This poem in The New Yorker made me think of dark, delicious things:
Rituals
Washing your hands, trying the lock,
burning a hundred head of cattle
not to eat, washing your hands
again, trying the lock again,
talking forever to yourself,
saying the sorts of things the god
least can understand, who finally
figures this must be for me.
— Jeff Dolven
On a related note, there are 4 ads in this week’s TNY for fancy psych hospitals. Glad to see they’re keeping the percentage up.
Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) said: I’m getting pret-ty worried about how we’re gonna organize the gmails of great thinkers & publish volumes of correspondence. Who’s on this?
Itinerant Daughter says: I am. Don’t you worry one bit.
—
If perhaps you get this, though, I’m sorry to say I can’t watch your new show, as I am incapable of watching anything other than re-runs of Intervention and Law and Order SVU that I’ve already seen eighteen times. My psyche is on a permanent Aristotelian carthasis-by-tragedy loop.
Famed poet Adrienne Rich died Tuesday. I wanted to post “Valediction Forbidding Mourning” (seemed apropos) but it had been removed from all the usual sites due to complaints from the copyright holder. Fair ’nuff.
Song
You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.
You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely
If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns’ first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep
If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning
Places I can legitimately say I’ve exhibited:
MoMA
Art Basel Miami
Armory Show, 2012 (see below)
We received at my office the gorgeous catalog for a publishing company called Sceptre, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Numerous writers wrote little pieces about the number 25. Below is my favorite:
25 Collective nouns for un/common things.
a reversal of mirrors
a slump of slippers
a forest of rubber gloves
a telescope of toilet rolls
a voodoo of pincushions
a dream of pillowcases
an expression of pumpkins
a bouquet of odd socks
a niggle of crosswords
a crumple of carrier bags
a regime of paperclips
an armament of cutlery
a cloud of used tissues
a duel of toothbrushes
a migration of pens
a convalescence of dressing gowns
a fable of apples
a sob of raindrops
a passage of newspapers
an alarm of clocks
a whirlpool of wooden spoons
a clacker of stilettos
a thud of potatoes
an eviction of bin liners
–– Jess Richards
My Attempt
a prayer of annotations
a bottle of triplets
a library of oysters
a backlog of icicles
a continent of mistakes
a garden of scarves
a page of orgasms
a whisper of paintings
a zoo of hearts
a video of persimmons
a meal of schoolchildren
a dance of questions
an orb of horses
a blanket of thimbles
a concert of nail files
a palace of statistics
a harvest of fireworks
an exercise of massacres
an avalanche of emeralds
a funeral of attics
a contest of spirals
an umbrella of kittens
a tea bag of wood chips
a protest of pinkies
a blitzkrieg of hedges
This beautiful picture of models in the recent Chanel show…
They also make pearl bobby pins (Chanel does, that is) and you should buy them for me.
Reminds me of a favorite story of mine, that I once posted here… an excerpt, for your continued enjoyment:
I left town for 6 months, bummed around, came back. I had never forgotten Cass, but we’d had some type of argument and I felt like moving anyhow, and when I got back I figured she’d be gone, but I had been sitting in the West End Bar about 30 minutes when she walked in and sat down next to me.
“Well, bastard, I see you’ve come back.”
I ordered her a drink. Then I looked at her. She had on a high- necked dress. I had never seen her in one of those. And under each eye, driven in, were 2 pins with glass heads. All you could see were the heads of the pins, but the pins were driven down into her face.
“God damn you, still trying to destroy your beauty, eh?”
“No, it’s the fad, you fool.”
“You’re crazy.”
(Charles Bukowski)
This is the END OF ANNA KARENINA, присоска! (That says “sucker” in Russian.)
“I shall still get angry with my coachman Ivan, I shall still argue and express my thoughts inopportunely; there will still be a wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife, and I shall still blame her for my own fears and shall regret it; I shall still be unable to understand with my reason why I am praying, and I shall continue to pray –– but my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, every moment of it, is no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an incontestable meaning of goodness, with which I have the power to invest it.”
Another thing I found in PEN America that I love:
IN THE BATHTUB WITH GERTRUDE STEIN
by Angelica Freitas
gertrude stein has a big ass slide over gertrude
stein and when she slides it makes a great noise
as though someone dragged a wet cloth across
the huge glass window of a public building
gertrude stein from here to there it’s you the washcloth
behind your ear’s all yours from here to there it’s me the rubber
duckie’s mine gertrude stein and thusly we’re pleased
but gertrude stein is a charlatan thinks it’s fine to let one
loose under the water not i gertrude stein? it’s impossible
that anyone could so enjoy making bubbles
and because it’s her tub she pulls the plug and steals
my towel
and runs out stark naked huge ass descending the
staircase onto the streets of saint-germain-des-pres
HSD: Are we still on for drinks on monday?
Me: We are definitely on for Monday. Is there anywhere in particular you’d like to go? My friend tends bar at —–, have been meaning to head over there for a while and say hello to her and see if we can get some buy backs. Could be nice, could be slammed, but it is Monday –– or do people drink more on Mondays to forget their work-related sadness?
Oh great, I just realized I’m at a crossroads in my professional life and you would be a great person to talk to about this. (After all, it is a DAY, so of course I’m at a crossroads. My house is built at a fork in the way.)
HSD: The parenthetical at the end of your email sounded like an Emily Dickinson poem. I even googled it to see if it was, but apparently not. I would looove to talk about professional crossroads; mine also seem to be permanent.
Me: Ooo, well, the first paragraph of this email just totally made my day, and it’s not even noon yet! I’m submitting that one sentence to poetry journals, btw.
You probably know what my “wheelhouse” is by now (thanks, beloved boyfriend, for the term.) It includes (but is not limited to) the following: abandoned buildings, hasidic Jews, anything French, obscure or debatable mental illnesses, A&E’s Monday night schadenfraude line-up, little blond female icons in literature who remind me of myself, very small communities (particularly islands), playful works of art, hotel bars, Harold Pinter, black cats, “hotlines,” people who have committed suicide (subcategory: DFW) and impossibly short poems.
A marriage of two loves, then: a very, very short poem found on the blog of Daul Kim, a model who committed suicide at age 20 three years ago and whose blog, I Like to Fork Myself, of course outlives her:
say hi to friday night
we didnt acheive
anything
on friday night.
Neither did I, Daul. Neither did I.
RIP.
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