Monthly Archives: March 2012

Even if your cheap career depended on it.

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i prefer, to a calculated fault, the thing that is supposedly not the better thing. i feel sorry for assholes, Christmas trees, and panhandlers. Commercials make me cry. i enjoy other people’s smoke, can’t let go of taped-up shoes, rig my sunglasses with paper clips, and cherish articles of clothing that have earned their holes.  i prefer Manhattan Ave to Bedford, school to home, eating at the bar to a table, humor to comfort. i encourage unfinished business and jeans. Uncorrected proofs.  Marx. Laundromats. Trannies. Grey hair. Snacks. Jittery diesels. Dirty stories. Rain. Skipping breakfast. Old people. Adolescents. Houseplants. i buy boiled eggs. i think Stockholm syndrome is kind of romantic. i know this is a list of cliches. Sometimes i don’t care.

One of my Florida apartments was in a carriage house in the backyard of one of the Medievalists at my University. Once, just after an actually devastating hurricane, i had to go into the big house for something.  For some reason i was without a chaperone. Maybe the back door was open and i’d wandered in, desperate to find someone? Regardless, i found myself alone, walking through a beautiful but quite lived-in house. It was the sort of place i might usually go for, but then i hit the scary room. The walls were lined with ningyo, Japanese dolls, and they were unkempt, almost rotten, and in such a large quantity that the space disturbed me. i imagine myself walking backwards out of the room and scampering back into my own private attic. This is not the kind of preservation i collect.

In Be Here to Love Me (2004), there is an interview with Townes Van Zandt’s son that has haunted me for years. Looking clueless and sweet, the son mentions that they only ever bought groceries at convenience stores.  When i saw the film, i was fresh out of leaving someone i really, really hadn’t wanted to leave. My ex only ever shopped at the convenience store up the street. Beer and crackers, mostly.  Watching the kid mention this detail casually but bringing it up because he knew it was a big deal kind of…scared me.  A tiny thing that hints at walls of disturbance. i thought about him walking up the sidewalk to the store, a gesture that seemed gigantically immediate, driven, and short term, and i couldn’t stop crying for a while.

“Mostly Middle,” Michael Hofmann’s review of a new collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry  in the London Review of Books, 8 September 2011, locates her skill as a poet who only hints at the crazy: “It is in rare, late poems that Bishop permits herself not a long look so much as a brief glance at the worst: ‘A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift’ (‘Five Flights Up’) or in ‘One Art’ (a poem so stifled in its compressed clamour I’ve never cared for it): ‘It’s evident/the art of losing’s not too hard to master/though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.’ ” Compressed clamour. The art of losing. Yesss.  i’m not arguing for indiscriminate abandonment here. i’m looking for places where people found a way to do it constructively and carefully because it had to be done.

Cheesy, great Voices and Visions (1988) clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gMVffgkpfQ

That’s How Much Fuck Fish.

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Adaptation: something that is modified to suit new conditions or needs.

Are there superadapters? Something like supertasters? If there is genetic variation in taste, and sweetness is not objective–sour, neither–what can be made of variations in capacities for attachment–and detachment? One person’s sociopath is another’s twin? Last night at work someone told me that supertasting was a) very 90’s and b) actually a disorder rather than a skill.  The same thing could surely be said for superadapters, but that’s so easy.

Walking With a Ghost

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A rare solo visit to the Greenpoint library a few days ago gave me a second to thumb through the new arrivals in the adult section.  i immediately had a stack of about 10 books, including Barton Seaver’s For Cod and Country: Simple, Delicious, Sustainable Cooking; The Ten, Make that Nine, Habits of Very Organized People.  Make That Ten.  The Tweets of Steve Martin [yep–that’s all one title]; Olivia Harrison’s George Harrison: Living in the Material; The 2012 Pushcart winners; Arundhati Roy’s Walking With Comrades; and Roberto Bolano’s The Last Interview.

i narrowed the pile down to the last two, justifying them as subway reading–a crucial category, because if i do not have something really compelling to read on the train i will sleep through my stop every time,. i tore through the Bolano; about to begin the Roy.

A few highlights from Bolano:

“In one way or another, we’re all anchored to the book.  A library is a metaphor for human beings or what’s best about human beings, the same way a concentration camp can be a metaphor for what is worst about them.  A library is total generosity” (48).

“For me, the word ‘writing’ is the exact opposite of the word ‘waiting’.  Instead of waiting, there is writing.  Well, I’m probably wrong–it’s possible that writing is another form of waiting, of delaying things. I’d like to think otherwise” (62).

“That’s more important than writing it [poetry], don’t you think?  The truth is, reading is always more important than writing” (67).

Ritual Unions

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Got me in trouble again? Hard to say that i don’t like trouble at this point. That i like to trouble is clear–both in the critical sense, that’s how i wound up in grad school, but in my personal life as well. The two year itch. The permanent open door. The insistent, umm, curiosity about boundaries. i collect it nouns and verbs.

To collect pretty trouble. Like Elizabeth Peyton’s painting of John Lydon. Most people see ugly. She sees gorgeous. Now i can see, too. Like glitter and drag queens and hot, sticky loud shows in a tiny room toilet paper jammed in your ears and everyone’s pretty, too. Like the way David Gordon Green used to be able to make a junkyard or a broken building, or even a kid with pica beautiful–see above photo. And see this one:

Then sometimes the metamorphosis births the cockroach instead of the butterfly, and the trouble i get into just hurts. Think Lindsey Buckingham’s “Trouble.” If you know the song, it is soft, sweet despair–that moment when you realize, shit. i care. And it hurts. And you try to text that feeling and it looks like: crapcrapcrapshitfuck. And you listen to the song, and it’s a soft descent that makes you think, should i worry now?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbpuflLgmgM

But then you watch the video. Ha. Hahahahaha. It’s absurd. Six dudes playing guitar, singing with mouths open wide. Six more dudes standing up playing drums–totally feeling it.  Mick Fleetwood is even there, looking kind of like Animal from the Muppets. Supposedly he was meant to record a drum track for the whole song, but he and Lindsey had a tiff in the studio, and there are only 4 seconds recorded, and that is actually the drum track for the song. Those 4 seconds, over and over. On the double. “I think I’m in trouble. On the double.” Form follows function, on purpose or not. Trouble doesn’t have to stop at bad. It moves.

So here i am. There are piles of clothes on the floor. Most days i wake up, go straight to the coffee shop and work for a few hours, come home and change, walk to Isa and work for 9 hours. Repeat. Sometimes i have breakfast with Joni and then race him to school. i stay up late the night before and pack his little lunchbox and set his clothes out. Make sure his penguin humidifier is full for the night, that i roll him over when i see that little leg hanging over the side of his munchkin bed, that i kiss his forehead while he’s asleep, and giggle when he comes and jumps on me at 6:45 the next morning.  Yes, ritual unions got me in trouble. Again. i’ll take it. On the double.