A god lost in her bathroom finds a door…
(to the outside? No)
She finds the door to the next life.
She burns: “get back, get back to that nebula!”
Not The Steerage Type
Steerage is so queer. The smells of others assault my tender sensibilities. Why can’t they recognize the class of person that I am? My hope is to make them all see how I belong at the top of the pyramid of being. This may be steerage, but really I am not the least bitthe steerage type. Oh, you may spot me in the Stieglitz picture in the future and say to yourself — well, surely that’s the captain or some other important crew member out of uniform who happened to walk into the frame, but no, rest assured it is me — my qualities obvious to the naked eye. See me and know you are not looking at a steerage personage it is me transubstantiated through time showing you the qualities of a truly refined man…
“Blogging is very satisfying to me — even more satisfying, in many ways, than having a book in a bookstore or a page in a newspaper. If I have an idea or an image I want to riff on, I sit down for half an hour or an hour, and then I publish it where anyone can see it. Instant self-publishing. Instant gratification.”
this is about a poet who writes bird poems —
without birds appearing in the poems
mouth breathers and thirteen year old prostitutes often appear crying
artillery shots echo in the blue distance
the poet is a sketch artist of sorts
defining a lust for love in a criminal world
the spindle kids appear
congratulations — you made it past the needles and pokes
you’re in the fabric of gutter poets
enmeshed for eternity
she’s got pumpkin voodoo on the kitchen cabinets
the word piles are dense and are never really in focus
actually this poem is about a baksheesh for a back rub… huh?
see i’ve got this knot on my latissimus dorsi — the heebie jeebies, know what i mean?
and she’s says:
So I’m going to get Tropicana juice with my father last night at 2 am at some all night grocery store on Biscayne and 79th street, and I’m thinking back about the Hustler magazine I riffled through earlier yesterday morning. I found it between the mattress and box spring, you know? And I see this photo spread and think why do people send in photographs of their turds? The magazine has a contest to find the largest turd in America and people from all over the country send in pictures of super long spiraling turds in their toilets. And I think about the technicians at Walgreen’s — what are they thinking when gathering the photos into the sleeves when a half dozen turd shots are at the end of the stack. Do they show other people at the store? What kind of person mails this to a magazine? What kind of magazine wants this?
i mumble-mouth my way out
i got nothing to say
“I don’t know how to write. I know how I write. And then the next day, I don’t know again. The not knowing is what makes writing interesting and enjoyable to me.”
Jack-faced and jocular you meant to rob your parents because you needed a shot in the arm.
You’d already ransacked your grandmother’s apartment for her pain meds — her doctor wondering how one person could tolerate so many pills: “you’re taking them too fast, these should last you for three months — it’s been a month and a half! Do you have a grandson?”
He knew, but she dismissed it and you took advantage and pilfered her “pill-age,” and now you’re out.
You’re stealing from your mother and you’re enroute with her $40 in your pocket, and her heirloom engagement ring wrapped inside the wad of two $10 bills and four $5’s — and the pawn shop beckons you — strangely numinous like a shot of gold at the end of the block.
“There’s something wonderful about the spontaneity of social media, but I think at this point it’s becoming 100% toxic for people to be firing off the top of their brains… the deeper parts of our brain are actually more empathic. If you revise something 20 times, for a mysterious reason, it becomes more social, empathic and compassionate.”
Every time there is a large gap on radio or television, John Cage is paid a royalty of $4.33. This is why people sit and listen to rain. I’ll make a presumptive statement… I want to hug this guy. He was very Zen. A playground for the soul — I like to wallow in silence for a few hours. I cannot live on a diet of 100% ambient sound. He seemed sad… I’m glad he could laugh there. Just the kind of thing you would need for citations. Every time I get to this part I laugh like a donkey on crack. His laughter… My role model still… Duchamp is “the shit” as well. He reminds me of my high school guidance counselor. I also do elderly weddings and children’s birthday parties. This is amazing, and his cat looks like mine. I love this man.
***
Maps to Anywhere / Bernard Cooper (1990)
Understood. This is considered a landmark book of short creative nonfiction, but for my palate it’s uneven at best. The longer pieces — actually worked best especially “The House of the Future” and “The Wind Did It.” Both of these are comprised of a series of shorter essays and both deal primarily with Cooper’s father and his family. These are both excellent.
Of the flash / micro pieces “Temple of the Holy Ghost” and “Leaving” are exceptional. They work well as flash nonfiction and prose poetry.
But there’s something about the juxtaposition of all these disparate pieces that diminishes the whole for me. This is still a worthy read — as I understand it — the first to collect mostly flash nonfiction into one volume by one author. / Hardcover, 01/09/21.
“Writing is frustration — it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball; you fail two-thirds of the time…”
I’ve been healed, but it’s going to be a rainy day tomorrow. It was revealed to me that profligacy leads to losing scrapers and brushes — and uncontrolled oven fires… or was it oven fries?
