catch as catch can..

Whew! Just made the end of the month for a bloggie note.

Hanging out with buddies before traipsing around this summer. Running a bit and saw a few good things. I even have pix I (mostly) took myself. That's not necessarily a good thing as I'm not a photographer, but oh well. (The photos w/o attribution are ones I took.)

Put my hard hat on and hung out at another poetry house -- not in Philly this time -- the soon-to-be-new-home of New York's Poets' House. It's really impressive and I even have a few pix of Executive Director Lee Bricetti with her construction chapeau:



As you can see, she's very involved in the project!



After we saw that amazing space, one of my good friends and I stopped by another one: the beautiful, intense and word-centric art piece, the Irish Hunger Memorial. it's really something. I urge you to see it, and read through it. The memorial not only references famine that killed thousands in Ireland but the nature of people, places, governments to allow people to starve all over the world. it's in a great conversation with the new Poets' House home as it conveys how powerfully words reverberate. A real masterpiece -- and free to visit, roam around and touch. The pix below really don't do it justice but are more of a teaser:






It was a Manhattany day. We ended up in the West Village and walked right past this living monument:




With all this DOMA (that's Defense of Marriage Act for you non-wonky folks) dueling banjos ads going around, walking past or at least actually noticing the Stonewall Inn for the first time reminds me of how recent all this discourse is. Personally, I think New York attitude will win out over NY conservatism (esp. upstate) and we'll have same-sex marriage here. Yes, there are conservatives in the state but I suspect that no one here sees them being trumped by Iowa on anything that's not agrarian (and even on that level, we've got lots of farms outside of the 5 boroughs). When I saw the movie Milk (yes, Penn shoulda won that Oscar) it just reminded me of the historic era we're in. I mean, I remember those clothes! (Yes, I was young but I do remember them, I even wore the tike versions.)

Speaking of great, touching, morally-relevant films, I *just* saw the super excellent "Up" movie by Pixar. (Those of you who know I'm a goofy Harry Potter fan will not be surprised that I went to see an animated picture.) It was so good! Super touching, lots of great lessons/reminders for kids and adults and expertly done. Pixar is not joking! I've enjoyed every single one of their films that I've seen. Very moving and lovely economy of language. I even shed a tear or two. I'm no Roger Ebert (even though he is a Gemini and carries the sign well) so I won't presume a fancy review but go see. And it was great to hear Ed Asner! Talk about the 70s...I remember him from the Lou Grant days and he's an excellent actor and unapologetic lefty. Dude is mad old school. It's funny: he does look like the character in UP (without glasses) at this point in his life:




(h/t http://www.wallpaperez.net and http://www.eldercarerights.org/)

I realize I'm not only talking about the 1970s but, folks in *their* 70s. Asner graduating the 7th decade and will actually be hitting 80 this year. May I live so long as they say (and as vigorously)...

xo,
Tracie


Lines on Retirement, after Reading Lear
by David Wright

for Richard Pacholski

Avoid storms. And retirement parties.
You can’t trust the sweetnesses your friends will
offer, when they really want your office,
which they’ll redecorate. Beware the still
untested pension plan. Keep your keys. Ask
for more troops than you think you’ll need. Listen
more to fools and less to colleagues. Love your
youngest child the most, regardless. Back to
storms: dress warm, take a friend, don’t eat the grass,
don’t stand near tall trees, and keep the yelling
down—the winds won’t listen, and no one will
see you in the dark. It’s too hard to hear
you over all the thunder. But you’re not
Lear, except that we can’t stop you from what
you’ve planned to do. In the end, no one leaves
the stage in character—we never see
the feather, the mirror held to our lips.
So don’t wait for skies to crack with sun. Feel
the storm’s sweet sting invade you to the skin,
the strange, sore comforts of the wind. Embrace
your children’s ragged praise and that of friends.
Go ahead, take it off, take it all off.
Run naked into tempests. Weave flowers
into your hair. Bellow at cataracts.
If you dare, scream at the gods. Babble as
if you thought words could save. Drink rain like cold
beer. So much better than making theories.
We’d all come with you, laughing, if we could.

(h/t poets.org)

Dag, the month is flying!

(h/t stuffingtown.com)

Well looks like it took almost up to Memorial Day for Spring to spring up before summer. Nice weather in NYC. I'm sad that more than a few students had terrible convocation weather. Ah well. The main thing is that it's done. I got to hang out at a few fun student events at Pratt Institute and UPenn.




