fiendish lines

This week has been about:

The destruction of functional harmonies

My favorite living writer favoriting my lame tweet, about a deep desire for a discussion on masocriticism in a Piedmontese accent via a long distance phone call

The happy realization that I am going to Turin in a month

Auditions on Saturday (a state of affairs as well as an idea for a Lorrie Moore-esque short story?) 

Feeling sad while reading Morrison's Beloved 

(It also feels weird to refer to Toni Morrison as "Morrison")

Parataxis as a way of feeling

The jarring misappropriation of Susan Sontag (I will forgive you one day, though, Ms Popova, while starving and crawling through the streets for an internship)

Much like the arrival of a newborn, the ceremonious delivery of my new espresso machine (applause!)

A video of the Burning Ship fractal

The horror and the ineluctable Spiral Into Despair after discovering my favorite Whoopi Goldberg routine, in which a surfer girl is totally funny and then totally sad and then totally consoling us and totally making me bawl all over my aging macbook pro, deleted.

Thinking of doing a zine of New Literature with the title done in the style of WordArt 2000, but afraid that it will look like perhaps I'm trying too hard to explore (and transgress) the shifting horizons of aesthetics and taste.

sensitive driving

I guess this week has been filled with You-Saw-It-Comings, most of which have been unpleasant and had stemmed from the destructive machinations of a capitalist paradigm hypersaturated with commodities, or perhaps I'm merely concretizing theory and saying "There is a name for all our problems and it is This." 

I wish I had more time to wander libraries drowsily, reading cookbooks and flipping through philosophy and art theory in the thickly-illustrated "Introducing..." series. 

Having a thought: I don't know why I feel offended when people say that I have a "unique" voice/style/sensibility. And then upon further reflection, I feel like a capricious child, which, I guess, kinda sucks. 

Basically I spent the afternoon looking at air ticket prices and sighing my way to premature hypertension.

Leave the Spine Behind

The moon was never made of shoelaces
but your spleen could very well
sneak out of your body at night
to follow its passion for origami, opera,
or rare meat. You probably wouldn’t even notice
until someone at a bar punched you in the gut
and their knuckles found your vertebrae’s grooves
and the message was sent from brain to tailbone
that to not have a hometown is a disadvantageous
situation to find yourself in when the family
roses are pulled from the ground.
They’ll probably prescribe memorization
or thermonuclear meditation when the truth of the matter
is that any way you position your bed in relation to the compass
destiny remains a crock of shit. The other crock is in the will
and it has never been a secret that the desire to end estrangement
wins three times out of seven. Statistics can prove the likelihood
of my knee finding your knee-pit in the middle of the night.
My scars are out of town at a storytelling convention
trying to coax a fervor from a haughty diphthong.

— Rachel M. Simon

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.


— Jack Gilbert

After your death

First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
from your touch, left empty the jars

you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,

I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or—like another I plucked
and split open—being taken from the inside:

a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.

— Natasha Tretheway

week of 7 eggs

In the spirit of this blog circa 2006, I have returned from church camp feeling pretty relaxed (maybe even blissed out, but I am a puritan who doesn't like to associate with recreational drugs because it's pagan, because I am a puritan, and because ankles are sinful, and because chocolate is the devil's communion wafer, etc. etc.) and perhaps more at ease with living, in ways that I will not self absorbedly expose here. Perhaps I'll just say this: it's hard to love others if a model for perfect love doesn't exist, and I am thankful that there is an ontological basis for that, even if it's so fleeting and abstract in my mind.

Also, I'm not exactly looking forward to the weekend that is coming up. 

Also, the sun has been quite the self centred diva lately!! Hey solar system — I really don't appreciate that.

I miss good ol' 103rd st w and eating a broccoli pizza and living in fear of being mugged, like, 40% of the time. And rushing from lower manhattan to midtown for dinner and a thing at the lincoln centre. And walking up morningside heights. Cripes. I think people get really tired of listening to me go on and on about nyc.

triad

I am walking in the backyard with a neutral expression because I have been reading Megan Boyle and thinking about various scenes in various Wes Anderson films and thinking about a "new visual idiom" that I do not know much about. I come across a sack of quinoa. I open the top. I squat down and put my face into the quinoa. I lift up my face, and look at the sun. My face is covered in quinoa, like rainbow sprinkles on a cake pop. I lie down on the soft earth. A field of quinoa appears here 100 years later. A road that crosses the field is named after the quinoa plants. The place is famed for its beautiful sunsets. You make plans to take your children here, but this thought will always slip your mind.

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There is a food truck in Brooklyn that makes ice cream in various flavours. Its bestseller is an ice cream with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwich chunks, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches. It is a fractal with 0 calories.

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Hey mister! You into child prodigies??? I got you some prodigies at the back of store. This came in two days ago: seven kids with MFAs, and they're busy composing a song in microtone. Dig those tonalities! I've got a kid with a doctorate in comparative theology but he's a downer and he has a beard. There was a fifteen year old neurosurgeon but I sold him to that nice lady you met on your way in. I don't know about you but I would invest in the medical sciences right now, because you'll never know what's gonna eat you up, with all our drinkin' and eatin' and microwavin' — God. Yeah, these? These are 7 month old babies currently pursuing their MBAs while working their way up to a Guggenheim fellowship, because diversity is good. Can you spell polymath? They can. They can also spell zephyr, protohaemophiliac and Amy Sherman-Palladino. They've been getting quite good reviews from my customers but if I were you I'd wait for the next batch to arrive because they come with PhDs in analytical and experimental computing, and Google internships after the 3rd month. 

umami III

I came across interesting phrases today:

1. "volunteer go-go dancers"
2. "an erotics of epistemology"
3. "an island without rain"

umami II

I bought some bulgar this afternoon.

I also bought a pack of amaranth.

I tried adding a some miso to kewpie mayo. Then I mixed them together in a 50/50 portion. It was good. 

I plucked mint leaves from the plant outside my house, then I added them to my tabouleh. 

Blink if you understand this.