what you've been asking for

Marfa, Texas

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 01:40:00 +0000

I'll add to Jess's recent and excellent blog posts about our travels that for me at least, Marfa is an inspiring place for my writing. Light, landscape, art, new and old friends, joblessness, I'm not sure the reason but I've started a couple of new pieces since arriving. Unfinished and raw for sure but it's an exhilarating feeling to be writing again, and more than that, to be excited about the new work. I'm moving here. Or at least dreaming of it.

Day 4

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/12/we-heart-marfa-endless-travelogue-by-jessica-piazza.html#more

Day 5

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/12/photo-diary-and-poetry-as-monument-all-sorts-of-travelogue-by-jessica-piazza.html#more

Van Horn, Texas

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:27:00 +0000

I'm on the road, driving with my friend Jess (and her special dog Special) from California to Texas. We're at a Days Inn in lovely Van Horn, Texas and will be going to Marfa early tomorrow. Jess is guest blogging about our trip for the Best American Poetry blog-- part travelogue, part meditations on poetry and art. Here are her posts to date which do a much better job than I could of capturing our trip.

Day 1

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/12/we-be-trippin-a-travelogue-by-jessica-piazza.html

Day 2

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/12/patience-and-doubt-more-travelogue-by-jessica-piazza.html

Day 3

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/12/all-the-funs-in-how-you-say-a-thing-even-more-travelogue-by-jessica-piazza.html#more

Poem

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:44:00 +0000

A poem of mine, Tikkun, is now up on the Boston College Magazine website, reprinted from the journal Post Road.

http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/fall_2009/endnotes/tikkun.html

what happens by accident

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 03:37:00 +0000

There is of course the pleasure of return, the trusted patterns, the stories I've heard and told, the way in which it's easy to fall back into the roles we've made, been given, and accepted -- all of the small pleasures of being with the ones who, if they don't always know us best, understand who we are in time and love us without reservation.

I went to my aunt and uncle's house for Thanksgiving dinner. This is our fifteenth or sixteenth year of being there. Despite the art everywhere -- at one point in the night my brother and I walked through the hallways admiring the de Kooning and Johns and Miro prints deciding which we'd like for ourselves -- my aunt and uncle are unconcerned about the rambunctious kids or the exaggerated arm swings that come precariously close to expensive and fragile glass sculptures. It's another reminder of their natural grace and kindness, a warmth they both have that's hard to describe yet seems to inhabit their actions and interactions.

What doesn't change from year to year: the jokes about who drinks too much, who talks too much about politics, who's missing, the production of a group picture, the small children wound like tops, and the checking in of the where and how and when of each others lives. Ritual, we love and complain about, knowing I think this how we find comfort in what changes in small and significant ways from year to year. Ritual, the force that allows us to mark time not as continuous but divided: here and after and before. Ritual, as the way we can tell and retell stories of how we've arrived here, together, again.

But this is not my family. Or to be more precise, they are not my, my sister, my brother or my mother's blood relations. My aunt and uncle are not my aunt and uncle. The ones I call my cousins are not my cousins by blood. My connection to them is through my stepfather. We are what happens by accident. (There's a longer, more complex piece to be written here, about how children whose parents divorce and remarry see themselves within a family. There is for us, a certain point where, aware of the world to varying degrees, we start to understand family not as something we're born into but as thing that can be made and remade. Family is not static but shifting, an unstable element.)

But they are, my aunt and uncle, my cousins, even the people there who I don't know, are without question, my family. I feel closer to them than I do to some of those to who I am actually related. Perhaps it's because of time, the sheer accumulation of familiar habits and traditions we've been a part of over the years. Perhaps it's just an acceptance of the way things are. Or perhaps, and I think this what I'd like to believe, it's a more purposeful decision, a distinction between the family we're born into and the family we choose.

Sick

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:37:00 +0000

In the 12 days (and counting) I’ve been sick, I’ve lost ten pounds, watched countless hours of terrible, mind destroying television, written nothing, read nothing, and have generally been miserable. I’m on the slow train back to better, with only a hacking cough and tiredness still lingering. Being sick is not fun, and while this isn’t exactly news, I haven’t been this sick in years and had forgotten the black cloud that comes with the feeling that your body is abandoning you. It’s a terrible feeling to feel that your body is the enemy and you’re powerless to do anything but be sick. The days and nights I spent in bed, I tried to will the time, the time I wanted to only go faster, to speed up, into something productive. This is time to think. To be still. To meditate. But it’s not. The time when the body is in pain is lost time. This sickness though is temporary; I’m lucky, I’ll get better in time and my life will continue and this will become a story about the time I was really sick for two weeks.

While I was sick C. recorded a couple of short essays for me to listen to. One of the excerpts she read was from Mark Doty’s memoir Heaven’s Coast, which begins with him explaining that he no longer thinks of illness as a solvent. He beautifully, of course, goes on to describe how illness can be instead a kind illumination: “demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears. I think this is what is meant when we speculate that death is what makes love possible. Not that things need to be able to die in order for us to love them, but that things need to die in order for us to know what they are.”

I’ve had quite a bit of time to think about that passage and though I trust him and the hard wisdom of what he writes of, I can’t help right now but think of illness as that solvent, not breaking down just the body, but relationships. I don’t mean to compare the flu with a terminal disease but only to suggest that if illness is indeed a solvent, it’s taking apart the self’s connection to the world. When I’m sick I don’t want to be, or talk to, anyone. Illness means retreat back into the bear cave of the self. To hibernate. To be alone. I’ve felt for the last two weeks pretty far from the normal workings of my life and the lives of my loved ones. Stripped of my own sense of self and the desire to be part of the world, I’m exhausted by my own lack of attachment. I know it’s a temporary state and one that feels somehow necessary, a kind of biological imperative to be alone, away from the world of health and happiness, the world that seems a forbidden and distant kingdom. I’m incredibly glad that feeling is coming to an end. I’m tired of being the sum of my body’s pains and aches. I’m looking forward to being back in the body I recognize. And besides feeling lucky to be getting better, to have a body that can heal, I am also very thankful to have friends and family who have persistently called and wrote even when I didn’t want to talk. Thank you.

