can avert it?

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from LA to Oakland.  WTF?  Exhausted!!

Stuck at LAX still! I’ve been here for three hours and will need to be here for more than three hours more. Someone day something to entertain me!

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Los Angeles…

At LAX dealing with a flight cancellation waiting for a flight back to the bay area. Much boring standing in lines, but it’s giving me a chance to reflect on the high of this short sojourn. Not only is Joseph Mosconi a gracious curator & host, but he also inhabits a house with his wife Rita that is a paragon of simple & beautiful retromodern design, and I got to stay there, in what he called “the friction room” [fiction] so I woke up early this morning and read The Sorrows of Young Werther (I realized I hadn’t actually read it, just Barthes on it), and it made me think (of course) about the regrettable and ridiculous particularity of love, and about the ruboff of the beloved onto intermediaries (as when Lotte’s bird takes food from her mouth) (ah that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek, etc.). It struck me that Lotte really did lead Werther on terribly, and she did in fact regret the loss of him when she thought of the finality of actually marrying Albert. But you know, I digress ( as if, really, there were anything to digress from.

Well but LA. I kind of love LA. It would be fun to live here for a while, and take a million pictures of its kitsch and clutter. It’s a thing, LA. The reading was right near Madame Wong’s, I guess the former Madame Wong’s, where in 1979 I saw The Germs and The Middle Class and wore my hair like a rooster and Penelope made fun of me and I hung out with Billy Zoom and we put our beers in the freezer so we could have beer slush for breakfast. I recall wearing a burgundy suede fringe coat. Also a party at a rich person’s house and Scott who wore one of those cool oversize striped mohair sweaters.

The reading was in the incredibly cool space of The Public School, a utopian venture indeed, and the reading series goes by the endearing name of Poetic Research Bureau. A small platform stage with a circular rug I sometimes knelt on.

Lorraine read first a very alert work, so smart and located, I mean it seemed to be about situating herself in a cultural space and coming to terms with being there. I showed three videos in between readings of poems from the new book.

Although the weather was cold and rainy miserable there was truly quality turnout: Vanessa Place, Brian Kim Stefans, Teresa Carmody, Matt Timmons, Ara Shirinyan, Andrew Maxwell, Christine Wertheim, Aaron Kunin, and several others too; I was honored by everyone’s presence braving the weather and holiday fatigue for the sake of poetry.

Afterward, many of us went out to eat in Little Tokyo. I had to forswear the pickles, but managed the pretty delicious unagi rather well since I am regaining some chewing skills on the right side. I guess that means there is some hope for the future?
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You’ve probably seen this, but apparently it only takes 1/5 of a second to fall in love.

ability to chew

love

new dance class

projects: poems, videos, plays, essays, skirts, meals, events, curricula, songs

no more pills

ghost-bust the apartment: sage, artwork, rearrangement, parties

streamline possessions a little, my clothes don’t fit

kineticism, stretching, exercise (as exorcism)

fresh flowers when possible

unanticipated possibilities

he goes to the babe and kisses herrrr… for her dumbness and huge eyeballs… as he kissed her and then kissed me… with that darting little tongue …and meanwhile I am thinking about

asymmetry, its essentiality, the asymmetry of a face giving it naturalness

those photos of faces made to be perfectly symmetrical: they looked like monsters

there can be asymmetry with a balance more perfect than symmetry?

as the golden light reflects off of a perfect ankle, I notice I am the sun and the golden light comes from me, and fills me back up with the golden light I am emitting

cool as a mint in bright winter

full of hormones and phonemes

a piece of laughter staying at the front of my head
as protection

this ridiculous love for dysfunctional males:  “poo-la-la”… I needed to learn to lie down in the clover by myself, with the muses and absent presence swirling around me as pirate ghosts. the beagle scratches his mushroom-shaped butt in a spiral on the ground, all the dogs cock their little heads importunately, the foxes just slip out of the headlights: you can’t ever get a good look at them. I have half a mind to have half a mind, the wind makes me layered, the markets are full of foods I can’t reach and if I could reach them I couldn’t eat them and they probably wouldn’t be good for me anyway. A general all-round slipperiness, but without the bliss. Large steel sculpture with interesting acoustics, but I can’t see over the top, and it makes me dizzy, but then, everything makes me dizzy, and don’t think I don’t notice anything, because I notice everything. Consider that a kind of arc, but I don’t know yet if it’s comic, tragic, or tilted, only that it’s curved, and I don’t know if the curve is pleasurable or uncomfortable, if it butts up against my cervix or reaches points of delight. Nibbling on the cookie of mortality, daily, until it is done, every last crumb, like winter covering your mistakes with snow and wheels spinning in furious squeals until the rubber parts wear out and I’ve run out of frownies and indigenous miracle oil to put on my scar, but I don’t mean to sound pathetic since I’ve not been beaten by a husband when five and a half months pregnant so that my water breaks and I give birth to the child prematurely and then he threatens to burn down the house with me and my other children in it, and I’m not as far as I know being taken over inside my body by any horrible diseases and the sun is shining on the seagulls as if nothing disruptive had ever happened. Still I want to take you and shake you by the shoulders, what the hell is WRONG with you, until you see clearly the feathery mists in my solar plexus that you either chewed like jerky or twisted into long drooping braids dripping with salt crystals. I don’t know. I rub a little sage between my fingers. The seasons are wrong. These loves are like ticks or tapeworms or barbed and tapered darts, they wiggle into the layers of my clothes, go up through my foot in the slimy creek, I try to pull them out of my skin like the swan girl in the movie but there are always more, and I can’t just spin and spin in the stagelights until I have grown great black wings, I remain myself except a size O and in a state of drugged and gaping bewilderment, like WTF? Poo-la-la. It was so red and sticking up, I was afraid he was going to hurt himself. “I’m just working on my translations.” The pile of plush animals. United: untied.

Deer, egrets, cows, calves, horses (playing), dogs, seals, hummingbirds, squirrels, geese (in formation) (honking), a black cat, seagulls (their aplomb!), a kite (bird), butterflies.

Cow parsnip, fennel, mariposa lily, tower of jewels, tea roses, orchids, camellias, bamboo, juniper, chickweed, iceplant, California sage, pampas grass, agave.

Breathing it in.  Now this is air.  It is like in Brooklyn there is no air.

Eating so many varieties of mush I am coming to love mush.  A feast last night of portobello soup with goat cheese and little bits of roasted garlic, a Persian dish called coucou (sp?) of parsley, cilantro, dill, and eggs, tofu pesto, garlic mashed potatoes, avocado, papaya, chutney, olives, mashed artichoke hearts with garlic mayonnaise, and pumpkin pie. Happy Festivus!

I feel a little like Frankenstein with this welt.  I took it on the chin, as they say!

In Brooklyn it is like there is no air.  I will have a big party and fill up the haunted space with celebration and bodies.  I am interested in joy (what’s that like?). “Don’t postpone joy,” James said.  Sometimes he is very wise. Sun is glinting through kinetic eucalyptus leaves, I would like to be a dog today and roll on the wet ground underneath them. That smell. Pinched life of betrayals, begone.  Closed-in, morose feeling of waiting for things to get better or at least change, begone. Febrile obsessions, begone, unless they are amusing. I need an ocean to stare at now and then. Don’t you?

Auto-husbandry: the way of the future?