The blue slur of oncoming sleepiness. She wants to shut down and forget all the complications, the rugburn of communication, the loss of words and fighting, the drag and stop of language as she fails Kate again and again. She hates these moments of burn and anger, and bites her nails until they bleed, copper in her mouth. (47)
The habit of meals and sleep, the patterns of pattern. Hours and streets and seasons. Leaves, new growth, then falling. Failure. Capability and time line. Endpoint and/or circular. (62)
Humans only use 60% of the oxygen in their lungs; birds 99%. (98)
Wait—
Think of all the mouths you have known: kissed, fed, envied, missed, desired, touched, grazed, imagined, fingered, fled. Your own: given, shut, blurted, silenced, sung. Enter. The room brims with words, vowels hitting our faces. Exit. Say X Y Z. If we linger here, where the alphabet runs out, never fear, our mouths loop back to A. My home is your mouth. Your home is my mouth. Remember? (125)
Wait.
You see, the heart splits both down and across. (125)
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Quarterly reading check in--Title, Author (Notes to Remind)
What I've read so far this year...
I like my new feature of what amounts to a <10-word personal "review." I'm a list-maker, a haphazard organizer of things, mostly words. I have this idea that everything I've ever read will be useful to me forever. I keep a notebook of quotes I like from books I read. I should say notebookS; you should see the stack of them. I started doing this when I was about 10. I should have known then that words would be what my life was made of, but I kept thinking psychology, neuroscience, then photography, before I got irritated at artists s**t-talking each other at some party and decided to focus on what had always diverted my attention anyway: writing. I'd always written stories. When I was a kid (often sent out of the house for the day) I would take a notebook and re-write stories I liked. I never had any interest in remembering them the way they were told exactly. I retold them, sometimes adding characters, plot twists. Then I started re-writing events in my life, making them turn out differently, better. Then I saw that better didn't make the story better.
Anyway, I have this idea that in twenty years, thirty years I will see some book cover or someone will mention Wallace Stegner or Maggie Nelson at a party and I will think, yes, I've read that/those book/books and will return home to look through my lists and have a good time remembering the read based on my ten-word description of it. So if you see me at that party and I have a faraway look on my face I'll either be conjuring this list, or forming a new list for something onto which I'm placing our conversation.
**
1. Trust – Liz Waldner (Not quite as engaging as Dark Would. “Passing”=amazing.)
2. Counterfeit – Christine LeClerc (Smart. Pop culture references. Nods to theatre.)
3. A Thief of Strings – Donald Revell (a bit of nature, a bit of the war)
4. Plato’s Bad Horse – Deborah Woodard (Long lines, excellent sounds, erudite references.)
5. The Most of It – Mary Ruefle (Short short prose from an excellent contemporary poet.)
6. A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat – Arthur Rimbaud (Woah. I want the Revell translation now.)
7. The Totality for Kids – Joshua Clover (Echoes of end of the world; pop culture.)
8. The Lack Of – Joseph Massey (As always, genius. I want more.)
9. Jane: a murder – Maggie Nelson (Poetic examination of aunt’s unsolved murder. Stunning.)
10. Wrong – Reginald Shepherd (Best moments=when sounds overtake him.)
11. The Red Parts – Maggie Nelson (Memoir, written shortly after Jane, while the murderer was being tried.)
12. Bluets – Maggie Nelson (She’s in love with blue; I’m in love with her. Paragraphs numbered remind me of Coetzee’s second, In the Heart of the Country.)
13. Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner (Novel of the “frontier west.” Grandma Susan’s lesbianish friendship explored; both women married men.)
14. Fifty Poems – Liana Quill (Spareness I don’t get. Birds and trees.)
15. Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives – Tom Shroder (Journalist’s examination of guy who examines scientific evidence for past lives—Ian Stevenson.)
16. Are We Lucky Yet?: Stories – Jane Bradley (Made me remember high school. And feel like a straight girl.)
17. The Black Swan – Thomas Mann (Mann’s feminine look at his imminent mortality.)
18. The Mere Future – Sarah Schulman (Satiric social commentary; only killers gain acclaim, riches.)
19. I is to Vorticism – Ben Mirov (“interstellar ventriloquism”=meaningful absurdity)
20. Otherhood – Reginald Shepherd (cover reminds of a Pgh photograph I once took)
21. Other Prohibited Items – Martha Greenwald (Best=Amtrak holdback; office poems also had excellent lines.)
22. Minimum Heroic – Christopher Salerno (best of the three)
23. The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans – Andrei Codrescu (“Not born but snapped”; best moment=showing book jacket as I.D. to cop)
24. Housekeeping – Marilynn Robinson (beautiful language I would have appreciated more if not for the voice of the woman on the audiobook.)
25. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story – Paul Monette (coming out story; language)
26. Six Seconds in Dallas: A Microstudy of the Kennedy Assassination – Josiah Thompson (most interesting to see the questions we do have answers to that the writer is asking in 1967; good math)
27. The Book of Frank – CA Conrad (feels like my childhood; maybe I am Frank)
28. Letters to Wendy’s – Joe Wenderoth (comment cards blossom epically)
29. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories – ed. Robert Shapard & James Thomas (a few nice pieces)
30. Personationskin – Karl Parker (terror and comedy of ambiguation; lots of caps)
31. Spar – Karen Volkman (prose poetry narrative interspersed with regular line-break poems; like)
32. Fast Lanes – Jayne Anne Phillips (title story one of the best ever love stories/relationship stories)
33. Half Girl – Stephanie Dickinson (swine princess; excellent metaphors)
34. The Preservationist – David Maine (retelling Noah’s Ark)
35. Savage Love – Dan Savage (compendium as of ’98)
36. Ka-Ching – Denise Duhamel (first section so good, money; parents’ mishap with escalator stunning – unable to look away)
37. Silkscreen Techniques – J. I. Biegeleisen and M. A. Cohn (a future project)
38. Family Dancing – David Leavitt (early 80s, standard storytelling, very consistent)
39. The Housekeeper and the Professor – Yoko Ogawa (tender, fascinating conceptually, 80-minute memory, mathematics prof.)
40. OK, Goodnight – Emily Kendal Frey and Zachary Schomburg
41. I Have to go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl – Karyna McGlynn (girl in the pool, yes)
42. World Famous Love Acts – Brian Leung (Loved, “Leases”=woah)
43. The Blue of Her Body – Sara Greenslit (Sex, drugs, and birds of prey)
I like my new feature of what amounts to a <10-word personal "review." I'm a list-maker, a haphazard organizer of things, mostly words. I have this idea that everything I've ever read will be useful to me forever. I keep a notebook of quotes I like from books I read. I should say notebookS; you should see the stack of them. I started doing this when I was about 10. I should have known then that words would be what my life was made of, but I kept thinking psychology, neuroscience, then photography, before I got irritated at artists s**t-talking each other at some party and decided to focus on what had always diverted my attention anyway: writing. I'd always written stories. When I was a kid (often sent out of the house for the day) I would take a notebook and re-write stories I liked. I never had any interest in remembering them the way they were told exactly. I retold them, sometimes adding characters, plot twists. Then I started re-writing events in my life, making them turn out differently, better. Then I saw that better didn't make the story better.
Anyway, I have this idea that in twenty years, thirty years I will see some book cover or someone will mention Wallace Stegner or Maggie Nelson at a party and I will think, yes, I've read that/those book/books and will return home to look through my lists and have a good time remembering the read based on my ten-word description of it. So if you see me at that party and I have a faraway look on my face I'll either be conjuring this list, or forming a new list for something onto which I'm placing our conversation.
**
1. Trust – Liz Waldner (Not quite as engaging as Dark Would. “Passing”=amazing.)
2. Counterfeit – Christine LeClerc (Smart. Pop culture references. Nods to theatre.)
3. A Thief of Strings – Donald Revell (a bit of nature, a bit of the war)
4. Plato’s Bad Horse – Deborah Woodard (Long lines, excellent sounds, erudite references.)
5. The Most of It – Mary Ruefle (Short short prose from an excellent contemporary poet.)
6. A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat – Arthur Rimbaud (Woah. I want the Revell translation now.)
7. The Totality for Kids – Joshua Clover (Echoes of end of the world; pop culture.)
8. The Lack Of – Joseph Massey (As always, genius. I want more.)
9. Jane: a murder – Maggie Nelson (Poetic examination of aunt’s unsolved murder. Stunning.)
10. Wrong – Reginald Shepherd (Best moments=when sounds overtake him.)
11. The Red Parts – Maggie Nelson (Memoir, written shortly after Jane, while the murderer was being tried.)
12. Bluets – Maggie Nelson (She’s in love with blue; I’m in love with her. Paragraphs numbered remind me of Coetzee’s second, In the Heart of the Country.)
13. Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner (Novel of the “frontier west.” Grandma Susan’s lesbianish friendship explored; both women married men.)
14. Fifty Poems – Liana Quill (Spareness I don’t get. Birds and trees.)
15. Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives – Tom Shroder (Journalist’s examination of guy who examines scientific evidence for past lives—Ian Stevenson.)