Wild Things

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:21:00 +0000

Where The Wild Things Are captures perhaps better than any other movie I’ve seen in a long time the danger and mystery and confusion and secret life of a certain age in childhood. It’s always been my favorite children's books – get me drunk and I’ll quote the whole thing – but the movie and the filling in of Max’s backstory offers something else, and though it slides close to sentimentality at moments and the Wild Things are a bit too talky, it also strikes in those opening scenes in particular to something near to the heart of how it is to live in a world that feels random and uncertain and where adult decisions, all decisions, feel both arbitrary and personal.

Max’s misunderstood fear of a dying sun, for example, is beautifully shot with Max sitting in the classroom and then the voice, the words of the teacher, following him as he rode the bus home. It reminded me of being a kid and listening to the radio and hearing for the first time about Russian ICBMs aimed in my direction. The thought of a missile capable of wiping out Washington DC, and our home 90 miles away, felt real and possible. I looked on maps of first strike cities and traced the outer edges of circles of immediate death and possible death by radiation poisoning. I imagined nuclear winters. The reports on the radio were another sign in a world of signs that said, not yours. No control.

The game of finding parallels between one’s life and any work of art is both an act of authentication but also a dangerous limiting of both the complexity of the life and the work. But as I watched the movie I couldn’t help but remember what it was like to see a parent begin to date again, seeing a sister's more popular world, strange and wonderful dreaming and play, or the rage and fear of emotions that can't be accounted for in adult terms. A couple of years ago my mother and I were going through a box of old letters, report cards, etc. and found a report written about my behavior in kindergarten. It said something to the effect that Josh can become easily frustrated if unsuccessful on his first try and sometimes has trouble controlling his temper. We both laughed, in part of how I’ve changed, but mostly because the personality described then could have been recycled and reprinted on every progress report, evaluation throughout my childhood. And while I think I’ve matured slightly since age 6, there was something surreal about seeing a younger version of myself, and a shadow of that description in my current self, written with such accuracy.

Eggers and Jonze, in giving Max a single mother just beginning to date again and worried about money, an older sister, an absent father, have set up clear domestic causes for his wildness. But even while they’ve set up possibilities they’ve also left it uncertain. The scene of the all the kids playing in the school yard, the science teacher describing the sun as a star that will one day die, and the quiet moments of Max playing alone, building of a room of forts, the igloo, etc. – all of these build to shape not the cause of Max’s behavior but the world in which he inhabits. If Max’s acting out were the result of a single cause then I think it’d feel manipulated, and I understand that compliant about the movie, but in my movie watching experience I could believe that Max’s confusion, anger, and uncertainty respond to the fact that the world, his world, is changing. Arbitrary and personal. At the end of a Mark Strand poem in Dark Harbor the speaker writes “Tell me I have not lived in vain, that the stars / Will not die, that things will stay as they are, / That what I have seen will last, that I was not born / Into change, that what I have said has not been said for me.” As we get older we find ways to deal with these contingencies – our own islands of imagination, wild rumpuses –it doesn’t change the truth that we’re born into a world of change.

The movie also conjures with intimate, often handheld shots, the strange and private wonder of play that too is part of childhood. Individual imagination, quiet revealing, games of one and wild stories: these become Max's way not just to entertain himself but understand his place with the world. Being a kid is a lonely business. I think one of the reasons that when adults describe this as ‘not a kid’s movie’ they are calling attention to the themes that make them uncomfortable. It’s what most ‘kid’s movies’ avoid, and for some good reasons -- loneliness is a hard thing to show in an interesting way and it makes people in our age of good feeling uncomfortable. There’s a moment where one of the Wild Things, “Carol” says something to the effect that Max as the new King of the Wild Things will keep the loneliness out. It’s a moment I think Eggers and Jonze perhaps show their cards a little too much. If it is a movie in part about loneliness, it's also about the counter to that: story.

“I could use a story,” Max’s mother says, and for me it’s also a movie about the kinds of stories we tell each other. And the stories we tell ourselves. The story Max creates of the Wild Things, the need to travel to that world in order to understand the one he left behind, gives him meaning and definition. By pretending to be King, he’s able to see who he is as both an individual, but also his part of his family’s community. There’s a letter Don Dellio wrote to Jonathan Franzen and quoted in Franzen’s book of essays How to Be Alone, I’ve been thinking about recently and seems connected to this idea of the stories we tell. Dellio says, “Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.” Max is like and unlike Dellio’s vision of the novelist as engaged in an act of survival; as a boy he wants, though can’t articulate, his desire to be both an individual and part of a community. It's what I admire about the end of the movie -- I don't think I'm ruining anything here -- is that even when Max returns, we know that life is in some ways unchanged. There's no false statements by either his mother or him about never hurting the other again. It's a happy ending to be sure but one that doesn't refuse the truths. Living in a community and staying an individual is hard. Being part of family isn't always easy. Life will continue. There’s no end to loneliness, just small islands of safety and danger, and some rooms where dinner is waiting for us, still warm.

Damn

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:41:00 +0000

One of the best poems I've read in a while.

In a Beautiful Country

A good way to fall in love
is to turn off the headlights
and drive very fast down dark roads.

Another way to fall in love
is to say they are only mints
and swallow them with a strong drink.

Then it is autumn in the body.
Your hands are cold.
Then it is winter and we are still at war.

The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear
about how we live in a beautiful country.
Snow sifts from the clouds

into your drink. It doesn't matter about the war.
A good way to fall in love
is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,

then down you'll fall through lovely mists
as a body might fall early one morning
from a high window into love. Love,

the broken glass. Love, the scissors
and the water basin. A good way to fall
is with a rope to catch you.

A good way is with something to drink
to help you march forward.
The gold-haired girl says, Don't worry

about the armies, says, We live in a time
full of love. You're thinking about this too much.
Slow down. Nothing bad will happen.

