East of me, west of me, full summer

camera obscura

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 17:44:04 GMT

Stumbled across some Abelardo Morell photographs at sfMOMA. I love the idea of an internalized public scene, the notion that the best way to see the outside world is to have it trickle through a hole in your wall and display itself upside down above your bed.

I'm home proofreading and feeling like general hell. Some good news, though: I'm going to the Napa Writers Conference in August, where I'll get dogged daily by my favorite poet, camp alone at night, and swim every afternoon in a kidney-shaped pool. Which always makes the kidneys happy. After all, how many organs have had the glee of being the basis for recreational structures?

Hope all you guys are well out there. I know it's been a long time.

an end to bourbon

Mon, 15 May 2006 14:29:26 GMT

I'm hungover on Emily's couch, so booze-addled that I don't even mind sharing my Pilsner glass of water with the cat. Who says there are no new lows.

Last night I locked us out at 3 am and we had to call a locksmith, but then Emily unearthed the spare key that she planted in the yard. We ran inside, turned out the lights, covered the dog's mouth and pretended we weren't there to avoid paying $100. Now as karma some man is hammering into the cinderblock wall that doubles as my skull, and I'm having delusions that the locksmith's livid and sleep-deprived wife has tapped my phone. I need to go home.

And I will. Today.

eastern tidings

Fri, 12 May 2006 21:53:42 GMT

I'm in Virginia. The woman next to me on the flight was wearing these:

Hippies everywhere must be enraged.

Here, it's gorgeous and warm and the cats are twisting around my ankles while the rest of the household sleeps and I read Claudia Emerson. Things ain't bad. In fact, I'd venture to say they're downright good.

adork·able: shit that is cute and geeky

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 20:52:19 GMT

As proof of this neologism I offer iron_poet, the collision of two of the Best Things Ever. Go look at it. It's the super-cute.

Another dorky bit: I got asked to read at A Clean Well-Lighted Place a month and a half from now. Let the nail biting begin. :/

OK. Back to my monster flatplan.

new dada

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 17:36:12 GMT

This morning I got an email entitled "Crush Festivities," which turned out to be spam poetry, and only a smidgeon worse than most slam poetry.

problematic gem?! diplomacy gibe at as transitory fully, to
marvelous in reprove, pipe dream junk mail, a Dutch mechanics, cent in sweetener as evenness arbiter. gabby Lent, witch pissed off and as bop
mutilation, state bookworm ascent whir point man attractive of grow technically and hone a at is pleat boomerang a
shriveled rains domination and crowbar adobe to approximate rap hamstring, strictly, the pockmark,. the adjustment at as box office politicize frantic, the of

attitude, insane!!! squadron to seductive modifier
hardware underweight the an volleyball braggart bubble and conductor, eggshell, to trait in congenial ecological that an multilateral

Whatever a state bookworm is, I'm claiming it right here and now.

In further news, I'm going to see Edith Frost tonight at Hemlock. It should be very mellow and mildly depressing, as a complement to the constant piss storm that is recent SF weather. To hell with this place.

sleepy cartographer

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 19:33:57 GMT

Oh, atlas

look

you forgot my island.

--Joshua Beckman

...

I'm feeling kind of unchartered myself today. I'm cranky and wearing one of those heating pad belts that make me look like a WWF champ under my clothes, so it's a good time to write rejection letters to "authors" who've sent me manuscripts written from the perspective of their bandana-sporting cocker spaniels.

I think I may go to Chicago in July for the––wait for it––Pitchforkmedia festival. Hear me out: It's cheap, I've never been to Chicago, and Berman might not have enough faith in his West coast PCP connections to straggle too far in my direction. Also, the Ex-Boyfriend of the Monosyllabic Alliterative Name and the Friend Whose First Name Is the Month in Which Her Middle Name Blooms live there, and it'd be nice to imbibe something with them. That depends on whether or not they'd see me, though, since I am going to the lamest event ever. Chances are they'd just arrange to meet me at various tourist locations during rush hour and then never show, so I'd get to feel jilted all over again. Which feels a good deal like a 711 Icey coming unstuck from its plastic cup and plunging down on my face at the rate of crestfallen, calculated by high school physics students the world over.

I suspect they make an over-the-counter medication for this. I think I'm gonna go fetch some.

