badgerbag: messy, surly, full of books

funfest!

I had a great time at Ladyfest today and heard lots of great work!

Eli- sang some songs, spoken wordy stuff on gender identity, relationships... some rhymed poetry. I'm hearing songs, formalism, something like slam poetry? not like i know what slam poetry is but it seems like people get a little bit hip-hoppy with their rhymed and not traditionally metrical couplets. she is starting a "creative online community" thing.

Um. blah blah blah. It was all very different from the staid readings I go to down here on the peninsula. where I am for some reason the only freak around and no one else swears or has funny hair. I guess they all migrate north. As I seem to be doing. But actually I am not abandoning my scene down here - more about this in a minute.

Mary W. (Wings?) Gimme an A! Gimme a B! ORTION! "best abortion I ever had." "abortion haikus" "Don't infiltrate my abortion" "An abortion is like that." Various sentences using the word, bringing the word into everyday speech - why it is so hidden.

Sabrina C. nice guitar playing.
"This morning we were the elephants (Elements? heh. well, either way.)
This morning we licked our lips repeatedly
this morning we got dressed & undressed and dressed & undressed 6 times..." <--- this was good and went on forever.
Last King of Doowop - why was she at all nervous and tender about this piece? it was fantastic. maybe a little bit harsh on rap, which can also be poetic and lovely and isn't, maybe, meant to take the place of romantic songs or be contrasted with it. "maybelline teens". many lovely turns of phrase...

Can I say all this? I always take notes at readings but I usually don't blog them, especially not with people's names. "I have been followed by the lonely aluminum wolf" or something (I like to write down lines that strike me tho sometimes i can't write fast enough and forget exactly) "as they warm you up for their licking shadows..." "I am weak in the way that matters most to the skin."

Yeah -- I'm happy whenever I hear something new that I didn't expect. -- even one line or phrase --

***
why so many cups of coffee stared into?
A cup of coffee is the urban lake of post-post-modernism...?
***
D. Di Prima - reading from Loba, mostly. (And I flip back to the beginning of this new notebook where I'd transferred a few scribbled down quotes from "The Poetry Deal" which i heard her read at the 50th anniversary thing in march)

"Oh Lil! you promised me the language of mushroom and fern!' "your murderous black crossroads" Medusa poem-translation "because you love the burning ground" "She strides on the battlefield"

I think of Wittig and Across the Acheron and wish very much to talk with Diane about that book and if she hasn't read it, to freaking make her read it. We are on the same wavelength in some ways. I long to send her my homeric hymns and stuff.

trina reading from "Tender Murderers" very amusingly! it looks like a great book. I will buy and read it and add it to my "women who kill" collection. not to be missed... everyone go buy it... and she is the nicest person on earth...

embarrassingly i ran out to bug diane in the alley and behaved like a total goober and so rudely missed the beginning of wendyomatik's reading. "her ideals died out 40 wars ago". fierce.

b. mandell. several stories about a girl named Lila. I wrote a bunch of things down from this. she and trina's outfits and reddish curls matched each other.

j. melusine in pink ballgown and tiara! (I'm sounding like a society gossip reporter as I dorkily admire the especially femmy outfits. but i do love a super femmy outfit esp. retro or girly. and all the dresses made me happy and so many times a decade ago would be the only cutesy femmily dressed person other than doss.) I liked "invocation for a phone whore" "Let there be bells! ring & ring! and not the slow tick of time..." any invocation is good by me. I liked her omphale, her pink pool, her death car, her gematria and quoting of anton le vay. fun.

susie something, a super-macha slam poet from AZ. "the stick shift never stopped us from touching' "behind seat belts that bound me like the rules of love" rather sweet memoir poem about first love
"I grew fighting" and then suzie strapon poem which was fun and fluffy and another long introspective poem about her dad and then the one about how she woudl start a giant trend of m0rmon lesbians with 10 wives raising dykey daughters and sending them all to br1gham young university.

at lunch w/chula, j. and s. and the sacredwhore girl and another person who was quieter and whose name i didn't catch, I was warming to j. mightily as she described reading the descent of inanna to her young niece at bedtime. heh!

I amused myself with a little private joke as I came back from the bathroom and ran boldy up the back of the booth thingie to hop back into my place. If I had done this not to get back into my seat but to throw my cloak over chula it would have been even funnier, but since no one else knows about Saint-Loup and how he impressed Marcel in the restaurant by doing this very thing, I was only privately amused (until now).

back again and fell a little in crush with T.H. - how could it be helped?! I burst into tears actually as she read "lucky". and felt like i might have to flee the room.

and I had a giant annoying asthma attack as smoke was coming into the room from outside. sucky sucky sucky and it super-sucks to go be the annoying hippie telling everyone to please not smoke anywhere even remotely near the door. it sucks to suddenly not be able to breathe and it's like someone's got their hands around my throat, but lower down and inside my chest, and is squeezing relentlessly. it's exhausting. and the floor starts looking like a really attractive place to lie down. I am sure someone was reading and i was listening on some level, but... yow, i was out of it for a while. and the inhaler made me tremble speedily and unpleasantly and want to lie down even more. next time i go there i'm gonna obnoxiously tape up Nosmo King signs everywhere or stand up and make a little speech about please go way far away from the door.

chula read her fabulous, hilarious stories! in a poodle skirt with fringe. I can't praise her stories because she will say that I'm just trying to get up her skirt. but wow, she was great. (though still at the tail end of having a cold and not enough sleep)

daphne read and i was so blown away. i mean i had been reading her interesting blog and liking it, and then last week read some poems of hers after chula shoved the book into my hands, but did not realize.. I can't even start or I will sound like a crazed fangirl, but she is doing some good, good, megagood things with language and it's rare that i freak out and go "oh my god a Real Poet" and feel that I am at the feet of mindblowingness. A lot of people try to get to where she is but they... i don't know.. not everyone can hold that sort of intensity and extended focus, and often people bail out of the burning airplane WAY too soon. I rave about my friend Antzen, and he is somewhere very interesting and visionary and knows what he is doing and I'm a mere grasshopper at his feet, but i'm going to be dragging him to hear daphne sometime in the future so that he will have something to learn from. I liked her mention of being a textual DJ. (which was something I had noticed Thea doing and also someone else, but i didn't have a name for it other than collage or bricolage or mixyuppiness, and I like "textual DJ" better.)

a horse i flog a little too often

i posted some of this to my temps perdu (Tom Purdue) list so it might not make much sense as it's an ongoing thing

Someone recently said they weren't grokking what perturbed Marcel-narrator so much about the Goncourts - why reading it and thinking about it made him feel that he wasn't ever going to be a writer or properly enjoy life. That book (extensively quoted) described in a flowery yet journalistic style a dinner party at the Verdurins'. It presented the beauty, wit, and grace of everything as if it were Reality... which is what depressed Marcel because he felt shut out of that version of reality. What he is saying about realism is that it's intellectually dishonest because of its claims to objectivity.

This, later, after he's had his mind blowing realization that he can be or maybe is already
an artist of a different stripe - after he trips on the paving stones (he's tripping!) and remembers being in Venice and then keeps seeing, smelling and hearing things all around him that remind him of other things and catapult him back into the past and make his memories and fantasy real. Suddenly he's filled with confidence that he has something to say and will
write his book.

Certain people, whose minds are prone to mystery, like to believe that objects retain something of the eyes which have looked at them... This fantasy, if you transpose it into the domain of what is for each one of us the sole reality, the domain of his own sensibility, becomes the truth. ... A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it. And this is why the kind of literature which contents itself with "describing things" with giving each of them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us, since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time. Yet it is precisely this essence that an art worthy of the name must seek to express; then at least, if it fails, there is a lesson to be drawn from its impotence (whereas rfrom the successes of realism there is nothing to be learnt), the lesson that this essence is, in part, subjective and incommunicable.

all games have their moments

We altered reality a whole bunch tonight during our Buffy game finale - did you feel it?

I totally love my character in this game - "Chip" - I based him very loosely off of someone I know but not very well, or really on a stereotype extrapolated and way overplayed and hammed up from the not-very-wellness that I know of him. (I'll confess. I based him on Acrobat's brother.)

Well tonight Chip had his moments because the anime cyber girl who is the consciousness of this girl who was dying of cancer.. um there's a lot of backstory... but she was the alchemical furnace of this evil other dude from some plane of hell... and my guy's deal is that he is an extremely affable dot-com "club kid" who does a whole lot of drugs. and in the game system he has the power of "psychic visions" which i specified in my hijack the game system and make shit up sort of way means that the more drug-addled he is, the more in tune he is with the occult/psychic/whatever vampiry weirdness. (Which, again, i usually just make up something and see if whump, the GM, will take the bait and make it so.) I made him call cybergirl and melodramatically tell her to hack into and start playing his "playlist for my death" that he had constructed for just such a moment of Ultimate Final Battle. It was especially fun tonight as it was the giant climax of weirdness - and The Plan to battle the evil thingie was that Chip would have an illusion spell cast on him to look like his robot girlfriend and was on this big altar thing as a sacrifice and the Evil guy would bite him and be infected by his/her nanobots which were sort of programmed by both Chip's reality-altering very intense trip and by Max's (druidsquirrel's char) hackery magic spell-program. And he began to control the amazing techno music with his mad tripping DJ skills and was able to slow and speed up time along with matching the beats of the songs to whatever tempo, and to time things so that the music would be synchronized with his sister the slayer's (rook's char) mighty punches. Much fighting and monsters and and beheadings and some necromancy and apocalypse and FBI agents and and swat teams and black holes and strange cell phone calls and amulet of Somthingos and odd relationship-conversations later, good triumphed, sort of.... maybe... temporarily... until next time.