(h/t www.treehugger.com)

Apparently, no Memorial Day weekend is complete without a Barbecue (with a capital B) and I had the occasion to get to one this weekend. Fun, groovy with folks I haven't seen for years. Slowly emerging from my underground thing after years of school and writing. Trying to get the band out there, too. Time to get movin'...

Heading out to the cooler and less delectable climes as I do every summer -- and spring is finally hitting the city! There was a little article in the NYT about people taking 'staycations' and even though I won't be one of the stayers, the comments other people made invoked some nostalgia: I remember when my brother turned some young teen year, he came up with the good idea of taking a tour of the city. Because we were little, we got into quite a few things for free(the Toussaut's Wax Museum was in the Empire State Building) because folks thought we were somebody's kids!




(h/t www.kilroymetal.com)

With people bbq'ing, the Statue of Liberty's head getting open and the waterfront abuzz, I'm going to miss my hometown even more than usual. I'll try to sneak in another quick note before the month's out. Just one for May has got to get a little dap for coming through in the home stretch.



(h/t brooklynbridgepark.org)

xo,
T


Gnosis
by Theodore Worozbyt

Turns out the radiologist didn't know thing one about radios. I stood there in my stocking feet and waited for the music to begin again. Being generally good with small motors I would mow and mow the lawn stoically with a white hand towel draped around my neck. I was stimulated by the reports of the optical scienteers. Because of the particular reflective and refractive qualities inherent in the molecular structure of the chlorophyll molecule, the wavelength perceived by the human eye as green is in fact repulsed by grass. Thus grass is all other colors. Impossible, impossible! was the catarrh violently discharging itself in the chambers of my thoughts. Grass and vert are green. Reading is black surrounded by white. If not, what? A barely perceptible hum underfoot that turns out to be electricity or some other invisible fluid? A basket heaped with unadjusted watches? The forests filled with white tigers. Fire came from god's beard. The sun rolled, a chariot wheel flaring its treads across the clouds. Starlight: angelic punctuation on the carbon paper of midnight. New York City sewers crawled with titanic alligators before debunkers in rubber boots stepped in. President Somebody was smoking an Egyptian cigarette and several papers didn't get signed before the prognosis began to resemble a trumpet: something gold around a hole.


(h/t poets.org)

April showers bring...staying in and watching movies

Coming in under the wire with April! The last day. It's been wet and more than a bit windy with big weather swings in Apple-town. Hope that means great flowers for May.

Got around a little bit this month: saw a really lovely independent film that won an award at Cannes in 2006 called "Luxury Car" at the Asia Society. It's from China and has some gorgeous acting and judicious direction. If you want to check it out yourself, here's a link to a clip:

http://www.linktv.org/programs/gl_luxurycar

The version I saw was originally subtitled in French so if you speak that language this poster will make even more sense:



Speaking of films, hick that I am, I *finally* saw two Shakespeare classics I've been meaning to catch up with: Julius Caesar with the luminous Marlon Brando and the astounding James Mason (and the great John Gielgud, Deborah Kerr, etc. everyone was rockin' it) and Laurence Olivier in Merchant of Venice. Just blown out of the water with the performances. Olivier's final utterance/lament at the end of the trial was just haunting and he showed a tremendous amount of restraint and grief throughout the film. Dude was not to be messed with! (That's him with the top hat. I haven't exactly *mastered* the blog photo thing so that's the best I could get of that picture, okay?)






That made me go into the wayback machine and pull out the good old Richard III with Ian McKellen (whose MacBeth with Judi Dench I also saw not too long ago).







Folks know I'm into the old school Brit drama (I, Claudius with Derek Jacobi and Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson were forever etched in my mind as a child. Yay for PBS and constant re-runs!). I've seen just enough of the less-than-successful adaptations of that stuff to really love it when it works on stage or screen (big or small). Super duper gorgeous.



If you want to see some great send-ups through (let's not be too precious about Will), my colleague Nelson hipped me to this hilarious clip of Peter Sellers doing Richard III doing the Beetle's "Hard Day's Night" that was chuckle-worthy in it's drollness:




and who can forget that Emmy award winning turn of *Sir* Derek Jacobi making fun of his own (*beautiful*) original BBC Hamlet on Frasier?:




*Everytime* I see these joints I have to laugh.