I give in and make the rain internal as well as ex-

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 02:02:29 GMT

I've got this thing about privacy turning itself inside out, evidently, and I just took the best shower ever, so you're gonna hear about it. About the cheap wine glass fogging; about today's new back scrubber and the way it makes me feel that I'm playing my body like a violin, and how that must make Hélène Cixous a little anxious and a little proud, somewhere in the French clouds, French like the shot glasses I bought that bear a hyper-blue lattice design and say "France" on their bottoms like all things French, including Hélène Cixous, surely; about listening to the elevator's chorus of Sunday evening homecomings, remembering this electrician I hired once who had a buddy that was killed trying to fix an elevator, who turned black as the soap turning round and round in my hands, making a froth wondrously white.

Now I smell like an approximated blueberry, and am thinking about walking to the Ethiopian bar across the street and getting a glass of honey wine, of swallowing the thick yellow luster by which I will surely be able to detect the shapes of my truest organs, as well as those that will someday betray me, those Judases crowding my frail Ikea table. I mean, that is to say, hey: Know all your enemies. Know who your enemies are.

straight, flounceless narrative

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 01:19:46 GMT

Two seconds ago I was standing outside my office, barefoot, watching snow flurries come down while someone played bagpipes at an indeterminable location. Or maybe snow in San Francisco is such an oddity that it is always accompanied by bagpipes.

When I was in high school I babysat for these kids that were smarter than me. (I caught the ten-year-old daughter reading Carlyle's Past and Present, which I still can't sludge through, and the son could play full piano concert pieces when he was four––before he broke his arm and decided to wear it in a sling for the next three years, "just because.") They were the offspring of highly eccentric professors who ended up getting highly estranged from one another, so I got to babysit while the father impregnated his bio grad student with twins and the mother rediscovered her collection of tie-dyed overalls and started going to Patti Smith concerts again with men who were equally interested in mold spores.

Anyways. The mom owned a 50s era brick house situated on a hill that had a bomb shelter built into the slope. We were playing in it one evening when suddenly we heard bagpipes and looked out the oubliette hole. Next door, a very red-headed, very rotund man was standing in an undershirt and kilt, playing the instrument, while six of his equally red-headed, not-so-rotund children danced around him in some strange, lethargic, postprandial ritual. So we stood there, agog, necks making every effort to mimic periscopes, watching the display. Then the mother came out with a BB gun and a plate, threw the latter into the air, shot it with the former, and then they all filed inside to attend God-knows-what ceremony. Probably just the Simpsons, but still.

Shortly afterwards, the family that I babysat for went on vacation, and the mom left me strict instructions on how to tend to her African violets. I must have botched it pretty badly, because she quit calling me to babysit. That or she realized that her kids were scary-smart and locked them in the bomb shelter, or sent them to join the Scottish dancing troupe next door. Regardless. There's some strange beauty down in those parts. And I miss it like a lost limb.

n'importe quoi

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:22:19 GMT

So Emily called to tell me that when she finishes at UVA she is moving to Mexico and changing her name to Honey "Vaso con Helio" Lucas. She has officially invited me, and I am officially considering. Sit on your why, please. This is a whyless endeavor.

Last night was my first poetry workshop, and the class is almost entirely comprised of women in their sixties, all brimming with attic salt. They seem dear, serious, and sharp as hell. I think it'll be good for me.

I've been meaning to write about how awesome the Pollard show was a few weeks ago. He stuck to most of his solo stuff, veering occasionally into Mag Earwhig!, and then he came out and played "Game of Pricks," which we always yell out the windows while looking for parking. Somehow, it makes looking for parking one of the best parts of the day. Anyways, it was incredible, he was all high-kicks and tequila-swagger, and I'm glad I got the chance to see him before he drinks himself to death.

To the the co-worker who stole the picture of my family from my desk: You're a creepy fuck. It's, like, four people in dress shirts and pearls at a buffet. What the hell. Nothing that bourgeois can be worthy of stealing.

And shhh: I have a job interview with a textbook publisher on Monday. On verra :)

yes.

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 03:16:33 GMT

I just made a drink out of vodka and sugar cookie sprinkles. It looked like a vial of confetti water.

That's right.