I’m not sure.
I am certain that it is the devil’s work, and the devil doesn’t speak English, so here I am studying Mandarin and I have no idea how this fortune cookie, which is written in Spanish, got here.
I’m unable to sort this out and this is playing out like a David Lynch film.
I’m lost without a clear linear narrative, upset by temporal disjunction and gratuitous jump-cuts. I have no way of disengaging from this nightmare. I’d just like to fall asleep while at the editing bay, but the David Lynch film festival continues to loop in my head — Eraserhead is the only film projected.
I want to start again, I want a do over — to get to 500 lap dissolves already!
“If Nazis wanted to reach out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing ‘Jews will not replace us’ and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect. It is a minority position but by granting it deference we give it, over and over, the power of a majority position.”
I am the keeper of the Doomsday Clock. I know what will happen to us. I know how the world ends, but I don’t tell you. I’ll keep you in the dark. I stopped the hands on the Doomsday Clock at 11:59. When we met I thought I would turn back the hands on the clock, that I might set the pendulum in reverse. But you said our fate was sealed and it was fatal. I was drawn to that. I was afflicted. I set the works in motion once more, the cogs thunder. I have chosen this minute.
“This is what I know. Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. And my dog who was dead in 1957 is still dead. Yet I still keep thinking something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow.”
Our salad days are filled with bitter herbs and intractable roots — Not so much a salad, but a melange Of weeds and thistles — Indelicate things in our mouths.
Every bite a mouthful of rot and offal — Awful offal.
The kakistocracy is installed in the cupboards The cups are off on a two week vacation in Wuhan. We are mystified and malnourished.
Now I’ve had my wine… And you look better than you did twenty minutes ago.
And you say: The sky is a massive hole tonight — My precious lucida is eating the universe: Inside-out.
I can lay down and go to sleep.
The lights are receding And the darkness is strangely pleasing.
II. The Death of Tane:
Then there was the sickness — So hot.
The vault of heaven darker — Then darker — A black sun — At end.
It was succeeded by the shadow Of the shadow — Spreading — Nearer and nearer to the pin prick Of light — Destroyed.
To the west— distant— A white effluent Soft and yielding Bounds off.
III. Passage:
Crossing guards cane a woman. She stopped traffic — She wore a mask She needed a cuddle — She shook — She hollered: “You there, take this…” Her eyes closed.
The wind appeared pink.
“Your mother buggered little boys and girls!”
“She’s a ghost,” My mother said —
“Alone —” As she squeezed my neck.
“Goodbye,” I cried.
IV. Coulrophobia In The Land Kakistocracy:
Clowns are spotted in the Carolina gloaming — Clowns with knives at the edges Of dark woods.
I met an old man who loved A woman who — In whispers — Had recently died.
He recounted his harrowing nights Raising his hands at An unfamiliar country.
Without spotting an actual person — He spent lonely days Encircled by clowns — And a stranger… We can not discuss.
Painful moments in our pockets.
I saw groups staring up — Untethered — Lost — Exiles.
They looked small in comparison with This Curious Refraction.
V. A Violent Force:
Corybantic priests run — Amuck through prickly weeds — Bloody hands full of entrails Chased by their sacrificial lambs and Headless corpses — With empty chest cavities — Whose names were not happily chosen.
Among the monticules of ashes — Lie dismembered heads Mouths stuffed with testicles.
And the stranger — Bright and Barren — Grows stronger — Triumphant.
“And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?”
Below you’ll find a book review I wrote yesterday when there was some semblance of normalcy in the ether. I spent the entire afternoon and evening doing what is most inimical to writing — watching history unspool on the tube. Please be wise.
Please be safe.
***
The Year of the Monkey / Patti Smith (2019)
Enjoyable enough memoir from Patti Smith. Spends a bit too much time segueing into dream states incarnate. But even ok Patti Smith is a good enough time with a book.
It doesn’t have the import of Just Kids or M Train, but it certainly has the art, remembrances of things past, literary allusions, loss of loved ones, and globe trotting, and photography of both earlier books (few memoirs do).
I was lucky enough to read my copy while listening to the audiobook (a practice I started with some books last year, and first with Smith’s M Train) because Smith’s voice and reading style are unmatched — well, except maybe William S. Burrough’s who makes a brief appearance here and Tom Waits (who doesn’t).
Another bonus of the audiobook is that where my hardback edition ended with the post-epilogue in 2017, the audiobook which was released in the spring of 2020 included an extra 45 minutes of material up to the pandemic’s early days in the U.S. in 2020, and obviously incidents between 2017-2020. A nice perk of the audiobook. / hardcover & audiobook, 01/04/21.
“I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges, the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost. I wiped the shit from my shoes again and again, still going about my business, that of being alive, the best I could.”
