If you say hide, we'll hide.

Sometimes I wonder why I haven't gotten farther. That disease that every writer has. Then sometimes I feel shy about the things I have. The wondering of 'Should I have this when people I know who are just as good as I am don't have what I have?' In the past two days this has come up. To which one person replied 'I don't know anyone who works harder than you do.' And another replied 'All of getting anywhere is more about persistence than anything.' I do need to own up sometimes to how effing hard I work. I mean, when I work, of course. Today I hiked with the dog all morning and afternoon, talked to Sheri on the phone for two hours, then watched three episodes of Dexter. Now I am weighing the options of sleep and theory. Specifically many many many many pages of theory on small-print blurry pdf that I have to have read for Tuesday.



Tonight I wish my vortex worked. Or that I could fold the 5. I will take theory to bed instead. I was going to do a post on recent things read. Or about sadness of leaving planted things. About my dog's negative type and how I hold her collar and rub her chest until the bad men pass. I was going to post on changes and things staying the same. What does and doesn't. About the reading the other night. And conspiracies, conspiracies, conspiracies. And how everyone I talked to had something else I needed to read. And now people don't understand that this is like handing a junkie a needle. You tell me I should read something, I read something. It is a problem. I could have worse problems. But you can see the anxiety in this, right?

Happy birthday, 'dolf.

Know that I still miss you and love you wherever you are.

One More Stop, plus 60 miles

TITANIUM HIP CHECK



There's a way that I've been pretty anti-poetry lately, anti-writing. Maybe it's burnout, maybe it's recognition that starting in a few weeks and for some long time, I will be expected to "perform" (i.e. write). Or maybe it's some current need for unfiltered, unfettered experience. Maybe I want to see things, feel things, do things without any thought for how to translate anything into anything "meaning"ful. The thought of all that exhausts me. Even just sitting down. To tell you what I'm seeing, feeling, doing. Not to mention the parsing out and piecing back together.


SHOTGUNS 20% OFF

What the flashing LCD light says. As I write this - in a notebook, my computer not having been turned on in days - 3am on the train outside of Hutchinson, Kansas, where I lived as a very small child. I watch two small, unaccompanied children gather their things. They are probably 6 and 9, about the age my brother and I left this land already too familiar with caring for ourselves, each other, our mother. Already too familiar with "adult things." I wonder as I watch the younger child shake his brother, pointing to the land outside, dark fields, scattered streets at 3am, if there is something to this land that ages children prematurely. The conductor asks "are you traveling with anyone?" The older kid responds "no, sir."




EVERYTHING LIKE OCEAN

I remember the heat, the dust, and then the snow drifts in winter, scooping up to the roof of the house. Where we could climb there. Everything extreme. And slow. Days spent corralling toads and digging ditches just to watch the creatures get nervous in a crowded bucket, just to watch the ground blow by from under it. And the trees caked with dry ivy we climbed in. Sometimes poison ivy. That I made my brother eat. I did it. I was not allergic. Sorry. Everything unattended. And when we fell, we fell. Trees and red splotches. Wounds and underwater.


OSAGE, CAN YOU SEE

Grandpa knows none of this history, though some he can guess from when we were younger, even younger. The condition we were in sometimes when we were "dropped off" for a day, a few days, a week. Until Grandma said No More Of This. That she wouldn't deal with my mother, the loose, loose cannon wrecking my father, her only child. Or deal with the children - chapped, bruised, silent, bleeding - who were never part of her.

I don't want to write about any of this. It might be days before I turn on my computer, before I post this from the tiny Public Library, the only place in grandpa's town with wi-fi. I will walk five blocks through 115 degree heat to check email and to maybe post this. Right now as I fast approach the town of the 3am train station (now 4am train station, train late for the crazy weather in western Kansas) I just hope my rental car is there. I haven't more than napped in about three days. And I've got a long dark drive yet to go. I will take a few minutes in my overtired to learn the car's controls. Find the lights. Find the windshield wipers. Find the FM stereo. The radio will be playing what was playing when I left in the early 1980s. It always is.

from Haruki Murakami's HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD

“Listen. I may not be much, but I’m all I’ve got. Maybe you need a magnifying glass to find my face in my high school graduation photo. Maybe I haven’t got any family or friends. Yes, yes, I know all that. But, strange as it might seem, I’m not entirely dissatisfied with this life. It could be because this split personality of mine has made a stand-up comedy routine of it all. I wouldn’t know, would I? But whatever the reason, I feel pretty much at home with what I am. I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want any unicorns behind fences.”

[Book #95 for 2011]

Innovative structure got me thinking about the duality of living multiple lives. Like the way we move through the world as it is, but then when we're (or I should say, when I am) in the middle of a writing project we are also simultaneously moving through that world. Sometimes time moves similarly in both worlds, sometimes not.

Every time I read something with a fantasy / surreal element to it, I think: sure, why not. And then for a while that's what will make the most sense to me. Unicorns. Walled cities. Shadows cleaved from bodies. Subconscious shuffling of numerical data set off by a sequence of tones. Underworld with flesh-eating inklings. Hot librarians. And the end of the world. But I don't believe a switch will be toggled for permanence in either field.

from Ariel Dorfman's MASCARA

If I began to send drawings to her, it was because I wanted to be invited to her birthday. No matter how unsightly those drawings might be, they were a way of asking for attention. Each morning, when she arrived at her desk, she found the gawky colors I had worked on so hard. It is true that she never thanked me for them, not even casting me one of those smiles which you fabricate, Doctor; but I comforted myself with the thought that she was receiving them like a remote queen who, however accustomed to the cheers of the multitude, nevertheless could feel gratified by an offering from a worm.

Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect

I think buildings excite me more than words do even. I mean, there's also trees. Sometimes I can be stopped in my tracks by the shape and form of a tree, fascinated at thinking about the different factors in genetics and environment, even the day to day, that went into the tree making the choices it made for growth and then the outcome aesthetically. I find myself taking a lot of photos of individual trees. And then I upload them to my computer and I'm all like, what do I do with this? I have a folder titled "Trees that I Liked." Past tense because most of them I won't see again. I started to call it "Trees that Excite Me," but that's kind of weird. Oh, so buildings. I like houses, will sometimes spend much of a Sunday afternoon walking all over town and going into every Open House I come across. I like to see how people use interior spaces, but it's the structure itself that gets me. To see the evolution of choices in living spaces. The house across the street from me having a pantry cellar. I mean, just that one room that was cut deeper from the crawl space, the narrow and dangerous twist of stairs, and then the shelves. I went down there and I didn't ever want to re-emerge. The weirdness of that space. I could have set up a desk in there and lived the rest of my life by the light coming through the little east window. So much light! But it was underground, hidden, bomb-sheltery, everything painted white. I spend at least part of my day every day looking at sites of architecture. Sometimes individual architects, sometimes reading about their lives and influences, sometimes re-learning the names of the features on gothic cathedrals, sometimes scrolling through photos of libraries and schools, sometimes looking at how "modern" is interpreted in different parts of the world (Scandinavia! for example), more often just going from place to place online finding random buildings though. I think I would have been an architect if it wasn't for the fact that my stepfather was an architect.

The Half-Year List

1. Where We Think It Should Go – Claire Becker

2. Doctor Copernicus – John Banville

3. The Book of Frank – CA Conrad

4. The Irrationalist – Suzanne Buffam

5. Bobcat Country – Brandi Homan

6. The Book of Questions – Pablo Neruda

7. The History of Violets - Marosa di Giorgio

8. Octopus – Tom C. Hunley

9. The Planets – Dava Sobel

10. Accident – Nicholas Mosley

11. A Natural History of the Senses – Diane Ackerman

12. Crash Dome – Alex Phillips

13. The Country of Loneliness – Dawn Paul

14. Dayglo – James Meetze

15. ----------FEBRUARY----------Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrl Revolution – Sara Marcus

16. The Terror of Living – Urban Waite

17. Tocqueville – Khaled Mattawa

18. The Island of the Colorblind – Oliver Sacks

19. Black-Eyed Heifer – Shelly Taylor

20. Stalin in Aruba – Shelley Pahuk

21. Breaking the Map – Kim-An Lieberman

22. The Last Waltz in Santiago: And Other Poems of Exile and Disappearance – Ariel Dorfman

23. What Kind – Martha Zweig

24. Sasquatch Stories – Mike Topp

25. Coming Through Slaughter – Michael Ondaatje

26. Gallowglass – Susan Tichy

27. Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem – ed. Stuart Friebert & David Young

28. Nox – Anne Carson

29. A Moveable Feast – Earnest Hemingway

30. Hunter Mnemonics – Deborah Woodard

31. Easter Rabbit – Joseph Young

32. ----------MARCH----------The Worse-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel – Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht

33. Recipes for Endangered Species – Traci O’Connor

34. Blue for the Plough – Dara Weir

35. The Bodyfeel Lexicon – Jessica Bozek

36. The Myth of the Simple Machines – Laurel Snyder

37. Green Cammie – Crysta Casey

38. Mad to Live – Randall Brown

39. The Nightyard – Stephanie Anderson

40. The Energy of Slaves – Leonard Cohen

41. Pee on Water – Rachel B. Glaser

42. ----------APRIL----------The Tiny Wife – Andrew Kaufman

43. Chelsea Girls – Eileen Myles

44. Hinge & Sign – Heather McHugh

45. A History of the Human Family – Sasha Steensen

46. Man’s Companions – Joanna Rucco

47. Sing, Mongrel – Claire Hero

48. The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits – Kim Gek Lin Short

49. One More Theory About Happiness – Paul Guest

50. The Spell of the Sensuous – David Abram

51. Cut Away – Catherine Kirkwood

52. Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More – Mark Strand

53. Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson

54. The Field Guide to Flash Fiction – ed. Tara Masih

55. Alive and Dead in Indiana – Michael Martone

56. The Long-Legged Fly – James Sallis

57. The Father of the Predicaments – Heather McHugh

58. People are Tiny in Paintings of China – Cynthia Arrieu-King

59. ----------MAY----------Invitation to a Beheading – Vladimir Nabokov

60. The Art Lover – Carol Maso

61. The CIA and the Cult of Intelligance – Victor Marchetti & John D. Marks

62. Halfsteps + Cloudfang – Daniela Olszewska

63. Strange as This Weather Has Been – Ann Pancake

64. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives – David Eagleman

65. Soot- Jeff Walt

66. The Inquisition Yours – Jen Currin

67. The Tears of Eros – Georges Bataille

68. Advanced ELVIS Course – CAConrad

69. Theory of Religion – Georges Bataille

70. Vertical Hold – Jeff Simpson

71. The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems 1953-1981 – Amelia Rosselli

72. How the Broken Lead the Blind – Matt Bell

73. ----------JUNE----------Reality Hunger: A Manifesto – David Shields

74. At the Point – Joseph Massey

75. Rust Or Go Missing – Lily Brown

76. Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel

77. Dunstan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master – Kevin Prufer & D.A. Powell, eds.

78. Goat Song – Brad Kessler

79. Deviant Propulsion – CAConrad

80. 2666 – Roberto Bolano