Looked.

when the design digerati fail you

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 23:02:20 GMT

The problem with flip phones is that they come equipped with a seam along which to break, as evidenced by the two clean halves that my phone split into last night. So I am now not answering for an entirely different reason than that for which I wasn't answering before. Don't like that overly wrought syntax? Yeah, well, send your fleet of carrier pigeons to tell me about it :)

I have a prescription for migraine medication now, and a copy of Sarduy's Cobra. We'll see if everyone's favorite Roland was right about this shit. I am in dire need of a damn good wow-ing.

more crapehanger-ing

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 21:45:36 GMT

Should I be disconcerted to hear that my doctor's appointment was moved up because someone canceled theirs "due to illness"?

This week's been shit. I've got a very sick friend on the east coast, and even discovering that the couch we bought last weekend for $16 is in fact a fold-out couch can't make the situation seem one iota of ameliorated.

This is one of those times I wish I had been taught how to pray. Not the formal gestures or words to any particular incantation, just the frank ability to ask of the ether what you cannot ask of the ground. In my family, going to church was a bit like going to the zoo, as if we were tourists of faith. Granted, we were in a small southern town where my father would have been fired and his children ostracized had we not gone to church, so we had to make the best of it, but still. I certainly didn't learn from it. And I wish I had, in a pick-n-choose sort of way.

In (forced-ly) better news, I have The Best Idea for a Halloween Costume Ever. It's so good I may start wearing it nine months in advance. Don't worry. You will be embarrassed to be seen with me.

bagatelle

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 03:08:31 GMT

Bosses rarely happen on Fridays at my particular workplace, and that was for the finer today as I refused the regimented khaki. Mainly in the hopes that I could go straight out drinkin' from work and not feel lame, but a minor though violent hiccup has me sitting alone and gussied in my apartment, ignoring the dishes ripening in the sink.

I'm liking Brenda Hillman these days:

With pure joy exists
a kind of hollow,
the inverse river, the opposite water.

I suspect that resonates because I always find myself in the nudgezone of dichotomies, in the realm of the ole' "yes, but." It is because I am lazy and refuse exact coordinates, prefering to be in that safe area of the graph shaded as true for both equations. But that totally undermines the rather nice, nuanced gist of what she's saying there, and so I will shut up, jerkfaced as usual.

Okay. Peter is home. Off to scrape a beer from the bottom of a glass somewhere in the vicinity.

the teeth of places

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 18:17:42 GMT

Back from Florida. We had glorious turbulence. I love that pratfall of heart, that whole balletic slapstick of viscera. I sat with my eyes half closed, intent upon the rare glee of pericardial flutter, occasionally gasping a little. Other passengers probably thought I was getting off or something, but to hell with 'em. At least I didn't loudly whistle the song I want played on bagpipes at my funeral, like the douche behind me.

In Tampa, my parents greeted us in matching peach-colored shirts, claiming it was an accident, which is somehow worse than if they had done it deliberately. They looked old, time-whittled, silvered by the alchemy of aging. It does me in to see them like that. But all in all, the family managed to hold off on the histrionics for Peter's sake––there was only one embittered reference to my less-than-illustrious genealogical record of Mississippi slave-owners––and meeting his moms and siblings was truly charming. I just hope they like me : /

Any connotations of home that Florida once held have pretty much been dissolved, but still the landscape gets to me. The yawning mouths of roadside mailboxes, the fists of oranges drooping in the slow slump of gravity. Live oaks reach from beneath the earth like the dutiful, sun-seeking branches of great oaks secretly huddled underground, bunkered against erosion. And an occasional blown-out tire rebecomes a water moccasin, its imbricated tread pattern glinting in the constant sun, new body slinking wetward.

Here the sky is lavender with fog and rain, and it's nice to be back, even if it does mean back to the hell of work and moneylessness. Though we did buy a TV yesterday––grâce à Peter's mother––and I am going to finish watching The Bicycle Thief. Right now.

so windows snow and pears soften

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 17:57:14 GMT

The one morning I can sleep in and my mother calls before eight o'clock. I am now alert, shuffling from room to room in my Eskimo sleep boots, eating cold artichoke pizza, and feeling the general dreariness of the morning chill my marrow by a few Kelvins.

To whomever renewed my paid account, I thank you dearly, and apologize if you did it months ago and I never noticed. My mamma raised me better, I swear––even if she has the ill-gotten gall to call before Official Holiday Cognizance Hours have begun.