16. Are We Lucky Yet?: Stories – Jane Bradley (Made me remember high school. And feel like a straight girl.)
17. The Black Swan – Thomas Mann (Mann’s feminine look at his imminent mortality.)
18. The Mere Future – Sarah Schulman (Satiric social commentary; only killers gain acclaim, riches.)
19. I is to Vorticism – Ben Mirov (“interstellar ventriloquism”=meaningful absurdity)
20. Otherhood – Reginald Shepherd (cover reminds of a Pgh photograph I once took)
21. Other Prohibited Items – Martha Greenwald (Best=Amtrak holdback; office poems also had excellent lines.)
22. Minimum Heroic – Christopher Salerno (best of the three)
23. The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans – Andrei Codrescu (“Not born but snapped”; best moment=showing book jacket as I.D. to cop)
24. Housekeeping – Marilynn Robinson (beautiful language I would have appreciated more if not for the voice of the woman on the audiobook.)
25. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story – Paul Monette (coming out story; language)
26. Six Seconds in Dallas: A Microstudy of the Kennedy Assassination – Josiah Thompson (most interesting to see the questions we do have answers to that the writer is asking in 1967; good math)
27. The Book of Frank – CA Conrad (feels like my childhood; maybe I am Frank)
28. Letters to Wendy’s – Joe Wenderoth (comment cards blossom epically)
29. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories – ed. Robert Shapard & James Thomas (a few nice pieces)
30. Personationskin – Karl Parker (terror and comedy of ambiguation; lots of caps)
31. Spar – Karen Volkman (prose poetry narrative interspersed with regular line-break poems; like)
32. Fast Lanes – Jayne Anne Phillips (title story one of the best ever love stories/relationship stories)
33. Half Girl – Stephanie Dickinson (swine princess; excellent metaphors)
34. The Preservationist – David Maine (retelling Noah’s Ark)
35. Savage Love – Dan Savage (compendium as of ’98)
36. Ka-Ching – Denise Duhamel (first section so good, money; parents’ mishap with escalator stunning – unable to look away)
37. Silkscreen Techniques – J. I. Biegeleisen and M. A. Cohn (a future project)
38. Family Dancing – David Leavitt (early 80s, standard storytelling, very consistent)
39. The Housekeeper and the Professor – Yoko Ogawa (tender, fascinating conceptually, 80-minute memory, mathematics prof.)
40. OK, Goodnight – Emily Kendal Frey and Zachary Schomburg
41. I Have to go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl – Karyna McGlynn (girl in the pool, yes)
42. World Famous Love Acts – Brian Leung (Loved, “Leases”=woah)
43. The Blue of Her Body – Sara Greenslit (Sex, drugs, and birds of prey)
Friday, February 12, 2010
Jack Spicer is my valentine
So Jack Spicer asked me out. I wasn't sure if I was going to go, but he was sweet, unassuming, didn't expect anything from me. Just a few hours of togetherness.
I'd never read anything by him. I'm still somewhat new to poetry, still feeling my way. Focusing on contemporary work, while slowly filling in the back story with the classics of the 20th century.
C buys a lot of books, which is good for me because I like to read, often directionless, book to book as they appear in front of me. In this house there's no shortage.
I'd heard the name, loved the title (my vocabulary did this to me - supposedly his last words), so I picked it up the other day, daunting in its collectedness at nearly 500 pages. Well-behaved reader that I am, as expected to do so, I read the intro AND the "about this edition." I was into it. The first handful of poems though? Good lord, no. I'm not really into poets waxing all mythological. I mean, I know that's a style and there's a great tradition and I should have paid more attention to Edith Hamilton. That's on me. And I like it the way I like the Bible. For the silly stories. Kind of in the abstract. I don't want either to feature in the poetry I read, though god and gods can be done well.
Then I got to "Imaginary Elegies":
Yes, be like God. I wonder what I thought
When I wrote that. The dreamers sag a bit
As if five years had thickened on their flesh
Or on my eyes. Wake them with what?
Should I throw rocks at them
To make their naked private bodies bleed?
No. Let them sleep. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
The dummies in the empty funhouse watch
The tides wash in and out. The thick old moon
Shines through the rotten timbers every night.
This much is clear, they think, the men who made
Us twitch and creak and put the laughter in our throats
Are just as cold as we. The lights are out.
The lights are out.
You’ll smell the oldest smells—
The smell of salt, of urine, and of sleep
Before you wake. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
What have I gone to bed with all these years?
What have I taken crying to my bed
For love of me?
Only the shadows of the sun and moon
The dreaming groins, their creaking images.
Only myself.
Is there some rhetoric
To make me think that I have kept a house
While playing dolls? This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
That two-eyed monster God is still above.
I saw him once when I was young and once
When I was seized with madness, or was I seized
And mad because I saw him once. He is the sun
And moon made real with eyes.
He is the photograph of everything at once. The love
That makes the blood run cold.
But he is gone. No realer than old
Poetry. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
Upon the old amusement pier I watch
The creeping darkness gather in the west.
Above the giant funhouse and the ghosts
I hear the seagulls call. They’re going west
Toward some great Catalina of a dream
Out where the poem ends.
But does it end?
The birds are still in flight. Believe the birds.
*
I'm hooked. We're spending the day together, just me and Jack. Maybe a bottle of gin. Maybe some Chinese take-out.
I'd never read anything by him. I'm still somewhat new to poetry, still feeling my way. Focusing on contemporary work, while slowly filling in the back story with the classics of the 20th century.
C buys a lot of books, which is good for me because I like to read, often directionless, book to book as they appear in front of me. In this house there's no shortage.
I'd heard the name, loved the title (my vocabulary did this to me - supposedly his last words), so I picked it up the other day, daunting in its collectedness at nearly 500 pages. Well-behaved reader that I am, as expected to do so, I read the intro AND the "about this edition." I was into it. The first handful of poems though? Good lord, no. I'm not really into poets waxing all mythological. I mean, I know that's a style and there's a great tradition and I should have paid more attention to Edith Hamilton. That's on me. And I like it the way I like the Bible. For the silly stories. Kind of in the abstract. I don't want either to feature in the poetry I read, though god and gods can be done well.
Then I got to "Imaginary Elegies":
Yes, be like God. I wonder what I thought
When I wrote that. The dreamers sag a bit
As if five years had thickened on their flesh
Or on my eyes. Wake them with what?
Should I throw rocks at them
To make their naked private bodies bleed?
No. Let them sleep. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
The dummies in the empty funhouse watch
The tides wash in and out. The thick old moon
Shines through the rotten timbers every night.
This much is clear, they think, the men who made
Us twitch and creak and put the laughter in our throats
Are just as cold as we. The lights are out.
The lights are out.
You’ll smell the oldest smells—
The smell of salt, of urine, and of sleep
Before you wake. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
What have I gone to bed with all these years?
What have I taken crying to my bed
For love of me?
Only the shadows of the sun and moon
The dreaming groins, their creaking images.
Only myself.
Is there some rhetoric
To make me think that I have kept a house
While playing dolls? This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
That two-eyed monster God is still above.
I saw him once when I was young and once
When I was seized with madness, or was I seized
And mad because I saw him once. He is the sun
And moon made real with eyes.
He is the photograph of everything at once. The love
That makes the blood run cold.
But he is gone. No realer than old
Poetry. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
Upon the old amusement pier I watch
The creeping darkness gather in the west.
Above the giant funhouse and the ghosts
I hear the seagulls call. They’re going west
Toward some great Catalina of a dream
Out where the poem ends.
But does it end?
The birds are still in flight. Believe the birds.
*
I'm hooked. We're spending the day together, just me and Jack. Maybe a bottle of gin. Maybe some Chinese take-out.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
I want to be the man who has me.
Paul Monette mentions several times throughout the winding coming-out narrative of Becoming a Man how he has to work hard not to let the current Paul, the one writing the story get too disgusted at the closeted Paul he used to be. This removes some of my readerly and gay sensibility of wanting to yell, 'what the hell, dude. It doesn't have to be this hard.' That said, it is hard. It was hard for me in the nineties, it was sure to have been even harder in the seventies. I guess I give it today's worldview (mine) and it all seems ridiculous to be so bent on staying sexless. In the context of 1972, just slightly post Stonewall (and though he was living 70 miles from the city, it seems to have been little more than a blip on his radar of self-hatred), even his therapist seems confused that his goal is to be straight. And he tries!
This book was written in 1992, just a few years before Monette died at age 49 or 50, young. Written as a startled response to the warm, fuzzy response his book Borrowed Time received. Borrowed Time was a portrait of his relationship with Roger Horwitz and Roger's death from AIDS. It was loving, accessible story of two men in love that made the loving look easy. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story was Monette's angry response that, sorry, no. Gay love is not that easy.
It's hard not to see myself in all coming out stories, as I'm sure many gays do. My story ran parallel to his in many ways. But where he kept celibate and then dated women to try to cure himself, mine was all for show. In the coming-out formulary, his self-hatred equals my self-preservation. He truly wanted to change; I simply didn't want to die. This has mostly to do with the time. Though my coming out pre-dated contemporary gays in the spotlight (except maybe for Elton John and a few other elders, and the bi-wonder of my idol David Bowie), I knew it wasn't something wrong with me. I just figured there was no one around like me (except the queer black kid, the double excuse for punching bag in our white, straight suburban dream), that I'd meet them in another life, find my own "city of orgies, walks and joys" like my kind had been doing for ages (or since the advent of capitalism, thank you John D'Emilio). At some point my attraction to women just evolved into a quiet acceptance of, 'oh, this is something I'll worry about once I leave this small town.' (Though I did eventually end up getting lucky in high school.) I dated boys and enjoyed it, even though my heart was never in it; I never once thought it might go somewhere.