Anyway it was fun. post-game meta-game analysis with rook and thoughts on his essay on player/GM proactive and reactive styles.

good moment which whump is probably blogging about right now, i was doing my drugcrazed yet (unbeknownst to anyone probably) actually funny and intelligent babble about urizen and eritharmon and azrael and gargamel and how they were by my side like my guardian angels and then how i was going through the 9 circles of hell but instead of virgil as my guide i had papa smurf. this was vastly amusing me but then whump outdid me with his line about "tis better to smurf in hell than to serve in heaven" and i think he broke me. Yes. broke. giggling. falling over. had to close eyes to savor the silliness.

we had these great in-char blogs for this game when it was an every other week game. i haven't kept up with mine but it was fun while i was doing it.

ooo?

I just realized that I went "ooooooo!" in the last 2 posts. maybe even further back but i'm afraid to look. It's like I'm in "Greystoke" where for the first half hour all they do is hoot at each other.

My mom and dad and minnie and i used to go into "greystoke mode" at random moments all thru my post-greystoke childhood, and we'd just hoot at each other and hop around on the furniture, giggling. we would (before and after greystoke) often go into book-tarzan mode and run about yodelling and wrestling crocodiles and panthers. even today, it is a standard family greeting to walk into a room and say, "Ho! Tarmangani!" or to go after a cat to pick it up and narrate this mundane event with something like "hush, for the mighty king of the jungle stalks Bara, the deer."

Meanwhile... Rook is having the most stressful couple of months, and Bad Day, ever at his job at Barflink. Everyone send him love, and naked photos, and comment on his blog, and make him mix tapes and stuff.

We have a buffy game tonight and i'm looking forward to it! Whump is gm-ing and it's our final episode.

Jo just sat back down in her office chair and said, wistfully, "O iPod! My nipples stand erect in your presence!" and we cracked up insanely. I feel bad to be having so much fun and all this jolly laughing with children peacefully playing, while Rook is being bebothered and frazzled and pressured and tormented at his formerly peaceful, slackacious job!!!

Tomorrow I take off for the Litfest, too. but i have arranged for the neighbor teenager, Tapir, to come for a couple of hours and play with Moomin to take the heat off of Rook so he can lay around or write or whatever...

Miraculousness that Sophie and Moomin are sitting together having a real conversation about secret rooms and castles and pretend games - without any yelling, grabbing, pouting or contradiction going on. how long can it last? Sophie is lying outrageously, telling Moomin that she used to live in China and had a thousand-year-old goldfish that died. "I used to be a Chinese girl. But now I'm dead." "Oh! "

sangreal!

Jo is gloating over her new birthday ipod. ooooo! it's cute.

"I'm holding out for the Holy Grail. It'll have all my music, and it'll be a giant hard drive, and it'll go on my keychain. And it will also be my phone."

"But you could have a little one now. An ipod mini." Are they paying this woman to tempt me? or what?

"No. i'm holding out." I'm on the floor, computer in lap, drooling a little, knowing it's dumb and besides, if I spent 250 bucks, I'd rather have the most perfect black platform go-go boots known to huwomkind.

Jo leers down at me and waggles her eyebrows. "You could get a PIIIINK one!" she prompts, as if I'm 5 and she's trying to get me to pick out some new underwear at target, or take my nice medicine that the doctor says will help me get better.

Sadly, the idea of "a pink one!" does make me want it more. When did this happen? I was a cynical little girl who didn't like pink, long ago.

whoop! new books!

rooks mom sent a giant package of books! i can't tell if they're good or not, but 2 of them were for me and are really super old hardbacks of chinese poetry. ooooooooo.

I must now go read all the new Moomin books to him as he says they have hard words.

It's so cool that now he knows what it means to get an exciting letter or package. My gp used to send letters with little drawings and maybe a penny or a dime or something taped into it or a stick of gum. Having something in there made it incredibly exciting somehow. or when he would write 'l.u.s.' meaning "l00k under st@mp" and that meant to peel the stamp off and you'd get a secret message.

the swan song

yesterday and this morning I have been translating swan poems. "Tuercele el cuello del cisne..." where the swan is really a nasty pretentious toad but you don't realize it until you kill it, and @gustini's poem where she is looking at the blank page and feeling very powerful and imagines the swan of modernism sailing up and she totally like, fucks the swan of modernism and his pink beak is lying dead and still and limp in her lap. Modernism is totally her bitch. It's so great!!! Now Darío's swan is next and I bet it will piss me off amazingly so it's good that I did @gustini first as a pre-antidote. (would that just be a predote? a foredote?)

We hung out in Golden Gate P3rk and then had dinner at Chow. i was feeling very cityish, riding N train with way-too-heavy backpacks and flouncy skirts, in a suburban-tourist way enjoying looking at people and large stone buildings with strange ornamentation and fire escapes and all the enticing windows of the stores and restaurants and the way everyone is somehow more purposeful and mysterious when they're strangers in a city rather than strangers in downtown My Town where... it's just different... people's time is slower and their purposes more carefree and they seem somehow unburdened or less burdened. I remember the feeling manhattan gave me - not a happy feeling but so tense and wound-up as if the bustling busyness and intentions of all the swarming people were crackling in the air making my skin crawl... it was a stressful city...in SF i feel an inexplicably happy wound-up feeling though. I wonder why?

I have still not made it to green apple books nor to the extra-cheap-tights store but maybe next week.

Chula played me 2 very silly songs about the W0mbles. Remember you're a w0mble! and their basic theme song. vastly amusing. i am definitely a w0mble. i must see the tv show! i also read a goofy kids book "SOS B0bomoblile" about a boy genius who builds a submarine and discovers the loch ness monster.

It is really good to be here but especially in the morning (oddly) i miss rook's sluggish waking up and Moomin's little piccolo voice politely requesting juice and the playing of Castle, and our whole morning routine, even the routine of me grumpily clutching my hot coffee and glowering at my computer and wishing I had a moment's peace and didn't have to make anyone's breakfast or lunch or put on anyone else's tiny socks. of course here i am with that moment of peace and i'm appreciateing it madly and have been working for hours on end on my translations. Yet at the same time i'm way homesick - go figure.

little plaid things

Obtained this morning at Target:

- little plaid skirt, so perfect! my particular favorite red plaid! WITH LACE. and pleats. and fake leather buckley strap thing. I used to have a skirt like this but it was stolen in the Great Lingerie Robbery of late February. this one is even better and it says "princess" and "sassy" all over it. AND. hang onto your panties, folks. It is also a SKORT. how could it be better?

- perfect replacement black sleeveless turtleneck for one i had long, long ago

Nearly bought, but resisted:

- idiotic black t-shirt, size girls XL, with pink sparkly skulls and flaming guitars and the words "punk princess" and "rebel girl". it would have been perfect but for the too-tight puffy sleeves. nearly bought and cut sleeves off. Oh dear. I might have to go back and buy it. but then would have to decide whether to keep it or whether to give it to chula, who would look incredibly cute in it. i mean: pink sparkly skulls. hahahah.

STILL NEEDED:

- red plaid messenger bag. bonus if it has some extra dorky-punk chains on it. extra-longness for vertical binder insertion also a bonus but not strictly necessary
- black knee socks. several pairs. all cotton. they must not be too tight so i can't just go to kmart and get the girls' size.
- pants that fit me!!! WTF!!!! why? and that are not a) oldladyish b) ugly lowriders

on a less esoteric note

I had one of those funny totally non-profound epiphanies on the order of "why it's smart to make your bed in the morning."

We have this vertically stacked washer/dryer unit. And the controls are sort of in the middle. And for a long time now - months - I've been vaguely wondering why almost but not every time I put in a load of wash, I start it at the default "reset" setting with none of the buttons pushed, because I don't care about "max extract" or "extra rinse" or "super pointless spinness" or whatever --- but t hen when I go to move the wash from the washer below to the dryer above, A BUNCH OF THE BUTTONS ARE PUSHED. for a while I thought it was Moomin opening the closet doors, as he likes to hang out there tying the door shut with his ropes and then opening it again. Or I wondered if Rook sometimes came along behind me and sneakily pushed the buttons because he has an innate, touching, trusting belief in buttons like that, that claim to do something Extra and special, and in all manufacturers' instructions and how much shampoo and conditioner to use even though the shampoo people have a vested interest in lying to you about it.

Yet it happened even when no one else was home! It must be a malfunction of the washer itself? How? Ghosts? ghosts who believe in extra special washer-cycles?

Then just now I was leaning up to take the stuff out of the dryer, before I opened the washer to take the newly washed and wet clothes out and transfer them up to the dryer. You got that? Try to picture it. Picture the dryer, taller than me. Picture me leaning in to scoop the socks out, and picture the buttons in the middle between the washer and dryer. THEN PICTURE MY BOOBS. Yes. For months, my own breasts have been pushing the buttons of the washer.

buckets of snot, but a strong happiness

my allergies are ridiculous. i'm writing from a remote outpost of hell and misery.

but oh, the middle of Time Regained is freaking me wild like smoove b. It does not matter whether I desire the neurotic tailspin, or the delirious joy of time travel and Art. Both kinds shall be provided to me for my pleasure.

