Mar 31, 2004

What the Hell am I Eating?



It's not langpo, it's my lunch: "Chicken Scallop Mousse Terrine." Which seems to bear an alarming resemblance to Tuna Noodle Casserole. Or Brahmin Spam. Accompanied by Radiccio Salad with Smoked Gouda and Pecans.

What was it about eating the food in Hell?

Surly



I am deeply dissatisfied with my hair today. My skin is pasty and broken-out. I think I'm somehow going through puberty AGAIN...

And the weather outside is like Jack Frost's armpit...

Mar 30, 2004

Virtual Walk Home



Last night walking home from the err...bar...I thought it would be a good idea to document my journey with the digicam. I haven't quite gotten the hang of the camera yet, so only a few of them came out. Today it seems far less interesting than it did last night.

Anyway, my walk home:





"I Have a Miniature Secret Camera"



Blogger's block.

Am planning something exciting when I can get home to my home computer, involving my new little toy:

Mar 29, 2004

Watching TV last night i saw Wycleff Jean perform a song in a manner vaguely reminiscent of Leon Thomas, and for a moment I smiled. Leon Thomas, peeps, it doesn't get any better than Leon Thomas...
From the introduction to Keith Douglas: The Complete Poems:

"The masters at his first school found him difficult: 'bumptious and aggresive', too bitingly critical, too unorthodox, too fond of his own fantastic methods, too clever for his own good. His next school, Christ's Hospital, only managed to contain him by being exceptionally forgiving and flexible. His biography helps us to understand this. His whole childhood can be seen both as a nursery for his peculiar alienation, or what he called his 'long pain', and as a forcing house for the unusual strain of independence in his character. He pondered this a good deal, partly because he could see how much dislike it provoked. From quite an early age he showed an acute awareness of somehow having to manage inside himself some extra thing that was almost unmanageable."
"I LISTEN TO THE DESERT WIND

I listen to the desert wind
that will not blow her from my mind;
the stars will not put down a hand,
the moon's ignorant of my wound

moving negligently across
by clouds and cruel tracts of space
as in my brain by nights and days
moves the reflection of her face.

Like a bird my sleepless eye
skims the sands who now deny
the violent heat they have by day
and she denies her former way

all the elements agree
with her, to have no sympathy
for my impertinent misery
as wonderful and hard as she.

O turn in the dark bed again
and give to him what once was mine
and I'll turn as you turn
and kiss my swarthy mistress pain.

- Wadi Natrun, [October 1942] --Keith Douglas."
Gosh, in Russia all you have to do is nail a shoe to a post...

CAMBODIAN MAN CUTS OFF PENIS TO FEED SPIRITS
Mon Mar 29, 3:01 AM ET

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - A Cambodian man cut off his penis when he said he was visited by four hungry spirits in a dream and he had no chicken or duck to offer them.

According to police, 33-year-old Soun Ney told the spirits to go away when they first appeared to ask for food, and waved his penis at them in defiance.

"Devils, I don't have any chicken or duck for you," he was quoted as saying by local police chief Phoeung Vat. "If you want to eat anything, you can eat my penis."

Soun Ney said the spirits agreed to eat his penis. He was rushed to a hospital near the capital Phnom Penh after he castrated himself with a butcher's knife.

"He is lucky to be alive," Phoeung Vat told Reuters.

Villagers in the deeply impoverished southeast Asian traditionally offer chicken, duck or cake to the spirits of the dead to ward off bad luck.

Mar 28, 2004

Cooking with Meat and Soda



Sweet & Sour Meatballs, 7-UP Pound Cake & The Champagne of Beers...
Am psyched to have rediscovered Ruins' "Symphonica": Yes meets grindcore meets Beijing opera meets Rogers & Hammerstein, performed by stoned Japanese people. Absolutely brilliant.

(Mostly) Worldless Playlist



As per xtina's request, I've compiled a playlist which is for the most part completely devoid of lyrics. Which isn't to say that the human voice isn't represented, but they're not lyrics per se. I've tried to limit the selections to jazz and electronic stuff and a little bit of hip-hop beats. It was nice to hog the stereo today (roommate is away for the day, no Electroclash!) and annoy the neighbors (who have been playing "Appetite for Destruction for about three days). The list should fit on an 80-minute CD-RW, which, if she's really nice to me, I might give her.

'Circular Temple #2', Matthew Shipp, from "Circular Temple."

'The Creator has a Master Plan', Pharoah Sanders, from "Karma."

'Places I've Never Been', from "Antipop Consortium vs. Matthew Shipp."

'The Tri-Five', Mark Feldman, from "Music for Violin Alone."

'The Piano Tune', LTJ Bukem, from "Points in Time 003."

'Abyss of the Birds,' Oliver Messaien, from "Quartet for the End of Time."

'Marion Barfs,' Clint Mansell featuring the Kronos Quartet, from the "Requiem for a Dream" soundtrack.

'Glacier,' E-VAX, from "Putting the Morr back in Morrisey (Morr Music Comp)."

'And then Red,' Joe McPhee and Dominic Duval, from "The Dream Book."

'My Old Flame,' Bud Powell, from "Blues for Bouffement."

'Praha in Spring,' Ruins, from "Symphonica."

'Kill Pussy Kill,' Girl Eats Boy, from "Songs of the Siren."

'WELS Concert Part. 2' Peter Brotzmann, Mahmoud Gania and Hamid Drake, from "The WELS Concert."
I'm coming unhinged.

Had fully intended to go out barhopping last night, enjoy the warm air, hit relentlessly on anyone willing to make eye contact with me, and see where the night took me.