I wonder what the equivalent is now.
While I can't really cozy up to the fact that he didn't get laid regularly until he was approaching thirty, I can understand the trend of running from people he actually liked. "I told myself to go with it, not to be afraid. I was beginning to worry that I didn't know how to have sex with someone I liked" (271). My history is littered with girls I liked and ran from. The longest relationships were always with the safe ones, the ones where I knew where I stood emotionally and so had nothing to lose. The ones I actually loved, well, I never let those relationships go anywhere. But this has more to do with being stupid than gay.
At least I got that figured out soon enough to do the right thing by C, who is definitely not safe, and whom I be a wreck by if I ever lost.
Anyway, I'm starting to use this space as more of a reading diary than anything, which I suppose is okay. An homage to lines I love. If you know me, you know that I may interrupt your speaking to let you know that what you just said would make a good line, that you should probably write it down. Unless, of course, you aren't a writer. Then I'll steal your shit, rest assured.
*
And I think of my father when I read this, he who would love his sexless daughter:
The project of our enemies is to keep us from falling in love. It has always been thus, the history writ by straight boys who render us invisible, as if we were never there. Left and right, fascists and communists, they loathe us in equal measure. Then the Holy Fathers of every religion, their sick equation of pleasure and sin. If you isolate us long enough and keep us ignorant of each other, the solitary confinement will extinguish any hope we have of finding our other half. (25)
I can't believe it myself, how fresh the wounds of the deep past sting, how sharp the dry-eyed tears are even at this distance. The very act of remembering begins to resemble a phobic state--feeding on every missed chance, stuck forever in the place without doors. What's crazy about it is, I forget that I ever got out. For an hour or a day the pain wins. It throws a veil of amnesia over my real life... My white-knuckled grip on happiness, hoarded against the gloating of my enemies, against the genocide by indifference that has buried alive a generation of my brothers. (172)
Throughout, Paul Monette's language is beautiful. This is the first I've read of him, and won't be the last. It seems everywhere I've gone with this book in the past few days someone has stopped me to say, I loved that book.
If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks. (175)
...I had no choice but to keep on looking in the wrong places for the thing I'd never even seen: two men in love and laughing. For that was the image in my head, though I'd never read it in any book or seen it in any movie. I'd fashioned it out of bits of dreams and the hurt that went with pining after straight men. Everything told me it couldn't exist, especially the media code of invisibility, where queers were spoken of only in the context of molesting Boy Scouts. (178)
No longer invisible, we still have a long way to go. Even Weeds, a show I love, likes to kill their queers. (We're currently watching Season 5.)
Waiting numbly for a train in a place where there are no tracks. (179)
And just getting into bed with somebody wasn't the magic solution, because people could hide their terrors in pure technique--depersonalizing so completely the body embraced so they felt nothing at all. (253)
From his journals in 1972 when he was sleeping with men and women, still figuring out the sway of his orientation:
I feel fairly calm and together until I have to explain myself at all to anyone... Sex is more regular with Ellen. That is, I'm not afraid I can't do it anymore, but I can't stand the intimacy of it, can't face being the man in the situation. And yet I think of Bruce on Saturday [a trick] and get pissed thinking how irrelevant I was/am in the passive role. I want to be the man who has me. (264)
This book was written in 1992, just a few years before Monette died at age 49 or 50, young. Written as a startled response to the warm, fuzzy response his book Borrowed Time received. Borrowed Time was a portrait of his relationship with Roger Horwitz and Roger's death from AIDS. It was loving, accessible story of two men in love that made the loving look easy. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story was Monette's angry response that, sorry, no. Gay love is not that easy.
It's hard not to see myself in all coming out stories, as I'm sure many gays do. My story ran parallel to his in many ways. But where he kept celibate and then dated women to try to cure himself, mine was all for show. In the coming-out formulary, his self-hatred equals my self-preservation. He truly wanted to change; I simply didn't want to die. This has mostly to do with the time. Though my coming out pre-dated contemporary gays in the spotlight (except maybe for Elton John and a few other elders, and the bi-wonder of my idol David Bowie), I knew it wasn't something wrong with me. I just figured there was no one around like me (except the queer black kid, the double excuse for punching bag in our white, straight suburban dream), that I'd meet them in another life, find my own "city of orgies, walks and joys" like my kind had been doing for ages (or since the advent of capitalism, thank you John D'Emilio). At some point my attraction to women just evolved into a quiet acceptance of, 'oh, this is something I'll worry about once I leave this small town.' (Though I did eventually end up getting lucky in high school.) I dated boys and enjoyed it, even though my heart was never in it; I never once thought it might go somewhere.
I wonder what the equivalent is now.
While I can't really cozy up to the fact that he didn't get laid regularly until he was approaching thirty, I can understand the trend of running from people he actually liked. "I told myself to go with it, not to be afraid. I was beginning to worry that I didn't know how to have sex with someone I liked" (271). My history is littered with girls I liked and ran from. The longest relationships were always with the safe ones, the ones where I knew where I stood emotionally and so had nothing to lose. The ones I actually loved, well, I never let those relationships go anywhere. But this has more to do with being stupid than gay.
At least I got that figured out soon enough to do the right thing by C, who is definitely not safe, and whom I be a wreck by if I ever lost.
Anyway, I'm starting to use this space as more of a reading diary than anything, which I suppose is okay. An homage to lines I love. If you know me, you know that I may interrupt your speaking to let you know that what you just said would make a good line, that you should probably write it down. Unless, of course, you aren't a writer. Then I'll steal your shit, rest assured.
*
And I think of my father when I read this, he who would love his sexless daughter:
The project of our enemies is to keep us from falling in love. It has always been thus, the history writ by straight boys who render us invisible, as if we were never there. Left and right, fascists and communists, they loathe us in equal measure. Then the Holy Fathers of every religion, their sick equation of pleasure and sin. If you isolate us long enough and keep us ignorant of each other, the solitary confinement will extinguish any hope we have of finding our other half. (25)
I can't believe it myself, how fresh the wounds of the deep past sting, how sharp the dry-eyed tears are even at this distance. The very act of remembering begins to resemble a phobic state--feeding on every missed chance, stuck forever in the place without doors. What's crazy about it is, I forget that I ever got out. For an hour or a day the pain wins. It throws a veil of amnesia over my real life... My white-knuckled grip on happiness, hoarded against the gloating of my enemies, against the genocide by indifference that has buried alive a generation of my brothers. (172)
Throughout, Paul Monette's language is beautiful. This is the first I've read of him, and won't be the last. It seems everywhere I've gone with this book in the past few days someone has stopped me to say, I loved that book.
If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks. (175)
...I had no choice but to keep on looking in the wrong places for the thing I'd never even seen: two men in love and laughing. For that was the image in my head, though I'd never read it in any book or seen it in any movie. I'd fashioned it out of bits of dreams and the hurt that went with pining after straight men. Everything told me it couldn't exist, especially the media code of invisibility, where queers were spoken of only in the context of molesting Boy Scouts. (178)
No longer invisible, we still have a long way to go. Even Weeds, a show I love, likes to kill their queers. (We're currently watching Season 5.)
Waiting numbly for a train in a place where there are no tracks. (179)
And just getting into bed with somebody wasn't the magic solution, because people could hide their terrors in pure technique--depersonalizing so completely the body embraced so they felt nothing at all. (253)
From his journals in 1972 when he was sleeping with men and women, still figuring out the sway of his orientation:
I feel fairly calm and together until I have to explain myself at all to anyone... Sex is more regular with Ellen. That is, I'm not afraid I can't do it anymore, but I can't stand the intimacy of it, can't face being the man in the situation. And yet I think of Bruce on Saturday [a trick] and get pissed thinking how irrelevant I was/am in the passive role. I want to be the man who has me. (264)
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Mean Something?
I understand the trend of popular readership through my family. They are not literary people. But they've always been readers. My father likes art books, he's a high school art teacher, went to school for sculpture. My mother consumes romance novels by the truckful. My Aunt Louise reads a lot of nonfiction, mostly things about the natural world. When my aunt tells me she likes Robert Frost and 'isn't smart enough' to understand contemporary poetry, I understand she's smarter than she thinks.
Some call it putting random thoughts together, a friend recently referred to it as the 'smart-aleck' school of poetry. Contemporary leanings in poetry and fictive prose have been about seeming either smarter than their readership in making references the general population won't be privy to or cultivating a camaraderie of 'you get this, don't you? look how smart and funny we are' geared towards the other smart alecks of their trade.
My aunt says she's not smart enough and I tell her it's not her, it's writing right now, poetry, the contemporary drag. That's just where we are right now. The smart clothes we're putting on. Maybe it's the Bush years, the war years, how we were attacked 'right on our own soil,' the years of upping alerts, packing small vials to get on planes. Our culture of fear. There's so much that's so important that needs to be looked at, that perhaps we as a tribe are overwhelmed and so write about very little. We want to be smart enough to outrun the fear. We don't want to look at it. (And I'm only marking it from W's reign because I wasn't enough aware of the contemporary poetry scene prior to about 2000. I am ready to stand corrected.)
