Category: observations

signs of spring

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A beautiful day.

The sycamore trees outside my window starting to sprout little burgundy pre-leaves.

Walking through the Fulton Mall this sunny afternoon, a couple: her hand tucked in his back pocket.

Men-of-the-hoi-polloi addressing me wolfishly, although I am 45 and look tired.

Many tulips (for sale).

Street revellers in shades of green in the very Irish Windsor Terrace.

Jay St. station smelling inexplicably like the Paris Metro (dusty, sweet).

Unrelated, but notable: Extraordinary reading by Larry Price at the Poetry Project last night.

Oh and, last weekend Anselm gave me a copy of Have a Good One. The pages smell of cigarettes: traces of Dana Ward?

Up too late! My movies did this to me! Must go to sleep.

Here in the gynaeceum

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Today I feel like… a large group of worms
with a flattened, unsegmented body, fleshy
and flawed and desirous of exaggerated
compliment. Fluttering or waving freely,
gaudy, ostentatious, conspicuous, and
impudent, my wingless wings are firm
and pulpy, like fruit, or like fleams,
especially those used for opening veins.
I am rigid and pliant, stiff and easily
bent, capable of modification by a group
of yellow pigments or a person who
flattens something. I guess that means
I am a Flathead, erroneously named by
confusion and marked by my windiness
of speech. I vulcanize a whole new rubber
tread on the bare underlayer of the fabric
of this verse, like a signal given by a drum or
bugle or a bend or turn as in a line or
wall. What is done in revenging puts a new
vamp on savagery, but with a dull or rounded
apex that draws back the veil of inadvertence
and undergoes diminutive revving. It vamps
again or anew, falling into an earlier, worse,
or less complex condition, like the flesh
at the edge of an incision that can be retracted,
or drawn back in, as in claws. High-pitched,
shrill, piercing, brilliant, intense, as a sharp flash
of light, it passes close to or skims the surface in
opposite directions parallel to the plane of the contact,
causing it to flow in a stream or fall in drops, let flow or drop,
send forth or spread about, or cause to flow off without
penetrating. Today I am about the size of a pigeon
and am related to the petrels and albatrosses, like
a leaf base enveloping a stem of grass, or membrane
around a muscle. She is the nominative case form,
her the objective, her or hers the possessive, and herself
the intensive and reflexive, except as in, “our dog is a she.”
This is a collection of sheeny things bound together, partly shaved,
like a regular fem or female animal: severe, intense, acute;
strong, biting and pungent; a kind of daisylike chrysanthemum
breaking or bursting into pieces suddenly. Here in the gynaeceum
I, costumed as a person or persons whose appearance or habits
are like those of a gypsy, release combinations that are free
to turn in any direction and will keep their original plan of rotation
no matter which way the wheel is turned. A circular or spiral motion;
whirl. Revolution. Vortex. Coil. (see tugging at the ear in perplexity)

Brave New World

Nada Gordon4 Comments

I’ll be the first to admit that my politics have always been a little suspect: riddled with cynicism, overly emotionalized, morally relativistic to a fault, maybe more than a little despairingly misanthropic, even nihilistic. I am not particularly proud of these tendencies, but there you have it. In part I think I am this way to signal my revulsion at self-righteousness in general; so often, positive political action looks like smugness. Perhaps it can also be partly attributed to Nixon having been in office around the time I was beginning to form a conception of what it is to be political. I remember having written him a letter of protest (I was perhaps about six) about Vietnam, complete with illustrations of soldiers in fatigues firing guns, and receiving back from him a little gold-embossed postcard with a fake signature saying how happy he was to hear from the children of America. Oh, I thought, so much for that.

I also harbor an extreme suspicion about, well, not about collective action per se (for its force and potency is undeniable) but about the power structures that crystallize after those upsurges. Think of what happened after the revolutions of France, China, and Russia, for example, or after L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, or even after the revolution that Christianity initially was.

It is with these predispositions that I cannot help but temper my exultation at this beautiful new presidency. I’m not a killjoy, really I’m not, but I want everyone to stay grounded, realistic, and critical even as we’re exulting. Clearly Obama’s victory is a victory for everyone (it’s funny, but the version of Word I’m using still doesn’t recognize “Obama” as a word, and there’s a red squiggly line under it) with a heart and a brain, at least in this glorious honeymoon moment we are having with him. Since I was in utero when JFK was around, I really don’t remember having a president who was so eminently lovable (and really, Obama is a lot cuter than JFK). Carter was a little endearing, Clinton was slickly seductive, but my heart never went out to either of them (although I did dream a couple of times that Bill and I were “friends”), and all of the Republicans were of course either monsters or doofuses. (Word apparently doesn’t think that’s a word, either, perhaps because Word is a doofus.) Will we still love Obama, I wonder, when he slams Afghanistan? when he mixes it up with the Russians? when he reaches across the aisle too many times? Will he charm us into thinking it’s OK when the healthcare plan he manages to get passed is just as labyrinthine, frustrating, and mendacious as the one we have now? It remains to be seen.