KEVIN PRUFER
Poetry
October 2009

Last Words

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:26:00 +0000

Last Words in New York Times, By Claire Cameron, September 19, 2009

I haven't written much in a while, but this made me want to write or at least post this article. These statements, last words, said by Texas death row inmates before they were executed are compelling, surprising, a few are darkly humorous, but taken together they are devastatingly sad. On one side of these words is an act of terrible and shattering violence they most likely committed. And on the other side of the words is silence. Many of them apologize or ask for forgiveness, and in doing so we see the incompleteness of apology and the finality of their deaths. Most likely -- and as was described in a recent New Yorker article, it seems that at least one innocent person was executed -- being important here, and shadowing all of these words with doubt. And while I know they've been gathered and arraigned by the author to create an effect, this is an editorial after all, it doesn't diminish their power for me. Its not an overtly polemical statement against the death penalty, though it certainly serves that purpose, but rather a reminder that a person is speaking, was speaking.

Nocturne, Phnom Penh

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:43:00 +0000

A short prose piece from being in Cambodia this summer, part of a very cool site of collaborative writing projects called The Owls:

http://owlsmag.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/stamps-rivkin/

Why so quiet Josh

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:13:00 +0000

When writing poems, the blog feels like an escape, or at least a counterweight to a certain kind of intensity or focus or obsession with precision, but when i'm working on prose, in this case an essay, or right now pieces of an essay, writing here feels like a distraction or taking away somehow from the prose. I'm also really busy getting ready to teach. So instead of reflections on the state of the soul or the purpose of poetry (Milosz: "The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person/ for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors), here are a couple of things I'm looking forward to in the next couple months.

Poetry! New books from a couple of writer's i really like...

Robin Ekiss' The Mansion of Happiness

http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780820334080-0

Gabrielle Calvocoressi's Apocalyptic Swing

http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780892553532-0

Max! The night max wore his wolf suit he made mischief of one kind and another...

Where the Wild Things Are Movie

http://wherethewildthingsare.warnerbros.com/

Wisconsin Music! The state that brought you fried cheese curd brings the noise...

Volcano Choir (with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver)

http://www.jagjaguwar.com/onesheet.php?cat=JAG156

boarding all rows

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:42:00 +0000

It sort of makes sense to write this last post of my summer travels from an airport. (and in a hurry) I'm in St. John's Newfoundland and two flights away from being home, or as close to a home as I have. When I arrive in SF I'll be going to the apartment where all of my stuff has been living for two months but where I have yet to sleep or cook or live. My fellowship is over, I'm teaching new classes, my girlfriend lives in a different time zone, In other words I'm returning to a life that in some ways feels unfamiliar or at least very different from the one I had before I left. I've been thinking again this morning about the Cavafy poem "The City." Just as there are songs or albums which become placeholders for a time or season -- for me this last year Bon Iver's album "For Emma Forever Ago" -- there are also lines of poems for me that rattle around, graffiti the walls, echo and call, and I keep thinking of the lines, "You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:/ there's no ship for you, there's no road." But this morning, it doesn't feel like this at all. In the last days of travel the pleasures and small comforts of home grow large -- cooking with friends, my red bike, running up the hill on Church Street and descending into Dolores Park, writing with John at Que Tal. At the same time the realities and questions of the future become real. A friend recently wrote something to the effect that at a certain point ones' course of life becomes set. Sitting here, waiting to return, these next couple of months already have the feeling and weight of big (and small) decisions that will set my life's course for a while. It's a feeling that by turns is exhilarating and overwhelming, probably one of the reasons I haven't slept the last couple of nights. But it's morning, the sunlight is bright on the tarmac, departing planes diagonal the huge glass windows, and they're calling my flight. This morning I'm hoping for good things.

I'm Home (Sort Of)

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:28:00 +0000

though I'm still thinking about Phomn Pehn, and will be for some time I think. It's a city unlike any other and one that feels at the edges of law and reason, complex and unknowable, wild and alive. The neat lawns and ordered rows of traffic of my sister's suburban neighborhood, not to mention the complete absence of moto drivers leaning or sleeping on their bikes, food stalls and street venders, women pulling carts of vaulable debris, seem eerily quiet, as if there is something missing. Which isn't to say I'm not thrilled to be back and have drinkable tap water, working plumbing, cleaner air, regular hot water, wide sidewalks, and most of all to be with family and friends, but even the hum of traffic in my sister's neighborhoods sounds subdued. Life in Phomn Pehn happens so much on the streets and in the outside spaces and I'm thinking about the evenings in the squares beside Independence Monument. To blasting music hundreds of women in rows do group aerobics – lean and push and pull in almost unison. With the exception of the person at the front, almost no one is wearing workout clothing. There are even competing groups, some doing a faster, athletic version while in others the music is slower and more melodic. It's a sight that's lovely and odd.. I can't help but smile. At another end of the square boys kick small rattan balls, double the size of a grapefruit, playing either soccer or juggling the ball between them – a cross between hackey sack and volleyball – a game called sepak takraw. Some play without shoes and I have a hard time in the quick speed of the soccer games figuring out who plays for what team. Yells and hollers in Khmer rise up when a team scores. At the edges of these games and workouts, people sit on the small patches of grass and laugh and gossip. Families stroll and vendors hawk and teenagers flirt and tourists watch and as evening becomes night the crowds become smaller and the air quieter.

snapshot of walter (siem reap, cambodia)

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:45:00 +0000

For example, he tells me, the time he was a Tuk Tuk driver on Pub Street, working all night driving drunk tourists to their guest houses. One dollar a ride. The woman he met, not his future wife who was then working at the lizard shop in the Old Market, but the one who served beer at the restaurant he invited back to the room he rented with his brother for 30 dollars a month, shared bathroom with the other rooms. Five or six times, he says, she went back with him before he found out she was already married. Then he goes to her house. Waits outside. Stands in the dark on the street until her husband comes home. Her husband is a police officer, big car with lights, and that's the end of that. Never wants to see her again. The big trouble, you know. Don't want. Then he meets her, his wife, who according to her father is worth $2000 dollars. What's the word for this arraignment, he asks, when the man pays for a wife. A thousand of it he saves himself, five hundred he borrows from his sister and another five hundred from his brother in law, all going to the family for this girl. This is the woman, opening his wallet to show me her picture, a professional portrait done with a hospital blue background and she's not quite smiling. Pretty, he says. I agree. Together they have a one month old. Still owes the brother-in-law. Or to be precise one month and eleven days. And he asks, where do you go tomorrow. He wants to give me a good price.

