what big eyes you have, Virginia Woolf

So my distance vision is not really the best. Driving around is always exciting because I need to be immediately in front of a sign before I can receive its course-setting instructions. My imagination, therefore, plays a fair part in sighting what's far-off. So imagine my surprise yesterday as I drove east on University and spied, looming above the line of car roofs, what appeared to be the head of Virginia Woolf, looking especially huge and saturnine, strapped to the top of a Volvo.

I had a moment of wincing clarity: I'd finally lost my mind. For that instant, I determined that I'd finally had the psychotic break I'd long dreaded. Maybe this decapitated author existed only for me, a private dancer here to haunt my demented mind. To my great relief as I neared her, though, the splendor of the plaster head's reality was unmistakable. She was real. Phew.

I pulled over, the bulldog in me engaged and ready for the play-tug negotiations that would ensue as I convinced the lucky owner of our star-crossing, that he was absolutely meant to sign the big Ginny over to me. I already began the plans for her arrival in my small, but willing home. She could sit in my window and look out over the downtown Oakland cityscape. A bay window of our own. To my disappointment, though, as I walked up the street "Virginia" revealed herself to be none other than the miserable matron from—yes, that's right—American Gothic.

I went into the store anyway. I'd parked, after all. In the SF Bay Area, that's commitment. And well, it ends up I just loved this guy. I asked if he had a digital camera (I only had my phone with me). He didn't, but said that he actually went over and drove around the Google campus whenever he had Gothic wife strapped to the car. His strategy was to sucker the deck kids roundabout those parts to take pix and post them online—just like I was wanting to do. "Free advertising," he smiled. And look at that. Per his plan, I was charmed enough by the outsized oddity that I inadvertently ended up advertising for Rerun clothes (see side of Volvo). The guy was a regular guerilla marketing marvel.

just a few leagues under

Some journalist somewhere (The Atlantic?) wrote that we've lost our appreciation of noble melancholy. That was years back and I bit hard and deep into that truth like a starved sea lion come upon the perfect, available prey.

Melancholy gets brighter, more useful as time paints in broader backdrops for me. Today's a day off. I never take them. It's all mine and I'm in my PJs at noon, drinking coffee, reading poetry.

I don't read Adrienne Rich enough.

I think it's because I nearly always experience a kind of coitus interruptus with her. She builds it with precision, word by turn by wait wait go—and every fiber sharpens its form, gets taut—only to fold back in together too soon, relaxation of quicksand resolution. Frustration. We should take longer to get there. That's the point.

See the end of this poem. It rounds back to its beginning, much too much of an echo, especially for something underwater. The whole long metaphor demands muffling and tenacious, difficult movement toward exact discovery, a revelation beyond the expected identification of being wreckage and diver at once. We're with her underwater, all the pressure on our ears, streams of bubbles disrupting upward from the Regulator, the crippling, slowing flippers. I need not just to see something down there, to glimpse it, but—well, maybe my expectation is unrealistic here—to startle when something murky in this wreckage reaches out to grab me by the hair. Increasingly, I demand the shock of the true.

And I have to work hard to understand the punctuation choices in here. Especially since we're talking about words as maps, I'd like more direction along my short lines. Boss me around with a comma now and then. It's not too much to ask.

All that said, I love the embedded mots justes: maritime floss, ribs of disaster, vermeil cargo. These words—I have no idea why—remind me of Bishop's rosettes of lime, her isinglass, the oarlocks on their strings. And then this line, it brought up Gilbert: "we are the half-destroyed instruments / that once held to a course," more the first half than the second. All in all, it makes me consider jumping overboard the next time I visit the otters at Elkhorn Slough. Just to feel the nervy risk and reality of my long hair floating loose down under the planet's deep dark.

Diving into the Wreck

by Adrienne Rich


First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

fall beyond all fear

Autumn! We're moving into my favorite season, the time of my first memories, the showy months of firecracker color and moody disintegrations. Time to reflect and correct!

This (ever so slightly edited) excerpt of a letter from Rabbi Michael Lerner is a fine starting point. I do struggle against the idea of a Godplace or a Godself (seems to me this necessarily includes any place that can be called a place). Nonetheless, I'm grateful, what with all my distracted troublemaking and ego-based adventuring, that I receive stuff like this to remind me what I ought to take seriously at the center:

-------------------------------------------------

It is particularly appropriate for 9/11, as we pray, that Americans can let go of their desire for revenge and move to a higher level of consciousness, abandoning the fantasy that somehow "homeland security" can be achieved through militarism and dominating others (as the U.S. Administration and its hired guns in Iraq are trying to do).

Let us pray for the healing of the fear and trauma that guides the policies of the U.S. government and many of its leaders. It is also appropriate for Ramadan and for the Jewish High Holy Days, days when we search our deeds and contemplate how far we have strayed from our highest God place within. We know that each of us is deeply imperfect, and though we have been wronged by others, our spiritual traditions teach us to move beyond whatever anger we've experienced to a place of forgiveness. We must start that process by forgiving ourselves also, for not being all that we wish we could be, and for losing contact with our holy God place within us.

Imagine how blessed our world could be if that path of forgiveness became part of the reality of America's relationship to the world, Israel's and Palestine's relationship to each other, the Muslim world and the West's relationship to each other, the Chinese and Indian and Western relatonships with each other. And from that forgiveness, we would move lovingly to change economic and political arrangements that are oppressive or hurtful both domestically and internationally. Well, we may not be able to make all this happen in the next few weeks, but one place we can start is by using this prayer every night of our lives before we go to sleep.

Many blessings to you, and I humbly beg your pardon for any ways that I have hurt, offended, or otherwise transgressed in relationship to you!

Rabbi Michael Lerner

Bedtime Prayer of Forgiveness

I forgive every person who has hurt or upset me.

May no one be punished because of me.
May no one suffer from karmic consequences for hurting or upsetting me.

Help me become aware of the ways I may have unintentionally or intentionally hurt others, and please give me guidance and strength to rectify those hurts and to develop the sensitivity to stop acting in a hurtful way.

Let me forgive others, let me forgive myself—but also let me change in ways that make it easy for me to avoid paths of hurtfulness to others.

I seek peace. Let me BE peace.
I seek justice. Let me be just.
I seek a world of kindness. Let me be kind.
I seek a world of generosity. Let me be generous with all that I have.
I seek a world of sharing. Let me share all that I have.
I seek a world of giving. Let me be giving to all around me.
I seek a world of love. Let me be loving beyond all reason, beyond all normal expectation, beyond all societal frameworks that tell me how much love is "normal," beyond all fear that giving too much love will leave me with too little.

writers with sharpies

Stopped in at Writers with Drinks, a reading series that, as it happens, involves a regrettable amount of just the kind of spoken word I really don't understand or appreciate.

My attention span petered out during the last poet's performance— somewhere near the tenth complete line of expletives, delivered in that grinding trochaic rhythm of all spoken word readings (SPOken BROken RHYMing TIMing EFFing ANgry POets).

Fortunately, I had a Sharpie in my bag and tons of poems in mind. The night started looking, well, much sharper.

Emily Dickinson
It might be lonelier
Without the Loneliness—

(Look! Poe is in the audience)

------------------------

Jack Gilbert
We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe.

------------------------

Walt Whitman
I too am not a bit tamed—
I too am untranslatable.

(It is most useful to have gamey accomplices!)
------------------------

James Dickey
Live like the dead
In their flying feeling.
Loom as a ghost
When life pours through it.

------------------------

Emily Dickinson, refrain
It might be lonelier
Without the Loneliness—

(My hand looks a bit like a fakey, Halloween hand. Alas.)
------------------------

Denise Levertov
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of poetry.

------------------------

Dorothy Parker
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

------------------------

[Please note the Elvis skull.]

------------------------

Emily Dickinson, surreal
It might be lonelier
Without the Loneliness—

------------------------

Edna St. Vincent Millay
I shall forget you presently, my dear.
So make the most of this, your little day.