I made it as far as Charlie's Kitchen, where, after a mere 2 drinks my emotions started going haywire, and I started to realize that if I stayed out I was going to get in a fight, or start crying there at the bar. I'm not sure what overcame me, some feeling of nausea or complete isolation coming from the realization that I was out drinking alone because all of my friends have paired off, or have quit drinking or have become sufficiently sick enough of my bad attitude that they just don't come around anymore. Ordinarily, flying solo is not a problem for me, I've spent half my life taking to strangers in bars, but it is becoming more and more difficult. I'm losing my nerve, that feeling that people are looking at you because you're there by yourself and they're thinking that there's something wrong with you because you are alone on a Saturday night is becoming more pervasive. I'm starting to believe it. All of the failed romances, the petty arguments, and the general nervous angst of Boston is starting to seep into my bones. It's a bad sign when going out and getting drunk isn't even fun anymore. It doesn't feel the same at 32 as it did at 28, 29, 30... It begins to feel like it will go on like this for the rest of my life. Peoples' lives around me seem to be changing, moving, forging ahead, but I am stuck in this place, this pattern, this hole.

So I went home, drank a bottle of Black Opal Shiraz, ate an entire box of Little Debbie Peanut Butter Crunch bars, read blogs and attempted to write. My writing is starting to suffer from my current mental/emotional state as well. I get stuck on the same themes, the same images, the same old same old.

It is a formidable rut I'm in. Ordinarily I pride myself on being able to do what I need to do to break out of such things. However lately it feels like I am losing the battle. One can only pick oneself up, dust oneself off and keep shambling along a certain number of times until it starts to feel pointless.

I am really staring to feel in my heart that I need to leave. It isn't that I don't love Boston. But Boston doesn't send me flowers anymore, Boston mutters and turns its back to me in bed, Boston doesn't return phonecalls, Boston forgets our anniversary, Boston is cheating on me. It's the hollow resignation, realization that one needs to leave, though one may not necessarily want to, entirely.

I spend too many nights drinking alone, too many weekends wandering around the cold streets of this city by myself to believe that there's some kind of "community" I'd be abandoning. There is no community, we've splintered into factions, gotten sick of each other, gotten lost in our own egos or seduced by the closed little worlds of our own problems.

It's like this, Boston: I'm lonely, my heart is broken, I asked you for whiskey and you gave me gasoline.

I can take care of myself, but not when the world around me has turned to stone. City of Boston, if you want to keep me here, then you've got alot of making up to do. I'm already halfway out the door.

This World is Complete and Perfect



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Mar 27, 2004

DEBAUCH 7

Imbibing the black wine to purge
the taste of the rubies from my mouth,
the ground lit by tender shoots
& limbs budding in fever, the shadows
grow graver & I split

like a fruit along the groaning fissue, fusion
or fuschia snowflakes driving the engine
of this rut into antiquity: that's it,
a baseless absolution & levitation, the
blue veins climb the worried spire, a weird
blossom unfurls its solar panel petals into
this the only day that's ever been, the binary
language of reservation, reservation's axis
that tilts toward the felled clementines
& the pregnant loam where worms go,
where white stalks reach for the air
as bloodless fingers: Indian Pipe, Skunk
Cabbage, every green thing that smells
like hell. A tongue collects flies, digits try
the heavy atmosphere, touch nothing,
go on growing.

Mar 26, 2004

It's 63° outside and I can barely keep my eyes open. My boss is in Madrid. Fuck this.

Batarde
Batarde- You are bold and forward, but some people
consider you a bit twisted.


What Calligraphy Hand Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
"I'm not gettin' on det ting..."

is what the Jamaican woman with an army of luggage said as we the dozen or so Fung Wah victims approached the ruined stretch of street where the bus usually docks and were met by that most dreaded of sights to any Fung Wah traveller:

The short bus.

The last time I rode the Fung Wah short bus, I feared for my life. This ride was no exception. Rather than having repaired the shocks, they seemed to have installed some sort of mechanism which would amplify any irregularities in the road in order to shake the cabin violently and prompt the driver to further increase his already ludicrous speed. On top of that, I was surrounded by college kids who seemed to be in the process of falling in love, or at least preparing for some heavy petting. I felt nearly obliged to provide a ziploc bag full of Trojans and a lecture on VD.

The KGB reading was like nothing I've ever experienced. Within moments of them opening up the bar, people began to pour in. Well groomed, well dressed New Yorkers, and the place began to fill up to fire-hazard mass-grave proportions. I could only assume this stampede of New Yorker readers were there to see the featured reader, a certain Former Poet Laureate who goes by the name of "Billy." To avoid any google-related conflict, said reader will be referred to hereafter as the FPL.

Having obtained a beer on the house (they actually give free beers to readers, or rather 3 free beers, as after that they started to charge me; though the charging seemed to take place after I read) I put my bag down by the podium and attempted to manhandle my way through the crowd to get to the hallway and some air and to find GM. Upon reaching the other side of the room (and finding GM), I realized that there was no possible way I was going to be able to re-enter, as the crowd had now spilled out into the hall. I wasn't enormously worried, as the first reader was to be the FPL, which I guess was an effort to clear out the folks who were there only to see him out so some of the other readers could enter the building. From where I stood (in the hall) all that could be made out was the FPL's narcotic drone (something akin to the Guidance Counselor from South Park) and occasional bursts of laughter as the throngs guffawed at his "dumb as a post"="accessible" antics.

Only a handful of folks actually left immediately following the FPL, but I was able to squeeze into the room to hear the rest of us "regular people," who had been allotted slots of 7 minutes, as opposed to the FPL's, um, I dunno, six hours or something like that? Upon squeezing into the room I realized that the amorous kids from the bus were there! I forgot to check their faces when I, the weird dude who didn't say anything to them during the whole 4 hour bus ride, approached the podium.