snapshot

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 10:27:00 +0000

yesterday we rode bikes through the ruins of Angkor Wat. it was our second day there and so we'd already seen the 'big sights' -- the jungle tree limbs and roots breaking through the stone, the huge Buddha faces carved into the ancient stone -- and so we cycled in the blazing heat on our single speed bikes down an elephant path to what was marked in very tiny print on the map we had as "the gate of the dead." no signs. no tuk tuks. no tour groups or kids offering bracelets and cold drinks. ahead of us monkeys crisscrossed the path. we arrived at the massive entrance way, the same as the Eastern and Western gates with the towering faces, several stories tall, half crumbling, and breathtaking. here it was silent. we were the only ones there . for about an hour we stayed there before biking back to see more of the sights and then later, we rode the several kilometers back into town to catch a bus for sihanoukville, the beach.

course correction

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 07:31:00 +0000

to cambodia. i'm at the airport and I'm on my way to phenom pehn. (I'm actually already here but ran out of internet time at the bangkok airport so i'm posting this now) . it's a last minute change in plans but feels like the right choice. some of my favorite people love the city and the country and if that's not a good reason, I don't know what is. and wats. lots of wats. and it'll hopefully be less trafficked than thailand, or at least the parts i visited. chaing mai, where i've been the last couple of days is a beautiful place, the people are friendly and the food amazing, but there's the feeling that the experience of being there already has already been carefully packaged. for the loads of families, first time travellers, and all the other tourists who wonder through the markets. but beyond that, it was a place without history. not that the area isn't rich with culture but that the attractions are about a different kind of pleasure. it's the pleasure of touching a (drugged) tiger or bungee jumping or visiting a tribe in the hills (that knows you're coming and has knickknacks to sell you). i don't mean to be too cynical it's just that it felt like a place without consequence or past, or that the history there was second to the desires of travellers for 'experience.' too much of aiming toward what a foreigner visiting thailand wants, or expects to see. there's an adam gopnik quote i recently remembered and discussed with my brother, it's a passage from Paris to the Moon: "There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more." i make no claims about which one i am, though i know which i aim to be. and to my mom, don't worry, i'll be safe.

Extremes

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:10:00 +0000

I've been working on this post on and off for more than a week and can't seem to finish it, or at least feel satisfied about any of the claims about place or travel. The other reason I haven't finished it, aside from the fact that most of my intellectual stimulation comes from conversations with 8 and 9 year olds about point of view and syllables is that my little brother made a last minute visit to Bangkok. He was on his way to Urumqi in Western China when the riots and violence started so he wisely changed his plans and found a cheap flight here. We spent the evenings together in the city doing what we do best as travelers: walking and eating. On Saturday, I didn't have to teach and so we walked around the city visiting a Wat (Buddhist temple), stumbling upon an electronics market (that was really a cover for all the guys selling homemade Thai porn) before finding a wholesale fruit and vegetable market, a place, from the strange but friendly stares and giggles, not often visited by tourists. Everywhere there were thousands of pounds of garlic cloves and elephant sacks of chilies, as well as huge pallets of bananas, dragon fruits, mangoes, watermelon, papayas, rose apples, families in their little stalls together shucked peas or separating chillies by size and quality. Walking and eating. The food here, especially the street food, is plentiful, cheap, delicious. From the roasted duck to the noodles to the curries, we wandered together through the streets and alleys like hungry dogs.

Which brings me back to my first night in Bangkok. and the feeling of extremes that I feel in being here. After arriving and being treated by my host to a very nice dinner we walked to a neighborhood night market. There were variations of typical boardwalk amusement games, baseballs thrown at stacked cans, rings over coke bottles etc. but there were also ruckus calls and cheers of people gambling. Some people sat on improvised stools but most stood and threw down money on painted boards betting on the numbers from what looked like for all you Price is Right fans a Plinko game. Further in the night market children tried to catch goldfish in a baby swimming pool. Others ate at the rows of stalls on the street, grilling meat and seafood, large vats steaming with broths and soups, and even baskets of various kinds of fried insects. It was clearly a neighborhood night market, not very large but very active with something for each person in the family. Noisy, chaotic, fast and completely alive with activity. But, in comparison to the rough and tumble speed of city life ( perhaps true of any city, but this one in particular) I'm lucky to be treated very well by the people running the program. I've been taken out fancy dinners in private dining clubs that overlook the city, treated to a Thai massage, and I'm staying in a pretty swanky (at least for me) hotel room. Fresh towels replace the ones I use in the morning, the guards at the door smile and say hello as they push the up button in the lobby elevator, and my room, with it's crisp white sheets on the bed and beautiful hardwood floors – not to mention the kitchenette with the washer/dryer – offers a kind of calm and order in the middle of a busy urban city. It's not so much the quality of the room or an attempt to brag about my digs, but rather one part of being here.

Going back and forth between walking around and coming back inside is a little disorienting, and after the long (and challenging) day of teaching my sweet if not very advanced group of 7, 8, 9, and 10 year olds, part of me craves the comfort of the hotel room and the other part of me wants the pressure and speed of the city. What these extremes mean, I'm not so sure yet. If anything I think it has made me more aware of the my outsiderness here; not that one doesn't always feel the basic truth of that to some degree as a foreigner, living on the other side of language and history and custom, but I think the extremes here offer a heightened sense of separation. But there's also a kind of pleasure in the extremes, and perhaps the possibility for understanding; a fiction teacher I once had said that a good story was about moving characters to their furthest poles of themselves. By doing so, she argued, the truth of their character would emerge.