------------------------

The Writers with Sharpies Grotto: This is where it all happens.
(Okay, it's the bathroom of the Radio Habana.)

my melancholy model

Birkerts, Sven. Reading Life: Books for the Ages. April 2007. Graywolf Press. ISBN 978-1-55597-464-0. $16.00.

Written as part of the Brattleboro Literary Festival, September 28-30, 2007

In The Reading Life: Books for the Ages, Sven Birkerts has arrived at the vantage from which he’s seemed destined to write all his literary life: the remote and elevated outpost of retrospection. Linking his thirty years as a cynosure of the reading life to the eleven books that defined that charted course, Birkerts matches up his past and present intellectual selves through the rereading of his touchstone texts, The Catcher in the Rye, Madame Bovary, and The Ambassadors among them.

Lifelong readers will likely relate to many of the common formative experiences recreated in The Reading Life. Birkerts begins, for example, by flashing back to the narcotic sway Holden Caulfield held over his fourteen-year-old self: the identification with “the comic pathos,” “that almost killing despair” of adolescence, and the eventual, mature revelation that what once passed pejoratively for Caulfieldian alienation was, in reality, nothing more—and nothing less—than “the essential impulse toward privacy.” Jumping ahead, as he does deftly throughout the collection, Birkerts feels the book’s potency after he learns of his preteen daughter’s affinity for it. The conclusion of The Catcher in the Rye clicks into its rightful place: fixed as a still-life of disaffection, Caulfield functions—tragically—as every generation’s object lesson in “the disappointments of life to come.”

Not all characters go so gently into their set site. The most diverting characters in this pantheon inspire more wrestling on the critic’s part; they provoke what Birkerts calls the “disputatious inner swing [that] defines engaged reading.” (The Reading Life is crowded with the intricate fight-dance of such relations—with Binx Bolling, Lily Briscoe, Rupert Birkin, and others—and as such, the collection, of course, defies neat abridgment here.) The major characters of this latter category do not so much reappear after prolonged absence from Birkerts’s reading list, but exhibit a sustained, lifelong entanglement in the critic’s active intellectual life.

Emma Bovary is a case in point. Birkerts, a committed child of the counterculture, had long resisted the centrality of the classics until fate holed him up on an isolated Montana ranch with no other reading options but Madame Bovary. This wizardry is one of the pure pleasures of reading Birkerts—the uncanny ability he has to select the very book that the energies of his life require for highest truth at any given moment. Having met Emma, as he familiarly calls her, the course of his literary life reset itself.

Birkerts traces the subsequent strands of his career spent growing into a consciousness of Flaubert’s craft, the rich pretext, text, and subtext that together form Bovary’s romantic folly. Her “ravenous wanting,” it becomes clear, are meant to inspire neither judgment nor sympathy alone, but both at once, resulting in a tormented, sorrowful, and “complicated self-division” on the reader’s part. Birkerts shows time and again, as he does with his immense deference to Flaubert’s characters, that it is not with false hope for strict moral truth that one might usefully tend to a book, but for something subtler, more graceful, less immediately evident, for the shifts in a character’s actions or outlook that invisibly slip the knots of our convictions, leaving us—to our great surprise—somehow reconfigured after the book has ended. Birkerts’s work stands as a wild proof that the literary work’s constancy offers the best measure of the reader’s evolution.

Birkerts reports, after he finally finished The Ambassadors, having reveled in the rapture of “literary endorphins.” This athletic metaphor intimates that the reading life must be accorded the same focus—no TV, no instant messaging, no iTunes in the background—given to any other disciplined endeavor. Birkerts considers it “reading as a way of inviting [ourselves] to be overtaken.” And though critics may come to literature for various reasons—vanity, hunger, blood sport, haven—one imagines Birkerts remains in the game “for the solace of literature mattering.” What matters, what makes the difference, and what, after having gone 516 pages with Strether through the long haul of The Ambassadors, will tell each reader whether she’s up for doing it all over again, is taking the right, the only, position one can honestly take in relation to the work: one’s own.

the only thing ernest and i will ever have in common

Great news: I'm no longer hunched like Igor, craning the neck to type at my very low coffee table. I've got a desk! It is massive. A handsome fellow—dark, tall, and exceptionally solid (as we like our fellows)—with newsroomy fixtures, he's a drafting desk of sorts, with all sorts of coffee rings on top and neat, measured tape on the two top drawers that read in perfect lettering, "templates and triangles ONLY" and "French curves ONLY." How could I refuse a free desk that accepted French curves only? Well, I could not is the answer.

M. just helped me move the beast up the stairs. And that called for an immediate, insulin-frenzying doughnut excursion. And of course, more Peet's.

I was going to get a tall chair for it, but standing at it now with the mirrored closet right behind me (that I can turn around to and speak with), I'm feeling like Hemingway was really onto something. Standing at a tall desk is the most! (Is this the sugar and caffeine speaking maybe? TBD. Stay tuned.)

p.s. As of yesterday, I've also given up my swashbuckling ways and gotten my own DSL. Seems like good California commies like our lot should be able to share signals, but it's just as well that my neighbors no longer need to compete with my incessant need for their bandwidth. Avast, mateys, it's clear sailing ahead! This barnacle's shoving off! (And so on. Eufemia, where are you when I need your help with all this piratical talk?)

i'm so lost

So the Emmys are coming up in a little over a week and Lost is nominated for six of 'em. It's true. I'm a Lostie. I can't help myself.

I have watched the show and watched it all over again. The first season had me gripping pillows and screaming aloud. Lost is the only TV show I've seen in its totality multiple times.

(Hmm ... That may not be true. I've probably seen all the episodes of Three's Company, though it's not a claim I can validate. My memories are just chock-full of hours spent sitting sort of stupefied, eating cheese, drinking Shirley Temples, and laughing at Jack Tripper. Come to think of it, if Three's Company qualifies (I hated missing that opening soundtrack), then Star Trek probably does, too. Oh, and of course, Dukes of Hazzard.)

Lost's backstory and hidden narrative elements all heavily inform the developing structure of my short story collection. An odd set of influences I've got: Alice Mattison, William Faulkner, Louise Erdrich, and the Lost writers. What can I say?

Don't think I'm ashamed of it. There's no question that the provenance of my story structure is one to be proud of. The writers know hooks and angles. Turns out, no surprise, they have interesting taste in books, too. The writers recently posted their favorite novels on the Lost site. I've read every one of their all-time favorites (not that hard, lots of classics in there) and was so surprised and delighted to see The Moviegoer on there. What a strange book that is, full of oddball questy business, and how far it's managed to travel! Man, The Road, that book was tough stuff. I made the mistake of bringing that with me to Italy. Not not not a beach read, but I'd burned through all the other books I brought and so the back-pocket, plane-ride-home book had to come out.

Well, anyway, Emmys are up September 16th. Here are the writers' book choices, if yr interested.

All-time favorite novels:

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Frannie and Zooey by J.D Salinger
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
American Tabloid by James Ellroy

--------------------------------------------------

Books that the Lost writers are currently reading:

So You're Going to Be a Dad by Peter Downey and Nik Scott
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
John Adams by David McCulloch
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War by Robert L. Beisner
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

make believe: gone apple pickin'

So we’re in that peculiar post-summer summer season unique to the Bay Area. The fog that I love so much has officially given the game over to that Satanic, sticky, will-wilting heat that refuses to abate, the swelter that clings even to my arms as I scrabble for water bottles and any show of climatic temperance.

(An aside: come to think of it, this heat presents me with an ideal solution for a recent problem. My father's just visited me and I think the shirt I wore to the A's game--it read "New Jersey: Only the Strong Survive"--really bummed him out; he's got big pride of place (he, by the way, wore his DiMaggio jersey and Yanks hat). So it seems only appropriate that I cover the "New Jersey" in masking tape and write "California" in its place. Loverly.)