That said, there are some excellent contemporary poets and prose writers who are getting down the important things about the way we live now in understandable terms and with beautiful care to language. Richard Siken, Heather Derr-Smith, Shane McCrae, Brian Turner, Patricia Smith, to name a few. It's just that they're hard to find if you don't know where to look. And looking from the outside, most contemporary writing is not for the populace; it's exclusionary. With that in mind, I would tell my aunt to read Robert Frost and not to try to bust in and find some meaning in what's being done today. If I see something I think she'll like, something that will mean something to her, I'll send it her way.
This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately; it relates to much of what Codrescu's The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans talks about. The book is from more than a decade ago, but is still vital thought on what's going on.
Ted Genoways (Virginia Quarterly Editor) has some smart things to say about the current state of fiction and literary journals here: The Death of Fiction, including:
But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.
Some call it putting random thoughts together, a friend recently referred to it as the 'smart-aleck' school of poetry. Contemporary leanings in poetry and fictive prose have been about seeming either smarter than their readership in making references the general population won't be privy to or cultivating a camaraderie of 'you get this, don't you? look how smart and funny we are' geared towards the other smart alecks of their trade.
My aunt says she's not smart enough and I tell her it's not her, it's writing right now, poetry, the contemporary drag. That's just where we are right now. The smart clothes we're putting on. Maybe it's the Bush years, the war years, how we were attacked 'right on our own soil,' the years of upping alerts, packing small vials to get on planes. Our culture of fear. There's so much that's so important that needs to be looked at, that perhaps we as a tribe are overwhelmed and so write about very little. We want to be smart enough to outrun the fear. We don't want to look at it. (And I'm only marking it from W's reign because I wasn't enough aware of the contemporary poetry scene prior to about 2000. I am ready to stand corrected.)
That said, there are some excellent contemporary poets and prose writers who are getting down the important things about the way we live now in understandable terms and with beautiful care to language. Richard Siken, Heather Derr-Smith, Shane McCrae, Brian Turner, Patricia Smith, to name a few. It's just that they're hard to find if you don't know where to look. And looking from the outside, most contemporary writing is not for the populace; it's exclusionary. With that in mind, I would tell my aunt to read Robert Frost and not to try to bust in and find some meaning in what's being done today. If I see something I think she'll like, something that will mean something to her, I'll send it her way.
This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately; it relates to much of what Codrescu's The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans talks about. The book is from more than a decade ago, but is still vital thought on what's going on.
Ted Genoways (Virginia Quarterly Editor) has some smart things to say about the current state of fiction and literary journals here: The Death of Fiction, including:
But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Reading Andrei Codrescu's Half-Naked Muse and the Boy in the Lake
But here is the thing: physical intimacy or potential intimacy is only a device for opening the floodgates to what really matters: words. What I want from my friends, male or female, are words. Great torrents of conversation, ramblings, monologues, infinite confidences, stories, anecdotes, confessions. I know that there are silent friendships out there just like there are platonic ones. I don't hold to those. I like my friendships warm, fleshy, verbal, sensual, sensorial... (50)
Me too, Mr. Codrescu. I think some of my prior relationships were gotten into mainly as a ruse for trapping people I admired into endless conversation. That said, I do enjoy the other aspects.
As the written depends only on the written, a poet finds himself inside a vicious circle of substance sucking by his own products' products. What was once living becomes Naturalism, Realism, Surrealism, Modernism, Postmodernism, etc. The speaker diminishes and the speech becomes all. But this is not the same speech as the sacred speech of the beginning: this is the even speech of machines, not the unpredictable story of the gods. This is speech turned upon its own devices, speech about speech. The cosmogonic myth and the fairy tale are replaced by the novel and television. The ritual-sacred utterance becomes a bourgeois commercial proposition feeding endlessly on the demands of a self-perpetuating market that is not an audience but, precisely, a market. Who reads? Who watches? The reader and the viewer have been replaced by the Spectator. Utterly different creatures these three: they vary physically. The body of the Spectator is a strategic map for the deployment of cultural products. The reader and the viewer used to touch. That is now forbidden: art is produced for the sake of production, which is to say for the sake of storage. It is made to be noted, credited and put in resumes, not to be actually read. In fact its message may be exactly the opposite: NOLE ME TANGERE, DO NOT READ ME. Art pour l'art is art contre l'homme.
The poet today is like Scheherazade: he must tell a story each night in order not to die. (130-131)
The workshop writers masquerade as non-mainstream writers but that's only an illusion; they simply cater to the surveyed needs of a different class of consumers, namely academic institutions. Notice I said "consumers," not "readers," because properly speaking, these workshop writers do not have readers: they produce their materials for resume-building in order to fill the self-generating slots of a growing bureaucracy. These writers do not even read other members of their resume-building subgroup. ...These writers are institutional insiders disguised as outsiders. (135)
What is prompting me additional thought, and which I don't feel adequately able to speak on yet, is the alignment here of resume and commercialization. The selling and the selling. While I agree to some degree, to some degree there are differences. Part of why I read like a pig, snuffling through the muck of everything I can lay my hands on, is to avoid this sense exactly. That no one reads. I read you. I read you all, provided that you never cease to entertain me with something I can't find anywhere else. This, too, a steep order. The business.
Also why, thus far, I'm happy to have avoided cogging in the machine of the academy. Or so I think. I don't have (as much) the anxiety of gross production.
To believe this entirely would be to lose hope. So I don't. But there's something to it certainly. I'm also always shocked by how many creative writing students are so resistant to reading. The grumblings about how much reading instructors are forcing on them. How they don't read for pleasure. (What is pleasure? Vacancy?) But then, in my experience anyway, they don't tend to be the most engaging storytellers.
*
The weather continues to consume me. Sun and warm that calls for my blanket on the beach. Sand, rock, grass. I used to go to Lake Padden a lot to read, after a bike ride there, after a run around the lake, after a swim. My own triathalon (taken slowly). I haven't been there in a while, not since I moved and the bike ride got tripled. There're closer shores. The bay is just down the street.
Last weekend a young man drowned in Lake Padden when the canoe he and a friend were rowing capsized. The lake is so manageable. Like a bathtub is how I've always thought of it. I swim across, I swim back, I swim across. It's three miles on the trail around. I don't know what the diameter is the length I swim across. But I just can't imagine anyone dying there. People in boats die young in this town. One boy was drowned, the other was saved. When the authorities pulled up the canoe from the lake bottom, the two life jackets, unworn, were still in it.
Me too, Mr. Codrescu. I think some of my prior relationships were gotten into mainly as a ruse for trapping people I admired into endless conversation. That said, I do enjoy the other aspects.
As the written depends only on the written, a poet finds himself inside a vicious circle of substance sucking by his own products' products. What was once living becomes Naturalism, Realism, Surrealism, Modernism, Postmodernism, etc. The speaker diminishes and the speech becomes all. But this is not the same speech as the sacred speech of the beginning: this is the even speech of machines, not the unpredictable story of the gods. This is speech turned upon its own devices, speech about speech. The cosmogonic myth and the fairy tale are replaced by the novel and television. The ritual-sacred utterance becomes a bourgeois commercial proposition feeding endlessly on the demands of a self-perpetuating market that is not an audience but, precisely, a market. Who reads? Who watches? The reader and the viewer have been replaced by the Spectator. Utterly different creatures these three: they vary physically. The body of the Spectator is a strategic map for the deployment of cultural products. The reader and the viewer used to touch. That is now forbidden: art is produced for the sake of production, which is to say for the sake of storage. It is made to be noted, credited and put in resumes, not to be actually read. In fact its message may be exactly the opposite: NOLE ME TANGERE, DO NOT READ ME. Art pour l'art is art contre l'homme.
The poet today is like Scheherazade: he must tell a story each night in order not to die. (130-131)
The workshop writers masquerade as non-mainstream writers but that's only an illusion; they simply cater to the surveyed needs of a different class of consumers, namely academic institutions. Notice I said "consumers," not "readers," because properly speaking, these workshop writers do not have readers: they produce their materials for resume-building in order to fill the self-generating slots of a growing bureaucracy. These writers do not even read other members of their resume-building subgroup. ...These writers are institutional insiders disguised as outsiders. (135)
What is prompting me additional thought, and which I don't feel adequately able to speak on yet, is the alignment here of resume and commercialization. The selling and the selling. While I agree to some degree, to some degree there are differences. Part of why I read like a pig, snuffling through the muck of everything I can lay my hands on, is to avoid this sense exactly. That no one reads. I read you. I read you all, provided that you never cease to entertain me with something I can't find anywhere else. This, too, a steep order. The business.
Also why, thus far, I'm happy to have avoided cogging in the machine of the academy. Or so I think. I don't have (as much) the anxiety of gross production.
To believe this entirely would be to lose hope. So I don't. But there's something to it certainly. I'm also always shocked by how many creative writing students are so resistant to reading. The grumblings about how much reading instructors are forcing on them. How they don't read for pleasure. (What is pleasure? Vacancy?) But then, in my experience anyway, they don't tend to be the most engaging storytellers.
*
The weather continues to consume me. Sun and warm that calls for my blanket on the beach. Sand, rock, grass. I used to go to Lake Padden a lot to read, after a bike ride there, after a run around the lake, after a swim. My own triathalon (taken slowly). I haven't been there in a while, not since I moved and the bike ride got tripled. There're closer shores. The bay is just down the street.