Being in a new place, especially one that's far from ones own experience has at first the temptation of seeing into what can't be seen from within. I'm thinking about Robert Frank's America photo series for example and the way in which being an outsider allows one a different kind of access. I make no such claim for being here, I'm only trying to think about what it means to not just be here, but to seek it out. I wanted this. And this seems to be the real question I'm asking myself. Why go? I think there's a tempting if imagined possibility for travelers: if only I just... then I'll never be sad again. But it ain't true. We know it. Yet I don't think I want to side with the speaker in Cavafy's poem beautiful and terrifyingly “The City” who claims in response to a you going to another country, “You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.../ You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:/ there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.” The only city we ever truly visit is the one we carry with ourselves, he seems to claim – and while I'm with him to a point about the origins we carry within us – the problem with the request of the you isn't his or her desire to “find another city better than this one,” but that somehow the past and the self will disappear. Instead the other city, the one sought, might become not a replacement but a compliment, a city within a city. I think of the last line of Tony Hoagland's grail poem, Why We Went and What We Found: "And we'll never sad again! Or never sad in the same way."

Musafa

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:25:00 +0000

To the things I love about Singapore – the food (hand pulled noodles, laksa, sweet tea, mee goreng, etc.), always being able to watch a soccer game or table tennis/badminton on local TV, staying in a hotel with a sauna and a pool, the sounds and smells of being in a place that's far from home, teaching (most days), or at least being back in a classroom, my very bright and charming students – I can now add Mustafa to the list. Mustafa is a store, though that word feels inadequate, in the Little India neighborhood, open 24 hours a day, that sells everything from designer sunglasses to spices to washing machines to knock-off Nikes. Yesterday, after dinner at a vegetarian place with the most amazing chutney and homemade yogurt two of the other teachers and I walked down the main street of Little India, past the Hindu temple, the stores selling cheap bangles and T-shirts, the bell and beat of Bollywood soundtracks, the gold dealers offering 'Just Good' rates, and the curry-fragrant restaurants with older men outside pushing menus, to Mustafa.

The ceilings are low, aisles small, and the people range from the frantic mothers dragging small children to the older Indian women in bright saris resting on the stairs between the levels to the clearly (see Josh) lost. I spent most of my time looking rows of adapters, running shoes, razors, spices, and, cue angelic music the Nikon D5000. What I loved there wasn't the quality or price, but the sheer quantity of each thing offered – endless varieties of cumin and rows of different kinds of tennis racket – and the number of people weaving through the aisles, most clearly on a mission. They knew better than to walk in and browse. It's a surreal sort of place, and after getting lost several times and rejoining my friends, I was ready to return to the street. And it's loud. From the ubiquitous pop music playing everywhere here to the discussions of what to buy and where to find it. After thirty minutes I couldn't see straight, half dazed by the brightness of the lights, drugged into awe and confusion by the endless rows of cleaning products, gold jewelery and on and on and on. Enough. But maybe that's what I like about it too – it's not a place for the casual or the timid. It's impossible to take it all in at once. Walking in is a tacit agreement to be included in the chaos and to be overwhelmed.

But in the interest of balance I should also give some time to the things about being here that are difficult or challenging: the three shirt a day heat, staying in a hotel without a real desk, books, kitchen, etc., the malls of high-end stores (though someone recently pointed out that the reason for the mall, and the great benefit of them is they blast their A/C so offer a place to hide from the weather), and most of all the time difference between here and there. Or, maybe it's just not being around my friends. The week before last, while in Kansas City, I started making a joke about wanting to be a pastor, perhaps because I'm so taken with the narrator's voice in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and his description of his work as a pastor of being able to see, understand (and not understand) people, or maybe because I like the idea of an audience I can see and hear and respond to: a flock. The more I think about it, the more I realize when I say I want to be a pastor, what I'm really asking for, somewhere below the joke, in the way that beneath most jokes is the spark of truth or feeling, is the continuity of community.

My friend Marc first coined the idea of Friend City: a place where all the people one loves could be together. Not quite a commune, but close. In someways the desire alone shows some kind of paradigm shift from years ago when extended families lived, if not in the same house, but on the same street, same neighborhood, same city. I have memories of my grandparent's house, my father's childhood home, in Brighton Beach and the small upstairs apartment where my great-grandmother lived. There was, for better and worse, an overlap of generations, and beyond that, an extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. nearby. A few of my close friends live near family, but most are far from home, and even their homes are far from other relatives. We're spread out across state and country, without the safe certainty of a place fixed in time. We become each others families. Being here has been particular hard – harder than I thought it would be – to be away from the people I care about and am accustomed to seeing, talking to, and being part of each others lives. In part ,it's just getting used to the routine of getting up before six, the return to having a 'real' job, and the time difference. But I also know there's a deeper feeling about the kinds of trade-offs that one continually makes as an adult: choices, that even as they offer freedoms, also define limits. Is it possible I wonder to be both part of a community, connected to others, and still have a kind of independence? Or asked another way, if it's impossible to live without certain trade-offs, how does one see these choices not as trade-offs where one thing is lost and another gained, but as different possibilities?

layover

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 06:25:00 +0000

I'm sitting in the Tokyo airport waiting for my flight to Singapore: paging announcements in the quick and singsong lilt of Japanese, small children shrieking and running carefree, many weary looking travelers in the ungenerous florescent light of the international departures area. (I'll be out of the country for the next month and a half teaching, traveling, and hopefully writing.) There's a line from a Levis (?) poem about the 'easy loneliness of travelers', and while that seems true in the days of long bus rides, crowded markets, and unfamiliar cities, there's something about being in an airport at the start of a trip that invites both that nostalgia for what's left behind, and a sense of possibility. There's a quiet lifting of weight when the start of a journey actually begins. A breath. A pause. A moment amid the noisy comings and goings, to think and consider the trip that's actually happening. In some ways getting ready to leave has been a blessing; I haven't had time to fully consider the amount of transition. The semi-frantic errands of the last week or so, in addition to moving, have diffused the feeling of being untethered. The last two years have allowed me the illusion of safety – external validation and definition. It was the easy, if sometimes awkward or strange, answer to 'so what do you do.' But now. But now . Being untethered too, I want to believe, can be a kind of blessing too. My friend describes needing physical markers for the spiritual or emotional ones. I think I'm the same in that way and this trip, part work and part pleasure, feels like the end and beginning. Until I landed here, it almost didn't feel real. It was an answer to a question, an abstract vision of a place, a distant possibility, an idea. And now that it's happening, I'm pretty damn excited.