... Anyway, I for one—so that we’re clear on this—object to this damned heat. Stow me away in an Alpine cabin, shake snow from the eaves just over my windowsill, ply me with hot cider and a few decent books, and I am yours forever. That’s the dream. The reality: I suffer and sweat and snooze my solitary way through these spirit-dousing, Mojavian high temps as I do every ding dang late San Francisco summer. (Would that that wintry-haired old Twain really had said, and really would have been right in saying, that "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.")

Oh! The heat. Bastard Zeus and his bolt-throwing, tube-sock-wearing weather team. Bastardy bastards. Have I no choice but to roll with this insufferable tropicality and pretend I didn’t burn, even from behind tinted windows? In fact, I do. I can set my sights instead on the future. What to ponder? Ah, yes. Harvest time. Even the phrase has a redemptive autumnal tone.

I will think of apples and squash and pumpkins on my plate and in my soup bowl, maybe all of them together. I will praise the nightshades. Having moved into an apartment, though, I have no garden to watch for the first time in many years. (Hence, you have witnessed the lunatic doting on indoor orchids that rightly belong on the other side of the equator. Hmm.) A stumper. How to autumnate? I will walk into my kitchen and see what’s there from this last farmers’ market:

Two tomatoes (zebra, Cherokee) with the freakish lumps that signify heirloom
Fingerling potatoes
Spring onions, garlic, shallots
Roundabout a dozen assorted stonefruits, two threatening to abandon themselves to wrinkles and worse if I don't hurry up about it ...

I browse around among other items, and come to it: the perfect, singular apple in its own bowl. This is the thing for which I will plan: apple picking.

Like an apple on the tree
hiding out behind the leaves,
I was difficult to reach
But you picked me.

Indeed. I’ll give you two apple poems by two Roberts. The first is Frost’s lesser-known, better apple poem, in my opinion. Am I the only one that reads it as a kind of ode to love unconsummated?

Unharvested

A scent of ripeness from over a wall.
And come to leave the routine road
And look for what had made me stall,
There sure enough was an apple tree
That had eased itself of its summer load,
And of all but its trivial foliage free,
Now breathed as light as a lady’s fan.
For there there had been an apple fall
As complete as the apple had given man.
The ground was one circle of solid red.
May something always go unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left,
So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.

—R. Frost

And now there's Bly. I’ve seen him read a few times and however much ridiculous, manly bluster he brings, I continue to admire the importance of (some of!) his ideas and the grace of his phrasings. He leaves nothing of life's difficulty out--it's all here: the wisdom gleaned in transit, the conscious thoughts of culpability, the regret, the deepest need for communion, the growth and fatigue, the transience of our most important opportunities.

Passing an Orchard by Train

Grass high under apple trees,
The bark of the trees rough and sexual,
the grass growing heavy and uneven.

We cannot bear disaster, like
the rocks—
swaying nakedly
in open fields.

One slight bruise and we die!
I know no one on this train.
A man comes walking down the aisle.
I want to tell him
that I forgive him, that I want him
to forgive me.

—R. Bly

So. I'll be here. With all the intervals of weight and levity that tip the scales of my mind, I'll do what I can to return to the thought of apple picking, reveling: the heat is present, just as warm as we want it to be. The sun is gentle, hanging back, and the apples are not at all difficult to reach. It’s the perfect moment to be alive. And yes, of course. It's just the right thing to be doing.

the matter of life and death

My apartment is blacktop-in-the-sun hot. And despite keeping both fans going 24/7, I see it has had its effect.

As disappointing as it is to see the blooms on the spidey orchid show me their first, barely visible signs of imminent collapse (slightest tint shift and curl of the long elf foot sepals), they're giving off a hell of a scent. I'm transported: wild orchids on the road to Hana. Yes!

Well godspeed, orchids. Let me breathe it in. (Now if i could only find my imaginary way to those waterfalls we swam under.)

opp & the olivettis

Four of my best mates have signed on for the Oilcan Pen Pals project. Rationale: my mental machinery works best as a standalone unit, but the social tune-ups, however much I try to avoid them with guarded, excessive alone time, keep me attuned, adaptive, curious. So all that means is it’s time: I haven’t had a steady pen pal since the fourth grade and my Underwood’s grumbly and lonesome for work these days. What a good day to shop for stamps.

I don’t get to have tea and cake with some of my favorite folks flung all around the country and at various intl outposts, so we’ll trade leisurely letters on all things literary (and whatever else there is). I’ll diversify it: origami, pressed weeds, treasured shadow box item giveaways, poems, poems, poems, rocks, clippings, and thoughts on both the swirling plastic flotsam and the anchored rustbuckets at my life’s noble, oceanic depths.

And for you and yours, I’ll post whatever’s permitted by way of excerpts and exhibitions, as it occurs to me.

ready for reykjavik

Reading about B. Fischer again.

I can't help but fixate on what I know is my own complicated mythology of genius. I've long acceded to the convention that high intelligence brings with it an attendant instability of character. I have only the most provincial rationale: in my own hometown, I, like any kid with long daily yawns of free time, colored in the bounds of my own full circle of life, all of it based on the folks I saw most often. Maria, mentally ill, walked around the neighborhood obsessively, wearing layers of tights and grimy sweatshirts, even in our stickiest summers. She captivated much of my attention. I smoked my first cigarettes while I followed her along train tracks. I sat blocks from her and just watched while she talked to herself for hours. So much gesticulation, real arguments happening, few resolutions, just distractions, and then all of it over again, the next round. It taught me suffering.

But when she'd see me, her eyes nearly shocked with their charge. She'd smile with the few bad teeth she did have and her eyes lit up with a violent intelligence that scared me then. I'd never been seen like that. She looked into me as if we'd been separated for years and I'd just said I'd marry her son. I felt held to her by chemistry. I felt held in the very same way I did by an employee at the bigger library a few towns over. I was very shy of him, though. He had the same social ineptitude, only it seemed willful; he had a keen consciousness, but it seemed to have been given a circuit to run. So, I concluded, it didn't break him in the same way. Everything, then for me, came down to circumstance. And circumstance was not only a matter of one's practical inheritance, but one's effort. My drive, then, has always been a matter of walking the demons, keeping them fit, exhausting them.

But increasingly I think I've got a lot of bullroar happening in my head about all this mental wellness business. Assigning the precocious among us a special propensity for insanity removes the responsibility factor. I can't just say that predestination led Bobby Fischer to crack under the cubic pressure of so much mental work and attention. Insanity is, I imagine, a dubiously overtaxed plea. I'm holding him increasingly accountable for his own moral career, the way the boy genius devolved from a model of intellectual hope to a vitriolic anti-Semite. Maybe I pay so much attention because I'm disappointed and need an explanation for the precise ways in which an inimitable strategist can recede from his work, and relax into such base, ignorant, backwater prejudices.

Things I don't understand can keep me up at night. I'm wanting more than ever to get to Japan, then to Iceland not to meet him in his home, but to walk the tracks, to sit on the benches.

So: please wire money, must walk among the poppies soon. Thanks!

------------------------------------------

Poppies in October

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly —

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

— S. Plath

HARMAUDICON 2007!

***************************************

Harvey's Imaginary Productions
________________ presents _________

never-before-seen stills from the set
of Hal Ashby's 1971 cult classic!

Harold & Maude

***************************************

***************************************

We bring you over a dozen never-before-seen pictures from the set!

We show the real Hollywood story of young Bud Cort's partying days!

We give you a rare glimpse of what it must have been like to work alongside one of the American film industry's most notorious divas, Ruth Gordon.

***************************************
But first, a word from our sponsors:

RED BULL GIVES YOU WINGS!

***************************************

And now a few candid shots to refresh you
on the names and faces of the film's original cast:

Ruth Gordon as Maude Chardin


Bud Cort as Harold Chasen


Craijan Merchashi, also as Harold Chasen
Little known fact: Two men, not one, played Harold. It was that big a role. Despite his virtuosity, Merchashi was destined to remain in the shadows.