Seriously it's everything I've been writing about for the last umpteen years. i was going to say the last 3 years but then i thought of all the things i tried to say 15 years ago in poetry about moments in time and looking forwards and backwards and the imaginary and ideal and the happiness possible. Everything proust just said about the freedom from the fear of death is just so cool. and it goes on for pages and pages. He just got snippy about social realism which is maybe ruining my trip a little, but oh, it's so good! Me and him and Coleridge are totally hanging out in the gay bar talking about our completely insignificant childhood memories. (What P. does not talk about is that it's part of why old people have a reputation for being lost in the past, or reminiscing boringly, or just sitting and spacing out in the sun on the porch; at some point inability to act and the desire for freedom from pain can maybe force one into a sort of buddhist enlightenment which becomes living the life of the imaginary. It's not necessarily senility or craziness.) Now, when he gets onto the "decipherment" --- i've often felt this too as an alluring but probably false idea - the feeling that there's something "there" to be read or unencrypted from either the random happenings or sights of reality, the impressions experienced, or from the interior "impressions", inchoate swirly stuff that becomes coherent verbal thought, that there is an underlying or pre-existing "reality" to be interpreted. That part he seems uncertain about and I must say that part I don't believe a bit unless i'm feeling particularly mystical in which case i'd say that that reality that is everything is only perceptible by god, and that's actually the only definition of "god" that I accept at all, an imaginary consciousness that could contain and see and know everything, i guess that's most people's definition but they believe it's true whereas i only believe it's an idea. Oops, I lost my train of thought.) But anyway there doesn't have to BE an "underlying meaning" and maybe he's not really saying that at all, he's saying that the impression (which is entirely individual because it depends on so many random experiences and associations of memory in the individual so that no one really sees a flower or a cigarette butt or a particular sunset or another person in the same way) ... um....that the impression and its individualness is the important thing to grasp in order to make art or really make anything. Maybe this could be summed up like whump's maxim "the more you know, the more jokes you get," but in this case, the more self-aware you are and the more you know about your own "impressions", the better your art. Maybe this is the ultimate navel-gazing narcissism? Hmmm it can't be helped. arrrrgh I'm groping after trying to say something new here and I'm not quite getting to it.

the amount of kleenex i've used up while writing this morning blather -- it's scary. there's little white heaps of completely soaked kleenexes all over the kitchen table around me. some people have flowers, some have used tissues.

i wish there was more coffee in the house.

okay - moomin is up - to action! I must be a woman of action! I turn aside from dreams and images, and charge forward like Saint-Loup into the trenches of breakfast and lunch-making and the putting on of socks and the going to Target and the visiting of the allergist!

Seriously people. Sometimes thinking about this stuff, which I do often, makes me feel a little crazy and alone. And so I'm wildly happy and feel that I love proust madly for making me feel less alone, even while I'm pissed at him for saying a bunch of important things so much better than I ever have or will.

nooooooo more nohow

Jesus H Christ... cat bath process = 1.5 hours. fleas do NOT die upon contact, even prolonged smothering, by the flea shampoo.

My allergies had gotten more or less settled down but now... i can't breathe again and am all itchy. I'm allergic both to the cats and to the perfume in the shampoo.

fucking hell.

next time, they will be stuffed in a cat carrier and taken to a vet, or a cat groomer, and dropped off....

on the bright side: Rook is the best cat shampooer ever. I've said this before. but he radiates calm. He sits nearly naked in the tub with a cat on his lap and he bathes the cat gently for hours and hours. How? They do not scratch him. He is the soul of patience... he could tame lions... or wild girls...

whew

I've run out of steam, finally. I had a giant allergy attack (damned tree!) and went to bed with Proust. That man is a handful in bed. A double-fistful!

I left Rook to deal with Moomin's bath and bed... was 100% tuned out, weirdly... i think it was the benadryl kicking my ass...

When the allergy meds started to work at around 9 I got up and played the piano till just now.

That new music book i borrowed from K. is totally fun and just what i needed. I am just sight-reading everything in the book and I'm about halfway through. Sometimes - like tonight - I come across something that I must have played when I was 10 or so (Solfeggieto - oh, it must have been earlier than 10. my fingers KNEW it. and i used to love to play it superfast!!! it was so easy and so impressive if you played it right - what a rush it used to be for the little-kid me!) there were others that I totally want to go back and learn nicely, something easy and beethoveny that made my protestant heart happy... haydn things that were familiar... I was tripping out on it... and felt like i should be wearing that white shirt with the frilly eyelet lace and the matching yellow and white gingham skirt that i thought made me look sort of grownup or at least not like a scraggy little kid... (circa 1978)

That was right when my parents put up some shelves over my desk in my room (my room! a new thing in new house!) and they were dark and shiny wood. My model horses were arranged on them. I'm trying to remember what else. The dark blue wooden tiny model of a tall clock that you could open the doors of and the clock really worked. What else? I can't remember. I can see the horses up there looking very magnificent. And I got some dark wooden bureau things too (where did that come from? suddenly I had my own room and all this stuff... and the brass bedstead... loved it all so passionately... hook rug on floor... I also recall looking at myself in the mirror in this room and constantly polishing all my stuff and dusting it.) Minnie's room had her crib (okay, it's more like 1977 then?) and some other bureau thing, the old one, and that rainbow rings mobile... I can't remember her room all that well... it had the entrance to the attic in her wardrobe, which I both envied and feared, but was great for hiding in.

blah blah blah... i'm so zoned...

there's a lot of meowing... i think Rook is flea-bathing the cats... i should go and help...

skaters

Moomin and I watched skaters and baseball players after Jo and her brood left the park. One kid talked to us and every time he'd skate up the ramp to our corner, he'd pretend to fire a gun at Moomin, and called him "junior" or "cowboy". Usually Moomin hates this hearty teasing from strangers but he loved the skaters and said they were brave heroes! So he grinned shyly at the strange skater boy and pretended to shoot him. It was totally fun.

I wonder if I rode my bike down there at 7:30 am, maybe the park would be relatively empty of attitudinous teenagers and I could tool around the lovely, lovely, smooth, rampalicious skate park on my battered star wars board?! Oh so tempting. I can at least go down the straight sidewalk and stop myself, and if I'm not going too fast I can turn in mid-glide without falling off. How much easier it would be without those nerve-wracking cracks in the sidewalk!

As we sat there I thought of funny nicknames for all the different skaters - Fabio, Suave, Coolio, J-Lo, etc.

silvery sprinkles

I totally love it that a few of my silvery white hairs seem to be clustering right at the top front of my head. Maybe more of them will come there, and I'll look all cool and stripey like my friend Q. does or like cruella de ville.

I don't know why having grey hairs excites me so, but I'm actually proud of them and point them out to people every chance I get as signs of my amazing maturity and wisdom.

it's you again, gandhari...

I have this moment of BANG realization at times reading a very very good book of a certain sort that I think of as my secret elitist canon, my Golden Bookshelf, my best of the best... where I realize OH. IT"S THE MAHABHARATA. the pancatantra? yup. dance to the music of time? yup. saga of burnt njal? oh most definitely and in fact nearly every really good norse saga or maybe All the Norse Sagas together. And not very far into Time Regained the sense of doom was building and I just BANG had that realization while driving home from the dump. Oh my god it's the Mahabharata again! Oh fuck!

It's the relation of the understanding of human relationships and families, which is almost understandable, to the most important and momentous and frightening thing, WAR. Which is not understandable. ("Why is there evil" being an important question to try to answer and War being the ultimate reality-destroying expression of evil, because it destroys what has been built and building is love, but maybe i'm just saying that as an avatar or worshiper of creating. ) And it is not just about War it is about how not to have War, but then if you have War, what happens. it is to express the buildup and the inevitability once the buildup of doom reaches a certain point, it is the juggernaut wound up like clockwork and released and unstoppable. it is the fire demons from Nausicaa. individual evils and jealousies and misunderstandings in a cacophonic feedback effect like compressed and compressing air in a spraycan jouncing around in there under high heat and pressure - so dangerous - it is the attempt to understand the 3-body or 5-body problem of the predictions of the orbits of planets or molecules but times millions and millions and colliding with another complex system and those complex systems are nations.

So that the pettiness between Arjuna and Dhristadyumna when they were little kids and their uncles and how their parents met and what happened back in their great-grandfathers' time ALL INTERRELATES AND INTERSECTS with "Now" making war horribly inevitable. Anyone who reads the Bhagavad Gita is familiar with Arjuna in the chariot begging Krsna to help him not be able to kill the enemy. "O my uncles and cousins!" if you read the whole Mahab. then you start to get it -- they are his uncles and cousins and friends that he grew up with, it is not "the enemy" in "war" -- he really knows them all and that makes it all the more unspeakable but you understand that all war is that way becasue of course the enemy is always on some level your uncles and cousins. You have to understand that when marcus aurelius writes of the individual self, or the family, or the city, being a microcosm of the State or Nation, it can be really true.

As Marcel keeps emphasizing that his neurotic microanalysis of his love and jealousy of gilberte and albertine and the lies and m. charlus's complexities have made him able to understand france and germany: "But just as there are animal bodies and human bodies, each one of which is an assemblage of cells as large in relation to a single cell as Mont Blanc, so there exist huge organised accumulations of individuals which are called nations: their life does no more than repeat on a larger scale the lives of their constituent cells, and anybody who is incapable of comprehending the mystery, the reactions, the laws of thses smaller lives, will only make futile pronouncements when he talks about struggles between nations. But if he is master of the psychology of individuals, then thesee colossal masses of conglomerated individuals will assume in his eyes, as they confront one another, a beauty more potent than that of the struggle which arises from a mere conflict between two characters; and they will seem to him as huge as... [blah blah blah] .. And considered from this point of view, the body Germany and the body France, and the allied and enemy bodies, were behaving to some extent like individuals... but since, even if one chose to consider them as individuals, they were at the same time giant assemblages of individuals, the quarell took on immense and magnificent forms, like the surge of a million-waved ocean which tries to shatter an age-old line of cliffs, or like gigantic glaciers which with their slow destructive oscillations attempt to break down the frame of mountains which surrounds them.... People, as they go about their pleasures, do not normally stop to think that, if certain moderating and weakening influences should happen to be supsended, the proliferation of infusoria would attain its maximum theoretical rate and after a very few days the organisms that might have been contained in a cubic mmillimetre would take a leap of many millions of miles and become a mas a milliion times greater than the sun, having in the process destroyed all our oxygen and all the substances on which we live, so that there would exist neither humanity nor animals nor earth, nor do they reflect that an irremediable and by no means improbable catastrophe may one day be generated in the ether by the incessant and frenzied activity which lies behind the apparent immutability of the sun; they busy themselves with their own affairs without thining about those two worlds, the one too small, the other too large for us to be aware of the cosmic menaces with which they envelop us."