Last weekend a young man drowned in Lake Padden when the canoe he and a friend were rowing capsized. The lake is so manageable. Like a bathtub is how I've always thought of it. I swim across, I swim back, I swim across. It's three miles on the trail around. I don't know what the diameter is the length I swim across. But I just can't imagine anyone dying there. People in boats die young in this town. One boy was drowned, the other was saved. When the authorities pulled up the canoe from the lake bottom, the two life jackets, unworn, were still in it.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Insult to Genetic Researchers
…I took the pie home with me and ate it with my mouth gaping, painfully aware I was not a moose and would never be a moose, but I had loved you in such an eerie and unnatural way. (from “Peek-a-Moose”)
I didn’t love this book the way I normally love Mary Ruefle, though (of course) I enjoyed it. It was kind of like combining Mary Ruefle with Borges and some clever contemporary poet boy (I haven’t decided which). Her (first?) book of “prose,” from Wave Books, The Most of It was published in 2008.
Poets are so coarsely bred they believe in force-feeding, arranged marriages, predestined outbursts. (from “A Half-Sketched Head”)
I’m not sure what this means, but I like it. Especially the part about predestined outbursts. Yes, we do decide we’re going to explode upon the world.
My job, as far back as I can remember, was to look forward to being happy. (from “The Diary”)
I’ve always been determined to be “happy” now. To most people (and to me) this includes to a great measure not working, not having a j-o-b. Since being abandoned by my family early on, I did poverty. I decided that I could do poverty very well. By poverty maybe I mean budgeting. Regardless, for a long time I was very poor. From that time I decided never to work full time if I didn’t have to. Though just combining work-work with the work of writing, and with visual work, I almost always put in what would be considered “a lot of overtime” each week. Not working so much allows me to be something of a workaholic.
That said, I also like movies. And cocktails. Long walks with the dog and playing Scrabble.
Reading I don’t consider work or leisure. I’m not sure what I consider it. To say it’s breathing seems overused.
How many books have I read? Only one – just as anyone who is literate has read only one book, or, to be precise, is in the process of reading the one book they will complete in their lifetime. That book is the particular sum of every book they have ever read, written in the particular order in which those books were read. The book is never the same, for no two persons have ever read exactly the same books in exactly the same order. There is a great difference between The Secret of Larkspur Lane followed by Anna Karenina and Anna Karenina followed by The Secret of Larkspur Lane. And if What One Can Do With a Chafing Dish happens to fall between … as opposed to Don Quixote … well, I don’t mean to insult the genetic researchers, but I have a hunch that if no two people are alike, this is why. (from “A Half-Sketched Head”)
I didn’t love this book the way I normally love Mary Ruefle, though (of course) I enjoyed it. It was kind of like combining Mary Ruefle with Borges and some clever contemporary poet boy (I haven’t decided which). Her (first?) book of “prose,” from Wave Books, The Most of It was published in 2008.
Poets are so coarsely bred they believe in force-feeding, arranged marriages, predestined outbursts. (from “A Half-Sketched Head”)
I’m not sure what this means, but I like it. Especially the part about predestined outbursts. Yes, we do decide we’re going to explode upon the world.
My job, as far back as I can remember, was to look forward to being happy. (from “The Diary”)
I’ve always been determined to be “happy” now. To most people (and to me) this includes to a great measure not working, not having a j-o-b. Since being abandoned by my family early on, I did poverty. I decided that I could do poverty very well. By poverty maybe I mean budgeting. Regardless, for a long time I was very poor. From that time I decided never to work full time if I didn’t have to. Though just combining work-work with the work of writing, and with visual work, I almost always put in what would be considered “a lot of overtime” each week. Not working so much allows me to be something of a workaholic.
That said, I also like movies. And cocktails. Long walks with the dog and playing Scrabble.
Reading I don’t consider work or leisure. I’m not sure what I consider it. To say it’s breathing seems overused.
How many books have I read? Only one – just as anyone who is literate has read only one book, or, to be precise, is in the process of reading the one book they will complete in their lifetime. That book is the particular sum of every book they have ever read, written in the particular order in which those books were read. The book is never the same, for no two persons have ever read exactly the same books in exactly the same order. There is a great difference between The Secret of Larkspur Lane followed by Anna Karenina and Anna Karenina followed by The Secret of Larkspur Lane. And if What One Can Do With a Chafing Dish happens to fall between … as opposed to Don Quixote … well, I don’t mean to insult the genetic researchers, but I have a hunch that if no two people are alike, this is why. (from “A Half-Sketched Head”)
Monday, December 7, 2009
Sharon Stone and a Bag Full of Books
I’ve been neglecting this blog. I’m a bad blogger. Honestly I blame it on a) living, b) the damn cold (how can I blog if my fingers are freezing?), and c) books.
I recently thought about re-reading The Savage Detectives. I liked that book so much and I’m putting off reading some of Bolano’s others (the few I have left). I really wish he wasn’t dead. Anyway, instead of rereading, I ended up flipping through and looking at the notes I had made while I read it the first time. And reading a few reviews of it online. It's funny to me that several reviews didn't actually get past the first 150 pages. I wouldn't have any idea anything about the book if I'd only read that much. Anyway, I don’t know why I write notes. I have no papers to write, don’t belong to a book club, and I haven’t written a review in a long time. God, what a book. Anyway, you should read it.
Also distracting me from blogging this week: Lily Hoang’s Parabola, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Arthur Rimbaud, who I’m currently in love with. I’m reading/rereading/gorging myself on A Season in Hell like it’s a Thanksgiving turkey. Parabola is also a force to be reckoned with. Stretching the definition of “novel” to a nearly unrecognizable form, this book is entertaining like nothing I’ve come across. The book wants me to figure out who I am. Or at least that’s what I think the tests are for. I’m closer, anyway. I might be a De-Constructor or a Doer. Also, a Sadist. Generally also anytime a writer wants to throw science in, I’m pretty delighted. If you need a book to shake you up a bit, to look at your own work a little differently, this is a good place to start.
And Anthem? Well, I don’t think Rand writes anything that isn’t one. The scope is always larger than the pages in your hands. For some reason this slim allegorical tale makes me want to try my hand at filmmaking. Maybe it’s just the image of the light in the tunnel, maybe the glass house on the hill. Ah, collectivism. Perhaps I’ll get a group together to make the film. (No I won’t.)
This week also saw me on the road. I can be fussy on the road, but this was mostly a good time. Carol and I read in Portland with Emily Kendal Frey. Like I’d special-ordered it, Emily read Airport, which you can find here: http://issuu.com/bluehourpress/docs/airport.
I read some of the new conspiracies, and also from Money for Sunsets. Carol, in my opinion, did not read nearly long enough. Also, she did not read the poem about the girl in the photograph with a plastic gun. I will make her bend to my will on this soon.
The Democracy of Bad Food
When I travel I eat a lot. Every coffee is a soy latte (which I never get at home, too candy-like), four dollars for a drink seems like nothing when you're moving at rapid rates of speed, when you're away from and feel you'll never get home. I eat on the road. My favorites: Subway sandwiches, waxen chocolate Donettes, fruit leather, scratch-off lottery tickets.
On Wednesday we did not take the train. Instead of the 8am departure, I walked the dog in the morning, walked the little lady to the yoga, cleaned house, packed the car, rolled around on the (newly cleaned) floor with the dogs, picked the little lady up from yoga, all her duds in the trunk and ready to go. On the way we stopped at the Mount Vernon co-op, a half hour south of Bellingham, oh land of richly organic produce and fantastic prepared foods. The sandwich I got tasted like soap. Or rather, the first bite with cucumber and pepperjack cheese tasted like soap. The turkey was smoked and not what I asked for. And every bite I was waiting for soap. I ate half the sandwich, not good for me (I'm an eater) and all of a great big Snickerdoodle to rid myself of the memory of (what I thought was) goddamn soap. Cookie for lunch=excellent start to any trip.
In Portland, I did not ask where the Indian restaurant was. I was a little turned around, but I knew there was a really good place close by that I'd been to before. We walked a few blocks, it was cold. Or, I should say, C was cold. So we picked a nice-looking Thai place. The boys working there were nice, it was clean, they gave us water, smiles, got tipped well. Back in the room, hotel towels for napkins, bad TV going, we ate Thai food that tasted like paper towels. I ate just to feel the texture, then scraped all the peanuts off the top and nibbled on those. Then had a great big chocolate chip cookie. Peanuts and cookie for dinner=excellent continuation of trend. I also had a soda, which I never have. Thank you traveling belly.
In the morning (starved), I had bad coffee at the corner coffee shop and a tasteless and stale croissant. Back in the room, cozy and showered, I spied something with baguettes in the window on the next block and had the best salad I've had all week. Okay, the only salad, but it was good. Walnuts and apples and bleu cheese. Lettuce, too.
Dinner was a pizza delivered by an uncool boy with a bad faux hawk. The pizza was cold-ish, but excellent. I also had a soda, drank directly from a two-liter bottle C wanted nothing to do with. In the morning I had another piece and got all the way to Everett before I was hungry again (more than two-hundred miles). Had a Subway sandwich, the bread of which tasted ridiculously sweet. They put sugar in that? Seriously? I picked the nine grain. What does that mean to them? Is sugar the ninth grain? Then C cooked vegetables when we got home, though I went to happy hour and Art Walk and didn't get home until 8 (much earlier than I should have, tired, tired, for Art Walk). Ah, vegetables.
