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 3, 2004
Mar 2, 2004
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!
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
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...
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!
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.
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.
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