(and I totally disagree with H1llis Wanker about what P. is doing with it and why)

It is horrible to realize I am living in those times, that we all are...

Everyone please savor the moment and appreciate everything and love everything, because of the possibility and reality of war...

the mood lives on

My fertile thinky mood-phase continues and maybe the word "derramar" applies in some way as I'm spilling over like a perpetual fountain gently burbling but there is also an element of non-gentleness to derramar like a sudden blow to the head. There's some gentle burbling but also moments where someone or something is inverting me and whamming me to get the last of the ketchup out of my head. But then there's just a little bit more in there.

Dunno what's with me but it's very pleasant to have it be sustained.

And now, a couple of phone calls and then a trip to the dump with the Acrobat to get rid of some of the junk and trash piled up in our yard! I've got junk in the trunk, baby!

All i really wanna do is lie in bed today and finish Time Regained. I think actually the immense momentum built up from proust-reading is what is fueling me and whamming me and kicking my ass into high gear. But now I want to FINISH it. It's so dire. I'm filled with holy doom.

Awe and foreboding. and it's all newly fresh as we continue our war. I ate a croissant yesterday as i looked at the newspaper and tsked just like mme verdurin - ouch - so painful - but so true.

ow

My knee hurts a lot lately. It's not hurting in a way that feels like I'm injuring it more by using it. And I'm using it a lot, doing a lot of walking, venturing to sit crosslegged, riding my bike, and doing those other things that one can do with a knee that make life so good. It's just that I'm aware of the knee all the time. My jeans today touching the side of my knee ... ick. (This, part of why I've been wearing skirts a lot more since January. They don't touch my knees. )

People keep recommending glucosamine to me and so i'm going to see about it... They make it out of crab shells and I'm allergic to crustaceans but according to the NIH that does not set off people's allergies as the allergy-thing is not included in the supplements. usually. probably. But there is also chondriotin. Maybe this will help with the pain.

i had a doctor tell me at some point a few years ago something like: "There is nothing mechanical wrong with my knee (anymore, or yet) and the pain is from a sort of psychological memory of there having been a lot of pain caused by a real cause; instead it's like my knee or my brain is remembering, falsely, that touching the knee caused pain and so it interprets touch as pain."

To her this clearlly meant, "Therefore, you are not in pain, or through an act of will, can possibly be not in pain, if you weren't so neurotic."

To me it meant, "Gee, I'm still in pain." Like, lying in bed on my side, which is how I sleep, it hurts for my knees to be touching each other, and even padded with a quilt, the weight of the upper knee on top of the quilt is still hurty. I swear. It sounds nuts but that's how it is. I hate to have anyone touch my knees - light, hard, however, yuck.

Maybe it's just on my mind more this week because of having bruised it twice very nastily.

At least it's not stopping me from doing stuff - like I said, whether I am using the knee a lot doesn't seem to affect the pain level.

fruit and the avoidance of objectification

I was also thinking in my thinkaceous moments (which all happened while driving to work but somehow continue on my mind's back burner as I "work" in this dull office) about a line from the poem I read last night where I said something about "peachtree orbitals" thinking of my juniorhigh friend samantha's breasts. Some line from some poem or song or something where someone described their girlfriend as being like a dusky peach. Dusky? how? twilight... darkness.... peachitude... a dark red one so dark red it's almost brown... or just the feeling of nightfall and fruit... or the dustiness of peach fuzz somehow being dusky grey... something... why are girls always peaches and not boys when boys or men are often peachlike... romanticization of consumability ----> consumption or consumability being desirablity being "love" or desire. Impermanece being important to the equation of consumability, like flowers and being like go lovely rose or a moody haiku, because fruit and flowers don't last, so it gives the consumability a driving immediacy: fuck me now, peach!

("or else." is often implied. as love poetry about impermanence and persuasion and courtship is so often threat poetry, though i try not to make mine that way but hope that it is the celebration of desire for its own sake. "as you sit by the fire and take down this book" or "go lovely rose" meaning "fuck me now, peach, or you will regret it when you are old and gnarled" )

I'm a pomegranate, by the way... because of all the time I make people spend in the underworld if they eat even 6 of my kernels... it's cool because it makes there be seasons... I don't mind being laborious and tedious to eat and having those bitter seeds that you have to spit out... it's nice to be tart and sweet and hard to peel and to have a lot of sections... your hands and mouth get a little bit bloody-looking... too much makes your tongue go acid... i'm very messy and labyrinthical but once you understand the geometry it's so much easier...

the idea of movement and sensuality, like when Garcia Lorca says "sus muslos se me escapaban como peces sorprendidos" not being in the cliche, but referring to a cliche, so not saying straight out, "your thighs are cool and smooth and silvery and slippery like a fish sliding by elliptically or sort of quickly and your thighs themselves and your personhood and the meaning of sex with you are elusive like the touch of a fish in water or the vision of a flash of a fish swimming by" but implying all those things and so much more by the inclusion of ACTION.

satisfied

My soundtrack this morning: Blind Willie Johnson. Get a taste! I love a happy yet sad soulful song.

Praise God I'm Satisfied

If I had my way I'd tear the building down! (deconstructionist anthem)

This public domain site fizzes with great, free blues songs. get them while they're hot!

cool in the tube of thinkythinky, and a wipe-out

The thinkyesquitudinosity whooms over me, wave-like. I'm holding my breath and waiting till it passes - trying to orient myself relative to the ocean floor so I can flatten out, huddle there, and then shoot up to the surface and gasp for air.

Again back to the destruction and reconstruction or mixingup of identity. Human relationships. The immense potential for fucking up. I wonder about the ways that I intertwine myself with other people's identities. For example the way I start to see me and squid and jo as a little bit of a hive mind: I don't mean this in a scary-bad way, but just that... part of my definition of myself is from the reflections of the identities of friends, or -- really -- my perception of the identities of my friends. This openness of identity is a vulnerability and maybe a lack-of-real-identity or "bad" chameleonness (chameleonitude) and maybe is what people object to as my (bad/good potential) blurring of boundaries. Because if I imagine the identity of another person (known imperfectly, always) as a STORY, and imagining myself or part of myself as being part of that story, think of the potential there is for that story to be, essentially, WRONG. or in the specific case I'm thinking of, obfuscationally, out of date, AND wrong, and wrong in complex ways.

And yet I like to think that these stories and identities can be re-imagined or re-written to be not so wrong or annoying or impinging on another person's selfhood.

"Get your annoying imagination's insidious tentacles out of my identity, already! Completely! Disengage! Reverse engines! Quit overanalyzing! You go round and round, and are always so essentially wrong! And by the way, none of it has ANYTHING to do with YOU! "

If it's impossible for me to quit doing THAT THING, whatever it is, probably the thing I'm doing RIGHT NOW, maybe having too obstinate or strong a story-envisioning and mythologizing, then maybe disengagement is the only way, but I can't even express how sad it makes me and the void left. I fill up that void various ways and maybe in way better ways. And realize that the deepness of how deep it runs actually shows me how maybe pathological it all is/was. The development of bad patterns of interaction - how to break them?

How can it be rewritten? Is it hopeless? Just give it time? I'm so sad about it.

another reason for that tubal ligation

Post-labor-and-delivery there was no sneezing allowed. Oh, none, none, none! I had to buy underwear, and wear it, as a sort of shock-absorber.

The bitter joke of one's midwife's advice to "do a lot of Kegels". Yah right. My pelvic floor bottomed out, honey, ain't no Kegel in the WORLD gonna fix it right. This is not a question of a simple tightening up of the love muscle. That midwife, bless her, knew how to fist, and for that reason I think of her often and witih more-than-affectionate-gratitude, but she lied about the Kegels. LIES. Every mom I know who doesn't have caesarian tracks -- pees her pants.

HOWEVER! I realized recently (with the evil Allergy Tree, which I now know is a sort of mutant giant privet) that I am now up to sneeze FOUR before I pee my pants. Yes, I can chain-sneeze 3 times with perfect safety. This is progress. That's one sneeze for each year since the trauma to the coochie.

I feel vastly encouraged at this minor epiphany!

lips and thinkiness

The burning question for everyone in the universe is now: so, what kind of lipstick?

the urban decay lip sharpie that squid gave me... with some retro-ish revlon lipgloss over it, as the lip sharpie tends to dry out one's lips... And I'm not wiping off my lipstick for McCoot, no way nohow, so there.

I am full of thoughts, but "thoughtful" doesn't do the trick. Thinkiness? Thinkingish. Thinkish, thunkish. Thinkacious. Thinkyesque. Yes.

frivolity in the morning

This morning I am overwhelmed with the desire to wear lipstick. That just won't fly at work in the G@tes building and I don't want McCoot seeing me as femmy in any way. Isn't that sad?

I'm putting it on anyway - I can wipe it off before he gets there. But what a funny impulse!

