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OK, let’s try again. My links no working.

Who’s more beautiful?

Waheeda Rehman (note my earlier misspelling!)

or…

MadhuBala (which means “HoneyMaiden””!)

????????

I am hopelessly — hopelessly! — entranced by both of them…

Mermaid Parade

Who’s going to the mermaid parade this Saturday? Any desire to go as a contingent, marching- or non-marching?

Let me know!

These Banner Ads

These banner ads are totally giving me the creeps.

Go away banner ads!

What’s really on my mind:

Who’s more beautiful — Waheeda Rahman or Madhu Bala?

If you don’t know who these women are, I really feel for you.

In the Doghouse

Yeterday, Gary used the expression, “in the doghouse.”

I laughed because the expression is so 1950s, so easily literalizable in cartoons and sitcoms (descending scale: wah wah wah).

I remember the first time I learned the expression, in third or fourth grade. I don’t remember any of the normal lessons from the bitchy teachers I had during those years, with the exception of one time we burnt sugar until it carmelized — oh and another tine being forced to make that capital cursive Q that looks like a deformed “2”. I also remember getting IQ tests (but not the results). What I definitely remember are the visists from guests artists. One guy taught us some songs from Man of La Mancha, which you KNOW I loved.

I learned “in the doghouse” from a man who came to teach us Japanese ink painting. He explained the expression, then said that if we made any stray marks on our paper we would be “in the doghouse.”

In the doghouse.

Some Babies

Some babies the avant-garde tradition throws out with the bathwater:

**epiphanies

**human beings in difficult situations in which they are compelled to make ethical decisions

**descriptions of suffering

**the mechanism of identification

Wow, the things you find when you google yourself. Here’s a whole newsgroup devoted to the creation of LOVEDOLLS, whose founder’s handle is “nada”.

We’re Going to Paris

Gary and I are going to Paris for two weeks at the end of July. It’s pretty much Gary’s first time to go anywhere!

Radical honesty.

I Hate Her

I hate her, as, I think, no other.

“Why can’t I fuck who I want?” she whines in a statement of purpose or manifesto of craving for validation masquerading as a poem — surely, it’s in lines, and steals some effects from a poem of Waldman’s that was never much more than repetitively and simplistically self-glorifying to begin with, but it never attains anything beyond a statement of that horrible, to me totally distateful, craving.

It’s a rhetorical question, because of course, quite blithely, she does. The answer, though, or one of many answers to such a manifestly selfish question, is that to routinely go marauding through other people’s relationships (this is her pattern, her script; she may as well be a robot) is to rip the social fabric, to do harm (certainly emotionally, and potentially physically) to all the parties involved (Buddha: “First, do no harm.”), and generally to rouse the sinister energies of the universe. It disempowers all. It’s a game of war, not of love. Look, I would say to her, if I felt there would be any value at all in doing so, we’ve all been hurt, tossed around, abandoned. Why do everything in your power to perpetuate that cycle? It will only come hurtling back at you with greater greater greater force, as for example, this deep, deep hatred of mine.

My hate’s not unmixed with compassion. That sounds weird but it’s true. The truth is that I’ve never met anyone who exudes pathos more palpably. And, therefore, I was always kind to her, even though I never felt any liking or affection for her, even though I thought she was a cringeingly awful writer and performer. I don’t think she could deny that I was always kind to her, as kind as I could be without getting sucked in to her whirlpool of endless neediness, that querulous falsetto voice fading away in self-pity. How he could have been drawn in to such a vortex is still a puzzle to me. Such is the nature of weakness, folly, and peccadillo, I guess.

Why, a couple of people have asked me, do you focus your anger on her instead of on him? It’s a valid question. He’s equally culpable, maybe more so, being perfectly well in possession of a delicate but powerful little word: “no.” He also gets the brunt of plenty of anger, believe me. But the fact is that I love him and he is my dear partner, my muse and companion and helpmate still — and I am coming to understand some of his motivations for doing such an awful thing that tests the very limits of my capacity to forgive. We grow, reach, stretch out our arms. Breath fills the bodies. Love! Not pure anymore maybe (my therapist says, “there is no pure love” — and actually she’s right — I say as much in _Swoon_: “We just keep opening up the same old wound.”) but love nonetheless. Take that, rapacious rapacious toxic strumpet!

p.s. May she be buried up to her neck in the metaphorical searing desert of her own making, and may the variegated stones of approbation be hurled at her for eternity.