I made soup last night.
And How the City Could Have Failed Us
The drive down was peaceful, easy. The last few times I've taken the train because the last few times before that it's taken me, respectively, 10 hours to get to Portland, 10 hours to get to Monmouth, 6 hours to get to Oly. It was that last trip to Oly (only 140 miles) that made me give up on driving. Portland should take 5-6 hours; Olympia, 3 with bad traffic. This time it took 5 hours to get to the Fremont Bridge in Portland. It's the bridge you take just after you get onto 405 and is the second-longest tied arch bridge in the world (I like reading about bridges; I do not like driving on them).
My mother used to joke that she'd close her eyes while she drove over bridges. I don't do this. I open windows. You know, just in case I end up in the water. I don't want to die all boxed in and watching water.
We hit traffic, bad traffic. Enough to sit on the bridge for nearly an hour, feeling the breeze and the tremble from the weight of traffic. I understand about failure factors and how most bridges are constructed with a factor of at least 7, weight-wise. I should be calmed, but I'm not. I've seen far too many videos about bridge failures to want to be one of the cars that feels the weight give away, hear the whine of metal and the thundersnap of everything going wrong. I don't panic while driving over them. I panic while sitting still on them. C rolled down the window. It was bone cold and I rolled them up again. "But," she said. I said, "I know, but at this height it would be like hitting concrete; there's no way we'd survive the impact. I'm not at all worried about the water."
The drive back, even with all our stops only took us 5 hours. I have faith in traffic again.
Boys Who Look Like
Jay Farrar hasn't aged. I went to see Son Volt night before last, kind of with Oliver and Meredith, kind of by myself because C didn't want to go. I never saw Uncle Tupelo because I only knew about them after they broke up. Some people followed one second marriage (Wilco), some followed the other (Son Volt); I've always liked both for different reasons. I think they were stronger together still. Anodyne is a genius album. No Depression too. Neither Wilco nor Son Volt have (in my mind) achieved this kind of greatness.
Jay Farrar had a bandaid over the bridge of his nose, a little tummy, and a spot of grey in the scruff of his facial hair. Other than that, he looks exactly as he did when I first saw him in 1996.
The lead guitarist was strangely attractive to me. I haven't looked him up, he's nobody I recognized. Younger than, probably 30. I had a sudden thought that he was probably good in bed. And maybe why the woman next to me never took her eyes off his tremolo-ing hands.
Sera Cahoone opened. Not my type, and her stage presence didn't add anything to the music, so I hung back and talked while she played. I liked the music though.
The boy at the Mac store yesterday also had a huge gash on the bridge of his nose. A theme. He was blonde in that way that made me think of all the boys in Salt Lake City I saw the first time I ever went there. Blonde boys at the gas station pumping gas. Blonde boys pouring Slushees. Blonde boys holding the hands of their blonde children, crossing streets.
At a coffee shop before the reading Thursday night, the barista reminded me so much of B I almost missed her. The good B. The quick wit and innocently seductive way of moving. The one that didn't ultimately hate me. But really, I suppose all incarnations would have disliked me eventually.
I bought a pastry from her, just to go up to the counter again.
A Son Volt standard:
The Biggest Fan
If I'd been on stage I would have been terrified of him. I don't think there was anything wrong with him, he was just really into the show. He looked like somebody's dad who had just been let out for the night after a rough few weeks locked in a house where no one talked about anything but female issues. Balding, short hair rimming the shiny pate, a straight-man's jacket, ill-fitted jeans (everybody has jeans that will fit them right, but hardly anybody wears them), a polo shirt. Maybe he was drunk. Right up against the low stage. The stage is elevated only about a foot and a half higher than the rest of the crowd. One good step and anyone could be up there with little effort. The man rocked out, hands alternately in his pockets, alternately cupped to the back of his head (as in, oh-my-god-i-can't-believe-it's-really-them?), lots of movement from the upper torso, lots of singing along. People around him had to stand back. Seriously. By half way through the show he probably had an equal audience to the band. I could see the guys in the band look at him from time to time, never laughing the way the fools in the crowd did, probably waiting for the inevitably gun or knife or broken bottle to come at them. We live in crazy times. This man looked the part.
The Dirt of Powell's and Other Bookstores
Looking Glass Books actually had a surprisingly good collection. Lots of stuff from Dalkey Archive, a press I really admire.
If you look at their website it's a caboose and they say it's much bigger than it looks. It is much bigger than it looks. It's a caboose connected to a house porch closed over, connected to the front of a house, all of which contain walls of books. I didn't buy anything, I was too distracted by talking to people and talking to my wonderful aunts who made the long drive north to see us. C bought a couple of things, right now all I can remember is David Rees’ Get Your War On.
At Powells, everything seemed strangely gritty. Like the front room, mud room of a house will seem in winter. The gravel wants in. I felt it everywhere. But maybe I was just irritated they didn't have everything I wanted. What I did buy: Noy Holland's What Begins With Bird, Lawrence Sutin's When to Go into the Water, Lance Olsen's 10:01, Denise Duhamel's Ka-Ching, Rimbaud's Illuminations (though not the Donald Revell translation I wanted), and Herve Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.
Basic Instinct
I watched this on TV.
The last time I saw it was on a little TV in Mark's room in high school. Neither of us knew the other was gay. I knew that a) Sharon Stone had gone to high school near where we were and that she slept with the whole football team and also my neighbor who went to school with her, and b) that I would sleep with her if I had the chance. Mark and I ate popcorn. And talked loudly enough that his mother told us to shut up; his father had to work early the next day.
It's still a good movie. Sharon Stone is still hot. It occurs to me that I'm probably now about the age she was then. She seemed so old and untouchable. I have little interest in her now.
I recently thought about re-reading The Savage Detectives. I liked that book so much and I’m putting off reading some of Bolano’s others (the few I have left). I really wish he wasn’t dead. Anyway, instead of rereading, I ended up flipping through and looking at the notes I had made while I read it the first time. And reading a few reviews of it online. It's funny to me that several reviews didn't actually get past the first 150 pages. I wouldn't have any idea anything about the book if I'd only read that much. Anyway, I don’t know why I write notes. I have no papers to write, don’t belong to a book club, and I haven’t written a review in a long time. God, what a book. Anyway, you should read it.
Also distracting me from blogging this week: Lily Hoang’s Parabola, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Arthur Rimbaud, who I’m currently in love with. I’m reading/rereading/gorging myself on A Season in Hell like it’s a Thanksgiving turkey. Parabola is also a force to be reckoned with. Stretching the definition of “novel” to a nearly unrecognizable form, this book is entertaining like nothing I’ve come across. The book wants me to figure out who I am. Or at least that’s what I think the tests are for. I’m closer, anyway. I might be a De-Constructor or a Doer. Also, a Sadist. Generally also anytime a writer wants to throw science in, I’m pretty delighted. If you need a book to shake you up a bit, to look at your own work a little differently, this is a good place to start.
And Anthem? Well, I don’t think Rand writes anything that isn’t one. The scope is always larger than the pages in your hands. For some reason this slim allegorical tale makes me want to try my hand at filmmaking. Maybe it’s just the image of the light in the tunnel, maybe the glass house on the hill. Ah, collectivism. Perhaps I’ll get a group together to make the film. (No I won’t.)
This week also saw me on the road. I can be fussy on the road, but this was mostly a good time. Carol and I read in Portland with Emily Kendal Frey. Like I’d special-ordered it, Emily read Airport, which you can find here: http://issuu.com/bluehourpress/docs/airport.
I read some of the new conspiracies, and also from Money for Sunsets. Carol, in my opinion, did not read nearly long enough. Also, she did not read the poem about the girl in the photograph with a plastic gun. I will make her bend to my will on this soon.
The Democracy of Bad Food
When I travel I eat a lot. Every coffee is a soy latte (which I never get at home, too candy-like), four dollars for a drink seems like nothing when you're moving at rapid rates of speed, when you're away from and feel you'll never get home. I eat on the road. My favorites: Subway sandwiches, waxen chocolate Donettes, fruit leather, scratch-off lottery tickets.
On Wednesday we did not take the train. Instead of the 8am departure, I walked the dog in the morning, walked the little lady to the yoga, cleaned house, packed the car, rolled around on the (newly cleaned) floor with the dogs, picked the little lady up from yoga, all her duds in the trunk and ready to go. On the way we stopped at the Mount Vernon co-op, a half hour south of Bellingham, oh land of richly organic produce and fantastic prepared foods. The sandwich I got tasted like soap. Or rather, the first bite with cucumber and pepperjack cheese tasted like soap. The turkey was smoked and not what I asked for. And every bite I was waiting for soap. I ate half the sandwich, not good for me (I'm an eater) and all of a great big Snickerdoodle to rid myself of the memory of (what I thought was) goddamn soap. Cookie for lunch=excellent start to any trip.