For some reason also as I pondered the important question of lipstick, an image of various teachers in my junior high and high school popped up. My perception as a child of the strange ways that adults dressed. their often elaborate hairstyles that clearly took an hour to do every morning and needed constant updating in bathrooms -- but why? it didn't help them look any less gnarly. The specific teacher that came to mind was Sra. Powell, who was short and huge-bosomed and maybe a little fat and forty. I liked her - she wasn't as bitter as the other Spanish teacher, Sra. Winz1nger, who had an even more elaboratly curly hairstyle - on a very bad wig. The Powell's main feature: wearing huge chunky necklaces. And they were really huge. And there were all different ones. I realized from my reading of my mom's fashion mags that this was to "bring the eye up" and make her feel taller and less fat or something. But instead, it made her look like a St. Bernard dog with tits.

On the other hand, I wondered, "what is her goal"? And figured it was to look like a fairly respectable middle class professional lady who maybe had a bit of a hippie-ish past and wanted to be just a tad unconventional. So-- success on one level.

The thoughts about femminess, style that should not be, lack of style, retroness, dressing in the decade you're happiest, the way my grandma goes to get the 15 hairs she still possesses "done" at the hairstylist (and "done" a la 1935 marcelled!), dressing so that it doesn't look like you pay attention to how you dress, but really you sort of do anyway, the significance of jeans, and how one appears in the eyes of cynical children shall probably continue all day on my back burner...

why?

oh well.

a few wacky thoughts on writing

As I drove home from the reading at the C@nvas Gallery I thought some more about my friend JG who gave me Advice the other day for several hours in a long talk about poetry. He has a large group of poems that are dramatic monologues not in his own personal voice. I thought about what it means when someone else reads the eloquent poems written from the point of view of a rapist and murderer or some pathetic mental patient who was forced onto the street or a shrewd hitchhiker who works at gas stations ... (this often being his sort of thing) That JG "tricks" the reader into reading "I... I.... I..." not assuming they will assume that the writer is "I" but that they will take on the "I" themselves and for a minute be tricked into assuming that point of view of that other imaginary person - they will channel the speaker in the poem. and thus be able to understand something about "that other person". What I try to do is different and the cool thing is that I think JG gets what I am doing and I apologize in advance for the fancyass jargon which I don'tt really use to myself other than at particularly thought-crazed moments after a reading or after talking about "why i write" for hours: I want to dislocate not just language and narrativity and grammar but also to dislocate identity from time and from self-hood. okay that's so overly fancy that I'm embarrassed. But that is sort of my overarching goal when I'm able to convince myself that I have one. So that is why when people say they are confused by what i wrote, (i.e. "who am i addressing, why does the "you" and the "i" change so rapidly without exposition or explanation or clear transition) I just grin at them and shrug, because when it works it works and the confusion is something to sit in and explore or run with or whatever. If "you" and "i" can get confused... I like to not tell a story but to act like I'm telling a story... um... something... (and oh, the irritating 'advice' from strangers that i get to number things, or put them in sections, or separate them out or explain them or simplify everything so that it can be spooned painlessly into the brain of the lowest common denominator... arrrrrgh... I don't want to be painFUL but instead if you dont 'get it' it should still be like pleasant music washing over you or like a foreign language, but of ideas connected in a way you don't necessarily get right away)

But NOT pointless incoherence -- not at all.

This, rather than the "identification/catharisis/return to status quo" sort of thing with poetics...

i think good novels do this too.

I had other things to say about invocation and ecstatic states and that pushing to extremes is necessary in order to say anything worth invoking. but i'm sort of tired!

the reading was nice though afterwards talking about how people read the same things a lot gave me food for thought and I wondered if i would run out of new things ever. I've been reading stuff for 3 years now and I haven't run out yet and there's still stuff from my past that I'd read without too much embarrassment.

I also thought a bunch more about the P.A. writers that I hang with and how rare their scene must be, really. I mean that i can go once a month to somewhere and read in front of pretty much the same 60-80 people who are also all writers of some sort, that's pretty incredible, and I also like hearing a whole lot of people all read something short (usually 25-30+ people read in 2 hours). All very friendly and a fair amount of variety. Over time I began categorizing the people by how good their writing was. I discussed my categorizations in detail once with D. Cumm1ngs and then with Pastiche and our opinions matched up fairly well though I tend to have more eclectic taste than they do. I just want to be marvelling and feeling like "oh, man, that's a damned odd and cool thing to do with words!" I love that!

(but the feeling I got from the few SF$U readings i went to -- a little too too -- a little too much inbreeding of ideas and applause of each other and in the head-ness -- all of them poncily writing for each other in an extended workshoppy way so that even the best work of it was curiously poisoned! this, NOT true of the c1pactli reading, but it had its own different brand of contagious in-group boringness. but overall much better work with amazing high-speed energy)

it was not obvious to me from beginning but afterwards very clear that my 1991 prose poem ranty things about stripping would have fit in way better with the theme and actually the general tone of the other story-telling spokenwordy things. But i didn't care really.

reading back over what i just wrote a minute ago i think i should have titled this entry "I am Master of the Universe and can destroy space and time". ha....

planet juice power happy world

Moomin:"My gun is the biggest gun in the world. It's the biggest gun on Earth and also on Mars. And we are on Earth, not on Mars, right?"
Me: Yup, we're on Earth. Does your big gun shoot humonguous cannonballs or something?
Moomin: No! It shoots flower tree juice power. It makes the bad guys stop fighting and it's the most powerful power in the whole world!
Me: Flower tree juice power! Yeah! Right, because flower power is like that.
Moomin: No, it's NOT flower power. It's flower tree juice power. And it's got flower juice house rainbow power! It makes the bad guys fall over dead!
Me: That's so incredibly cool! Does it have horsepower? Or, like, black power?
Moomin: Nope! It has horse tree house stopsign juice power and it shoots them! And it has beautiful horse tree juice Xmen power.
Me: *finally speechless witih awe*
Moomin: *infinite ramble on various powers*

Possibly japanese was his first language? because it was a lot he was one of those anime title generators.

out of every day

What is it you want from every day? What do you wish would be true every day, or would happen? What leaves you unsatisfied as you go to sleep, if it doesn't happen? Is once a week often enough, for whatever it is you desire from life? Once a month, once a year? All the time?

And what is it?

homeslice

That's it - I'm so charged up. I'm staying home today to write and work. And I'll go to work-work on Tues. and Wed. and inbetween the moments of crazed writing I'll make dental and vet and contractor appointments and all that sort of thing. there is no use blowing the head of steam I've got worked up this morning.

"homeslice" - I can totally hear my old gf Raquel saying "What's up homeslice" with a slightly exaggerated Texas accent and see her wild huge grin and our silly performance-arty things we did around town and superimposed on this 20 year old vision the thought of her as she is now, so much just the same but more so, a little or a lot burned out and maybe more mysterious as she drinks her MGD and hangs out with her wild storytelling fast-talking husband and plans new elaborate decadent pastries and concoctions for her job...

errandy things:
- send off poetry (furnace, rcr, 14hills, watchwd, caesur@)
- dental appt
- vet appt
- photo, print tree info for allergist. tomorrow, obtain letter
- call contractor
- laundry
- more flea-spraying outside
- maybe call K. about article
- write advisor about adding berkeley class. make advising appt

I have already worked intensely on 2 poems and am about to start on a third and I also feel very full of fizz for translating this morning!!! Oh such a good day! Thank you universe!

pie for breakfast, and the power to see through illusions and still love reality

"I say! I've had my tea in bed!" (Mr. Saltoona to Ethel, in The Young Visiters)

Coffee, pie, and cheddar cheese, peacefully consumed while Proust berates himself for the failure of his artistic vision and capability of perception of the things around him. I finished "The Fugitive" last night so I'm basically caught up to where my reading group is! Hurrah! I am a juggernaut!

though I have been marking bits here and there I haven't been taking the notes i should, or writing down the random tangential thoughts or the analysis of passages that strike me as particularly interesting. I'm just plowing forward in the book. I like to dog-ear a page, and mark a passage along the side, and put some excited stars or exclamation points in the margins. If I'm lucky, someday I'll come across those marks of frantic mental excitement and will remember what I was thinking, and I won't be embarrassed. I shudder to think what I wrote in the margins of "Thus Spake Zarathustra" when I was 14 - I can guarantee it was silly beyond belief. Possibly these marks and dogears will bring a blush to my cheek 20 years from now.

I continue going back to "Across the Acheron" and as lately I have been in San Francisco a lot it's especially poignant to walk around Valencia or be going up a big hill on Dolores and thinking about her visions of Purgatory.

In the first part of "Time Regained" Marcel reads a description written by someone else of the Verdurins' salon and dinner party, everyone and everything's beauty and charm, the flowers, the conversations, the paintings, the fancy china and delicious food -- and he gets upset at the thought that when he was in their company he was too cynical to enjoy the beauty or the good parts of them - "I was like a surgeon who beneath the smooth surface of a woman's belly sees the internal disease which is devouring it." He is so fascinated with seeing the pettiness and ridiculousness of the Verdurins' circle that he missed any possible good. "If, in the realm of painting, one portrait makes manifest certain truths concerning volume, light, movement, does that mean that it is necessarily inferior to another completely different portrait of the same person, in which a thousand details omitted in the first are minutely transcribed, from which second portrait one would conclude that the model was ravishingly beautiful while from the first one would have thought him or her ugly, a fact which may be of documentary, even of historical importance, but is not necessarily an artistic truth?"