The remainder of the readings, of varied styles and characters were just fine, and I was glad that we had gotten the FPL out of the way early. I was definitely the youngest reader and felt slightly out of place on that basis, but the crowd at least did not groan or throw things, and one lone person actually clapped at the end of one of the poems. Though after the reading I was approached by a wildeyed young man who said that he wished that I could have explained to him what my poems meant before I read them, as the majority of the other readers had done. I'm have to admit that addled by the crowd, lubricated by my free beers and just plain unprepared to deal with such a question, I slipped immediately into Arrogant Bastard mode and said "I don't believe in meaning." For some reason this reaction caused said young man to launch into a rote recitation of apparently his own poem. Which wasn't altogether bad, I might add. "I like that." I said. "Know what I mean?" "Yeah, gotcha..." and somehow managed to disenage myself and move back into the now sweaty and drunk throng.

It was good to leave the chaos of the reading for the relative serenity of GM's place where R the cat somehow managed to jump *delicately* onto my head. If people were like cats, life would be like one of those Hong Kong action films where people perform not altogether impossible, but highly unlikely feats. I haven't had a pet in a long time and I think I sort of miss it. Though given my lunatic schedule and general flakiness, I don't think I could provide a very good life for another organism. I can kill airferns. Maybe a pet zombie...





Back to ol' Boston by way of the 12:30 AM Peter Pan after ditching the Fung Wah for hanging out at P.N.'s birthday party.

Bus sleep is not the same thing as real sleep.

If I believed in a deity I would ask him/her/it that I never wind up as any of the people I met shambling, burbling, screeching, muttering to themselves or sleeping in chairs on the way back from South Station at 4:45. In case anyone is wondering, though the T stop opens at 5:00 AM, the first train does not, in fact, come at that time. Now I must somehow consume enough coffee to some how get through a day of work. More detailed report of the day and a half NYC extravaganza later when I am capable of thinking/speaking in complete sentences again.

Mar 24, 2004

Off to NYC, don't think I'm going to have a net connection, unless I find a stray Wi-Fi signal. Back sometime tomorrow.

Bored?



It's the zombie infestation generator.

Not unlike old Atari games, this requires a certain amount of imagination to make it interesting. As we all know how *my* mind works, I myself can watch the entire city go...

Mar 23, 2004

If I say the zombie movie was magnificent, you guys are going to think I'm nuts.

But, no really, the acting was great, the sound design was great. And boy, what a good looking gaggle of zombies!

You pretty much know what you're going to get with a zombie movie. But somehow I never get sick of it!
Who wants to go see "Day of the Dead" with me tonight? I hate seeing "feel-good" films by myself...
Chances are if you read this blog, you've already received my irksome self-promotional bulk email. But if not (just doin' my job, ma'am):

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

A CELEBRATION OF FULCRUM: AN ANNUAL OF POETRY AND AESTHETICS




Wednesday, March 24, 7 p.m.


@ Manhattan's KGB Bar, 85 E 4th Street (b/w Bowery & 2nd Street)
Info: (212) 505-3360


Jonathan Ames, Billy Collins, John Hennesey, Glyn Maxwell, Philip Nikolayev,Katia Kapovich, Mark Lamoureux, Ben Mazer, and Andrew McCord.

Mar 22, 2004

And All God's Angels Beware



The roommate is playing the bassline from Joy Division's "Insight" in the living room and we are all singing along under our breath.

"I remember when we were young."

I think it is going to make me cry.
I think the next project may be Chinese Restaurants.


YENCHING RESTAURANT, HARVARD SQUARE, CAMBRIDGE, MA
for Catherine Meng


I want to ask how you're eating
out there, alone

at the In-n-Out Burger?
Me, there's nothing so
I dunno,
white as sitting here
in the dim fold of the Yenching fighting
the urge to order double
& proffer Mooshi to the house gods, to the
angry dead or the ones who never
were. I never really eat
alone, you see, it says
GHOST BUFFET above all the doors
I enter, & for the spook
brigade it's 24/7 all you can eat
hysteria. I'm here tonight with General Gao, Gao
from Hunan & I think
Herd Boy & Weaving Girl, too.
It all worked out for them in the end, he
quips, over by the fishtank
I think she's putting her head
in his lap & the invisible waitress
don't know what to feed
the ones without mouths;
I hear out there where you are they
get burgers Animal Style &
it's true any man is 1
among 999 other islands, we're
makling progress: 1 uh
1 um
1.
Here Gao, chere Gao, keeps
poking me with his wicked
stick: Monster!

Quitit.

Heretic!

Quitit.

There's something important he says
the way
all these birds are screeching & he says
the end of the world, the very end, that
tastes like chicken also.
"This unit fears nothing execpt dinosaurs, zombies and pirates."

Zombies vs. Jesus



Zombies Push Jesus from Top of North American Box Office

Why settle for a barely credible gory story about just ONE guy who ostensibly came back from the dead, when you can go see a barely credible gory story about LOTS of people coming back from the dead.

The choice is obvious, I think.

Plus Jesus speaks in Aramaic. Zombies go "Aarrrrwwarraaarrrhhh."

Jesus loves you. Zombies want to eat your brains.

Fair enough.


You are Wallace Stevens. You are a sad, beautiful
insurance salesman. You write sad, beautiful
poems about nature and impossible things.


Which 20th Century Poet Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Mar 21, 2004

Somebody call an exorcist.

