wino haiku

scorching day
the corner winos
switch to white

tabernacle

Like most people, sometimes in solitude I talk to myself.
Sometimes it’s something significant like “I’ll never do that again.”
Or other times it's a revelation like “No time!”
It could be coupled with a grand gesture, or just shaking my head.
I do think mostly all this is not “talking” as much as “remarking,”
although I do sometimes ask myself an important question:
“Do I want to eat the rest of this?”
Sometimes I’m just looking for a little companionship.
I say to myself, “It’s raining pretty hard out here.”
And I answer, “You are right.”

First Lines of Favorite Novels

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. (Daniel Deronda by George Eliot)

It was a pleasure to burn. (Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury)

In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. (The Book of Laughter and Fogetting by Milan Kundera)

Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. (The Bell by Iris Murdoch)

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. (The Lover by Marguerite Duras)

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. (The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien)

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture of Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta. (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami)

In the town there are two mutes and they are always together. (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers)

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. (Waiting by Ha Jin)

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. (A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O’Toole)

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. (White Noise by Don DeLillo)

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. (100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

Jacob Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend’s home on a washday. (The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald)

This movie I’ve been seeing all my life, yet never to its completion. (Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates)

please feel free to chime in...

hey bulldog

I’ve got two poems up in the new Scapegoat Review: No Stars Tonight and When Wonderful, Add Water. “Welcome you enjoy!” as we used to say in China.

Alongside a couple other diversions, I’m reading Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori, a collection of five short stories from the point of view of the same man in eastern Europe between the wars.

The gulf between Jews and “goyim” is clear in the first story. You encounter Jews as lice-ridden children, but also as bold intellectuals in the person of a young devil-may-care pianist. I’m into the second story now. The narrator does talk about Jews and he himself incorporates the negative attitudes towards them, but this doesn’t quite consume the book, and you don’t hate him for his hate, really; he is self-aware and intelligent. He is an anti-semite but not in a rabid way. Still, in the book, what you can assume is a ubiquitous repulsion is about to turn the world upside down.

It’s one of those books that I remember having in my bookbag and I’m not terribly drawn to it, but once I start reading again, it’s very engaging. It’s not a compulsive read, but worthwhile and evocative.

I still have a four books from my challenge to read this year, and of those I plan to get to the Jim Shepard stories and Butcher’s Crossing this summer.

Thanks to Kavel Rafferty for the Saucy image.

both sides now

You know the repulsion that stuns you when you take a sip of some drink you think is going to be something else?

You expect coke and get milk?
You anticipate milk and you get white wine?

It goes beyond disappointed expectations; it’s not just taste but texture.

Isn’t it somehow like drinking the expected and the unexpected beverage mixed together? A sudden fluid pollution, as if you’ve poisoned yourself?

George

lived in a town
where everything was an absolute riot.

A funeral’d go by and George’d say
Heh heh did I ever tell you about the time

Heh heh
Heh heh heh heh

your lordship's leather sandals

The best thing about school vacation is there’s no school! There’s no homework. No forcing people into bed right this minute, and back out in the morning like strips of bacon. There’s no math test or Latin vocabulary. No long-assed parents’ night. No has everybody got lunch money? No piano lessons or gym clothes. It’s as if part of my superego has gone to sleep, or is off jet-skiing in the Caribbean. I get up in the morning and close the shades so no one will wake up!

the pain in my side helping me forget the pain in my teeth

I got a rejection from a big name journal a couple weeks back. I wouldn’t even mention it since it’s not a surprise that I’d get a rejection from a big name journal, but aforesaid big name journal actually solicited poems from me, and then turned them down, making for a very sumptuous session of humiliation.

Oh well. I hadn’t submitted anything in ages, but over the past three weeks or so I sent out a number of poems so that, aside from aforementioned big name humiliating journal, I got some acceptances, too.

First, Barn Owl Review took a poem called Unseen for its 3rd issue, which I’m really happy about, both because of the poem and the journal.

Then Juked’s poetry editor came back from vacation and took two more poems from my last submission, a poem called Despair and my little series on Monopoly Tokens, a couple of which have appeared here.

My poet friend Robert MacDonald has told me he stalks out my publications and then submits to the same journals (with great results) and now I’ve turned tables by submitting to Apparatus Magazine. They took two poems and a fiction piece called Tinder Box, which I'd submitted as a poem. The editor thought differently. I said I didn’t care how it was categorized. Check out Robert’s poem in the premiere issue.

Finally the very exciting Scapegoat Review took two poems for its next issue, expected up this month – No Stars Tonight and When Wonderful, Add Water.

So, in the scheme of things, I should come out positive, and thanks to daydreams in which I'm smoking cigarettes and drinking port in Lisbon in the body of a 23-year old man, I do.

& this cartoon made me laugh today.

& thanks to DoubleParlour for the illustration!