I am grasping this is the diff. between modernism and postmodernism as I think about the poems by @gustini and D@río and de Ib@rbourou that I've been translating. Also the culture-wars between B0rges and the other dudes, the sort of ultras vs. the social realists, in Buenos Aires... although no one would call proust a social realist... he is more like a failed modernist perpetually falling from grace or leaping out of modernist Paradise to follow a decadent and neurotic Satan.... or maybe the other way around, someone who is in a trackless desert and keeps going towards what might be paradise but always turns out to be a mirage and before he can get to paradise (which would be the perfect appreciation of the sublime in all things of everyday life) which appears to be so close and so possible, he realizes the mirage, where a modernist would be able to perform some solidifying magic through the power of belief, to make the mirage real ... something like that.

"Always I was incapable of seeing anything for which a desire had not already been roused in me by something I had read, anythning of which I had not myself traced in advace a sketch which I wanted now to confront with reality." Like the way the dude in Redburn longs to see Liverpool, where his father went and poring over his father's out-of-date guidebook -- I swear Melville is so underappreciated -- and he gets to Liverpool and it's ALL DIFFERENT because of time and it's also damned grubby and he sees all the squalid horrid poverty and watches that beggar woman and her child die of starvation... and yet he still sees the beauty that he anticipated from the guidebook and is made so happy by walking around and recognizing the grand architecture or heroic statues in the squares...

The trick is for the surgeon to see the disease and love it as well as the smooth belly, right? then Wittig's paradise is attainable... I've always thought this...

i remember describing my feelings about the intertwining of books and life or ideas and reality to E. F3rnea in her office in some wild-eyed sleepless phase and how she called me a "cryptoteleologist" which impressed me greatly as i didn't know what it meant, so it had the charm of a mysterious medical diagnosis or a horoscope and she had to explain myself to me at length. Later I felt she was just being optimistic and trying to put a good spin on the possibility that I wasn't nuts - like offering me a lifeline against incipient schizophrenia.

off!

I have been to the farmers' market and obtained fancy cheese and ... Gooseberries. I've often read that something is as green as a gooseberry but I've never seen them! Guess what - they're green. They look like little stripey fat tomatillo-watermelons, smaller than cherries but larger than blueberries. There's an eerie eyeball quality to them that's a little disturbing. I haven't eaten one yet.

off to a lovely-sounding brunch with people I don't know, and Moomin, and chula and i think maybe her gf will probably be there. I was thinking how I love a party full of people i don't know especially if they all know each other and what hell it would be to other people like squid or jo. F. or maybe L. was warning me last night that "P0tlatch can be very cliquish" (science fiction convention that I keep wanting to go to but haven't yet made it to) "But you probably know enough people that you'll be all right. Maybe." I found this funny. Cliques and groups of people have never fazed me yet. I guess it could happen... The more cliquish and tribal they are, the more I get to feel like a space traveller or an anthropologist observer. And if they're welcoming then I feel like a welcomed space traveller. but either way i love groups of people who have developed their own norms of behaviour and have a history. what could be nicer and more like reading an interesting novel? I mean, other than getting to hear the secret dirty history of someone I've never met, like when Iris sends me those long emails about her wild past.

ouch

i feel so bad for my dadinlaw. his back has been awful and he is so proud about pain. and he is pretty much going to have to have disk repl@cement surgery but that's only 1 of the things wrong out of many. basically he's 71 and his lower spine is beginning slow distintegration and there is not a whole hell of a lot of hope for that sort of thing so he's doomed to a cycle of pain, increasing disability, and probably more surgeries. and meanwhile he can only walk like 1 block, in agony, how is he functioning? and is going to asia for several weeks right before the surgery. he's so nuts. but i feel for him and suddenly feel regret that i didnt acquiesce and be dutiful for us to all go to asia with him and go to the gravesite or whatever. and i could hear he is intensely sad over his big plan to go to mt. p@ektus@n and he is trying to believe that he will do it next year. yah right. i cross myfingers that it will be true. maybe miracle surgery? hrm from everything i have read about disk repl. and fusing -- it's scary.

not always

it's as if i always get to do what i want and my life is some sort of luxurous dream in some people's opinions. But I did not get my weekend morning of:

- sleeping late
- playing new piano music
- writing utopia article
- finishing proofreading barak's book

I did not even get my 20 minutes of peace and coffee.

instead i have read many little-kid books aloud, woke up at 8, cleaned and de-fleaed and played random games, done more freaking laundry, put more laundry away, taken out 4 bags of trash although i have been taking out trash and recycling every day - EVERY DAY - and I'm covered in sweat and dust. i know everyone who is a housewife complains about this and I regret being dreary, but how is it that sudddenly i do like 2 hours of housework a day and everything's still all crappy and it still has to be done every day just so that i can sit on the couch? If there is to be any sort of vacuuming (in order to battle fleas) or anything, then Certain People must pick up after themselves as a regular thing. which means Me, Rook, and Moomin. And Certain People meaning Moomin are now old enough to put the caps back on their markers and put the lids on their play-doh cans. The general mess is NO LONGER all mine.

With Minor Irritation and Irkedness and petulance, and a resolution to vacuum up fleas and then screw it all and play the piano for an hour whlie drinking a ton of peaceful coffee,

Me

when nerds collide

The best party! All those old-school uber-geeks make me strangely happy with their lack of social graces and their propensity to converse by announcing Ideas loudly and then go on in monologue. Of course that can be an irritating trait but when you throw a lot of them together it works well. I looked at the flight maps and vacation photos of fjords and reindeer from that one guy who goes on cruises, blathered abotu politics, etc. Someone shattered one of my precious illusions by telling me that Keanu Re3ves was born in Canada -- crap! that means he can't be the dumb actor that we democrats put up for president! I'm trying to picture Leonardo di caprio being the figurehead of government, but i just can't get the funny picture of Keanu posing and strutting and mouthing political slogans...

As usual it was the best party food in the world as all the foodies showed off with their insanely good potluck. The best thing might have been the blue corn spoon bread. I ate a little bit of everything.

And I tagged along on K.'s tour of her Master Garden. "Is that lady a farmer?" Milo asked me, tugging on my skirt. Wow, the most amazing compost and rows of veggies mixed with flowers and strange volunteer squashes that are very mysterious and unknown. I ate a leaf of lovage, which looks like the tops of giant celery. fun fact learned: the hay beneath the tomatos is not only a useful mulch, it prevents leaf diseases and spotting caused by splashback. Her "fruit bush" projects were inspiring... i hate espaliering as it seems strangely cruel and ugly, but 3 foot high apricot or fig tree bonsai looks nicer and the point is then you can reach all the fruit. K. also nicely lent me an old book of intermediate-level piano music and i can hardly wait to take a crack at it.

Moomin was lovely at the party and had fun. We watched him in his swirling purple cloak, standing back and doing running attacks on a hedge with 2 swords flashing heroically.

At some point I hung with L. the only other chick there with a small kid, and begged her to give me the real low-down on the neighbor-city moms' club political controversy. It was juicy! And she knew all! We dished joyously. Can't wait to pass it on to Jo, Squid, and Ep. Not that it affects us or anything but the melodrama of it has a sick fascination. L. also told me that the neighbor-snooty-city club doesn't allow "political discussion" on its mailing list, which made me feel small surge of pride that the RWC one fought to keep the list flexible and uncensored.

I watched F. do her beading thing which she always seems to do at parties. After a while as she felt me watching her she began a sort of half-apology-but-not-really speech about it and how she doesn't have time at home... and I began ranting about my musings on sociability and how it should be just fine (and in fact in this crowd of eXtreme geeks, is just fine) to sit at a party and read or do whatever you want and have your mind engaged. And why it should be okay and "more social" at a party to just sit and stare into space when you could be knitting or reading or drawing or writing and just feeling the pleasant social vibes? what is "acceptable" and what isn't.

I like to watch her beading, anyway, as it's so enjoyable to watch someone's hand doing something skillful and technical in a practiced way. Sometimes little things like the way my boss at the Lobe School used to be able to take out his leatherman tool and open it instantly and fluidly to the right attachment for the job without looking... I admire this sort of skill as much as many people admire a professional athlete. The bartender in 26 mix the other night could put an arm behind his head and with a single graceful motion like a ballet dancer or a magician, whip out a cigarette and put it in his mouth. He looked like an alien creature with an extra hand, because the hand was coming from the completely wrong angle -- hard to describe but if you look in a mirror and try to reach your mouth from behind your neck with the hand of the opposite side than usual, you'll see how hard it is.

A person who shall remain nameless lost his temper amazingly and began cussing and yelling at some guy or guys. We woke up to it in the middle of it, ahving assumed it was all in fun but then realizing the yelling and anger were real. I think we calmed the angry a little bit. Of course I wondered whether it was actually not much more sane and good to yell and cuss at people who either like Bush or cynically accept his ascendance, and I didn't hear the argument, and maybe such people should be beaten up and left by the side of the road while rioting happens everywhere rather than peaceful backyard parties. So on some level I was a little in awe of this outburst of righteous anger. But on another level it was odd and made me worry about my friend and his temper! He was shaking and incoherent and I thought he was gonna have a stroke and die right there in front of us while holding the plate of kebab.

It's the ponies covered in scabs that I miss the most

SJ... where are you? why don't you answer my emails? I worry about you and Fr3nchie a little bit every single day as I scan my list of blogs to read and miss your funny writing and funny life.

the article

I can hardly tear myself away from "The Fugitive". Now Marcel's freaking out because his article finally got published in the newspaper. He imagines different people reading it and not reading it, and how other authors must feel as they're read or not, and he resolves to forever notice the main article on the front page of the paper and its author's name. fabulous things are said about authors and readers and how the article means something different when 10,000 people read it.