Mar 19, 2004

I did more film poems at the Video Balagan last night:




TIMOLEON WILKINS--MM

Diaphonous

gong sound


dress hewn hum


fiery DNA

helix tremble

O the green

moss trembles

haircut



thick grass

shoals

Some summer

flute

***

JEFF SHER--TURKISH TRAFFIC

Brillo rhumba

flytrap motion

static

cathedral

***

ROBERT BREER--FUJI

Skeleton

hat

train

Mt. Fuji airbrush

caterpillar

bridges pipes

***

BRUCE BAILLE--CASTRO STREET

Dark smoke

swan neck

shadows

pinhole industrial






blood fever

smokestack

white driver

sediment layered

terrace

I often dream of trains
when I'm alone


horizontal
piles it

rides the horizontal

iron dog
pants
blackness

***

D.A. PENNEBAKER--DAYBREAK

Daybreak shadows

innocent air

Chatanooga dim

reverse skyscraper

glyph:

Day!

LEN LYE--RHYTHM

Production ankle

production horse

beat drum rhumba

On the subject of zombies, am excited that the remake of Dawn of the Dead is in theaters as of today. Though I probably won't go see it tonight because I'm slightly scared of the people who would go to see it on opening night.

For all you strangers out there, I'm not a goth, I just talk like one...

I dated a goth once. It was pretty weird. I don't think after one hits 30 one should identfiy oneself with youth subcultures anymore. Not that she did, necessarily, but I met many people who still did. Perhaps it's due to some insecurity on my own part that I'm concerned with the notion of "growing up" (ignore MASH post below...), though I find it a phrase I wind up subconsciously saying to peope: "Just grow up..."
According to Online Mash (Do you guys remember this game from 5th grade?):

You will live in House.
You will drive a Invisible Hearse.
You will marry Shiva and have zombies for kids.
You will be a Harvester of Souls in Montreal, Quebec

I'm pretty much happy with all of it except I was kind of hoping for the cute waitress from Charlie's instead of Shiva...
You should definitely check out Sean Cole's Itty City from Pressed Wafer. Please note that the book is available from the address listed on the site, even though you won't find it listed there. (The Pressed Wafer website has not been updated since 1918. Purveyors of important literature they are, digital wizards they are not...) It is $5.



NYC Next Wednesday March 24



Hey, I'm going to be in NYC next Wednesday night for the reading mentioned in the sidebar. All of my usual NYC people seem to be out of town that evening, is there abybody out there who can put me up for the evening? I don't take up much space.

Mar 18, 2004

Bibliogal: maybe we should all get Art Nouveau tatoos in honor of your imanent departure.

This isn't the one I sent you before, but here's mine (heh)!:




AT, what about you?
Two-fisted action from Jess Mynes at the CARVE reading:

Mar 17, 2004

Today we celebrate the man who drove the drunk Bostonians out of Ireland.

On this day, redheaded French Canadians stay indoors.

Mar 16, 2004

SOL
Hymn to Phoebus Apollo

Despair, your alloy laurel
twines metal roots
even thru the blighted
ground, the sleeping
body grieves for you,
as do the things that go
white & wan in caves,
whose feelers make
their own cold suns,
who know it is the world
who has turned away,
the way a body turns
away. The sacrifices
laugh thru their opened
throats: You are prince
of withering things,
no proof against
the coy goon in the lobby
or the ones whose
arms are as shadows
are.
dbqp: visualizing poetics is always fascinating, but today there is a compelling post about a poet named Robert Lax, of whom I have never heard, but looks to be pretty amazing.

If you are interested in matters concrete or minimal you should scurry on over to dbqp. Heck, even if you're not interested in those things, you should go anyway, perhaps you will learn something anyway.

PWOERMD: THE BEAST

seventhth


Think of the blog as my home. Think of the comments field as being a guest in my home. Consider the context of the posts when replying. If I'm clowning around, then chances are it's okay to be silly. If I'm saying a prayer at the dinner table or showing you family photographs of emotional import to me, then at that time it is probably not okay to be silly. I am generally a nonironic person, so it is usually apparent when I am clowing around and when I'm not.

Just a public service announcement. This forum is important to me. So just trying to keep it as comfortable for me as it is for you.


Mar 15, 2004

At the risk of feeling like I'm 16 years old and scrawling lyrics on my leather jacket, here are the lyrics to a song I can't get out of my head these days. I like it because it is an exorcism song.

HOW GHOSTS AFFECT RELATIONSHIPS
-His Name is Alive (Warn Defever)

I dreamt that one had died in a strange place
They had nailed the boards over your face

I dreamt that one had died in a strange place
They had nailed the boards over your face

You are under ground
You are under boards
You are under ground

I bid to you anonymously
Never had to sleep again
& dreams kept away she could never allow

I bid to you anonymously
Never had to sleep again
& dreams kept away she could never allow

I don't like this at all
I couldn't seem to speak
I don't like this at all

Cut, bleeding & sad
When you dream of things you don't understand

Cut, bleeding & sad
When you dream of things you don't understand

You can't live here
You can't live here
You can't live here
You can't live here
You can't live here

Groan



So I said to myself, why not agree to lead the first HBS Staff Book club discussion, especially since I was promised the liberty of chosing the first text. Somehow once I submitted the text I intended to have read and discuss (Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude) the After Hours program director called me back and amended it to "chosing the first text as long as it's on the New York Times bestseller list." After an inconceivably irritating conversation, we were able to compromise with the only book which has had any mainstream success that really interests me at all: Franzen's The Corrections, which I vaguely remember somebody who's opinion I value telling me that it wasn't a bad book and that I should get over myself and read it. Hopefully I am remembering this correctly. I may never get over myself, but it looks like I'll be reading and discussing this text. Have any of you read this thing? It's not horrible, right? Right?

How do I get myself into these things. I knew that attempting to interact with my coworkers was a bad idea...