(If you don't see 2 links immediately above, just two pix, something's not working with the blog but be sure to google them! Youtube has the clips!)




So, as you may detect from the many stills I've been indoors and it has been raining a lot here...

But, one one of the few lovely evenings, I got a chance to see one of my buddies' bands play, Marvin Sewell's group. They were really great, fabulous really, and shared the bill with Jeff Lee Johnson (whom I'm ashamed to say I didn't know but was really moved by). Marvin urged us to see Johnson's band and I'm so glad I did!

Marvin's crew was hitting it and, if you know Marv you know he's not exactly a talker, but he was quite conversational that night...I have to say I learned some stuff about him I didn't know before -- and I've known 'him for more than 15 years! He had the ever-ready and deservedly in-demand bass player Jerome Harris (who I also have known since forever), keeping it lockety-locked.

M. Sewell's a low-key kinda dude as this picture sorta indicates. But he was workin' them strings:







Extra thumbnail pictures for being extra in the house this month! Now that spring is hopefully springing, there may be less so this should hold ya. Modern China, Old fashioned/adapted Shakes and cool newfangled music. Not a bad month to leave! See y'all with a poem (or two):

a woman had placed
by Anne Blonstein

after jorge luis borges

a yellow rose
in a hotel glass
the man had kissed her
on the neck
had kissed her
on the mouth

but these kisses belonged to yesterday
there would be no moment
of revernalization

yellow roses came from china
open in may before our hybrids
unfold pink rugosities and baroque scent
expose dusty fissured yellow pearls


Concordance [Our conversation is a wing]
by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Our conversation is a wing below my consciousness, like organization in blowing cloth, eddies of water, its order of light on film with no lens.

A higher resonance of story finds its way to higher organization: data swirl into group dreams.

Then story surfaces, as if recognized; flies buzzing in your room suddenly translate to "Oh! You're crying!"

So, here I hug the old person, who's not "light" until I embrace him.

My happiness at seeing him, my French suit constitute at the interface of wing and occasion.

Postulate whether the friendship is fulfilling.

Reduce by small increments your worry about the nature of compassion or the chill of emotional identification among girlfriends, your wish to be held in the consciousness of another, like a person waiting for you to wake.

Postulate the wave nature of wanting him to wait (white space) and the quanta of fractal conflict, point to point, along the outline of a petal, shore from a small boat.

Words spoken with force create particles.

He calls the location of accidents a morphic field; their recurrence is resonance, as of an archetype with the vibration of a seed.

My last thoughts were bitter and helpless.

Friends witnessing grief enter your consciousness, illuminating your form, so quiet comes.

March showers, April flowers and smiles!

Hey Bunnies!

April's here and I see a little green outside of my window. Yay!

So I've been keeping busy, last place outside of Brooklyn (and occasionally Manhattan) I've been to was Arizona -- nice landscape. I love the scrappy unusual plants there. It's almost like being on the balmy moon.

I, finally, thanks to my buddy Carlos Gallegos at U of A, put a toe into Mexico. I've always been very embarrassed by the fact that I've (very luckily) been to several countries on all the land masses that aren't mainly ice and hadn't yet been to the other country that is attached to this one. Seriously, I felt like a real hick. Still do but at least I hung out for a moment in the border town(s) of Nogales, ate a little, contributed to the economy (e.g. shopped) a little and disabused myself of the stereotypes of constant OK Corral drama whenever Mexico has been mentioned in the news lately. Can't really give myself props for being, as we used to say, "all up in Mexico" but at least I can't completely hold my head in shame -- about visiting Mexico at least. Picked up a sundress and made me think that one day soon it may even be warm enough wear it!

Is that warm sunlight I see in the horizon of the Nogales vendors?



(I didn't take this picture. See the url: http://azjdjcg.com/NogalesMexico503.jpg)

Now time feels fleeting as it always does when spring really gets to springing and I'm looking forward to a lovely, rigorous summer.

Since it's Sunday I snuck a peek at the style sections and all I saw was first lady pix. She's so adorably Amazonian!













Photo by Pascal Le Segretain /Getty Images





I was thinking both she and Mrs. Sarkozy wear flats for the same reasons -- so they won't be taller than their hubbies. But Barack O is over 6 feet, and Nicholas S is 5'5" ... irony much? (Hey, whatever works. I'm in no position to comment on height!)