Then he imagines that if he gets sicker and can't see his friends, he'll still enjoy contact with them by writing articles.... I want to quote a humonguous paragraph which fortunately I've found online:

I imagined some female reader into whose room I would have been so glad to penetrate and to whom the newspaper would convey if not my thought, which she would be incapable of understanding, at least my name, like a tribute to myself. But these tributes paid to one whom we do not love do not enchant our heart any more than the thoughts of a mind which we are unable to penetrate reach our mind. With regard to other friends, I told myself that if the state of my health continued to grow worse and if I could not see them again, it would be pleasant to continue to write to them so as still to have, in that way, access to them, to speak to them between the lines, to make them share my thoughts, to please them, to be received into their hearts. I told myself this because, social relations having previously had a place in my daily life, a future in which they would no longer figure alarmed me, and because this expedient which would enable me to keep the attention of my friends fixed upon myself, perhaps to arouse their admiration, until the day when I should be well enough to begin to see them again, consoled me. I told myself this, but I was well aware that it was not true, that if I chose to imagine their attention as the object of my pleasure, that pleasure was an internal, spiritual, ultimate pleasure which they themselves could not give me, and which I might find not in conversing with them, but in writing remote from them, and that if I began to write in the hope of seeing them indirectly, so that they might have a better idea of myself, so as to prepare for myself a better position in society, perhaps the act of writing would destroy in me any wish to see them, and that the position which literature would perhaps give me in society. I should no longer feel any wish to enjoy, for my pleasure would be no longer in society, but in literature.

Doesn't that just give you the creeping shivers? I mean obviously I'm not hiding out in a cork-lined soundproof room. I like people... But I still know what he's talking about. I have headphones, inhalers and air filters. and blogs instead of "The Figaro" newspaper.

wanted: interociter with stand

I am all excited about my new "build your own home interociter" kit after watching This Island Earth. what a great movie! I can't believe I've never seen it before. All the green glows and explosions and the fake tanned aliens... Exeter was so cool with his farewell speech! Everything perfect... pointy bras... wet evening gowns... things made of pure neutrinos... yay!!

It is indeed typical that you Earth people refuse to believe in the superiority of any world but your own. Children looking into a magnifying glass, imagining the image you see is the image of your true size.

Is "this island earth" a quote from somewhere? it rings a bell but I can't place it or find it.

new plan

I think the pollen-hosing and scooping really helped things around here. I'm going to risk another public pants-peeing and get busy one more time with the hose. anyone walking by might just think I"ve accidentally hosed myself down. Or perhaps for extra protection I can borrow one of Nutella's diapers from next door and use it as a mega-pad.

Moomin and I are chilling out after a very hot park day! tall iced drinks with bendy straws. "Is this Fancy Juice, Mommy?" Yes it is, my son.

Soon to be Fancier Juice after he goes to bed, I think!

There were not many people last night at the reading but I still had a great time and was interested to hear a bunch of different things read and sung and danced. I took my usual critical notes in a sly scribbly way. there were things to like and not quite like about nearly everything. Actually before any reading happened i suddenly had Ideas and felt all happy. and people were really nice. chula v. cute in ripped fishnets, dj-ing like a spastic princess of funkitude, and then reading her story and inviting people to stuff money in her underwear. I read a poem. had not practiced it or even finished it but i kind of like it anyway.

what was the acronym for the classic badness of the science fiction story? something like HAITE... "Here's An idea. The End." I laughed my head off - have never heard this before but am all too familiar with the genre and have often been found ranting about how whichever awful writer sat around with friends going "wouldn't it be neat if there were a story where X condition was true" and then goes off and writes it, but no other ideas are in the story... This is why I still think "The Journal of Fabulous Ideas" should exist -- a place for people to put those great ideas. Then they don't have to write bad stories and the world can breathe a sigh of relief.

in which i experience the joys of sentient-age children

Kids: Bang! Bang! Bang! *guns aimed at me*
Eliz: that was point-blank range.
Me: I'm bulletproof. *unflinching*
Kids: Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Me: I'm bulletproof because of my magic bulletproof forcefield.
Eliz: *voice dripping with extreme scorn and sarcasm* No, ACTUALLY, it's because of your SUPER BORING MOM powers. You have the power to be EXTREMELY BORING.

hahahaha!

shining virtue! the mind boggles!

up at 7:30
coffee
shower
feed kid
make lunch
dress kid
clean up misc. things
laundry
insanely hose down tree, attempt scooping up of like 200 pounds of pollen.
pee pants while chain sneezing
give up
shower
ride bike to cafe
leave giant backpack there
ride bike to carfixing place
get truck. yay!!!!!
to cafe. bad moms meeting. yummy breakfast.
take forgotten lunch to Moomin
buy diatomaceous earth
go to bank
home
hanky-panky
go to post office
more laundry, fold everything
work on poetry 1/2 hour
Eliz arrives
pick up Moomin and Sarah in Jo's car
play on lawn
grocery shopping adventure with 2 kids (gasp, how does anyone do it?)
home
put away groceries
juice and donuts for all!
play 2 games of fluxx
sneak off and blog
***
in our near future:
shower #3
dress slutty
go to squid's house
eat some amazing food she is making
ditch children, husband, friends to run to city girlfriend
read poetry
listen to poetry or spoken word or whatever it is
collapse exhausted and happy after fabulous day where i was magically competent at everything and didn't wreck jo's car

phooey on you, tree

It occurred to me yesterday that I could hose off the giant HellTree and try to knock its remaining flowers and pollen off of it and in general do what rain would do. The yard and driveway and front of the house are now hosed down soaking wet and the pollen is in theory neutralized. I think I should now put my sturdy extra-thick painters' mask on again and scoop the piles of pollen up into bags.

I'm glad I thought of it, but why didn't this occur to me weeks ago?! Dammit. It might have saved us much misery.

***
if i were really smart i would also have thought of hiring some guys to come hose it all down and sweep it up instead of just now trying to do it myself.

oh, finally!

I just made Rook crack up laughing by running into the room with my book and yelling, "Finally! I"ve GOTTEN TO THE HOT LESBIAN SEX!" as I waved this doorstop of a book around like a maniac. It's not even that hot, just some nubile young laundresses bathing by the river, but it's the juiciest pages yet.

unspeakable weirdness

Oh Marcel! Oh Albertine! I can hardly bear it. The neurotic weirdness of these people has finally got me cracking up laughing, about halfway through "The Fugitive" I'm just stunned, overwhelmed, completely and finally lost in all the lies and contradictions and complexities. Intense feelings and intense uncertainty and instability of feelings. Possibly Marcel should have applied glue to his brain, or hairspray.... or some time-slowing field... HOW did he ever record all these vague and totally believable progressions of thoughts? I'm in awe... I've been loathing Marcel for a while but at the same time all other characters and all other novels seems to barely skim the surface of the possibility of truth... I'm finally sort of grokking what this is all about...

I'm thinking suddenly of Middlemarch and how pleased I was with it and how grown-up it seemed. Proust kicks the ass of Middlemarch around the block into next week. How am I going to recover from this book and its disturbing aftermath? And what will happen next? And by "happen next" I mean "after t he next 100 pages of Marcel freaking out about in exactly what ways he (did and did not) and (does and does not) and (will and won't in the future) love and hate Albertine.

Note: mark the bits on what the dead think of us, for Jo. p. 520-521.

Perhaps, if she had known, she would have been touched to see that her lover had not forgotten her, now that her own life was finished, and would have been sensitive to things which in the past had left her indifferent. But as we would choose to abstain from infidelities, however secret, so fearful are we that she whom we love is not abstaining from them, I was terrified at the thought that if the dead do exist somewhere, my grandmother was as well aware of my forgetfulness as Albertine of my remembrance. And when all is said, even in the case of a single dead person, can we be sure that the joy we should feel in learning that she knows certain things would compensate for our alarm at the thought that she knows them all; and, however agonizing the sacrifice, would we not sometimes forbear to keep those we have loved as friends after their death, for fear of having them also as judges?

do you even realize... i mean... i'm just barely getting it... and I'm near the end of the series... at least 1500 pages into it...

lassoed?

Moomin is tying himself up again. This happens often, along with the making of elaborate web-like traps that involved all the doorknobs in the house. this time it's his ankles.

"Um... honey? Do you need help getting that untied?"

"No I don't want to."

"Are you sure? "

"I don't want to help getting untied. I WIKE it."

I swear to god this isn't my fault --- it must be from cartoons?

my noble steed faltered for an instant

But Jo swung us up on her dapple grey charger and carried us home. Thanks to Pilot for watching Moomin, and to the tow truck guy for showing me how to take off the little door on the shifty gear thingie and jiggle the little handle, which apparently is some kind of place to attach an anti-theft device and it's gone suddenly out of whack, so that now to get out of park I will have to jiggle my little handle (which personally has always been true, so it's really okay with me that I have to do it to my faithful truck as well) And thanks to the car fixing guy who looked at everyting and made tcching noises and estimates and is now going to figure out why it all happened and why the gas and temperature gauges don't work. And to whoever picked up my new bike helmet from where I stupidly left it on the curb, and put it securely on a nearby bush for safekeeping so that an hour later when I went back to look for the helmet, it was RIGHT THERE. thank you universe!

Bonus points to the car fixing dude for spelling "gauge" correctly.

I was fretting that maybe my truck would die before I got to paint it like a ladybug -- now I'm all jazzed again! Come on, little truck! 6 more months even! You can do it! I will paint you red and have a party.

also before I forget. three different people helped me with minor bureacratic obstacles today on campus. and they didn't have to - they went out of their way to fix everything and find things! so rare and so nice!

I'm very wiped out and exhausted and maybe sunburned from all the bike-riding in the very hot sun and from not enough food (bad) but soon Rook will come whisk us away for fabulous cool sushi in the air conditioned restaurant.