Charles "Pixelated" Tyner as Uncle Victor



***************************************

***************************************

The Inside Story!

The truth will out: Ruth Gordon was a bona fide tyrant on set. Second little-known fact: she was, in fact, the one responsible for Harold's trademark "Rubberband Legs" gait in the film. She forced Cort to walk the cemetery path with her every day until she felt he got it just right.

Down ...


... and back. Sources say hundreds of circuits!


More evidence that Gordon could be incredibly demanding and idiosyncratic: she felt scenes needed to be shot one after the next, in sequence, to preserve her own sense of "narrative juju." When her colleagues could not get a scene right, there was NO MOVING ON. She hammered away at the kinks until it was perfect. Here, Gordon watches as Cort struggles off-camera to get Rubberband Legs just so:



... The pressure began to wear at Cort's focus. Sources close to the best boy grip say that Cort, a former Olympic cartwheeler, just couldn't nail the physical acting after Gordon's example.


Shamefully, the scene was rewritten with somersaults where the cartwheel once had been. Friends cite the cartwheel lessons as the turning point, the moment Cort really began to spin out of control (see below).


But the signs were there from the start. Gordon had broken Cort--and everyone else--long before the gymnastic gaffes. And here's the rub: had Cort just been able to imbibe some Red Bull(tm!), he may have had the energy to keep up with the hard-driving, senior dominatrix. But it wasn't around in those days. Cort compensated with Robitussin and ketamine. This was, in fact, his undoing.

Sometimes Cort would just space out in the middle of a scene, kick into monologues or zero in on props to the exclusion of any other reality:


... Or he'd lose his balance trying to stand in one place:


Often the unfortunate actor would wake smack in the middle of a scene and have no idea what was happening or who the chick with the braids was.


To everyone's great relief, the camerawoman had a friend--Craijan Merchashi--who had played Friedrich Von Trapp in his seventh grade school play. Merchashi brought a real passion to the character:

And according to a barista who passed Hal Ashby once on a street corner in L.A., Merchashi brought out a soft side in Gordon, settled her down, lightened her up:


He even set up a date between Gordon and the camerawoman (she had a very deep voice that Gordon had always liked). The sexual tension between Gordon and the mystery gal behind the lens is clear in this footage that the Avid guy's mom "saved" from the cutting floor when she brought his liverwurst sandwiches in at lunchtime.



The last word on the love affair came from Ashby's nephew's neighbor Ed, who claims the apple was Gordon's advance, a sort of "Come hither, camerawoman." These were the Golden Days, weren't they, when there was that kind of innocence to be lost. Get that apple, girl. She's ready for a close-up.

***************************************

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Thanks for the Birthday Make-Believe Day, boys.
Lifetimes of love and all hands on knees!



***************************************

The presentation of this archival material has been made possible by a generous grant from the Maude Kennedy Foundation. Mieu, Maude. To your health.

Love you, Maudie.
***************************************

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power of suggestion

Another interval between Movie Week posts. Let's not force themes anymore; it cramps our style. (Soon, though: thoughts on The Invasion and pictures from the eagerly awaited Harmaudicon 2007!)

Okay, so here we go. I think I need to defend myself. I recently received an assessment from Sasha Cagen, the decidedly adored author of the (at least to me) sleeper phenom, To-Do Lists: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soulmate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us. I am summarily characterized thus:

--------

Elizabeth seems to be a very busy, creative, social woman (so many people to call and email, I can relate!). Her mind seems to be cluttered (I can also relate). She wants to write down every fleeting thought and obligation to prevent them from being forgotten. I understand the impulse to capture every single to-do item. I'm just concerned that she'll tire herself out from looking at her own list. (It exhausts me and I write epic lists!) She might benefit from writing shorter lists rather than one long running one. She should not be writing a to-do list within a to-do list.

--------

My mind is cluttered? Now that I've read this, my head aches. My list exhausts an epic list-writer? After the sweep of feeling like the winningest busy person on the block, I feel the dust in my eyes without a drop of saline in sight. Could I somehow organize it better? Where's my solution? The whole point of a to-do list is to catch it all in the net. Why keep short to-do lists? I can remember seven things I need to do. Forty-five, though, and I begin to buckle without my Linus blanket of lists. Hmm. Maybe I should put thinking about that on my list. Or imagine this: living with no list at all. Maybe I'll burn my to-do list tonight. Can I put that on my to-do list and then burn the proof of my intentions on the planet? Oh my. Total ontological crisis.

beyond michael moore

Documentary talk with Sister T today. She never seems to turn off the mind lights. Much title flinging and substance sorting and as a result, even more movies that must be seen--by her, by me, maybe by you. All I'll give you now is one each.

her recommendation: Ghosts of Cité Soleil
mine: Bus 174

On we go.

picture this

A momentary interruption of Movie Week to say that I've been sitting here the last few hours reading the latest by Sven Birkerts (Reading Life: Books for the Ages) and as I have, the first of eight buds on my rugged spider orchid opened right up in front of me, the sepals dropping down like two little elf legs.

I've had orchids for years, but I guess I've never sat still in front of them. They've always been tucked into some corner of misty, indirect, southerly light. In my new, compact place, however, they're front and center. And as I watch this growth, it's like I'm getting a condensed, close-in version of a calving ice floe, the spectacular miniaturized.

I read fifty pages, one foot dropped. Looked up twenty later, the next was down. And the flower is caught blooming, petals bending out but still sticky over the anther, like the tip of the tiniest vajra. And in his book, among the many glittery slivers, one phrase Sven used, unusually showy for his style but thus ideal for my adaptive moment, got the enchantment of the flower's uneven unfolding just right: "erratic and operatic, and errantly erotic."

Now THAT's art for all occasions.

now playing

Let's declare it Movie Week at the scribbler's cove. I'll begin with The Pillow Book (Peter Greenaway). This was presented to me as one of those "how could you have missed this," "must get in bed and watch immediately" movies, requiring chocolate and candles and all sorts of silky things at hand. Okay, I'm game.

Interim: Said movie is watched.

Yawn. Where's the candle snuffer? Bring the lights up. Do you have any tea to go with this chocolate?

The Pillow Book, as I've had to admit to the enthusiasts, did not work for me. Several scenes were pretty enough. Images of the calligrapher's brush on skin provided a predictable kind of appeal. Rain, blossoms, skin, skin, skin. Lovely, I'll take it.

But I think I spaced out somewhere during the outright enactments between and among various parties in all sorts of debauched states and strained postures. Something about it felt too frankly presented, even absurd, like wildlife mating footage complete with brushes, pillows, and parasols.

Even all that would be fine and passable, except for the subsequent series of freakishly broken taboos that function both to stimulate tension (one imagines that was the intent, anyway) and to meet the basic narrative demands of character development. Neither really comes off.

To great disappointment, I suppose, my primary physical response was a wince. I don't consider myself particularly provincial when it comes to matters such as these, but pillow book pages painted on the salvaged skin of disinterred lovers who died, arms crossed over the chest and blue mouth pouting, after a rather pathetic boudoir breakdown of drug-induced abandon all seemed--well, it just seemed weird to the point of distraction.

And let it be said that I consider weird an especially laudable characteristic, one to be encouraged equally in matters of love as in life. But as with any fancy moves, the risk of the bumble increases. And what a disappointment when a fellow adventurer commands attention by limning an aesthetic boundary, only to slip off the cliff with all the attendant whoa-whoa-whoa gesticulations of the humiliating fall.

Naturally, any heat that the weird might have generated in such a setting is discharged. And then what's left? Only the embarrassed sense of having witnessed the spectacle of sudden insufficiency and the ricochet replays of irrepressible memory.

or something just like it

The painfully fascinating DS and I visited an exhibit at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco this weekend, the occasion being the hundredth anniversary of Gertrude Stein's meeting Alice B. Toklas.