Also lingering in my consciousness are shreds of nostalgia for Hillary, even though I know she is sly, duplicitous, wooden, wrathful, and a lousy manager. For all that, I admired her. Only the future history of some parallel universe could tell us whether she would have been as good a president as Obama may be, or even if she would have been better. I think that would be a very interesting plot for a novel to be written in 2012. Would people have danced in the streets for her, I wonder? Or would they have done so only to celebrate the end of Bush? She’s been exceedingly quiet of late, but she continues to be quite the trooper in support of Obama and even of Al Franken in Minnesota. I think she deserves credit for that, and wish that people were not so quick to revile her. She hasn’t made any statement about her ambitions beyond being a NY Senator, denying that she wants to be in Obama’s Cabinet or a Supreme Court Justice.

I’m on that weird demographic cusp, you know, between Hillary voters and Obama voters. They made me feel different. Hillary made me feel steely and capable and tough. Obama makes me feel open and (guardedly) optimistic. Also weepy. I don’t know why his precedent makes me feel weepy. I don’t know if Hillary’s would have, despite my erstwhile fervent support for her and despite the fact that the oppression of one segment of the population is certainly no more special than another’s. I really don’t want to get into that territory, although can I just say that those who implied I was being essentialist in supporting her candidacy may just be blind to their own essentialism in supporting his? I also remain totally uncomfortable with the personality cult that Obama seems to spontaneously generate even as I grow more infatuated with him and watch videos of him on YouTube making tuna salad in his Rezko house with Michelle and Sasha and Malia saying “we need to chop up the gherkins.” And even though I keep breaking out into tears when I think, “this really happened!” I still feel queasy thinking about the upturned shining faces at Grant Park that honestly remind me of nothing more than the faces of the devotees at all the ashrams I was compelled by my mother to visit in my youth.

If all this sounds a little bit confused, it’s because, well, it is. What is this brave new world, that has such people in it? Can anyone tell me?

Questions that occurred to me on a first reading of The Grand Piano

Nada Gordon2 Comments

Are collectivities interesting because, as they are networks, energy can move along their grids?

Does the book feel a little like a soap opera?

Aren’t all autobiographies soap operas?

Is it lubricious enough?

Aren’t they awfully “invested” in “writing well?” Ought we to be more so?

(“they”? “we”?)

Doesn’t everyone enact a fantasy of themselves?

Do the names roll out like a scroll of (a part of) my own youth, sort of?

Doesn’t Ted Pearson write a little like, I don’t know, John Ruskin?

Doesn’t Lyn’s section sound a little like a testimonial?

Did Tom really have an experience with a transsexual?

Isn’t everyone in love with Carla?

Why is Barry the only one to mention clothing? Isn’t his section the wittiest?

Is the situation at Berkeley Ron describes replicable? I mean in the near future?

Why did Juliana make a fuss? Wasn’t Ron’s mention of the black woman his father was having an affair with a narratively necessary descriptive marker? And wasn’t Kit’s mention of “an African-American Marxist intellectual and auto mechanic with a daughter named Erica” not particularly eroticized – except insofar as he’s someone’s lover (and aren’t most ((happy)) people?)? Is the fact that the daughter named Erica significant? Is she Erica Hunt? Isn’t that generationally impossible? Or maybe the mechanic was older? Does every detail in a narrative have to be relevant? Why are we made uncomfortable by possibly irrelevant details?

Why was it hard for Bob to posit love as a term in a discussion of writing? Why does he seem so anxious?

Don’t they seem to mention their children a lot? Is having children really so fulfilling or is it something the species/the state brainwashes us into believing so it can sustain itself? Is that too nihilistic of a thing to even say? Was it a mistake for me not to have children?

Have “we” (not “they”) overcome modernism? Does modernism require overcoming?

Why is this book so expensive? Isn’t it wrapped in brown paper? Is it sustainable? Doesn’t it fit nicely into a coat pocket?

Didn’t I go to the Grand Piano in 1977 after walking ten miles for the whales through Golden Gate Park (not for a poetry reading) when I was thirteen wearing kung fu shoes which were all the rage then and getting blisters with my friend Caitlin who later became estranged from me and died of complications related to a brain aneurysm she had had many years before?

Aren’t there still a lot of questions to ask?

Am I looking forward to the next installment? Hell yeah!

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Doesn’t everyone — on some irrational, Ptolemaic level — think that their own constellation of influences is or should be everyone else’s constellation of influences?

This is a big problem!