Postscript: I'm safe and sound in Singapore. It's hot. No, that's not exactly it. It's dog mouth, all consuming humidity, clothes stuck to the body kind of hot.. But from my hotel window, I can see a bright blue pool (and in the distance construction cranes, a gas station, and the low clouds of maybe some torrential rain).

where i want to stand

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:05:00 +0000

from an interview with Thom Gunn

"When he [Robert Duncan] and Elizabeth Bishop met, they got on terrifically well. They would talk and gossip together and laugh. I asked each of them separately what they thought of the other’s poetry, and each of them said the same thing: “Oh, I can’t read it. It means nothing to me at all.” Their poetry is immensely different—much more different than mine is from either of [theirs]. Once I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the sixties at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop, and one was a protégé of Michael McClure called Free Wheeling Frank, literally a Hell’s Angel, who had written poetry dedicated to Beelzebub and so on. At one stage, Free Wheeling Frank handed me a lighted joint. I puffed on it, handed it to Elizabeth Bishop, and I thought: that’s where I stand, midway between Free Wheeling Frank and Elizabeth Bishop."

http://www.memorious.org/?id=119

remind me

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:52:00 +0000

I think it’s one of those weeks (months, years) when the words of others say better and clearer what I can’t quite put into words. There’s something strangely comforting about the process of moving – and unsettlingly too, very unsettling – that feeling of making an account of who you are, and who you’ve been, as the physical collections of your life are contained, sealed, and for a time disappear. My roommate described on his blog recently the process of finding mementos, photos, letters, etc., that have no ‘value,’ but can’t be thrown away. While the details of the objects are particular, that feeling of moving from amused pleasure to searing memory and finally a kind of reminder of past selves, feels true. It reminds me in some ways of Stanley Kunitz’s poem Touch Me. What both capture is that feeling of having different lives and different selves that, at moments, come back to us. It’s the gift of memory and forgetting that these selves, like photos of South American mountains, museum entry tickets at the bottom of a shoebox or high school love letters wrapped with rubberbands, stay far from our daily life, making it possible to imagine we can live in the present. But it’s the gift too that they come back, with age and time, to say, here is who you were. It's not just that it happens, but that we want to be reminded, pleasure and pain, joy and sadness, all of it. It's perhaps why the Kunitz poem doesn't end in a realization of the past tense, but the present. No, it's not just who you were that these object tell us, if we're looking and lucky, we can can see who we've become. Who we are.

_____________________________________

“There are a couple issues. The first is that it takes too long -- I start going through the first box, as I did just an hour or so ago, and suddenly I'm looking at ticket stubs for concerts I went to on dates as a teenager, letters and birthday cards from people I don't talk to anymore, train tickets from Italy and Russia, sports photos of girls I knew in high school, talismans of my mother.

At first, looking at these things makes me chuckle. Then my stomach starts to feel hollow. It ends with me spending an hour touching and reading every scrap of paper in a shoebox, and wanting, again, to throw it all away. I think that's why I keep it, so that every time I move, at least every year or two, I'll have to spend some time remembering who I used to be.”

from http://blog.justinstgermain.com/

_____________________________________

Touch Me

Stanley Kunitz

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171845

love for sale

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:01:00 +0000

apologies to my three loyal readers but packing and writing are, apparently, mutually exclusive. but fortunately copying and sharing is still well within my grasp. this is one of many wonderfully written, thought and observed moments from Simone's new book City Dog.

"It happens to the best (and worst) of us. Love at first sight. Or passing infatuation that in the maturity of time turns to a love so complete and enthralling that it shapes our feeling for reality. Or young love, puppy love, hapless crushes, the loss of all sense to an object that gives nothing back. Or studious love: Tell me more about yourself, I’m patient as the summer day is long, and don’t you think such-and-such is interesting? Cole Porter gave words to how we make ourselves available: “Love for sale. Who will buy? / who would like to sample my supply? / Who’s prepared to pay the price / For a trip to Paradise?” We don’t, can’t really, love pictures the way we love others. Flesh is both object and medium of love. It has its unpredictable mutability and felt pulse. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, a favorite of American intellectuals half a century ago but now seldom read, in his little 1957 book, On Love, says that desire, once fulfilled, disappears, but that love is forever unsatisfied. It’s essentially an act of impassioned attention, and when we fall hard, we’re madly attentive. Shakespeare’s lunatic and lover are of imagination all compact because they possess an aberrant, abnormal attention span. Like most experience that begins with a calamitous rush of feeling, love evens out in time and becomes normalized, sometimes (if we don’t pay attention) dulled or killed by habit and familiarity…Being in love is a condition, but love itself is all process. Ortega calls it “a psychic radiation which proceeds from the lover to the beloved, not as a single discharge, but a current.”