This, the celebration of a private milestone for a public poet, might strike you as suspect. It struck me that way anyway. As I learned working on my Bellow thesis, it's generally in the work of poetasters and artistic bottomfeeders that we witness the failure to distinguish between the poet's body of work and her lived life. But well, my friends, we've come all this way. The ocean floor has all sorts of good bits. And now that we've invaded the personal life of the ladies, what the hell, let's mill around for a bit, shall we?

First things first: I do wish there were more happy photos of Alice. Take a look at the one I've got here. I can earnestly say that that's one of the more flattering shots. Hayzeus! Most of the others are more of the same, painted portaits included, Gertrude looking very much the satisfied rooster and poor Alice to her side and slipped a bit back, as if an apron-string kid, always the dour sulker. If pictures are to be trusted (which, unless maybe taken by Arbus or Sherman, they are not!), Alice haunted around looking perennially bummed out--always with the same long limbs, pulled face, heavy cloche, shadowy mustache, and the eyes--ugh. The very eyes of contrition. Buck up, Alice. Look at the company you keep, for god's sake!

Anyway, we walked exactly two short hallways with a total of five display cases and maybe a dozen of said less-than-charitable portraits and photographs. All in all, it was a very good tourlet. It's a rare occasion, indeed, that I find myself trading Gertrude Stein recordings. DS even has a fantastic McAlly speaker doodad and so we sat on a wide birch bench and ate chocolate malt balls and listened together to our iPods (DS's black, mine an angelic white) giving poetry reading by proxy for our very own Gertie.

Syllable by arch syllable, she introduced "She Bowed to Her Brother" with a review of the importance of the period in the piece. I don't know why I'm so much less interested in Gertrude's perspective on the period than I am, as DS pointed out, the em dash in Dickinson. I just think Dickinson's dashes made a difference. Stein's readings seemed to be so very much about performance. Then again, so were Parker's. So were Millay's. And I have lots that I love about each of them. And it's not Stein's haughtiness that bugs me. If that were the case, "Daddy" would not be one of my more frequently played tracks in my lists. (And what do you know? DS played me a great excerpt of Plath. She can be heard tightly decrying the personal's unjustified place in the poetical; she made the important caveat that the personal must first be managed and manipulated and shoved around until it can be kept in its written corner. "Now stay, bad personal experience worth recounting; stay, I said!") I mean, if Plath wasn't arrogant enough in her standards and style to give Stein a run, then I don't know who was. And I, by the by, revel in Plath's punishing poems.

So. It's all, along with the sudden hole brutally torn in my own literary universe, naturally got me thinking about posterity. And I suppose that whatever aspect of a subject's life is being recognized, remembered, memorialized, at the very least I expect the items to be the authentic artifact.

To my great surprise, as I stood with my nose practically pressed up to the glass before the typewriter Toklas used to type Stein's weird poems and prose, DS read from the little placard that it was, in fact, "something just like" the Smith Premier of the Parisian lovebirds, NOT actually the McCoy. Outrageous.

I am going to start my own museum in which I will have papier-mâché Blackwing pencils, credible holographic replicas of the Moleskine notebooks, maybe a foam-mounted art.com poster of the Olivetto giclée that hung over Sontag's worktable. I will even make my own brownies and say my creation bears a striking resemblance to Alice's recipe. I'll call the show my Depressed Ladies' Literary Bakesale. It will be brilliant. You're invited. Bring your iPods.

he's right about the abandonment

Those of us who revolved at a remote distance from Liam—I never knew him well; we'd talked no more than ten times at most, emailed even less—are now swift in the eddy. Late into the night, toss, turn, toss, turn, I dizzied mostly in the terror of whatever his consequences may be (see 8/16 post), but I was also saddened by the what-ifs, fixated on the outlandish alternatives. I, all windows open to the waking echo of confusing strife, looked back at the let-downs we all may have been to him and, likewise—now or before—he to us.

Several friends have written saying they're angry. Or they're disappointed. I can't say I feel either of these things. There's almost a blank acceptance where these feelings ought to be. Who can presume to understand the suffering of another? We can write to ape it, build art in deference to it, probe it ruthlessly for some sort of statistical relief. We can get grand about the comprehension and capture of these things, but psychic pain, pain of the body—these, along with death, are of a province that remains impassive, solitary. And they always will be. Despite that, I miss Liam in a way that isn't justified since I was never really in his world in a complete way, not even secondarily.

I know it's indulgent to insert thoughts into the space Liam occupied among us, but I do imagine he'd lack patience, perhaps, with whatever personalized responses I might be tempted to have. Liam prepared me--and anyone else who has been paying attention to his poetry--for this eventuality. The poem that follows suggests only that we face it. That's a very different statement than suggesting we need to deal with it and move on. One never moves on in such situations, however remotely she stands from the sadness. She can only move in. Face that abandonment, after Eliot, and now after Rector.

The Remarkable Objectivity of Your Old Friends
by Liam Rector

We did right by your death and went out,
Right away, to a public place to drink,
To be with each other, to face it.
We called other friends - the ones
Your mother hadn't called - and told them
What you had decided, and some said
What you did was right; it was the thing
You wanted and we'd just have to live
With that, that your life had been one
Long misery and they could see why you
Had chosen that, no matter what any of us
Thought about it, and anyway, one said,
Most of us abandoned each other a long
Time ago and we'd have to face that
If we had any hope of getting it right.

Liam Rector, 1949-2007

I just received the following email from Victoria Clausi of the Bennington Writing Seminars, where I took my MFA & built close community.

----------------------------

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;”

--T.S. Eliot

It is with unbearable sorrow that I write to tell you that our beloved founder and director, Liam Rector, killed himself yesterday morning.

“Fare forward O voyager.”

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that any donations be made to the Liam Rector Scholarship Fund at The Writing Seminars of Bennington College, to organizations in support of Free Speech, or to The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).

Liam is survived by his wife, Tree Swenson, and his daughter, Virginia Rector.

----------------------------

I'm not sure what to say, except that I feel an achy need to get down close to the ground, to hold onto the planet, and dig my fingernails into the dirt while I'm on the surface. I cannot imagine making the choice Liam did. Sad's a weak word.

beautiful

from Poetry magazine

One Afternoon
by Joanie V. Mackowski

A woman stepped outside, crumbled
into a loose particulate, and, as the breeze
blew up from the east, she scattered: her handful
of heart, volcanic ash, spiraled the highway,
and five of her teeth slipped between
her neighbor's breasts; her neighbor
unbuttoned her blouse to scratch
at her suddenly red and luminous skin.
Days passed. Each day the sun distractedly
drifted from chair to chair; each night the stars,
old scatterbrains, they commiserated.
It didn't rain. Strange, the granular woman
thought to herself: although I encompass
so much, I accomplish so little.
Her car sparkled with her hair and bones;
her garden thrived. She tried to think:
why did this happen? what had I eaten?
why was I bothered?—those old hours,
spotted and exotic lizards, darted
the gravel, flicking through their colors
of skin as one flicks channels on a tv.
She couldn't catch a one. Then, as a flock
of sparrows converging for the skull
of an oak, all her twittering dust,
her brain, bone, and the dangerous shreds
of her fingers clawed for the sky;
what an interesting cloud someone said.

At first I'd included the Q&A, but ultimately decided the blah blah about Ovid and the supposed inspired madness of all poets undermined the grace of the poem and its movement. So here it is, naked. Go back and reread! Aloud.

godspeed, yone

So my best case scenario for sticking around on the planet, if we're using Yone Minagawa as a life-yardstick of sorts, is eighty-one more years. That remainder I've got is longer than anyone's even lived in my family, but why quibble?

