Got up overly early as punishment for not properly maintaining the balance of daily life, and wanting to be free. Decided to paint my nails five different colors, which I did. Nail polish is horrible, it smells like death, I shouldn’t use it, but my fingertips look like jujubees.
Thinking of how extraordinary it was to be sitting next to Madeline Gins at the Skirball Theatre watching a [great!!] klezmer musical, Schlemiel the First, when one of the characters said, “We need to not die!” I looked at Madeline in wonder.
Afterwards I sent her some links about Molly Picon and The Bagelman Sisters.
My notebooks are a mess, everything is kind of a mess. The semester ended and I have been cleaning up my office in a kind of exhausted confusion. What happened to all that activity. I need a VACATION.
I also need once again to be a more focused blogger. These little witty snippets on facebook, it’s like eating ladyfingers all the time.
I like old people who like birds.
I like people who like birds.
I’ve been to some readings.
Ariana Reines:
“I’m not good with time.”“Keats had hair that is also in Italy.”“You and your firewaterand mild poses.”
She uses a lot of Anglo-Saxon simple words and her work is at once colloquial and mythological.
Dana Ward:
“data pastries”“our songs taught me, just do what you want to do and don’t worry about it”“the eyelash piece of fabric I vanquished.”“mystify the world in order to fortify its / enchantment.”
Stephanie Young:
(referencing Rodrigo Toscano) “the problem of the person as a treasure map”“it [Hannah Weiner’s The Fast] is a book about not having a bathtub at a time of extremity”“water only conducts water from other bodies”“I was a dog who wanted other dogs.”
I went to a talk about conceptual writing at the white house.
Steve Zultanski quoted Bataille on poetry’s “instrumentality grounded in non-instrumentality.”
Sandra Simonds: “Work for a poetry that isn’t at home at this white house or any white house.”
Rod Smith: “the avant-garde is a stance toward reality,” and he paraphrased Deleuze and Guattari: “the function of art is to create new experiences.”
Reading books flutteringly.
Jean Luc-Nancy on Listening.
An essay by Jena Osman on Bern Porter.
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl’s Booby Be Quiet.
Anselm Berrigan’s Notes from Irrelevance.
Dana Ward’s This Can’t Be Life.
A book about The History of Dolls.
[Just sort of read on the train this morning the too too ironically named House Organ, which persists in sending two copies to the apartment. Didn’t he change his address? The first thing I always notice about it is the numbers trouble. It’s slightly better this time, 38 penises and 9 vaginas. Anyway, get this, there’s a contributor in there named Heman! Heman! And all these “yrs” and “&s”… (one poem reads: “yr eyes &/ testicles//equally/useless here”… um… my testicles?) … a rather nice poem opening the issue by Joel Lewis, though, (“I’ll give twenty dollars to the person who can pinpoint when the ‘slow clap’ first appeared in a movie.”), and a treasure hidden toward the back by iGloria Frym: “How come it took you so long/ To get it? Oh look, another demand:// Embrace Change.” That’s so Berkeley!]
I’ve been taking drops of B vitamins; it gives me the most extraordinary feeling.
Each person has the nerve to have a life story, parents, etc., such as the mother who shot herself and her two children because she was denied food stamps. We must spend so much of life in a scramble for continuance.
I saw Melancholia. Joyelle McSweeney’s review of it is the best. I had a discussion about it with my friend Peter. I thought Claire’s desire to watch the apocalypse on the terrace with a glass of wine was totally bourgeois (I agreed with Justine saying that was just shit), perhaps because I don’t have a terrace and I don’t drink wine. I said that the way it ended was right: in a moment of human contact. He said I was being quasi religious, judging people’s reactions to extreme situations. He said something about how Claire “grew.”
And I realized that I don’t care about how characters “grow” in literature. Such a view of things seems to be predicated on a progress model of life and society, whereas it strikes me that really we are all just hurtling toward decay, and literature is a way of diverting ourselves in the meantime. It isn’t to “improve” us. I suppose that notion comes from religion? And is carried over into the post-industrial?
Society, which is supposed to be a “safety net,” strikes me more as a kind of landmine of instability, confusion, and competing self-interests. A bunch of succubi. Am I wrong? Someone tell me I’m wrong?
Foil of restiveness – dry breast – hebdomadic lyric PLOD.
Oligarchy of the stupid. I forget the “t” of “ist”: socialis, communis.
Poetry as “personal tech.”
Blue panoply. Fitters……..
ffire breasts
nice train
the most uncertain thing I’ve ever seen
cockahooply
pale imitation/pay limitation
I want to be present with people. I make imaginary structures – world of cute babies – they are hard work, and we are a dopey species, just afterthoughts of microbes.
You (“husbands,” “best friends,” “uncle figures drunk on anger”) aren’t real people, you are asshole people.
Your eyes, assholes.
Your mouths, assholes.
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A half-naked urchin huddles in the doorway.
It doesn’t sound like it, but I’m actually in a pretty good mood.
Otohime 