Urgh......
Am considering reinventing the <[[[[[[-[[[[0{:}0]]]]-]]]]]]> template. What do you guys think? Would likely maintain the same color scheme more or less, but at this point the old template is so quirky that it's not working well on some machines.

Though I've grown pretty attached to this one, so I'm of two minds...

Mar 14, 2004

THEORY

Whales are blue because the cold blue sea.

Lambs are green because the fragrant grass.

Lightning is yellow because the lonely rain.

Blackbirds are red because sex.

Ships are orange because the black desert at night.

Rivers are purple because the dry, stained lips.

The people are grey because the flagstones &

because of the music.
My heart goes out to the brave people of Spain, for the terrible tragedy which occurred there, and for their forthrightness in choosing to upset the administration which in its complicity with the unending cycle of violence being perpetrated in the Middle East makes its own people, and people across the globe vulnerable to such attacks. The people of Spain choose change and not fear, even in the face of an atrocity on their own soil. Perhaps we can learn something from them.

Mar 12, 2004

Oooh, easy does it on the metal food group
You will swallow some tacks. You are a little
weird, maybe not so much in a good way. Buy a
yellow tie and wear it on your head.


What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
brought to you by Quizilla


Raid Kills Bugs Dead



Is my test of poetry...
Was reading from 29 CHEESEBURGERS at a Borders Books in Boston last night and some guy interrupted after the first poem about Shaye's and said,

"Did you write that poem?"

"Err...yeah..." I said.

Then he said, "I'm the cook at Shaye's, I made that burger. That poem sure ain't like anything I've ever experienced there."

He was kinda vaguely confrontational. It was a little weird, but also kinda cool. I've been waiting for someone from one of the many restaurants I mention to become aware of the book, most especially any number of waitresses I have crushes on (Yes, there are a bunch of them. How does that Tom Waits song go, "When you ain't got nobody...")

I should just start trying to trade copies for beers. Ultimately, that's where the money from the book goes anyhow...
Against my better judgement, I got the HaloScan comments to work with this template.

So go ahead, HURT ME...
I ask for love but all I get is freaked out...

I Need a Vacation



Oh wait, I just had a vacation...

I Need Another Vacation


Mar 11, 2004

Incidentally, I've only posted images of Aaron & me, since I don't like to post images of people without their permission. Aaron & I & Brian have pictures of everyone who read, so if you want one of us to post them, just let us know.

Where did that chin come from?

Me at the CARVE reading.


Oh Captain, My Captain



Aaron Tieger at the helm of the CARVE reading in Chelsea.

The photo at left is by Brenda Iijima. It's one of my favorite pictures of me. That's a book about Adolf Wölfli that I'm reading. I think that is why I like the image so much.

Mar 10, 2004

I try to remember a time before the ghosts, when everything was young. Can one remember how one's body felt at age 10?

I don't think so.

Can one do the same thing with the soul?

Same answer, I think.

Thus one must learn to inhabit the adult body, or the adult soul. A ghost is a disembodied soul. A body without a soul is dead. But if a soul comes back to its own corpse? That's a revenant. Is that different from being alive? A body occupied by a soul that walks and talks as if living...only the deep wounds will show you something's different....
Figured out a way to host images via my work account.

I won't talk much about the Carve reading, since others have already done so, apart from saying that it was a very warm vibe and some very great work was read. It was a pleasure to read with some of my closest cohorts and comrades and nice to do so in New York. Afterward we went to a bar which looked like the Zinc Bar but wasn't because it was in Chelsea. It's similarity to the Zinc Bar reminded me of the bars in Boston, all of which are some variation of the Irish pub or a sports bar, sort of repetitions of a theme. But in this instance, it was a different theme.

The next day at UDP was spent preparing for a launch party for a cultural studies/theory journal that an affiliate of UDP is putting out.

Immediately prior to the party, I went to a play put on by the National Theater of the United States of America, also located in the NEST space, called "What's on My Head," which was truly amazing. Sort of a bowdlerization of U.S. History done in the form of a kind of sinister game show. It was really funny and exquisitely produced. The audience sat on a riser which was mounted on these huge casters which the cast members who were offstage would push around. There was a very vaudeville-esque sense mixed with a certain perversity. A kind of songless musical for nihilists...

Following the play, an army of Ivy-league theory types and NYC mainstream literati descended on the space to huddle around the protype issue of "N+1." Which resulted in a weird mix of people, to say the least. Overall, a fun if slightly voyeuristic-seeming evening. Vaguely reminiscent of certain parties I attended with a certain Ivy-league type who will remain nameless, which I found to be somewhat disconcerting and indeed there were dopplegangers of said acquaintance there, but the $1 beers pretty much made the whole thing bearable.

Saturday afternoon was spent assembling copies of 6x6 #8 and also letterpressing more City/Temple covers. It was nice to meet some other 6x6 people, as well as a few other UDP people I'd never met before. In the afternoon I attended a bilingual reading at the Bowery Poetry Club: Jen Hofer reading with Myriam Moscona. Hofer's translations are really amazing, and the work that Moscona read from, "Ivory Black," was really interesting. The Mexican rendering of postmodernism is pretty interesting, and not as bloodless as alot of American pomo stuff I've come across. I'm probably a good audience for this, given my pomo leanings but my unwillingness to abandon "outmoded" Romantic tropes entirely. It makes we wonder though, if what's happened here is a kind of U.S.-ization of postmodernism, subtlely altering the concepts until they somehow fit into the sociocultural map of our intellectual and cultural institutions; sort of like what happened with concepts like...say...democracy or liberty?