Don't wake me from the dream! With that many years left, I've got time to master this effing fiddle, paint well, build a warehouse full of shadow boxes, settle firmly into fluency in Italian AND Japanese, tour Iceland, read my entire booklist (if I don't add anything else to it), send the letters I owe, review some stuff, run Boston, run Boston better, learn to build stuff, find a place with views and quiet, build a green home with views and quiet, learn to ride a motorcycle, buy a motorcycle, ride said motorcycle some faraway place, have important road trip realizations like Che (in a minor chord), act on insights, achieve enlightenment (snap!), and of course, finish two novels (yes, just two; can't be too lofty), the stories, the screenplay, even the epitaph.

So thank you, Yone! You (and the hope that, if I take my vitamins, drink lots of water, and exercise like Oprah tells me to, I might break your record) have reduced the anxious insistence I always feel to get all of the above done tonight. I think instead, it is a nice night to walk the dog to the ice cream parlor and get myself some coffee ice cream with extra fudge. And then I'll sit in the dark on the old-fashioned parlor seat with the cracked, striped covering, watch Bling (see 8/9) eat her Frosty Paws, and take in the magical example the beasts set in enjoying what's right before one's snout.

(And no, you are incorrect, mon cynical frere! Ice cream will make me live longer, not shorter. Silly health freaks. Oh, I'm sure of it. Ask me over ice cream when I am one hundred fifteen.)

paste

P likes to open a Word document and press ctrl+v anytime he uses a public computer or any friend's computer. What would he see if he did that on yours?

the sorrows of light rotation

When I was teaching a writing workshop to kindergartners, this one kid Harrison, who insisted on wearing the same delightful uniform of cowboy boots and a fringe jacket every day, came in and told stories that remain to this day among my fondest storytelling memories, right up there with my grandfather's wild Irish yarns. It's not that they were sophisticated or even particularly original, but while he talked in class I could watch him just making things up on the fly, a natural-born bulltosser. He could deliver a story with such deadpan confidence that his classmates believed unflinchingly that he'd hosted a jaguar in his Alameda Victorian. Pressed for details by teachers wanting to depose the bard, he never flagged. He could invent under pressure. He just had a capacity to wonder that could not be undermined.

I remember him when I settle into my more indulgent drifts of pointless imagination. I had this great run with an idea all night last night. I sat on the Persian rug playing tug with the nutty pup I'm dogsitting (the adorable little monkey Betty Bling, for those familiar) and we watched the original Star Wars together. And I got to wondering what Star Wars would look like if it was retold as a series of episodic raves. Bjork plays Darth, Tilda Swinton Luke, Rachel Weisz Princess Leia, and I of course would get to be Han Solo. (I spent my youth planning to grow up as either Bo Duke, Han Solo, or a Solid Gold Dancer. Sadly, I'm kind of the perfect blend of all three.)

Anyway, it would be part traditional straight-ahead narrative whenever it had to be, part Weapon-of-Choice-variety breakout choreographed routine after the fashion of Dancer in the Dark, only without the terrible gun scene and with razzle dazzle lightsabers/glow sticks. You know that underground very ravey-looking scene in--what was it, the third?--Matrix? That ridiculous stuff? Imagine crowds of extras like that: tribal, futuristic, strobe lights, percussion, smoke, silly makeup, time-elapse, and did I mention smoke? Jawas were born to be choreographed. Likewise Imperial Stormtroopers. Sorry, it's true. And the Death Star, the droids and their pop & lock movements, wooly Chewie slung with crossbow ammo, Obi Wan the sage--all well suited to my & Betty's enlightened reinterpretation.

And so after the movie, I was exceptionally awake (unlike now ... zzz ...) and took the little Bling for a late-night sit to watch the waves break on Treasure Island. And as we drove back home on my three good tires and the slow-leak fourth, we heard this song on 92.7 (the local dance station that pretty much plays the same six electronicky songs over and over and over). I just know I heard that same song at a warehouse rave in Baltimore roundabout 1994. I didn't know the name then and I don't know it now. But as it played, I could just see little Bjork and earnest Tilda battling it out with that in the background. The spectacle would shatter glass, a Phantom of the Opera kind of orchestral stretch. Hair-raising!

But what am I to do? Be a weenie and call the radio station? There are NO lyrics, unless you count exclamatory monosyllables. So what would I do--just call and say, "You know? That one that goes la dee ahhh ahh ahhHHAHAHHHHHH and sounds vaguely German at parts?"

You know what this means. Endless loops of the six tracks in heavy rotation to get back to that one other song, if they even repeat it. And even then, the damn DJ may not say the name. So off I go, skipping the blues in my iPod for the same sponsored songs on the radio: Rihanna, JT, Hilary Duff, that ancient Daft Punk song, Dirty Vegas, and Beyonce yet again. Oh, the things I endure to populate my mental wunderkammers. At least I know Harrison would approve.

hugh in mind

Being in the company of talented people in their artistic element is great. Being related to those folks, on the other hand, is sublime. Cousin Katie took this picture.

When I was a little girl (late single digits), I tried ardently to mother Katie all around her Brooklyn brownstone; she, ever the more sensible child, shuffled into corners away from me to read the book I remember she always had in her hands. I have always come on too strong and she was one of the first to educate me in that regard. She, as best evidenced in this composition, has much to teach about the value of space.

Katie’s leaving Seattle before I’ve arranged to visit. I should have visited. Back to Brooklyn goes KT. Sigh. Wherever she goes, though, I know she will invent beautifully and I’ll be her eager attendant. I am reading her play now and have attached my favorite of her photographs so far.

Look, see how the tree branch resembles a cord powering the streetlamp? On the blanket, that’s her. And a fellow named Craig who I thought was named Hugh. Sleeping in Seattle with a green Hugh.



I can feel the mood of this picture in my skin. It’s as if I was there.

the cave electric

Have I been in Berkeley too long if I feel inclined to kneel in the mud and thank my mysterious stars for all this great good fortune? Well it has been a long, often arduous, and sometimes miserable road getting to this here happy ranch. And everything's temporary, even grace, even productivity. So no, I’ll just go ahead and snarfle happily in my simple heaven for a spell, if you’ll brook the bliss.

Something about this new place has my mind roaring. This latest story I’m developing is writing itself, coming more smoothly than the last bloodletting experience I called fiction writing. And I’ve got a skeletal plot (some good bones, at least) doodled right here for a damned funny screenplay. (Who said that? Did I say that? No way. Well as M. says, perhaps it is finally the era of Yes Way.) Tonight I finished an article on the dinner party business (see July 22) and am about to begin another on a guerilla art movement here in the Bay Area. I’ve brought a couple solid authors on board at work and a regional paper sponsoring the Brattleboro Lit Festival just invited me to write a review of the latest book by one of our country’s best critics, Sven Birkerts. That’s an odd one—the book is a collection of reviews itself. So this will be a very metacritical review. And I feel not a little challenged by responding at such a distance from primary texts. But it’s not just about the reading; it’s the reading life, after all. So sure, I think I can handle that there horse.

But here’s the simplest crazy beauty. It’s always been one or the other in my life: writing or cooking. If I’m writing, I order pizza. If I’m cheffing it up, I skip the laptop. To my amazement, the benefit of being cracked-dirt poor (unexpected emergency vet bills flit and nip at my head like paper-cranes-gone-bad), I now have no choice but to cook. And people, necessity has rendered me a tricksy good cook. The frayed-thread-from-my-old-shoestring budget is, as it happens, the mother of all invention. My fridge resembles that of the Alpha Kappa Beta Abercrombie boys up at Cal, yet the miracles of spices, cheap farmers’ markets, and careful selection have me eating easy smoked paprika chops w/young broccoli and fresh corn tonight. Artist, sure. Starving, eff no!

(Sidenote: thanks for asking about the dear troubador, Rufus. I did mean to post a review of that sparkling starlet and his knockout eight-piece band. Suffice to say he made me come close to wanting to be a gay boy he was so talented and glamorous and prettyprettyprincess. Princess with gravitas, that is. Mountain Winery is like a Tuscan mirage and I’ll just say that being six rows back for the Judy Garland drag bit at the end with the cabaret jacket and the fishnets made me swoon. Welcome to the Cult of Wainwright, Kennedy. Indeed. He even made me wonder if I shouldn’t own more brooches. A chance to shine, after all, never hurt anyone.)

silly gato

Three posts in one day is excessive, but my cat Maude has been on my mind all day today and this picture E. sent has made me laugh so hard every time I've looked at it, well I just have to put it up.

see you next week

Going to see Rufus Wainwright this weekend in Saratoga. I'll leave you with a songlist that needs reordering. What sequence would you put it in?