Have a nice long weekend, all. And a good Christmas, too, if that's your thing.

o capitalism!

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 23:03:40 GMT

Ahh, paychecks are good. During my break I bought the new(ish) Edith Frost album, a wallet that has cute lil' accordion change pockets, and lettuce soap. I will now smell like salad.

It almost makes up for the fact that I had my skirt tucked into my tights, preschool style, for most of the walk to Union Square. Yeah. Slick.

Tonight, before we go out, I am making beer bread, broccoli'n'cheddar soup, and pumpkin ice cream. I've been making a lot of ice cream lately, even though I hate pouring the custard through the sieve. I'd rather pour it backwards through my sphincter than pour it through a sieve, truth be known, but I s'pose that wouldn't make for the tastiest concoction.

Accounting is playing Christmas music and it sounds like a Goddamned Wal-mart aisle back there. It's almost as bad as when I worked for that Conway-Twitty-lovin', prescription-drug-abusin' CPA when I was in high school. She'd lock me in her office with payroll and "Drop Kick Me Jesus, Through The Goal Posts of Light" on repeat for eight hours. Is this what numbers and Xcel spreadsheets do to people?

OK, very funny: who sent the GREYHOUND PARTY evite?

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 18:53:51 GMT

So this morning I received an evite from someone who I've never heard of. Perplexed (and unaware that I was so popular), I clicked on the picture of the host, only to have a close-up image of a razor-sharp, sickly elongated dog head pop up on my screen. What's worse, those who had already RSVPed were also bringing their "hounds."

Now for the woeful background information: I am irrationally, deathly afraid of greyhounds and all their skinny-headed brethren. This includes standard poodles, Afghans, and the ever-terrifying borzoi. Watch while one mauls this young ethnic princess! And while two blood-thirsty Afghans race to join the dismemberment fun!

I do not know what it is, but there's something so genetically askew with these creatures that, to me, they are architectonically intolerable, and thus evil. My oft-quoted mantra: If you can pick a lock with a creature's head, said head is too damn skinny.

...

Someone, my loves, is going down for this.

Cody, I am envisioning the most tender ligaments in the backs of your knees.

grief I do not own

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 20:19:57 GMT

Today during my lunch break I sat down with a copy of Donald Hall's Without and publicly lost my shit. The damn thing was sea-wet when I put it back on the shelf, and passers-by lost their bodily edges, their outer electrons snared by an invisible harness of air molecules.

I think I am losing any sense of public decency. Last time it was an NY Times magazine excerpt from Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking that I found at the Oakland airport and slobbered over during the BART ride back. Time before that it was the patch in Underworld where Martin Lundy searches for his dead wife's eyes amongst the photographs of baseball players in his collection of memorabilia. It's all got me thinking about grief, about how we plan for it, how we know the method by which we will tend to it years before.

Maybe it's that tomorrow will be the third anniversary of my grandfather's death. Or maybe it's that now I run the slight, fluke peril of losing a lover, whereas before I was "settled" I ran the chance of finding one.

At any rate, I want to go home. Home to a field of dead grass in northern Florida, where a boarded-up mansion to the south of my old house still waits for me to bring a forty, a pack of cigarettes, and a fellow who does not mind the cold.

a pause in the nidification

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 18:26:28 GMT

So we're installed––and by "installed" I mean our two items of furniture made it over without falling off the car. There's no television, so I've started reading Mishima's tetralogy and watching movies on my laptop, of which Scotland, PA stands out. It's a remake of MacBeth, but set in a small town fast-food joint, circa 1975. I liked it.

I also like Chuck Close and Kiki Smith, and will be going to their exhibits sometime this weekend. Lemme know if you're up to seeing some Close up close. I'm betting his pores are each, like, the size of my palm.

And I love our new place. I love the way the sun swooshes down behind the triptych formed by the bay windows, making the sky look like one of those Hydracolor t-shirts I always hankered after but never got as a kid. Most nights I sit around eating dry fiori by the handful, watching the tea lights on the windowsill give me the thumbs-up sign with their tiny, brazen thumbs of light.

Name me something better. I'll joust ya over it.

no Ehrenreich-posing for this one

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 18:56:38 GMT

Turns out I won't be writing the homeless version of Nickle and Dimed, nor pitching a pilot for The Real World: Homeless to MTV. Meaning, we found a place. Grove and Divis, no less.