I know I'm supposed to be all closeted about my fashion jones but I mainly look and don't touch, especially in this economy. So I'll go on: one of the things I don't get about the kerfuffle regarding Michelle O's clothes is clearly she's sending a message about modesty while the economy is doing so badly. Hence the J Crew mixing and lower key designers. I mean, like, 'hello?'.

Every once in a while she'll brand it out but I think she's trying to send a down with hyper-consumerism message just like the Pres. is. Now Oscar de la Renta is hatin' and opinionatin' on behalf of the couture crowd b/c *they* want to get the money that the First Couple usually bestows on designers. But let's just say that's what it's about: their bottom lines. My brother, oddly (because he could care less about clothes) hipped me to this piece and it is so cold-hearted a diss, I was kinda stunned. Then I applauded:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/4/4/716393/-Whites-Only-Designers-Reap-What-They-Sew-w-Mrs.-O-(POLL)

You can read the longer version yourself. The thumbnail is: why are all these designers complaining that this famous Black woman isn't wearing their clothes when they don't hire Black models? How can she even *see* herself in them? .... Ooops! the blogger went to church on 'em. No punches pulled. Worse was the excuse that some of them made that there aren't any Black models around. I mean that's ridiculous. I know some Black models and I don't even really *know* models!

Catch up with the rest of the millennium designers!

Anywho...I have been running into buddies I haven't seen in dog's years while out of town. Like Carlos, Kazim Ali, Kimiko Hahn and Fred Moten. Good to see faces in places...met some new folks since I've been back that opened up my peeps: Saw two thought-provoking lectures on photography icw academic duties.

One by the fashion photographer Miles Aldridge (segue, segue) at the ICP. My hipster arty students were full of meta-narrative comments about his latest book, particularly about how women were 'framed' as well as how he presented his family at the end of the talk. Quite the stimulating discussion. The attention to tone and color in the pictures was extraordinary and lush. I have to say that I enjoyed it most when he discussed the technique used in considering the film stock, cameras, background. The nuts-and-bolts stuff. We juxtaposed his 'intent' w/ Barthes relationship to 'intent' in Camera Lucida and it was really a nice contrast. Not totally fair I suppose since Barthes is a philosopher not a photographer but I think Barthes had the unfair advantage, as it were.

Aldridge did come across as a pretty amiable fellow as he signed books. Not a friend, but friendly!

I then had the pleasure of participating in a great conversation along with other eggheads (saying it with love!) and Susan Meiselas the very verite photographer, famous for, among other things, her work in Nicaragua during the war, her latest book on the idea of Kurdistan (conceptual mapping, Carlos?) and the controversy between her and Joy Garnett and Joywar. There's so much that can be said about Meiselas' work as a metaphor of journalism, fame, derivation, 'sampling' and community. Read around on line and see what folks are saying. Even though I'm not a visual person, gave me tons to think about and see.

For the rest of the spring, i'm getting some rest in the spring. No insane weekly traveling and conference talking. Planehopping is super cool, but only in doses. i miss Brooklyn.

Even walked across the bridge this week. Nothing else like it.




This poem is a bit longer than usual but a very nice 'slant' summary:














The Bridge, Palm Sunday, 1973
by Alfred Corn

It avails not. time nor place—distance avails not. . .
—Whitman. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

The bridge was a huge sentence diagram,
You and I the compound subject, moving
Toward the verb. We stopped, breathing
Balloonfuls of air; and noonday sun sent down
A hard spray of light. Sensing an occasion,
I put my arm on your shoulder, my friend
And brother. Words, today, took the form of actions.

The object of the pilgrimage, 110 Columbia Heights,
Where Hart Crane once lived, no longer existed,
We learned, torn down, the physical address gone.
A second possible tribute was to read his Proem
There on the Promenade in sight of the theme.
That line moved you about the bedlamite whose shirt
Balloons as he drops into the river, much like
Crane's death, though he wasn't a "bedlamite";
A dreamer, maybe who called on Whitman and clasped
His present hand, as if to build a bridge across time. . . .