In Portland, I did not ask where the Indian restaurant was. I was a little turned around, but I knew there was a really good place close by that I'd been to before. We walked a few blocks, it was cold. Or, I should say, C was cold. So we picked a nice-looking Thai place. The boys working there were nice, it was clean, they gave us water, smiles, got tipped well. Back in the room, hotel towels for napkins, bad TV going, we ate Thai food that tasted like paper towels. I ate just to feel the texture, then scraped all the peanuts off the top and nibbled on those. Then had a great big chocolate chip cookie. Peanuts and cookie for dinner=excellent continuation of trend. I also had a soda, which I never have. Thank you traveling belly.
In the morning (starved), I had bad coffee at the corner coffee shop and a tasteless and stale croissant. Back in the room, cozy and showered, I spied something with baguettes in the window on the next block and had the best salad I've had all week. Okay, the only salad, but it was good. Walnuts and apples and bleu cheese. Lettuce, too.
Dinner was a pizza delivered by an uncool boy with a bad faux hawk. The pizza was cold-ish, but excellent. I also had a soda, drank directly from a two-liter bottle C wanted nothing to do with. In the morning I had another piece and got all the way to Everett before I was hungry again (more than two-hundred miles). Had a Subway sandwich, the bread of which tasted ridiculously sweet. They put sugar in that? Seriously? I picked the nine grain. What does that mean to them? Is sugar the ninth grain? Then C cooked vegetables when we got home, though I went to happy hour and Art Walk and didn't get home until 8 (much earlier than I should have, tired, tired, for Art Walk). Ah, vegetables.
I made soup last night.
And How the City Could Have Failed Us
The drive down was peaceful, easy. The last few times I've taken the train because the last few times before that it's taken me, respectively, 10 hours to get to Portland, 10 hours to get to Monmouth, 6 hours to get to Oly. It was that last trip to Oly (only 140 miles) that made me give up on driving. Portland should take 5-6 hours; Olympia, 3 with bad traffic. This time it took 5 hours to get to the Fremont Bridge in Portland. It's the bridge you take just after you get onto 405 and is the second-longest tied arch bridge in the world (I like reading about bridges; I do not like driving on them).
My mother used to joke that she'd close her eyes while she drove over bridges. I don't do this. I open windows. You know, just in case I end up in the water. I don't want to die all boxed in and watching water.
We hit traffic, bad traffic. Enough to sit on the bridge for nearly an hour, feeling the breeze and the tremble from the weight of traffic. I understand about failure factors and how most bridges are constructed with a factor of at least 7, weight-wise. I should be calmed, but I'm not. I've seen far too many videos about bridge failures to want to be one of the cars that feels the weight give away, hear the whine of metal and the thundersnap of everything going wrong. I don't panic while driving over them. I panic while sitting still on them. C rolled down the window. It was bone cold and I rolled them up again. "But," she said. I said, "I know, but at this height it would be like hitting concrete; there's no way we'd survive the impact. I'm not at all worried about the water."
The drive back, even with all our stops only took us 5 hours. I have faith in traffic again.
Boys Who Look Like
Jay Farrar hasn't aged. I went to see Son Volt night before last, kind of with Oliver and Meredith, kind of by myself because C didn't want to go. I never saw Uncle Tupelo because I only knew about them after they broke up. Some people followed one second marriage (Wilco), some followed the other (Son Volt); I've always liked both for different reasons. I think they were stronger together still. Anodyne is a genius album. No Depression too. Neither Wilco nor Son Volt have (in my mind) achieved this kind of greatness.
Jay Farrar had a bandaid over the bridge of his nose, a little tummy, and a spot of grey in the scruff of his facial hair. Other than that, he looks exactly as he did when I first saw him in 1996.
The lead guitarist was strangely attractive to me. I haven't looked him up, he's nobody I recognized. Younger than, probably 30. I had a sudden thought that he was probably good in bed. And maybe why the woman next to me never took her eyes off his tremolo-ing hands.
Sera Cahoone opened. Not my type, and her stage presence didn't add anything to the music, so I hung back and talked while she played. I liked the music though.
The boy at the Mac store yesterday also had a huge gash on the bridge of his nose. A theme. He was blonde in that way that made me think of all the boys in Salt Lake City I saw the first time I ever went there. Blonde boys at the gas station pumping gas. Blonde boys pouring Slushees. Blonde boys holding the hands of their blonde children, crossing streets.
At a coffee shop before the reading Thursday night, the barista reminded me so much of B I almost missed her. The good B. The quick wit and innocently seductive way of moving. The one that didn't ultimately hate me. But really, I suppose all incarnations would have disliked me eventually.
I bought a pastry from her, just to go up to the counter again.
A Son Volt standard:
The Biggest Fan
If I'd been on stage I would have been terrified of him. I don't think there was anything wrong with him, he was just really into the show. He looked like somebody's dad who had just been let out for the night after a rough few weeks locked in a house where no one talked about anything but female issues. Balding, short hair rimming the shiny pate, a straight-man's jacket, ill-fitted jeans (everybody has jeans that will fit them right, but hardly anybody wears them), a polo shirt. Maybe he was drunk. Right up against the low stage. The stage is elevated only about a foot and a half higher than the rest of the crowd. One good step and anyone could be up there with little effort. The man rocked out, hands alternately in his pockets, alternately cupped to the back of his head (as in, oh-my-god-i-can't-believe-it's-really-them?), lots of movement from the upper torso, lots of singing along. People around him had to stand back. Seriously. By half way through the show he probably had an equal audience to the band. I could see the guys in the band look at him from time to time, never laughing the way the fools in the crowd did, probably waiting for the inevitably gun or knife or broken bottle to come at them. We live in crazy times. This man looked the part.
The Dirt of Powell's and Other Bookstores
Looking Glass Books actually had a surprisingly good collection. Lots of stuff from Dalkey Archive, a press I really admire.
If you look at their website it's a caboose and they say it's much bigger than it looks. It is much bigger than it looks. It's a caboose connected to a house porch closed over, connected to the front of a house, all of which contain walls of books. I didn't buy anything, I was too distracted by talking to people and talking to my wonderful aunts who made the long drive north to see us. C bought a couple of things, right now all I can remember is David Rees’ Get Your War On.
At Powells, everything seemed strangely gritty. Like the front room, mud room of a house will seem in winter. The gravel wants in. I felt it everywhere. But maybe I was just irritated they didn't have everything I wanted. What I did buy: Noy Holland's What Begins With Bird, Lawrence Sutin's When to Go into the Water, Lance Olsen's 10:01, Denise Duhamel's Ka-Ching, Rimbaud's Illuminations (though not the Donald Revell translation I wanted), and Herve Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.
Basic Instinct
I watched this on TV.
The last time I saw it was on a little TV in Mark's room in high school. Neither of us knew the other was gay. I knew that a) Sharon Stone had gone to high school near where we were and that she slept with the whole football team and also my neighbor who went to school with her, and b) that I would sleep with her if I had the chance. Mark and I ate popcorn. And talked loudly enough that his mother told us to shut up; his father had to work early the next day.
It's still a good movie. Sharon Stone is still hot. It occurs to me that I'm probably now about the age she was then. She seemed so old and untouchable. I have little interest in her now.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Grass, Blood, Books
Today is day three of recovery. Much of the bleeding has stopped and Carol's mom is on her way home. The patient is at present sleeping soundly on the couch with the (big) dog. Both snore quietly, but don't let on that I said so.
Outside the sound of lawnmowers is comforting, even considering I know what damage they do (putting more crap into the atmosphere per gallon than any other engine). It seems as soon as one mower stops, another starts up. The boy next door just mowed their small patch and now the house on the other side of us has started up. Soon, if the skies stay dry for now, I'll probably go out and make the big squeaking sound that I make when I mow. The sound that does not sound like the rest. The push mower. It takes some sweat, and I'm my own self-propeller. A week and a half ago (the first mowing of the year), I learned that the extension cord for the trimmer only reaches half the front yard. If the neighbors didn't think we were batty before, me on my hands and knees trimming the grass around the picket fence with a pair of scissors probably pushed the general consensus over.
I haven't felt much like writing lately, not writing anything, emails, poems (napowrimo be damned), revising the novel, none of it. Somehow getting dirty on long dog walks and from gardening (you should see my backyard!) seems more vital to me than it does. It ebbs and flows. I try not to get too anxious when I don't want to write. It's like getting infant me to eat peas or carrots. It was a mess and most of it ended up on the floor or in my hair. I'm not sure the metaphor is right, but there it is. I just don't want to. In the past three years I've accomplished more than in the rest of my life combined. I'm pretty happy with where things are. Reading also takes precedence.