I Was Made to Love Magic Nick Drake
Love Will Tear Us Apart Nouvelle Vague
Do You Realize? The Flaming Lips
Measuring Cups Andrew Bird
Hesitating Beauty Billy Bragg
If I Could Tell You W. H. Auden
Lover I Don't Have to Love Bright Eyes
Ship Caught in the Bay Frames
Poncho's Lament Tom Waits
Sleep Imogen Heap
Bruno's Theme Ben Charest
One Perfect Rose Dorothy Parker
Photocorners The Lovely Feathers
Closer Melissa Ferrick
Jackson Johnny & June Carter Cash
No Children Mountain Goats (God, I love that song)
Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk Rufus Wainwright
New Slang The Shins
Wild Horses The Sundays
Little Chief Xavier Rudd
Outro Yonderboi

you have ZERO friends

I accept an invitation to the latest dubious community widget, this one called Goodreads.com. I arrive on the site and, as D. points out to me upon his subsequent receipt of my invitation, it tells me "You Have ZERO Friends." Wow. Okay, I take this deficit seriously, I suppose, because this is, after all, a book club. Even better, it is a book club in which one gets all the wine and cheese to herself and can pop off about what a punk Norman Mailer is anytime she wants, off the grid of the calendar. No one even need be in the room. But, the notion goes, if they're a member of the community, they'll hear you on their own time. Well then, yes, yes, sign me up and get me my dog-eared copy of The Executioner's Song!

So. Like any good grade school chain-letter slave, I immediately blast off invitations to a few readerly friends. Several were already members, some with dozens of books, a few time-sinkers with hundreds. When I hear back from A., he informs me we need no such net below us to talk about titles. Well, no. We don't. I could just as easily write or call him (or you, for that matter) directly, e vero. But I've got lots of excuses: I need nicer quills, some good stationary. Phone's not set up at my new place, low minutes on the cell. I'm out of cheese ... and gads, I need more time. But if I can post on boards, can't I email? Indeed, if I can blog, can't I write letters? Or what about an actual date at L'Amyx?

I very recently visited the marble-and-wood, paper-piled offices of a most talented poet, Steven Rood. He plays classical violin, writes proper letters, lives and breathes poetry to the extent that two weeks is a desperate dry spell. I admire him for it. Last night as I was working on a story involving a harried couple and their encounters with the cats at the Hemingway estate, the couple stopped talking to me and I drifted away from them. I thought of Steven's devotion to his work and I fished out (from the boxes of my recent move) my tattered little motto and taped it up on the wall: "There are those who do and those who wouldacouldashoulda." Indeed. But what it do, as the kids say, is the question.

Is recreational blogging such a waste of time after all? We all need to stretch for the races. And the truth is I do find blogging easier than playing the fiddle. Or developing my fiction. Or, especially that be-all, end-all, most sacred act of my life: writing reviews--the real reviews, the ruminations, those deep carbonic excavations. For me, the process of critiquing is scintillatingly comparable to Maggie Gyllenhaal's work with her little blades in Secretary. Feels unbelievably good to strike something below the skin and to see (and feel) all that flows, brighter and richer than the mundane, everyday agonies, yes. But there is only so much that can be cut in a go. And when I contrast formal writing with the lesser efforts, I can't help but return to those chain letters of my elementary school years and defend their utility. For kids, freeplay is an accepted, if frowned-upon, diversion (I'm talking about my own preambles to blogging--chain letters, horoscopes, passed notes, locker graffiti, and what my brother and I used to call "chit chat" when we stayed up past curfew as young kids to make up stories and giggle ourselves to sleep). Light conversation is a necessary counterpoint to our highest form of masochism, the concerted, highly personal derivation of meaning. I dunno. Besides all that, there's a sort of vanity to all these online monkeyshines, as well. Like looking in the mirror before the big date.

But why hang the laundry online? Is that what this blogging around is all about, a matter of opting first for visibility, well above clarity? What is it about hanging a shingle on the web that's so satisfying? Is it a stamped proof of existence? Not really for me, no. That puts too fine a point to it. And even I have my standards in that regard. Take the quicksands of myspace, friendster, hi5, for example.

Myspace is an analog to the experiences I frequently have on holiday. I visit these breathtaking countries (the humbling spectacles, twinkling cornflower-colored cities after sunset, the awe-inspiring views, the mythical woods, the people and their body languages, the histories haunting street corners, all that wonderment at what's foreign). And in every place, it's the same: pods of humans trot to the brink of their photo opportunity, grin with great plasticity, snap the shots, look around appreciatively, and move along. Move along. Move along. That's all myspace is, proof that you've come, you've conquered, and you've moved the hell along, somehow compensated and enriched by (the exhibition of) shared experience. And hayzeus, go to those sites. The comments are an embarrassment to our kind ("I fucking love you, man; that beerbust was the bomb!"), the worst kind of frathouse asshattery. But mayhaps it's just not my venue.

Muriel Ruykeyser suggested that "if there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger." When I read S.'s lament for the future of literary criticism as corrupted by bloggers and I return once again to these fundamental concerns about the passage (and expenditure) of my own time, I do feel the old worries about productivity arise. But I find now that I can only really fall back on Ruykeyser's words as a rationale for all this rambling. We hunger not only for the sustenance of our mainstays, but for a few empty calories between meals, too. And regardless of what notes I pass on any given day, wherever the pleasures of chit chat may take me, whether I like it or not, I know for certain that it all brings me back to the same hard work with the same damn motto sitting there in front of me like a timeworn provocation. I know down to the bone, even if I entertain the doubts presented by those I admire most, that a masochist works for life.

happy mondays

A welcome gift to start my week:




What is important cannot be seen.
It’s the same as with the flower.
If you love a flower that lives on a star,
it is sweet to look up at the night sky.
All the stars are in bloom.
It’s the same as with the water.
What you gave me to drink was a kind of music...

At night, when you look up at the sky,
since I shall be living on a star,
and since I shall be laughing on a star,
for you it will be as if all the stars are laughing.
You alone will have stars that can laugh!
And when you have got over your loss
(for we always do),
you’ll be happy to have known me.
You will always be my friend.
You will want to laugh with me.

—The Little Prince

to-do: drop everything, see this

The Devil Came on Horseback

secret passage, hidden treasure

The night before I came to visit, the artists at Diving Swallow Tattoo opened their space up for a showing of Tibetan thangkas. One particularly rich, dark thangka was hung up toward the front of the gallery space, on the wall adjacent to the dragon-handled door and the neon flowers lighting the front window. And while Marie Wadman was busy mixing custom inks and prepping her station, I stood magnetized to the painting. Avalokiteshvara was the bodhisattva’s name. I knew just enough about Tibetan Buddhism to have passed my Problem of God and assorted world religion classes at Georgetown, but beyond that could be considered your typical Berkeley dabbler, a spiritual tire-kicker with—at best—an intellectual, recreational interest (though I happened to be midway through a simple, helpful book called Change of Heart at the time).

In the thrall of endorphins that lasted the next few hours, I sat propped on the pillows slung over a pub chair as Marie worked on my back. And I thought about the thangka, about this thousand-armed icon, about the place of spirituality in the world, in my world, the use of it. And I started to turn over and over the outside hope that maybe Avalokiteshvara arrived for a reason, as if he revealed a passage sliding open just as I set eyes on it.

Working at a place like North Atlantic, I walk within so many different communities—martial arts, healing & health, literary, and of course spiritual. The result of having spent my days supporting the work of these folks, so many of them with decades of experience refining their practices, is, in this case, instant, intimate access to the full story of the Bodhisattva of Compassion.