After the reading I went to another play, this time a workshop rendering of Michael McLure's verse play "VCTMS," at the Medicine Show Theatre a kind of retelling of the Electra myth through the lens of marxism and existentialism. Given that it was a workshop performance, there were no costumes or sets per se, but the actors and actresses sort of occupied these three tiers based on the implied class-structure of the play. It was a very visceral and stripped-down retelling of the myth, and I found it to be quite moving. Seeing actual actresses and actors do poetic verse made me excited about the concept of poetic drama. There seemed to be something organic about the way that actual moving bodies interacted with the words themselves, even if in this case they were just sitting in chairs or on the floor interacting with each other. It makes me think about my own sense of disembodiment I feel in my work and in general. Perhaps the answer to reinhabiting the corporeal is not necessarily by trying to reinhabit my own body, but the bodies of others by way of dramatic form. It is a kind of possesion of a sort, the way the words can move through another persons body, through their mind. McLure himself seemed pretty ecstatic seeing his own work channeled physically through others.

It is nice to go and see theater stuff in NYC, as it's not something I get much of a chance to do here. I'm not sure if that is because there's not much going on, or because I just don't know where to look for it. Most likely the latter.

On Monday night I gave what was probably one of my favorite readings to date, along with Genya Turovskaya at a place called Casper Jones Cafe in Parkslope, Brooklyn. For no reason specifically, other than the confluence of the work I read, the aesthetic environment of the place itself and the people present. Casper Jones is a really cozy space, sort of upscale but not entirely pretentious, the resident staff were really nice and there were these cool white fuzzy bricks on the walls. I'm not sure how to describe it other than that. Overall, the vibe was really good, there were not a ton of people there, but there were some new faces, and people who I don't think have seen me give a full reading before... And Genya's work was exquisite and seemed to accompany mine pretty well. Afterward, we all went to a really great restaraunt called Nana where I got some of the best salty spicy fried squid I've had to date. Outside the back window of the restaurant there was this amazing ghost-clock formed by projecting light through a smaller clock, thus making a big sort of shadow-clock on the wall. A fitting end to the reading, I think.

And now I'm back here.


Yup.

But looking forward to some great readings later on in the week.

Mar 9, 2004

Back from a productive and enjoyable 4 days in New York City. Will report highlights later. Right now, I kinda wish coming back to Boston didn't feel akin to gougeing my own eyes out. But it kinda does. No offense, Boston peeps, this is all my own personal emotional stuff operating. I do believe it is time to seriously evaluate what I am doing here and why and thinking about viable means of getting myself out of here.

Mar 8, 2004

Ok, I'm gonna quit it with the quizzes now. Thanks alot, Tieger...

DisorderRating
Paranoid:Moderate
Schizoid:Moderate
Schizotypal:Very High
Antisocial:Moderate
Borderline:Very High
Histrionic:Very High
Narcissistic:High
Avoidant:Very High
Dependent:Very High
Obsessive-Compulsive:Moderate

-- Personality Disorder Test - Take It! --


Hmm...the deathclock gives me another 11 years. I don't think it's taking into account my total indifference to traffic...

Apparently I'm gonna drop on May 6, 2015, according to whatever algorithm is being used. Better hurry up folks, time is running out...
Sleep well, Mr. Gray.

GENYA TUROVSKAYA AND MARK LAMOUREUX AT CASPER JONES


CASPER JONES CAFE READING/MEDIA SERIES

PLEASE COME!

MONDAY MARCH 8, 7:00 PM, AT CASPER JONES CAFE IN BROOKLYN

(see below for details)


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


GENYA TUROVSKAYA


Genya Turovskaya is originally from Kiev, Ukraine. She is a poet and
translator currently living in New York. She is the author of Calendar
(Ugly Duckling Presse 2002). Her poetry and translations from Russian have
appeared and are forthcoming in 6x6, the Germ, and Aufgabe among others.
She is currently pursuing an MFA in writing at Bard College.


MARK LAMOUREUX


"Mark Lamoureux's work has appeared in JUBILAT, LUNGFUL!, CARVE, FULCRUM,
ART NEW ENGLAND and others. His chapbook, 29 CHEESEBURGERS was released
by Boston's Pressed Wafer in the winter of 2004. Another chapbook,
CITY/TEMPLE was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in the Fall of 2003.
He is the managing editor FULCRUM ANNUAL."


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


Casper Jones House Cafe Bar Lounge

440 Bergen Street
between 5th Ave. & Flatbush Ave.
Parkslope, Brooklyn
(718) 399-8741
take the Q train to 7th Ave or the 2/3 train to Bergen Street

Contact Brenda Iijima or Alan Sondheim for further information.

Brenda Iijima: yoyolabs@hotmail.com
Alan Sondheim: sondheim@panix.com

Mar 5, 2004



A wasp in a dish of ash
makes some sound

of a life that's molting,

the star in your breast
receding, bereft
years & intentional
fallacies, pathetic now

how the tight demons
proffer poisoned jackfruit,

you don't dress the wound, you
press the wound & nothing
happens, every stigma

attached, how the days
unfold, what they do.

The wolf & the moon
get freaky, no motion in
the stall, the animals
are sleeping the stars are
out the moon is out
the answers fall like opals

into nets, they're not opals
they're sparrows'
hearts.
I hope it HURTS, motherfucker...

Ashcroft Hospitalized With Pancreatitis

Arrrr! I am a pirate of the ether....

Fantastic reading tonight in Chelsea, NY for Carve Magazine. Many friends and new friends, in a gallery full of pictures of something or other...

Am psyched to be in New York and among friends. Travel is the only panacea.

The ghosts here are a different color.

Mar 4, 2004

Very soon I will be on a bus to NYC to head out there for the Carve reading this evening. I am overjoyed to be getting a little break from the city of Boston. Hopefully I will still be able to blog and email, hitching a ride on a wi-fi signal with the laptop's airport. I like to think of myself as a pirate of the ether.