This year, thus far:
1. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity – Slavoj Zizek
2. The Capital of Solitude – Gregory Orfalea
3. The Automatic Message, the Magnetic Fields, the Immaculate Conception (Atlas Anti-Classics) – Andre Breton, Philippe Soupault, Paul Eluard
4. Bad Alchemy – Dionisio Martinez
5. Singing from the Well – Reinaldo Arenas
6. Dreamtigers (El Hacedor) – Jorge Luis Borges
7. Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object – Kathleen Rooney
8. Only This Blue – Betsy Warland
9. In the Devil’s Territory – Kyle Minor
10. The End of Rude Handles – Jen Tynes
11. Earth in the Attic – Fady Joudah
12. Too Close to the Falls – Christine Gildenour
13. The Art of the Poetic Line – James Longenbach
14. Names on the Land – George Stewart
15. A Humument – Tom Phillips
16. In the Land of the Free – Geoffrey Forsyth
17. Bloodroot – Betsy Warland
18. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
19. The Bride Minaret – Heather Derr-Smith
20. Blessing of the Animals – Brenda Miller
21. Meteoric Flowers – Elizabeth Willis
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
23. The Massacre at El Mozote – Mark Danner
24. Becoming Abigail – Chris Abani
25. Airport – Emily Kendal Frey
26. The Doorbells of Florence – Andrew Losowsky
27. This In Which – George Oppen
28. Pain Fantasy – Jason Bredle
29. Eva Hesse Drawing – Catherin de Zegher, ed.
30. Falsework – Gary Geddes
31. Seeing is the Name of the Thing One Sees: a life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin
32. Areas of Fog – Joseph Massey
33. Travel – Yuichi Yokoyama
34. Nada – Carman Laforet
35. In the Mode of Disappearance – Jonathan Weinert
36. Dark Thirty – Santee Frazier
37. Blood Dazzler – Patricia Smith
38. Quadrifariam – Frank Samperi
39. The Man Without Qualities (Part One) – Robert Musil
40. Undersleep – Julie Doxsee
41. The Glass Castle – Jeannette Walls
42. Wetlands - Charlotte Roche
Outside the sound of lawnmowers is comforting, even considering I know what damage they do (putting more crap into the atmosphere per gallon than any other engine). It seems as soon as one mower stops, another starts up. The boy next door just mowed their small patch and now the house on the other side of us has started up. Soon, if the skies stay dry for now, I'll probably go out and make the big squeaking sound that I make when I mow. The sound that does not sound like the rest. The push mower. It takes some sweat, and I'm my own self-propeller. A week and a half ago (the first mowing of the year), I learned that the extension cord for the trimmer only reaches half the front yard. If the neighbors didn't think we were batty before, me on my hands and knees trimming the grass around the picket fence with a pair of scissors probably pushed the general consensus over.
I haven't felt much like writing lately, not writing anything, emails, poems (napowrimo be damned), revising the novel, none of it. Somehow getting dirty on long dog walks and from gardening (you should see my backyard!) seems more vital to me than it does. It ebbs and flows. I try not to get too anxious when I don't want to write. It's like getting infant me to eat peas or carrots. It was a mess and most of it ended up on the floor or in my hair. I'm not sure the metaphor is right, but there it is. I just don't want to. In the past three years I've accomplished more than in the rest of my life combined. I'm pretty happy with where things are. Reading also takes precedence.
This year, thus far:
1. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity – Slavoj Zizek
2. The Capital of Solitude – Gregory Orfalea
3. The Automatic Message, the Magnetic Fields, the Immaculate Conception (Atlas Anti-Classics) – Andre Breton, Philippe Soupault, Paul Eluard
4. Bad Alchemy – Dionisio Martinez
5. Singing from the Well – Reinaldo Arenas
6. Dreamtigers (El Hacedor) – Jorge Luis Borges
7. Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object – Kathleen Rooney
8. Only This Blue – Betsy Warland
9. In the Devil’s Territory – Kyle Minor
10. The End of Rude Handles – Jen Tynes
11. Earth in the Attic – Fady Joudah
12. Too Close to the Falls – Christine Gildenour
13. The Art of the Poetic Line – James Longenbach
14. Names on the Land – George Stewart
15. A Humument – Tom Phillips
16. In the Land of the Free – Geoffrey Forsyth
17. Bloodroot – Betsy Warland
18. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
19. The Bride Minaret – Heather Derr-Smith
20. Blessing of the Animals – Brenda Miller
21. Meteoric Flowers – Elizabeth Willis
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
23. The Massacre at El Mozote – Mark Danner
24. Becoming Abigail – Chris Abani
25. Airport – Emily Kendal Frey
26. The Doorbells of Florence – Andrew Losowsky
27. This In Which – George Oppen
28. Pain Fantasy – Jason Bredle
29. Eva Hesse Drawing – Catherin de Zegher, ed.
30. Falsework – Gary Geddes
31. Seeing is the Name of the Thing One Sees: a life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin
32. Areas of Fog – Joseph Massey
33. Travel – Yuichi Yokoyama
34. Nada – Carman Laforet
35. In the Mode of Disappearance – Jonathan Weinert
36. Dark Thirty – Santee Frazier
37. Blood Dazzler – Patricia Smith
38. Quadrifariam – Frank Samperi
39. The Man Without Qualities (Part One) – Robert Musil
40. Undersleep – Julie Doxsee
41. The Glass Castle – Jeannette Walls
42. Wetlands - Charlotte Roche
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Live Nude Girl in the Devil's Territory, coming to a city near you!
If you're in Bellingham, or have the means and the will to get here the evening of Saturday, February 7, please join me in celebrating the recent release of Kathleen Rooney's memoir Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object and Kyle Minor's short story collection In the Devil's Territory, both excellent reads. Kyle and Kathleen have graciously asked me to appear on the ticket for their Bellingham reading at Village Books. Prior to being asked to read with them, I knew nothing about Kyle's work and tout de suite took advantage of the holiday sale over at Dzanc Books to grab myself a copy of his collection (as well as the latest Yannick Murphy book, In a Bear's Eye). Dzanc Books is a new press and if Kyle's book is any indication of the quality of the rest of their output, I think we're in for a long and excellent ride with them. As I do with any book of great merit, I have been taking my time getting through In the Devil's Territory (though I plan to have it finished before they roll into town). The (long) short story "A Day Meant to Do Less" is a complicated masterpiece that beautifully navigates multiple time shifts and perspective, including what has proven for me the best written illustration of dementia I have ever read in which the character exists on several planes of time and experience at once. I really can't emphasize enough how worth your time this book is.
Kathleen Rooney, thus far better known to me as a poet (mostly for her moving and at times appropriately jarring and disconcerting look at the art and oddness of wedding in 2007's winner of Switchback Books's Gatewood Prize, Oneiromance), has outdone herself with Live Nude Girl. Kathleen's memoir primarily addresses her experience as a nude art model and the strange perspectives that go along with that. At times she's balancing on several different levels, deftly melding art history, theory, and popular culture with sometimes wonderfully almost clinical narrative of the mechanics of modeling, as well as excerpts from childhood memory when supposing what may have allowed her this direction. As someone comfortable with my body, yet not willing to disrobe for strangers and having never examined this for myself, I read this book with almost voyeuristic pleasure. Check out this and other books by K. Rooney here: www.kathleenrooney.com. Oh! And she's also one of the founding editors of one of the best small presses in recent years to rocket onto the scene, Rose Metal Press (www.rosemetalpress.com).
Anyway, my lunch menu is tuna salad and Lost, and it's really calling me. Check Kathleen Rooney, Kyle Minor and I out Saturday, February 7 at Village Books, 7PM. To round out a triple-genre threat, I'll likely read a few poems to start things off. For other dates and locations, check the poster above or see the tour blog here.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Go hear!
TONIGHT!
Village Books! 7PM!
Set on the margins of Seattle, beneath bridges and on the banks of waterways, in strip clubs and flooded farmland, the prose poems in Tinderbox Lawn illuminate the intersection of domesticity and bohemia, orthodoxy and passion. Each untitled block of prose constitutes a novel-in-miniature, with shadow characters and shards of plot. The intensity of Carol Guess' poems builds through lyrical language and recurring images, capturing the moment when "the small mad heart at the center of things stall mid-tick." Carol Guess is the author of two novels, Seeing Dell and Switch; a memoir, Gaslight, and a collection of poetry, Femme's Dictionary. She is an associate professor of English at Western Washington University.
Poet Joseph Massey has this to say about TINDERBOX LAWN:
The sharply cut lines of Tinderbox Lawn veer from the stark and crystalline―”think hard enough about broken glass and it becomes rain”―to the blur of memory and dreams: ”silver with raindrops―no, barbed wire.” And between those conditions the possibility and impossibility of love lingers throughout, amidst vivid details of urban spectacle. Carol Guess, through brilliantly wrought blocks of prose, has made the kind of poetry you'll want to keep on your night-stand; poetry that won't leave the back of your head―the pulse and insistent whisper of it―a “bridge between faith and decay.”
Village Books! 7PM!
Set on the margins of Seattle, beneath bridges and on the banks of waterways, in strip clubs and flooded farmland, the prose poems in Tinderbox Lawn illuminate the intersection of domesticity and bohemia, orthodoxy and passion. Each untitled block of prose constitutes a novel-in-miniature, with shadow characters and shards of plot. The intensity of Carol Guess' poems builds through lyrical language and recurring images, capturing the moment when "the small mad heart at the center of things stall mid-tick." Carol Guess is the author of two novels, Seeing Dell and Switch; a memoir, Gaslight, and a collection of poetry, Femme's Dictionary. She is an associate professor of English at Western Washington University.
Poet Joseph Massey has this to say about TINDERBOX LAWN:
The sharply cut lines of Tinderbox Lawn veer from the stark and crystalline―”think hard enough about broken glass and it becomes rain”―to the blur of memory and dreams: ”silver with raindrops―no, barbed wire.” And between those conditions the possibility and impossibility of love lingers throughout, amidst vivid details of urban spectacle. Carol Guess, through brilliantly wrought blocks of prose, has made the kind of poetry you'll want to keep on your night-stand; poetry that won't leave the back of your head―the pulse and insistent whisper of it―a “bridge between faith and decay.”
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