Avalokiteshvara, so disturbed by the depthless sadness of the world, committed to freeing all sentient beings from the suffering of our world. Looking around himself at all the sorrow that persisted despite his best efforts, he fell into despair. In form with the fantastic narrative turns of so many parables, Avalokiteshvara’s head then split into thousands of pieces. When Amitabha Buddha restored him, he gave him eleven heads with which he could hear the cries of souls in samsara. Avalokiteshvara tried to reach out to them all, but his two arms shattered, inspiring Amitabha Buddha to give him a thousand arms, with an eye on each palm, to reach out to those suffering in the world.

I am going today to pick up my thangka of Avalokiteshvara. I am impossibly excited about it, about setting up an honorable little place in my new home for him. My relationship to him, as well as my increasing awareness of respect, compassion, detachment, feels like a smooth rock in my pocket, a treasure for the moment and for the ages. I’m a lucky kid!

notes (of oak and cassis) from underground

“The Grim Eater” in Pixar’s Ratatouille, in my view, begins the movie as a symbol of all that needs to change in culinary criticism—snobbery, ego (indeed, Ego is the critic’s surname), stringency, and, most of all, isolation. If he is not alone in his funereal office writing damning reviews of doomed restaurants, he is dining alone with palpable disdain.

Look, by contrast, at the critics of Top Chef. If you’re unfamiliar with the show, here’s BRAVO’s description: “A group of twelve aspiring chefs, both professionally trained and self-taught, will compete in a series of culinary challenges. Each week, one contestant will be eliminated by a group of well-known judges. The winning chef will receive…”—yes, yes, yes, they receive lots of prizes. But what’s left unsaid there is the most welcome development that America’s socially anemic foodie culture has seen since Julia. Huge groups of folks are shown coming together, eating together, talking together.

We need only note that Top Chef’s ridiculously sharp and sexy Padma Lakshmi jilted Salman Rushdie shortly after heartthrob gadabout Tony Bourdain guest-judged an episode alongside her to understand that food is, in fact, the music of love. Sharing it is a binding human ritual. Feels as if we folks in the U.S. today are alone in our oblivion to this primal need. Even on a recent trip to ancient Roman ruins of the San Sebastiani catacombs (Peter and Paul—Bible, not band—were buried there), I visited a huge subterranean room in which Christians are said to have held intimate feasts for their beloved dead. After they finished eating, they etched benedictions into the wall. They broke bread. Life had meaning worth recognizing and recording together.

The good news: underground dinner parties are, if you will, on the rise. Never heard of them? Stay tuned for a forthcoming article I’ve written on this phenomenon. I recently attended one such event hosted in a gorgeous live-work space in SF’s Mission district. I don’t think I overstate it when I hope that these parties may bring Americans the closest we’ve come yet to a legitimately Italian piazza experience.

I’ll distinguish the eating experience this way. Saturday night: I’m at Bar Bambino, where, engaged solely with the fabulous company I kept at my private table, I ignored every other soul in the room. Come Sunday, on the other hand, I’m awash in the open energy of forty souls gathered to enjoy an inventive seven-course meal of fresh, organic food all together and to scratch out some new cross-hatches in their already live social networks. More coming on this soon. In the meantime, here’s what I ate:

Poblano pepper taquito
Roasted poblano, avocado, crooknecks, coconut meat with a sauce of cilantro, lime, tamarind, seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, flax)

Tres gazpachos

Ginger tofu skewers with drunken morels
Ginger-tekka-sichimi tofu, ume-shiso kanten, sea palm, and morel

Tahini porcini rapini greens

Composed salad
Cipolline onion, haricort vert, chiogga beets, Bermuda Triangle chevre, filberts, cresses with a kumquat, tarragon, and fennel confit

Jeweled baby basmati
Basmati with barberry, mulberry, tonka bean, saffron, orange blossoms, pistachio

Stonefruit ten ways
Plum: raw, frozen, thyme
White peach: hot and cold gelee with coconut water
Poached yellow peach tart with apricot ice cream
White nectarine: raw, frozen, rose geranium
Yellow nectarine: raw, confit with candied kumquat

(That last one—stonefruit ten ways—sent me scrambling back to the Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Even the jilted literati have to admit: there is a certain inimitable pleasure to a menu—look at those noble accents and lucid, inescapable rhythms. It can only be poetry.)

so jealous

I stand here cooking. The sage and prosciutto crisp up and the two tilapia fillets are just done. Her white zin poured, my Ariel chilled. We’re about ready and Miss Liz Hille circles the kitchen, hungry hawk. I have known her for a few years now—we wrote fiction and set our first darts of literary criticism sailing together at Bennington Writing Seminars—and I have stepped wordlessly out of her life multiple times to etch out runes in the soot of my solitary cave. Again this time, she’s there, easy, when I emerge. I dish up fish, potatoes. I listen as she recounts climbing toward meaning after having had her students read Hills Like White Elephant and I realize what I’m feeling: jealousy. However many light-years apart our preferences in style may be (her Bukowski to my Coetzee, her Gaitskill to my Austen), I envy the students who get to work with a reader like her.

It’s not that I lack literary outlets. I can—and do—lob titles with whip-quick bibliophiles every day. In fact, I realize I spend the greater part of most days devoted to books in one way or another—reading, editing, rereading, writing, throwing, weeping into, studying, browsing, copying, promoting, reveling, reimagining—and so I necessarily talk to and work with lots of like-minded humans, all communing around this momentary art. Liz, however, has some simple witchcraft in her way of reading. We should all be so free of pretensions, but engaged to the depths. I toast genuine curiosity, the possession of fierce opinions without a single cutting edge, and most of all, shameless rapacity. But I can’t help but worry her kitchen might get crowded. Can you blame me?

Here’s an excerpt of Liz’s latest.

those who can't do

for Library Journal

Kohl, Herbert. Painting Chinese: A Lifelong Teacher Gains the Wisdom of Youth. Aug. 2007. Bloomsbury USA. 176 p. bibliog. b/w illust. ISBN-13: 978-1-59691-052-2; ISBN-10: 1-59691-052-6. $19.95.

Wilder, Robert. Tales from the Teacher’s Lounge. Aug. 2007. Delacorte Press. 309 p. ISBN-13: 978-0-385-33927-8; ISBN-10: 0-385-33927-5. $23.00.

Robert Wilder, having left behind an advertising career to work as a teacher, presents classroom tales so tall that they function less as reliable memoir than dramatic parody of classroom-as-asylum, with much of the (laugh-out-loud) humor derived at the expense of young students’ attitudes, actions, and disabilities. Each of the four thematic parts (teacher training, student days, family and education, and a final selection loosely bound by the idea of a teaching community) depicts more stammering, twitching, swearing, and screaming than the average school could abide without being shut down. So while the essays in Tales from the Teacher’s Lounge exhibit the author’s knack for hyperbole and well-timed, outrageous hilarity, that entertainment value is boldly derived from disturbing classroom scenarios.

Worlds apart stylistically and thematically, Painting Chinese shows Herbert Kohl as he retires after forty-seven years as a professor and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Social Justice at University of San Francisco and takes up the art of calligraphy. Having inadvertently registered for a class in the company of five- to seven-year-old students, Kohl details the technique he learns along the way (the use of water and ink, ways of holding the brush, tiers of subject matter for the beginning student, and the importance of copying the masters), but more importantly peppers these basics with broader lessons from a lifelong student of the world. Kohl analyzes his own life with curiosity and candor. Drawing upon admirable readings and research, Kohl offers original, sensitive reflections, as when he considers the life of the Monkey King, the impact of Mao Zedong on the life of his mentor, the wisdom of Wang Wei, and the connections between Chinese painting and Taoism. Though sentimental at the odd interval, Kohl’s willingness to inquire within makes him a worthy role model for any student.