"Monsters are always happy."



That ghost speaks and I listen with my blood.
I am so fucking T I R E D!

Please let me sleep.....................

Mar 3, 2004

Can we all go back to bitching about our broken hearts and sexual frustration now? Thanks

Have other peoples' hits gone way up today? Do people really like conflict that much? Is this why poetry slams are so popular?

You humans are so disappointing, I'm glad I'm just an apparition...
People say *I'M* too intense, but you kids are making me look like David Carradine from "Kung Fu"...
To anyone who's thinking that the Boston poetry scene is like a cross between the World Wrestling Federation and the Special Olympics, it ain't always like this...
The ghost pounds on the door in the remote hours of the morning until you finally let it in. It enters the room like an opened vein.

The first thing it does is open all of the drawers in the room, and dump their contents onto the floor.

The second thing it does is break all of the glass in the room.

The third thing it does is to set all of the clocks to 11:34.

The fourth thing it does is write its name in blood on the wall.

Don't be afraid, it's just its way of showing affection.

The fifth thing it does is smash all the furniture to bits.

The sixth thing it does is pound the air out of your lungs.

The seventh thing it does is it just hangs there above the rubble in the middle of the room, staring at you.


Mar 2, 2004

I used to want an army of evil robots, but maybe I shoudl have an army of robots of love, instead. That would probably be alot nicer. Nice pastel blue robots of love. Coming for you all. You have 10 seconds to love your neighbor 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2...
It says "LOVE" on his chest. He's a little robot of love! Isn't he CUTE!?!?!



And people say I have no paternal instinct...

PEEPS
New Portraits by Kate Ledogar
March 9-27
Reception Friday March 12, 7-9pm
Contact: Kate Ledogar at 617-441-3833 or kateledogar@yahoo.com

Kate Ledogar, owner of 108 gallery and columnist for the Weekly Dig, presents her new series of portraits of rock stars and others. Ledogar has shown many similar series over the past seven years: in 1997, portraits of coffee house regulars at the 1369 in Central Square, in 1999, a series of musicians, employees and other denizens of the Middle East Restaurant and in 2001 a group of 30 self portraits and 30 portraits of other people, displayed in grids at the Middle East, the Gibbs Gallery at the Arlington Center for the Arts and the Diesel in Somerville.

Her current series, PEEPS, focuses on a more diverse and personal group of friends and family, including her close friend Brooks Morris (owner of Buckaroo's Mercantile in Inman Square), two sets of retired parents and step parents (on Long Island, NY and South Venice Beach, FL), cable access semi-star Robby Road Steamer, Union Square sixth and seventh graders Vicki and Ralph, and other local heroes.

Kate says "Obviously I'm writing this myself, so I won't comment on the quality of the work. (Some of the pieces I like, some I think I could have done better.) Hopefully the series will give people a sense of my soft city - the world that I inhabit through the people that I know - and give the spectacular subjects of these portraits the spotlights that they deserve. "


Narcissistic Egomaniac Peanut



At times it is pragmatic for the Ego to supercede the Id. Since the Id has claws and the Ego coddles. I don't want to be a part of the club. If you want to come into my cave I'll tell you the visions I have. I don't like the town meeting because you have to wear shoes. We've got more important things to do here in the dark... Since when did poetry become a sewing circle? I read your books, I go to your readings. If I want to hear from you while I eat my frozen pizza, I'll invite you over for dinner...

This post is about the Buff List v. Blogging, for you linear types...

A few entirely practical words about the Buff list and why, for me, it's sort of a little alarm clock telling me it's 12:15 AM and time to go to bed and not much else. (If the Buff List floats your boat, fantastic, I'm merely offering my 2 cents):

Cent #1.) IT'S UGLY. Given that I spend a significant portion of my day staring at the Yahoo! Interface or alternately MS Outlook, the last thing I want to do is spend a lot of time scanning variously formatted text in the context of that window. Start a Website or a group Blog or something, I can't bring myself to stare at black-on white single-spaced text. What's one of the best things about books? They're often very beautiful and the sense of design interacts with the content. I find blogs to be quite similar to books in that respect.

Cent #2.) THE DIGEST CONTENT IS POORLY ORGANIZED. If I see something in the digest list what interests me, I generally have to spend an untoward amount of time looking for it, or sometimes I go to the archives and do a keyword search. Or most of the time, I just don't bother. Again, this could be remedied by a change of format.

Cent #3.) I like pictures. Blogs often give their authors the opportunity to incorporate images with their text, thus adding another dimension to the experience of reading them, which enhances the experience in many ways, from Christina Strong's flash poems to Jim Behrle's delightful cartoons, this adds something charming to the experience of reading blogs. Much more pleasant than trying to parse a half a page of Harry Nudel...

Innovation, ye experimental poets... The Buff List dinosaur has remained the same for I don't know how long. Are you ladies and gents still using rotary phones? C'mon, I know some of you guys are techies. Build yrself a website with a decent interface. Really, I'm that shallow, or at least that spoiled by technology...

Mom was right!

The Devil Card
You are the Devil card. The Devil is based on the
figure Pan, Lord of the Dance. The earthy
physicality of the devil breeds lust. The
devil's call to return to primal instincts
often creates conflict in a society in which
many of these instincts must be kept under
control. Challenges posed by our physical
bodies can be overcome by strength in the
mental, emotional, and spiritual realms. Pan is
also a symbol of enjoyment and rules our
material creativity. The devil knows physical
pleasure and how to manipulate the physical
world. Material creativity finds its output in
such things as dance, pottery, gardening, and
sex. The self-actualized person is able to
accept the sensuality and usefulness of the
devil's gifts while remaining in control of any
darker urges. Image from The Stone Tarot deck.
http://hometown.aol.com/newtarotdeck/


Which Tarot Card Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Mar 1, 2004

Warm pre-spring nights like this one always make me feel...better? I don't know if better is the word. Nostalgic perhaps. Because they make me think of a similar such night in the pre-Spring of 1991 when I first encountered Kenneth Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese.