We hadn't imagined happenstance would lead us next
To join with the daydreamers lined up before
An Easter diorama of duck eggs, hatching
Behind plate glass. The intended sentiment featured
Feathered skeletons racked with spasms of pecking
Against resistant shell, struggling out of dim
Solitary into incandescence and gravity, and quaking
With the shock of sound and sight as though existence
Were a nervous disease. All newborns receive the same
Sentence—birth, death, equivalent triumphs.

Two deaf-mutes walked back the same but inverse way,
Fatigue making strangers of us and the afternoon
Hurt, like sunburn. Overexposure is a constant
Risk of sensation and of company. I wondered
Why we were together—is friendship imaginary?
And does imagination obscure or reveal its subject?
The ties always feel strange, strung along happenstance,
Following no diagram, incomplete, a bridge of suspense. . . .

Sometimes completed things revisited still resonate.
I'm thinking about Crane's poem of the Bridge,
Grand enough to inspire disbelief and to suspend it.
The truth may lie in imagining a connection
With him or with you; with anyone able to overlook
Distance, shrug off time, on the right occasion. . . .

If I called him a brother—help me with this, Hart—
Who climbed toward light and sensation until the sky
Broke open to reveal an acute, perfect convergence
Before letting him fall back into error and mortality,
Would we be joined with him and the voyagers before him?
Would a new sentence be pronounced, a living connection
Between island and island, for a second, be made?

(from poets.org)



Oh and for those who observe: Got this from the IHC website. Super soul-stirring gospel music on the page: http://www.ihc-cog.org/

springing?

Heya Bunnies:

Been running around like a lil old nut! 3 cities in 3 weeks and on to #4. Been having fun traveling but now the cold bug (a.k.a. too many airplanes) has grounded me for the weekend...I'll live.

Sunny and pleasant in Brooklyn! While I was out getting even more orange juice I saw lots of hipsters and regulars making the rounds, too.

Mine over the season included Norf Cakalak, Oh HI! Oh and one of the beautiful cities on earth, Chi-town. That place is crazy gorgeous. Brooklyn New Yorkers are not generous with out-borough praise but this place is an astounding gotham to behold. No wonder the new Batmans are shot there. It's totally retro-futuristic. This is a *detail* of the Harold Washington Library (yay HW! One of the unsung heroes that aided our current president's ascent.) The picture after the detail is the building.

Keep in mind: this is a *library*:
































Got a chance to see a show, catch up with arty friends and hang out with the sophisticated and downright perky Kimiko Hahn. Super fun!


















Last night, I saw this lovely band: Melvin Gibbs' "Elevated Entity". If y'all know Melvin you know the roof was raised!















A great project. He's one of the great New York musicians (we'll claim him) but we have to share him with the rest of the planet, especially with the crew he's got for this project. Here's an overview --

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/musician.php?id=15988

And he's a Gemini. I claim all of the twins (except the Bush parents, Guiliani and anyone I don't agree with). Spring is our season coming up.

So I was happily thinking these fond thoughts and happened to be laying about in my sickened state and ran into Michael Moore's film, SiCKO (sp). That movie is one heck of a tear-jerker and a very deep meditation.

Got me to thinking that the concept of "insurance" is really deep! Both SiCKO and this whole AIG thing makes me think of the relationship we have with the concept. I came across this joke from an insurance education page:

Comedians often joke that, “it shouldn’t be called life insurance. It should be called death insurance because it doesn’t pay unless you die. And even then it still doesn’t pay you; it pays everyone BUT you!” (http://www.ensurance.com/lifeInformation.asp)

That's kinda what Moore's film is dealing with and that the taxpayer bailout frustration is about. Feeling exploited and vulnerable. If you haven't seen the movie in a while, it's worth another look. Bring your hankies...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6555965314375016580

(Some of the links might need pasting, btw)

But with the warm weather other possibilities seem feasible:

Happily [excerpt]
by Lyn Hejinian

What is not is now possible, a ponderable
You muse on musing on—so much now but you do
You can rearrange what the day gets from accidents but
you can’t derive its reality from them
The dot just now adrift on the paper is not the product of
the paper dark
Nearly negative but finite it springs from its own shadow
and cannot be denied the undeniable world once it is
launched—once it’s launched it’s derived
Tonight sounding roughly it isn’t quite that only words can
reason beyond what’s reasonable that I drop my eyes to
Something comes
The experiences generated by sense perception come by the
happenstance that is with them
Experiences resulting from things impinging on us
There is continuity in moving our understanding of them as they appear
Some which are games bring with them their own rules for
action which is a play we play which we may play with
an end we value not winning
The dilemmas in sentences form tables of discovery of
things created to create the ever better dilemma which is
to make sense to others


(hope Lynn doesn't consider this too much of an abomination of her poem...I used the Poets.org website to cut & paste from.)