Please Remove My Name

Downtown there’s a man who will write
my name on a grain of rice for 5 euros.
I’m sure he’s a decent man who could use
5 euros, but what would I want with that?
Please remove my name from all grains of rice.
I write my name on the dirt in the eaves.

instruments of torture

Daniel Pennac’s 10 Inalienable Rights of the Reader:
You have
1. the right to not read,
2. the right to skip pages,
3. the right to not finish,
4. the right to reread,
5. the right to read anything,
6. the right to mistake a book for real life,
7. the right to read anywhere,
8. the right to dip in and browse,
9. the right to read out-loud, and
10. the right to be silent and not defend your tastes.

the sky today

When I was four or five I was standing in our gravel driveway on Marlboro Ave. The sun was shining like a good example and at the same time it began to rain, but only on half of the driveway. My mother said this was a called a sunshower. And I said, ok, now I’ve seen it all.

lice

I should be sipping chardonnay with you,
watching the candlewax build its limestone quarry.
But I itch all over.

It’s hard to be inhibited when a belittling affliction
salts the wounded scalp like some medieval torture.

I get more primitive by the minute.
Mmmm, to scratch is natural.

Will you squat behind me, apeman,
and ogle my follicles?

As god is my nightlite

I’m reading Manhunt, a book about the chase and capture of John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices after the Lincoln assassination and attempted murder of Sec’y of State Seward. Even those without a special interest in Lincoln would enjoy this book. The beginning, especially, is so compelling that I had to talk to myself to keep from yelling and protesting. Even though you know the outcome, there is Booth climbing the stairs in Ford’s Theater, and it’s almost as if you could prevent what’s about to happen. Very exciting book and picture of the bygone.

Photo by Thomas Allen, a man who likes to conjure the characters out of the books by cutting them loose from the covers.

car keys to moderation

some die of heartbreak
some die of loneliness
some die of an overdose
everything you die of is an overdose
an overdose of tuberculosis
an overdose of choking
an overdose of ocean
an overdose of accident
none of this is the least bit funny
said the man who died laughing

Holzlöffel

Many people think German is ugly but I’ve come to love it. I’ve lived here almost two decades and still learn something new everyday. Some think the sound of German too hard. My brother finds it hilarious. When I visit him he greets me and the kids by shouting all the German words he knows (and laughing about it), a list that includes Schnitzel, kaputt and Totenkopf. We laugh, too. German is funny, sometimes, but also expressive.

I admit to loving all the high-falutin’ words that float about intellectual circles – Zeitgeist, Weltanschauung, Weltschmerz, lebensmüde, Schadenfreude- as well as words with less ambition.

One of my first favorites was fünf, a simple little one, meaning five. It reads as if you’re trying to clear lint from your nose. The /ü/ is pronounced like a deep /u/, only purse your lips and flatten your nostrils. Sort of. Fünf would make a good name for a cat or small dog, or a whiskered pig.

Another is wunderhübsch, which is the product of German’s ability to smush words, as many as you like, up together into a new word. Literally it means wonderfully pretty. The first and last time I heard someone use it was when Luisa was a baby and a young woman said Luisa was wunderhübsch. I found that very sweet. Luisa was and still is wunderhübsch, but this is not a word I hear much. Hübsch alone is also good!

I also like the words that start with /pf/, like Pfirsich, or peach. It’s such a jumble of consonants, and when you say it, it goes down so suddenly it’s hard not to be amused. I also love Pfeffer, Pferd, Pflaume, pfiffig, and I mourn the Pfennig.

One I learned fairly recently is Stickstoff – as in nitrates, used in fertilizer. This is a laugh. Don’t forget that in German an S before a consonant is pronounced sh. It’s funny to hear grown-ups having a conversation about Stickstoff.

One of the best words is doch, the word used to contradict a naysayer. It’s irreplacable, and I love it for its right-on usefulness rather than its sound. The closest English equivalent would be “did, too!,” (or "is, too") as in “you stepped on my foot,” – “no, I didn’t,” – “doch!”

I also love Schmutz (dirt, grime, smut) and Dreck (ditto) and Gejammer (wailing or complaining), and a lot of anatomical words. But I’ll leave those for another day.

the smoke enters my mustache

There’s a lot of noise out in the universe. We miss most of it in our little spaces.
For example, barking dogs. Right now, you can’t hear the one driving me nuts.

And really, what is with the dog star?
That must be loud. I bet it keeps whole neighborhoods awake.

Take my temperature. I feel a little better already.

the dark, i'm all for it

I didn’t hear many people celebrating the arrival of summer over the weekend, but a few long faces did lament how the days will now gradually get shorter. All I can say is Thank You! I prefer the sun in small doses, and the less daytime the better.

When I lived in New Jersey I don’t think it stayed light much past 9 pm in summer, but in Germany at the time around solstice the day ends at about 10:30 pm. And dawn is already creeping up at 4 am. I know because I was up this morning at 4 and my first thought was whaaa? The sunrise/sunset guide claims the sun rose at 5:15 am and set at 9:39 pm. While that may be true, there is a definite before- and afterglow.