I think Wednesday afternoon we're taking a bottle of whiskey up to Kite Hill, if anyone's interested. Hell, we may even fly a kite, which thus far I have never seen anyone do up there, wind or whiskey or no.

And oh yeah: we got an enormous king-sized mattress from a guy in the Mission. When I asked why he was getting rid of it, he said he was in a new relationship and only needed room for two people, that there'd be "no more sleepovers." So I guess we just started our collection of gay-orgies-we-didn't-participate-in memorabilia. The goal is to obtain Anything Dennis Cooper.

a curio

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 23:25:16 GMT

This weekend, at a parish sale, I wrote a check to the Most Holy Redeemer. There was no "Church of," no "Parish Fund of." I essentially wrote a check to God.

I am afraid it will bounce on principle.

And oh yeah: the phrase "everything will be all right" is getting a little threadbare. In fact, the words are at the point of syllabic unraveling. I recommend we switch to "everything is going to be tater tots." Because tater tots are delicious and all right is only all right, after all.

I typed this with my argyle-stockinged feet. (But not really.)

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 04:39:30 GMT

'Twas one of those weekends that seemed swollen with affirmation, supersaturated with many molecular instances of "yes."

We went to Jesse's birthday party, which was pleasantly peopled and set high above the streets of Hayes Valley in an astonishing lil' solarium. I threw together a berry fool, wore a bright marigold dress, and made a variety of embarrassing papilionaceous gestures while standing drunkenly close to the roof's edge.

It was not unlike happiness.

Then Michelle and I saw The Squid and the Whale last night. It rehashes the predictable Noah Baumbach/Wes Anderson themes and dialogics, but without the implausible though charming quirks. I liked it in that mild way you like things on November evenings, when your fingertip rediscovers the hole in the pocket of last autumn's jacket and the petrichor drifts up from the newly soused streets to greet you on the way out of the theater.

And then I went home to be very thick in love.

tiny landscape

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 05:01:37 GMT

I grabbed a pack of frozen broccoli at the grocery store tonight and when I loosed it into the pan it was stunning, a small block of the wickest tundra, glistening with ice fuzz and green vim. It made me a lil' sad when Peter chopped it all up.

I like the idea that we can unwrap vistas from plain food packaging, that a slice of topography can simmer on my stove top.

In other news, I'm reading Pale Fire. It's some sorta gorgeous. If I were a winged insect, I would most certainly want Nabokov and Véra chasing after me with their nets. Being pinned to a display mat by the twentieth century's premier belletrist/entomologist and his esteemed inamorata couldn't be all that bad.

midweek prattle

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 23:49:20 GMT

I love fall back. There's something glorious about waking up to a sky that has already declared itself blue for the day, that has let its indecisive haze slip from the shoulders of the city.

Pretty much slept through the American Analog Set the other night. I probably would have found it more riveting if every tall male in San Francisco hadn't come to the Bottom of the Hill with the express purpose of obstructing the view. I swear, these guys could've stood at the bottom of the other side of the hill and seen the stage just fine.

Show-wise, that's it for me for awhile. I sheepishly wanted to see Metric on Thursday night, but NO because (1) Metric is considerably not talented, (2) it's total Tin Pan Alley teenage hipster tripe and so the crowd will be very obnoxious––even if they will be conveniently short––and (3) these are my locust years, and the tiny shells of their bodies litter the floor like peanut husks. Meaning, my poverty has set like a bad perm.

Tonight I'll finish watching a documentary about Henry Darger, the outsider artist. I haven't been able to sit through all of it because Dakota Fanning narrates a portion, and there's something wretchedly creepy about a small blonde school girl reciting a story about small blonde school girls who happen to have male genitalia. It just goes to show that something can be entirely inappropriate in its aptness.

[insert interrobang]

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 07:49:59 GMT

They've illustrated Strunk & White and provided an accompanying soundtrack.

For those of you without NY Times access, here's one of the more absurd snippets (from a 1981 letter written by E.B. White):

You might be amused to know that Strunk and White was adapted for a ballet production recently. I didn't get to the show, but I'm sure Will Strunk, had he been alive, would have lost no time in reaching the scene, to watch dancers move gracefully to his rules of grammar.

This is cream-worthy.

Wait, make that creamsicle-worthy.

And off to the fridge I go.