In like Flynn...the Lion!

(If you read the subject heading with a New York accent, it rhymes!)

Well dahlinks, the last few weeks have been kinda interesting and the new month is keeping yours truly a'hoppin'... This'll be a little long. Just pretend I wrote 3 and put them together -- which is basically what I did.

Couple weeks ago I got a chance to see two really yummy mainstream films just before Oscar's Day, Milk and The Wrestler. (Still got lots of catching up to do in this regard, obvs.) Milk was one of the most endearing an elegant films I've seen. Just lovely and Penn was astounding. Such a nice light touch and he made me ask my favorite types of questions when I'm watching a film: "*That's* the guy from 'Mystic River'/'We're No Angels'/'Dead Man Walking'? Really lovely storytelling from Van Sant. I saw it with one of my buddies and we had to get T shirts afterwards, we were so giddy!

The Wrestler's tone was very different, gritty. Mickey Rourke was almost unbearable to see. Just heartwrenching. I didn't get a T-shirt that time but another friend of mine and I did take away lots of food for thought. I saw the film as more of a meditation on aging but that might just be because I don't care about sports not even contrived ones. Without that 'distraction' it was easier to look into the trajectory of this modestly hopeful character stubbornly plodding forward. After the movie I saw the comedian Marc Maron's new live show "Scorching the Earth". Very intense. My brother and I saw the first draft of it in Brooklyn and it's definitely gotten stronger. Raw, unapologetic and toward the end Marc reads this letter he wrote (that's all that I'll say about it -- see it yourself) but prefaces it by saying that he looks just as 'bad' as the person he wrote it to. An understatement. If you see the internet show he does w/ Sam Seder, the performance is like a more combative and raw version of his persona on Break Room Live.

Well that was a couple weekends ago...

Last weekend I hung out at Duke for the Infection in the Sentence experimental poetry conference. Got to hang out with my buddy Fred, jazz musician/poet and bon vivant Cecil Taylor, Brent, Christian, Eileen and lots of folks it's been good to see and been to long to see including two -- Susan and Cecilia -- whom I'd seen last at the surreal Helen Adam reading last year. Well you can find the whole list of participants of the conference (except for Kamau B who couldn't attend due to illness) on the Duke U website by googling the search terms. Lots of fun and way too much food. Quite yummy fare in the south and I swear the plates are bigger in North Carolina! I also got to see a grown up soon-to-be-former teen I know who looks like a lady and everything! I remember when her age was in the single digits. Ah, time fleeting thing.

Speaking of academics, I got a mo to check out a talk at my lovely Institute that featured theorist Randy Martin. It was a great talk and those dancer types sure are lovely and demonstrative! They really can fill up a space! During a really fun lunch organized by Jon Beller, I found out that back in the day Mr. Martin had also met/took classes with an actor I've long been a fan of: Bill Irwin. (His presentation as George in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?" was an exhultant character study.) That's some crazy 1 degree of separation stuff right there!

Snow came in this month and I barely dodged it in the air, I swear! My plane touched down before the snow fell. Phew!
Even though 'the weather outside is frightful' -ly cold, feels a little like spring is around the corner. That Puxatawney Phil was right again, I hate to admit but in NY at least, it's sunny!

I'm traveling a bit now and hope to send off another missive soon in higher double digits!

Tracie

A Word dropped careless on a Page
by Emily Dickinson

A Word dropped careless on a Page
May stimulate an eye
When folded in perpetual seam
The Wrinkled Maker lie

Infection in the sentence breeds
We may inhale Despair
At distances of Centuries
From the Malaria --


I Sing the Body Electric
by Walt Whitman (first stanza)

1
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.


