Otohime

Nick, of course I like Gary’s blog. As should be well-established, I like everything about Gary. But like all the blogs that make themselves manifest in well-developed linked paragraphs of galloping rhetoric, I resent it a little, too. Like how come he has the time and is such the expert?

Plus, all the time and energy he gives to researching exotic cultural artifacts he once put into writing to to me, way back when I was an exotic cultural artifact, too. First I was jealous of flarf, and now I’m jealous of the blog. Maybe that’s why I had to start my own.

Now ***you*** are all my Garys (makes queenly gesture of spreading hand out over a wide expanse).

Of course, I wouldn’t trade the quotidian coziness of our (I mean Gary’s and my — oh and that includes Dante and Nemo, too) sweet cohabitation for the frenzied & yearny days of epistolary distance, but I can’t help missing the intensity of that engagement

You can hardly blame me.

It was a troubador’s dream…

HEY STEPHANIE!

Did I tell you I was born in Oakland?

And as a teen I lived at 58th and San Pablo, across the street from the Muktananda ashram. Yeah! Uh huh!

Right now I like Heathens in Heat best of all the blogs.

Not that it’s a contest.

I like Nick’s a lot too. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything so adorable as Nick and Murat talking to each other, their first meeting, intensely conversational doppelgangers!

Jack asks that I give a rundown of my reading (if you can call it that) Wednesday night. I think that’s a little too self-spattery even for me, Narcississa. But Marianne tells me she’s going to write something about it. You go, girl.

Nick, in the meantime, has said something very sweet about it. Thanks Nick!

There are parameter people and then there are no-parameter people.

I fancy myself in the latter group.

Of course there are always parameters.

But I enjoy the fantasy of kicking at them, storming them, even just pushing them out a little to thwart the cops.

Brian seems to want some parameters here in blogland. How come?

By the way I’m not calling him a cop. I really dig Brian. But he does seem interested in constraints. His assertion, not long ago, for example, that he wanted to see more visceral poems that were under a page long. Why under a page?, I asked him. It’s a good constraint, he said.

Books demand limits, Barry wrote. Yes, and they push them too.

Brian lauds blogs as being laboratories for what will later be more polished work.

For me, I just want more more more pondwater.

I might even say it’s ALL ABOUT pondwater. As opposed to “polish.”

I don’t seem to have the same set of problems (for example problems with blogs) as some of the other bloggers do. I have a different set of problems, of course, like the fear that I might actually be a problem. That fear is of no real consequence except for the agon that infiltrates my work. I might say I’m attached to that fear and that agon as a kind of stimulus.

I don’t have any problem, for example, with the idea of this being my lawn. Or my front yard. If it means I can actually have a front yard! My coop does have a side garden where longlong ago when it was actually summer I grew basil, but that’s a far cry from a front yard.

I remember a yard in San Francisco – where was it – Diamond Heights? That was filled with the most extraordinary variety of succulents I have ever seen. They formed a mosaic of color and shape and texture – gray, bulbous, deep maroon, spiky, low, trailing, lime-green – all on the slope in front of a beautiful San Francisco house.

There are other front yards I have seen, both on the east and west coasts, filled with tchotchkes – little dolls, stuffed animals, bits of pottery. Yards as labors of folk art. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, as Ellen Zweig put it, the front yards are like installations: Blue-clad Virgin Marys in hand-built alcoves, sometimes made of stucco, sometimes enclosed in glass.

I like a yard.

I like notes under doors. Or better yet notes under pillows.

The invisible description of this blog is “a kind of pillow book of musings.” That’s all. Not all things for all people. Not trying to build a canon or a coterie or a reputation or take the whole fucking crazy out of control water buffalo of a world by its horns, look it in the eye and somehow hypnotize it into curbing its aggression. I just can’t do that.

Not to fetishize the beauty of particulars – but I guess I feel… if I love … the details of life… enough… I am moved to go on… even with the ridiculous practice… of writing poems.…

my blog disappeared…

Jordan Davis writes in on the topic of SELF:

Subject: Self

The soldiers, as queasy a random selection from the globe’s hot spots as

could be managed on a helicopter’s notice, rounded the quiet corner with

mounting dread.

“Shit,” said Kielbasy in his thick, garlicky accent.

“Are we looking into it or what,” said Ben Fong-Torres, crouching

for cover. “Did I roll my 401(k) over into a granola bar?”

There, in front of them, wearing striped red and blue pants,

was BRENDA COULTAS!Q!!!!!!! andshe was reading fucking awesome poetry

Can you tell there’s something wrong with me? I’m more than a little defensive.

I’ve just got … to calm… down…

I DON’T WANT ANYONE EVER TELLING ME HOW (OR HOW NOT) TO WRITE.

NO MATTER WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE WORLD.

NO MATTER WHAT “ART HISTORY” DEMANDS.

NOT TEACHERS OR EXPERTS OR IDEOLOGUES, ESPECIALLY NOT IDEOLOGUES.

WRITING IS THE EXERCISE OF AUTONOMY.

SO DON’T FUCK WITH ME.

Ron again: there are a lot of relatively younger writers today who adopt some of the surface features of langpo in order to rehabilitate it back into an already canned psychology of the person

By “already canned” does he mean “always already canned”?

Is psychological dysfunction a kind of botulism?

Can you get self at a discount at Costco?

Are there generic or store brands?

Can I tell if my self isn’t canned by whether or not I have the taste of metal in my mouth?

If I get rehabilitated can I go free?

NB: The label of PARROT brand condensed milk has the loveliest picture of a rainbow macaw on a creamy background.