“Love for Sale” W.S. DiPero City Dog (2009)

a little mirror of the library

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Tue, 26 May 2009 00:51:00 +0000

Iskandariya

by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

It was not a scorpion I asked for, I asked for a fish, but
maybe God misheard my request, maybe God thought
I said not “some sort of fish,” but a “scorpion fish,” a
request he would surely have granted, being a goodly
God, but then he forgot the “fish” attached to the
“scorpion” (because God, too, forgets, everything
forgets); so instead of an edible fish, any small fish,
sweet or sour, or even the grotesque buffoonery of the
striped scorpion fish, crowned with spines and
followed by many tails, a veritable sideshow of a fish;
instead of these, I was given an insect, a peculiar
prehistoric creature, part lobster, part spider, part
bell-ringer, part son of a fallen star, something like a
disfigured armored dog, not a thing you can eat, or
even take on a meaningful walk, so ugly is it, so stiffly
does it step, as if on ice, freezing again and again in
mid-air like a listening ear, and then scuttling
backwards or leaping madly forward, its deadly tail
doing a St. Vitus jig. God gave me a scorpion, a
venomous creature, to be sure, a bug with the bite of
Cleopatra’s asp, but not, as I soon found out, despite
the dark gossip, a lover of violence or a hater of men.
In truth, it is shy, the scorpion, a creature with eight
eyes and almost no sight, who shuns the daylight, and
is driven mad by fire, who favors the lonely spot, and
feeds on nothing much, and only throws out its poison
barb when backed against a wall — a thing like me,
but not the thing I asked for, a thing, by accident or
design, I am now attached to. And so I draw the
curtains, and so I lay out strange dishes, and so I step
softly, and so I do not speak, and only twice, in many
years, have I been stung, both times because,
unthinking, I let in the terrible light. And sometimes
now, when I watch the scorpion sleep, I see how fine he
is, how rare, this creature called Lung Book or Mortal
Book because of his strange organs of breath. His
lungs are holes in his body, which open and close. And
inside the holes are stiffened membranes, arranged
like the pages of a book — imagine that! And when the
holes open, the pages rise up and unfold, and the blood
that circles through them touches the air, and by this
bath of air the blood is made pure . . . He is a house of
books, my shy scorpion, carrying in his belly all the
perishable manuscripts — a little mirror of the library
at Alexandria, which burned.

I've Got the Spirit

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Sat, 23 May 2009 20:30:00 +0000

It’s taken me a while to get this together because like my life at the moment, it is going in several directions at once. At first this was a rumination about the purpose of rejection (no, thanks), and the necessity for external validation (yes, please), but ultimately I’m more interested in thinking here about what I’m reading, writing, listening to etc. For a while I thought about posting a poem, but couldn’t find one that I wanted to post. So apologies to the three readers of this blog for the delay in deciding what, if anything I’d say. Here goes a short piece that if I ever tried to turn into a real piece of writing I’d call something like “I’ve Got the Spirit.”

In the essay “Gots is What You Got” in W.S. DiPiero’s new book of essays City Dogs – a piece about his beginnings as a writer growing up in Italian immigrant community of Philadelphia in the 1950s – he writes, "Whatever is authentic in my work is due to the crass commingling of that abstract sense of formal beauty with the given language textures and soul-conditions of my culture, though when I was struggling for post-adolescent and cultural independence, I of course believed I had to refine out the "crudities" of my culture. And yet I never did shed my tribal legacy of my contrariness, the festive abrasiveness and chafing hilarity that even now I still at once love and cringe at. It too me some time to realize that abrasiveness, mineral grit, could be the kind of pumice stone that polishes a surface and gives shapely forms a chased gleam.” The friction of these two forces – internal and external, given and chosen – allows a voice that belongs wholly to neither: something surprisingly new and individually idiosyncratic. No other voice but this. It’s a recognizable narrative about the merging of the colloquial sounds of the street and the high tones of literature, bringing together the given and the made, the raw and the cooked – yet, even as it’s a familiar trope, it’s one that still has tremendous power. It’s essentially the story too of the modern, polyglot English we speak and write, of the high Latinate words, soft and rolling and melodic, and the guttural edges of the Anglo-Saxon words. Sometimes like clouds, passing into each other seamlessly or other times colliding like boxcar trains crossing the same intersection at the same time, the effect is one of reminder (our language is a made thing / the world is a complex/ conflicting) and creation (here is something new from different parts). I think my interest in using different tones in a poem comes from a similar place – moments of small or great tonal shifts within a single poem offer a kinship between things that otherwise would remain disparate, a joining of worlds, and isn’t this one purpose of art: to cleave differences into a temporarily stable whole. For some readers, it can be a digression or a breaking of the contract the poem sets up with the reader. Perhaps they’re right, but I think the play between lines of tonal dissonance, as in Berryman’s Dream Songs, allows lines like, “Filling her compact & delicious body / with chicken páprika, she glanced at me / twice” and later in the same poem “'You are the hottest one for years of night / Henry's dazed eyes / have enjoyed, Brilliance.'..” to push and pull the reader towards a new language, familiar and unfamiliar at once. Which leads me, inevitably, obviously, of course, to Joy Division. Well sort of anyway. I recently got from a friend the albums Unknown Pleasures (1979) Closer (1980). (You might ask how I’ve never really heard anything by them beyond “She’s Lost Control” and I hang my head and admit I too have never read War and Peace or anything by Pynchon – the world, as Wordsworth said, is too much with us. It’s also not lost on me that I’ve been listening to a band whose lead singer died young under tragic circumstances.) In the 1981 review of Closer in Rolling Stone, Mikal Gilmore writes, “Yet none of that really says much about how obsessing Joy Division's music can be, how it can draw you into its desolate, chiaroscuro atmosphere and fearful, irretrievable circuits. Draw you in and threaten to leave you there.” I like that phrase “chiaroscuro atmosphere” and how it describes in visual terms the auditory effect of the music, but more then these two descriptions, at its best it feels new, even thirty years later – without complete allegiance to its earlier influences, but aware of them all the same. In the same RS review, Gilmore goes on to write, “But it was also music that could rush and jump and push, and a composition like "Disorder" – or better still, the later single "Transmission," with its driving tempo and roiling guitars – seemed almost spirited enough to dispel the gloom it so doggedly invoked.” “Disorder,” one of my favorites, the anxious rawness of the vocals is heightened by the slanted, quick drums and bass and rather than sinking into a melancholy, the song seems to rise. Ellen Bryant Voigt in the new Missouri Review describes, as she does elsewhere in her book of essays The Flexible Lyric, the double power in the language of poetry – one of syntax and one of music. According to Voigt, what prose gives up is this attention to the music, and the ability to make song. I’m not sure I completely agree with her, what I find so powerful in Joy Division’s music, and the play between the light and dark, is a tension between what it says and how it says it. There is, in many of the songs, a coolness or austerity that pushes against the clearly punk influenced sound. And while much of what I’ve been writing about is tension – between voices, tones, sounds – what connects the elements of this post for me is an interest in beginnings and the question of how we find/make/create a voice that’s our own. How do we know when we’ve found it? Will it be appreciated/ recognized? How, once we find a style/voice that’s our own, do we keep challenging and pushing ourselves? In one account the producer of the Unknown Pleasures, in order to create a certain mood – this sparseness perhaps – would turn down the heat so low the band members could see their breath. I love that image of the band playing and Curtis singing, a small cloud of cold air surrounding the microphone, repeating three times: Until the spirit, new sensation takes hold, then you know.