A Noun Sentence
by Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Fady Joudah

A noun sentence, no verb
to it or in it: to the sea the scent of the bed
after making love ... a salty perfume
or a sour one. A noun sentence: my wounded joy
like the sunset at your strange windows.
My flower green like the phoenix. My heart exceeding
my need, hesitant between two doors:
entry a joke, and exit
a labyrinth. Where is my shadow—my guide amid
the crowdedness on the road to judgment day? And I
as an ancient stone of two dark colors in the city wall,
chestnut and black, a protruding insensitivity
toward my visitors and the interpretation of shadows. Wishing
for the present tense a foothold for walking behind me
or ahead of me, barefoot. Where
is my second road to the staircase of expanse? Where
is futility? Where is the road to the road?
And where are we, the marching on the footpath of the present
tense, where are we? Our talk a predicate
and a subject before the sea, and the elusive foam
of speech the dots on the letters,
wishing for the present tense a foothold
on the pavement ...

It was a cold and wintry night...

and I got to hang out with some lovely Bardians (newly graduated) under one of those bright, Brooklyn half-moons for a birthday party.

We had a free-wheeling conversation and yummy birthday (cup)cake. Under candles folks started waxing about school and stuff. One of the things I encouraged them to do despite being smarty grad students, was to go the commencement ceremonies. My mother forced me to go to my graduations after I was a full-grown lady and they were fun! The whole ritual process of walking, the gown and stuff, really makes the experience tangible. You can feel time passing in a way that we're often too rushed to see.

Speaking of tangibility, that weekend after the party I slid over to the Watermill Center on longuylan -- that's "Long Island" for non-natives -- and checked out Robert Wilson's spot: http://www.watermillcenter.org . Met some very groovy artists and saw some fun work by them.

Despite the limited experience due to the winter climes (they've got lots going on in the outdoor space too), have to say the art collection in there is phenomenal. From all over the world from very modern to very old in spaces that were super minimal color-wise so each piece seemed to be suspended in animation. It was quite a different perspective for this writer to consider art in workspace (I live in an orange house, so that should tell you something).

Quite the pristine spot and even kinda museum-y what with the no-shoes policy and my mom didn't even have to be there to tell me not to touch anything...guess I kept a few things from my 5-year old self!

Even though my borough is attached, longuylan does feel New England-y in a way the rest of this neck of the woods does not. Some ways good, some ways bad: yesterday I was walking down 6th ave in Manhattan and there were these weird collections of garbage that seemed almost deliberately placed: a gigantic pile of left-over McDonald's food on the sidewalk as if it had been installed and further along in Greenwich village a substantial collection of horse manure almost pyramidal shaped on the sidewalk. It was just there with no indication that a horse had been there at all...odd even by NY standards. Rushing-by people had this look of disbelief on their faces, including me -- and we have a high garbage visibility threshold in these parts.

They were so random yet self-contained that after I said 'gross'! I thought they had to be a set-up: the garbage in New York is like everything else good and bad in the city: not that well-organized.

I did have flashbacks to NY in the 70s though: gritty, nasty, lively. Maybe those piles were milestones marking the end of gentrification as we knew it.

What [The flower sermon]
by Ron Silliman (excerpt)

The flower sermon:
critique is like a swoon
but with a step increase,
the awkward daughter who grows
to join the NBA. All we want
(ever wanted) was to be on that
mailing list, parties at which slim caterers
offer red, yellow, black caviar
spilling off the triangular crackers
while off on the bay
rainbow-striped sails dip and bob and
twist. The woman in the yellow raincoat sits
on a bench at the edge of the schoolyard
while two small children race
across the asphalt plaza. Too many books
sail the moth. A tooth that's lost
while flossing. A short line
makes for anxious music. Not breath
but civilization. The president
of Muzak himself says
that humming along constitutes time theft.
First snow in the Sierras = cold showers here.
The east is past. Margin of terror. The left
is where you feel it (dragging the eyes back
contra naturum). We're just in it
for the honey. Spackling paste
edits nails in wall when painted. Elbows,
shoulders jammed together on the bus.
At each transfer point, glimpse how lives
weave past. A woman with an interesting book
in her purse which I pretend not to see.
Letters crowd into a thought. Green paper
folded around long-stemmed roses
is stapled shut. Rapid winter sunset
lacks twilight.


PS: BTW, if you saw my earlier post from almost exactly 2 years ago (or not), I lamented on the traciemorris.net bulkregister inaccessibility drama. Anyway it's ovah and you can find my little pithy comments via traciemorris.com, traciemorris.net and/or tracieswebsite.com or .net. -- T