I remember I had just gone from Marlboro College's dining hall to my work-study job in the library. There were only the earliest traces of leaf-buds on the trees that were everywhere around campus. I was most likely full and full of coffee, the great thing about the Marlboro College dining hall was that you could eat as much as you wanted from a fairly large variety of food. Having grown up more or less "white trash," it was the first time I had experienced many of the foods that the dining hall served: felafel, pesto, hoummus, you name it. I was a vegetarian then. I remember cutting up my mouth trying to eat an artichoke because I didn't know you were supposed to just scrape the meat from the sharp leaves.

Anyway, I was in the room in the basement of the library where all of the books came in to be processed for putting them on the shelves. It was my job to use one of those spongy fake-tonuge things to apply the little Marlboro College Library sticker to the inside of the front cover. I would then type (type!) the call number on a little slip of paper and apply the adhesive plastic window around it to attach it to the spine and then I would type the bibliographic information into a primitive DOS program. At the end of the night I would print out all of the card catalog cards on a dot-matrix printer and then go file them in the card catalog. The head librarian's name was Sally Andrews. I think she might be dead now.

The Rexroth book was in the stack books to be checked in. It was the harcover edition with the special vellum flyleaf and the vellum pages in front of the first page of each section where the poet's name was written in Chinese. I guess I was enticed by the beauty of the book itself, and started to read the poems. I had never seen anything like those poems before. I don't think I had had any contemporary poetry classes, or poetry classes at all for that matter, as it was only my second semester of college. I was in a workshop, though, and writing horrible poems as much influenced by The Cure and Joy Division as they were by what I had read to that point: T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, Richard Brautigan and a few others. There was something to the elegance of the plain language that Rexroth used that clicked in my head and I felt like my entire perception of what poetry was and could be was changing in the space of the time that I read the book cover to cover when I was supposed to be processing the stack of books. I have since realized that I probably could have stolen the book then, and nobody would have ever realized since it hadn't been processed or entered into the stacks yet. But I was a better person then, and such a thing would not have even occured to me.

As I was reading that stuff, though, I realized that I was going to be a poet. It was pretty much in the cards at that point anyway; I had been lauded for poems I had written in high school and had been the editor for my High School literary magazine, but it was unclear whether I was going to be a writer of fiction or poems, or a photographer, or an artist, or a drunk... But at that moment, I knew that it was poetry. Had I known what being a poet would really mean, in terms of my life, my relationship with my family and the sacrifices I would need to make, I may have slit my wrists then and there. But of course I didn't realize. I didn't really realize that there was anything different about being a poet than there was about being an accountant, or a scientist, or anything else...

I was still a virgin then.

I remember copying by hand Tu Fu's "Moon, Flowers, Man" and hanging it on the door to my dorm room. That dorm room that smelled of cigarettes, coffee, and "Black Velvet," the cheap Canadian Whiskey I was drinking at the time. God only knows who was buyingt that shit for me, but both my roommate, the crazy Pakistani speed metal guitarist, and I had developed a liking for it. And for the poems from that book, which I would take out of the library once it had been processed, by me. I got back late that night because I finished up the pile of books that I was supposed to, having lost a couple hours going through the Rexroth text. The library was mostly empty when I went upstairs to file the cards in their proper places in the card catalog.

I most likely went back to my room and did my homework, wrote a poem and probably drank Black Velvet, which seemed to always be on hand. I would impress the somewhat unsavory crowd I ran with at that time by drinking an entire bottle of the foul stuff and still being able to recite the poems I had memorized from that book. Everyone always seemed to be gone several hours after when I would eventually start to puke. Except for my roommate who also spent a fair amount of time throwing up that semester. That small fact aside, it was a pretty idyllic time, reading those poems, and other stuff that I had first encountered at that time, Nietzche, Jean Rhys, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, etc. etc.

It wasn't long before I was writing my own imitations of those poems, something that would not last long, but it marked a big step from those tawdry, turgid things I was writing prior to that. Admittedly it would take me a long time that things did not have to be crafted as aribtrarily and as pristinely as the stuff I was writing as a result of having come across that text, but it did mark an important stage in my development as a poet.

Later that semester I ordered my own paperback copy of the book. It is the copy that I still have today. Now dogeared and stained, a kind of avatar of the self, ala Portrait of Dorian Grey. Except that both the book and the man are aging. I'm not sure which is in better shape...

Am very much looking forward to GETTING THE HELL OUT OF BOSTON for a little while. (See events at sidebar). I will be in NYC from Thursday until Tuesday. Haven't made many formal daytime plans yet, so if any of you NYers know of readings that are going on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night, or good art shows that are up, or anything else, or if you just want to hang out, drop me a line!

YOUR MAMA DON'T BLOG

Study: Blogging Still Infrequent
Happy 30th Birthday to Aaron!!!!

This is the first first day of March in quite some time that the Pogues line "On the first day of March it was raining" doesn't apply.

I guess this certainly qualifies as "in like a lamb." How will it go out? like a lion? like a lover? like a thief?

I remember on this day last year we had Gerrit Lansing's 75th birthday party. I remember driving home with James and Amanda and Christina and Jim Dunn and I can't remember who else and singing that Pogues song "Boys from the County Hell." It was snowing and miserable that day. But somehow full of light.