out of sheer rage

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Fri, 15 May 2009 19:46:00 +0000

I have poems in the new issue of Blackbird and I'm pretty excited by both having poems out in the world and being in an issue with the amazingly talented Nicky Beer and Rita Mae Reese, as well as other writers who I admire. What's strange though is that though I'm happy about being published, I feel pretty far from the poems in the magazine. Both poems were started about five years ago and though I've continued to revise them, they feel as though it was written by a different kind of writer. The process of revision, sending out, acceptance, etc. takes time, and it's been a period, I hope of some shifts and progress and growth in my work. I think some of the things I strive for in more recent poems – an openness and directness in particular -- doesn't feel as present in those poems, which of course makes me wonder if it'll always be like this, when I look back on my work, seeing the rough seams, the limits, the whole range of time: writer I was, the one I am and the one I want to be? I think though to have it any other way would mean a kind of artistic stasis; perhaps this is the right kind of ambition, to make work that pushes and strives towards something better, brighter, shiner, faster. Or maybe it’s a wrongheaded wish for a kind of impossible perfection. I’m almost done reading the amazing Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s meditation on not writing an academic book about D.H. Lawrence. My friend who gave me the book to read said it best, it’s like being included in a conversation (or conversations) you’re already having about freedom / stability / art / restlessness / peace / desire. I’ll have more to say about it in another post, or maybe not at all, but the conversation of the book is also for me one about risk. The recent loss of my friend Craig has been on my mind, consciously and unconsciously, these last two weeks. It’s entering my writing and how I think about myself in the world. I’m not sure I’m even ready to describe the loss, one that I know is so profound to many people I love, and one that doesn’t feel totally real yet. Yes, we were friends, or maybe more like friendly, but his presence in my life was more important than I could’ve described before his absence. I remember reading Shells when I was an undergrad just beginning to think about myself as a writer. It was one of the first books of poems I’d ever read, certainly the first book by a contemporary writer. Up until that point it was only anthologies, handouts, etc. The idea of the book of poems was something I didn’t even really know existed. Craig’s book made it possible to see the single poem as being part of a larger conversation, and that certain themes like friendship and desire became available in ways they hadn’t been before. His work was permission at a moment I needed it. But then later, when I got to know him and became friends, I understood something else -- there’s was a kind of openness he had about him: he wanted to talk, loved it, being the center of things, generous and willing, always moving and going. There’s something surreal that happens when someone you know first through their words becomes a real, living person, a kind of doubling where you always know two of them, and both the words and person are rewritten with a new vision. His restless seeking, and sense of inclusion, part of his writing and part of himself, was important to my own sense of being an artist. In a way he was the first real connection to an idea and promise that for so long was just imagined. I can’t quite articulate it. It’s something irrational and hard to name, but by example and presence, he made things possible. In art and life. Dyer describes Lawrence writing to his friend Rolf Gariner about being in Celyon surrounded by others studying Buddhism, “I am essentially a fighter – to wish me peace is bad luck – except the fighter’s peace.” At another point Lawrence writes, “But always remember I prefer my strife infinitely, to other people’s peace, haven, and heavens.” The fighter’s peace as I imagine it is not a desire to eradicate the self but to accept the contradictions and thrashing that comes from being alive in a world of competing desires. It is a moving towards the world and not away from it. I can’t speak for Craig, but I recognize in this something true – not necessary a preference for strife, but a willingness and understanding of how struggle makes for a richer, if more complicated life. My friend sent me one of her favorite passages from the book, and it’s also one of mine: "there is no escaping the everyday. What Lawrence's life demonstrates so powerfully is that it actually takes a daily effort to be free [ vs. "some grand, once-in-a-lifetime gesture of relinquishment, or of standing up for a certain principle"]. To be free is not the result of a moment's decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed. More than anything else, freedom requires tenaciousness. There are intervals of repose but there will never come a state of definitive rest where you can give up because you have turned freedom into a permanent condition. Freedom is always precarious.” We go, we push against the limits of what’s easy or safe, what’s expected not for the sake of making art but because there’s no other choice and anything else would be contrived and unsatisfying. This is something I truly feel, but know that it risks romanticizing Craig’s life, or death, or the version of a certain kind of artist. Terrence Des Pres, an essayist who I deeply admire and who also died under tragic circumstances, has an essay on the death of John Garnder called “The Accident and Its Scene” which describes this sense that the writer’s death begins to shadow the life and we’re left to construct narratives from limited facts. I don’t want that to happen, though it’s perhaps inevitable. Instead, I want to remember Craig for his life, and how he matters still. I know though that all of this, all that I have and will write about him is small consolation, a insufficient and incomplete way of saying that I will miss him, deeply.

in rotation (or good songs for uncertain times)

noreply@blogger.com (BIO) — Mon, 11 May 2009 02:57:00 +0000

between this and the black key's 'the lengths' i'm stretching the limits of how many times one or two songs can be listened to on repeat. but some days, some weeks ask for a certain soundtrack and all i can do is listen until the songs, like a drug in the bloodstream, run their course.

Hard Life - Bonnie prince Billy