Tomorrow, an afternoon with Jo's kids and at some point I hope my truck comes back into my hands because I am going to this reading with Chulita and last time i tried taking the train it was clear that caltrain + bart means like 2 hours unless there is major luck involved.

human again

I feel like a normal person again except for the cramps. Last night I was totally going nuts and had no idea what to do with myself. I got the stir-crazy feeling that I had to get out of the house. Rook also was incredibly stressed from a 12 hour work day, and had no energy to listen to my round and round neurotic hoo-ha. Allergies at near-catastrophe level. Cramps. But most of all the violent turbulent wild mood. I realized I could nip out and go to Cafe Barfonne (at 9:30 pm, only other nearby alternative being going to Safeway or something dreary like that). Or on a bike ride. But I couldn't find my helmet! (and still can't.) And I ran into something and bruised the hell out of my knee, and then Moomin kicked it really hard by accident while we were on the couch.

So I thought that I'd go to the cafe and translate something and make myself feel better by having done something constructive despite the mood of Grim Darkness and Hell.

I ended up (on the way out to go to the cafe) playing the piano suddenly for an hour and a half. Somehow with the turbulence I longed to play a lot of messy chopin but instead made myself learn new bach invention (inspired by Jo posting about listening to one.) It made me cuss and stomp that I could not make my fingers do what I wanted and what I could hear in my head, and I wanted to just give up on it, but then realized that a good cure for my awful mood was making myself be disciplined. And it worked great and all my irrational anger and despair at various people sort of turned inward into self-discipline, which might sound bad but it felt good and comforting.

A thing about me and anger lately. I still maintain that I don't want to be overcome by anger. I like to be in control of my words and actions. I don't want to yell at anyone or say irrational or hurtful things, to the best of my ability. But here is my solution, when I realize I'm angry (and step one here, which I'm not good at, is realizing I'm angry in the first place) I will try simply to say that I'm angry, and maybe why. I don't have to give a 10 page analysis of why and justify everything and take it all back beforehand. I can just say that I'm angry about it whatever it is and that I won't accept (being treated like that, the things people have said, etc.) What "not accepting it" means I'm not really sure. It sounds like some sort of ultimatum.

And also I realize that no one cares much about the ticky way that I phrase being angry about something and that won't make any difference to them being mad back at me for being mad in the first place.

This applies to a bunch of different areas of my life I think.

periodic mood swings are really good for you -- they fiercely lift the veils... thanks, hormones...

Then I took a short bike ride in the cool nighttime and felt about 1 million times better than before. It was just what I needed.

chula called me later on and listened to my wild fears of sending out stuff for publishing and said something very useful. that unless she were to go brain dead, her writing and judgement will be better than they are now in 6 months or in a year. And so will mine. And so yeah I might cringe a little at what I wrote and published now. But it is pointless to wait for some imagined perfection, as the goal is to keep improving if that is possible. And that in 5 or 10 years, what i said and how perfectly or not I said it is less important than having gotten something out into the world and the fact of having done it. I know this but it was very comforting to hear it. And the validation from K.'s letter to me (which I got yesterday afternoon) is part of what threw me into a tizzy. If someone at his level says my stuff is that good, then I have to accept it's that good and I have no excuse anymore not to send it out, which is, frankly, scary. It is scary to be known and read (or read and rejected.) I want it though.

I finally finished "The Captive" which was a huge downer and also NOT helping my mood in any way. Now on the next book I can't even believe what just happened - I think Marcel just made it up or that Albertine is hoaxing him because he's so damned annoying and creepy.

it's that time again

I'm pretty sure this is PMS whamming me into the ground all of a sudden.

maybe some comp@y segundo turned up really loud will fix me. i could strap the speakers into my undies and blast it up there.

everyone write me email right now.

mental flabbiness

I'm so getting this book for my mom: The Obesity Myth.

She's been on my ass about how she's going to take me to the mall. I'm a little stressed about it all and I wish I hadn't said I'd let her buy me stuff. I'm going to take it back. After a lot of questions I finally "confessed" I was skinnier than usual and she freaked out about it. I wouldn't answer the "how much do you weigh" questions nor would I say what size I wear. She jumped in anyway and made a lot of assumptions. I can't bear the thought of what is going to be said to me and I don't want her even looking at my body much less commenting on it. can i just ask her not to say anything at all, ever, ever again about my clothes, hair, skin, or body?

Ugh!

I thought I was going to be all nice and just smile and nod my head and try to make her happy, or whatever, and maybe could even fake a temporary interest in clothes magazines. But I just can't do it...

instead i will suggest that we all would like some genuine western wear and maybe they'll buy Moomin a cowboy hat and Rook and I will buy ourselves some sort of hilarious belt buckles or hats or boots.

waptop

Moomin is now the proud owner of a PB 180C. (Thanks to McCoot not caring what happens to it.)

I can't wait to give it to him and explain that it's his very own and he can type on it anytime he wants!!!!! I predict he will freak out with happiness and grownuppitude.

the unreality of stanfffnord

The quiet of science libraries can be very cozy. Sitting behind the desk - overhearing slight rustling from the reading room, the clicking of the sensor at the door when someone walks in or out, the thump of books from deep in the stacks. You get to know the regulars and what they're interested in. People have conversations in front of your anonymity.

SFSU is a city street in constant brownian motion. People jangle together. It's dynamic. The density is overwhelming. I like it and feel at home. It's messy and overflowing.

Here at Stanffnord I have the creepy feeling that an apocalypse happened and no one noticed. Even during the school year when classes are in session, it seems like an empty city. It reminds me of Los Alamos or Fermilab; huge open space and buildings, some cars, and barely any people visible.

In the G@tes building everyone's hiding. I'm sure it's worse because they're geeks and not very social anyway, but all the doors are closed. People are always getting on the elevator going in the opposite direction from me. No one's ever in the bathroom. The reading rooms and conference rooms are stacked with dusty magazines and have been in disorder since some budget cut 10 years ago. Orderly rows up till 1986 and then: piles of dust and smoky fingerprints that might have once held information of use to someone. The untouched magazines are ghosts. It's a melancholy place. Eight fancy printers almost never used are in the central open workspace here on the second floor. I'm the only person I've ever seen take anything off the printers there; sometimes I print something, forget, come back a week later, and a paper jam, unfixed, is still going, a red light blinking, my print job still half-printed out on top of the machine, and half-stuck in memory. It's like a eerie town I've come into with my big rig, and no one's home - the plates of food still out on the tables and chairs pushed back but alien abduction, or some unknown disaster... CROATAN carved into the elevator door...? An office door squeaks open and then clicks shut and a boy walks by and doesn't look into my open office. All day, maybe 3 people pass me in the halls. There's no visible social life. The streets and sidewalks and landscaping is too clean. The monuments and fountains, unlooked at, unloved, unused.

I think this is what wealth does in this country... it creates unholy isolation... Important things are supposed to be happening here... but no one sweats or loves or looks anyone else in the eye in this place... the population density fell below critical mass for anything to Happen, or else that density was never reached... subjectivity and the possibilites of random collisions must have died here long ago...

learning

I woke up thinking of Y.'s poetry and all these things I learned from it.

From Antzen I learned a lot about sustaining a very long poem and about the freedom to digress. Everything thought about in one moment can be spun out and examined and connected to every other thing in that moment's thought. His essential jazzness. the excellent quality and intelligence of his thoughts. he revises and memorizes -- incredibly prolific yet not spewing and leaving the work untouched like buddhist anti-revisionists.

But from Y. I learn all sorts of things about some different kind of freedom I don't know how to talk about. The freedom of love and metaphor and a little craziness. In person she is often on an edge that I associate with schizophrenics; wild eyed, sweating a little, mystical, ready to echo any subject and riff off it. She's scary-intense with no boundaries. I love our odd conversations. I like hearing about her lover. Last night she talked with me about how it is unfair to him to write these things but that he agrees to play the role for her. "I make him god. He can only hold that for a little while. It's dangerous." when she starts getting into the kabbalah.... heh heh... but at the same time she seems to pop back up into reality or what I consider reality, or else she fakes it really well.

ahhhhhh

Well that was a much-needed fix.. I thought earlier that I wouldn't be able to get it up. But as soon as people started reading I got all excited and was no longer sick of the book and felt that everyone was fabulous geniuses or most everyone, anyway. Antzen, brilliant as always, G.H. alas read nothing new though he had an entire new manuscript with him and I saw only a bit of it; but I'm cool with hearing "The Terrorist" for the umpteenth time - it seems better on every reading. The trick is to trick him out of the new manuscript before he gets drunk and burns it. Damn. Y.'s amazing long thing was great, read by a starryeyed blonde bombshell fangirl. We introduced Y. as someone who fucks god every night and went on and on in poety ways praising her glorious weirdness and her free-spinning poems.

Most of all it was such good variety and I felt proud of the book (which i got so sick of while doing it) all over again. They were all very different good poets. So not a "scene" where everything matches up -- we all were willing to go on each other's odd, shy trips.

As for me. I not only got it up, I fucked the whole harem. It's so shameful but I love to have hordes of admirers. And there is a moment if I am lucky where I feel the mood of everyone in the room and feel that I'm connecting directly with them. That was happening and it was so great! Afterwards everyone was begging me to see the series of short poems. And Witter dug the translation with all the groves and nymphs and grots and vastyness. I read it in spanish, rottenly (i kind of made myself read it though i knew I'd do it badly, as a spur to practice.) And I'm glad I read the huge unfinished poem. Now I know where some of the missing bits are and also it was a surprise how much people liked it and what they quoted back to me later and what they thought was funny.

No one cares if you read a 10 minute long poem, as long as it's all about the breasts of underage lesbians.