a different motion-feeling

Nada Gordon2 Comments

The NY Times reviewed this weekend a book by Roy Blount Jr: Alphabet Juice. I quote from the review:

Disdaining those scholars who think the relation between words and their meanings is arbitrary, he argues that “all language, at some level is body language.” …. Blount zeroes in on the expressive words that “somehow sensuously evoke the essence of the word: ‘queasy’ or ‘rickety’ or ‘zest’ or ‘sluggish’ or ‘vim.'”

I could not help but note that

[Blount writes] “‘Swoon’ emerged from the old English swogan, to suffocate, because the mind and the mouth conspired to replace ‘og’ with ‘oo’ in order to register a different motion-feeling.”

Eugenic Ether Hymen

Nada Gordon1 Comment

A flagellated fee rigor woos the murky poi;
Bad deed tenements let out a nifty gut howl.
As addenda, Ed snuffles – oh swirly!–
And a cad, refereeing, oft tempts the ting-glum lox.
If a reevaluated goofing yins two yurts,
And this condescendingly pimping snowsuit is, um, wuss
Then a reappeared fluffier miniskirt mulls in its yolk, and,
ceding to fleetingnesses, houris play with vinyl polyps.
Like antimalarial diffident dingy piss,
a piffling baccarat ebbs opium onto you
with a fleetingness like –ow!- myrrh wool poop.

(please note, this is a near-anagram of the first eleven or so lines of the poem “Here in the Gynaeceum” that I posted yesterday)((with super-amount gratitude to and copycatting of KSM, that rascal!))

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?

Another thing about the Bay Area

Nada Gordon3 Comments

In the Bay Area, there’s a particular way of “giving feedback.” It’s very detailed, complex, and thoughtful, and the listener is supposed to receive it in a kind of quiet, receptive way. It’s a kind of social code or community behavior. We don’t have this in NY, at least not in any kind of codified way.

Has anyone else noticed this?