I’m not crazy about summer to begin with. I’m only glad the solstice means the tilt and curvature of the earth will let the ridiculous length of days start to erode. For the night to be pitch black seems natural. I like the stars and the moon, or if it’s raining, plain old soggy black.

i come from a state of astonishment

After feasting, mint restores coherence.
*
The sky appears impermanent this morning.
I’m taking it personally.
*
The wind is sorry, going grey.
*
slate grey, smug grey, sullen grey, worm grey, symphonic grey, rock-bottom grey, dungeon grey, dove grey, radium grey, brain grey, vesper grey, slush grey & blue intrusion
*
Concerning my prescription:
Can I still eat citrus?
Can I light long candles and drink wine?
Can I succumb to Catholic mystics?
*
Weltschmerz. I wash mine down with coffee.
*

one fox sighting = one gin & tonic

The new Dirty Napkin is up, including my poem Emergency Subsitutions.
Charmi has a wonderful poem in the issue, too, called A New Mythology. It moves seamlessly and appears to have been effortless but it's doing some hard work, with pacing, progress and surprise. I also liked Timothy Pilgrim's Side Effects May Include.
Otherwise, it's too early for me to have read everything. Go over and read it for yourownself!

uncle teardrop

I finished another book from my challenge today: Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell. I really really liked this book. It’s got story. It’s got character. It’s got plenty o’ words grouped up together in good groups.

I knew I’d like Winter’s Bone from the first paragraph. Take the first sentence: Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat.
The first interesting thing about this sentence is “break of day” and its lack of “the.” Woodrell could just as easily have written “the break of day” or “daybreak,” but no. Something a little off there, a little old fashioned? Ok. And then the sentence becomes a string of senses – the cold, a faint smell on the air, then the wallop of sight.

2nd sentence: Meat hung from trees across the creek.
What I like about this sentence is – having just gotten to the end of the string of the first sentence – this picks up right where we left off, as if being re-jolted by what we just witnessed: “...meat. Meat...” I like the meat/trees/creek long -ee- happening here soundwise. And the image brings me something macabre. What kind of meat?! I know from this there are going to be some sacrifices made I this book.

Then: The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards.
Here Woodrell has dispensed again with the “the” before “low limbs,” and plays again with sound - flesh/fatty, low/limbs, saplings/side. I’m impressed. Can he keep it up? What I especially love about this sentence, though, is “pale of flesh.” It’s almost Elizabethan. Or is it Ozarkian? I’ve no idea, but I dig it. I also like that fatty gleam of meat contrasted with the saplings that have to bear it. And I learn later in the book about the young bearing up under their history.

Now the killer: Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.
I could rattle on some more about language here, but mostly look at that metaphor. I know this book is going to involve something ripening. This is a story about a 16-year old girl growing up in poverty with meth heads and other sundry characters, including a guy named Uncle Teardrop and a Shakespearian trio of witches. Experience is going to round the girl out. As a reader I’m happy about the “sweetening,” a foreshadowing that tells me this story won’t be all bad – there’ll be something good in it, or at least worth working for.

killer headache

my headache is a pervert / a dope fiend
hoodlum / meat eater / worse

a thug / a plagiarist / smuggler
an arsonist / bling king / worse

my headache is a pyro / crack head
a swindler / loan shark / worse

a scapegrace / shoplifter / whore
phisher / a cut-throat / worse

a crook / bloodsucker / mafioso
worse / my headache is an optimist

my 3 sons

My first dog was Toto. We got him as a puppy when I was about 5. He was a black & white mutt, and friendly. When my parents divorced three or four years later, my father took Toto with him. I don’t remember being too unhappy about it. There was enough to be unhappy about. My mother said my father needed the dog to protect his new house, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t want either of them.

When I was in junior high, we adopted a little poodle named Bunny. Dumb name, but she came with it. Every step you took, she was at your heels, nipping your feet, trying to get you to play. I considered this my sister’s dog. My step-father was also fond of her. We never took her for a walk, just let her relieve herself in the yard. We had a big yard. She was a small dog. She died of smoke inhalation when my mother set the house on fire with a cigarette.

My father also had a dog named Django that I often used to dogsit. This was a shepherd mix, a nice dog, mostly because he wasn’t mine. He was brown with beigy red patches, head more labrador than shepherd. He lived to be very old and was put to sleep to end his suffering. Why do we consider this right and kind when it comes to dogs but not to people? This is screwed up.

I have a dog now, too, named Stella. She’s a handsome dog, friendly and well behaved, aside from eating garbage and other dogs’ shit. I like her but at this point I know I’m not a dog person, or a cat person, a rabbit person or fish person. I’m hardly even a person person. But the kids and husband wanted a dog and I went along. On the evening before we got her, we all voted and I indicated a desire to vote no. They looked at me like I’d taken a shot at the pope, but luckily missed, and was thus responsible for the pope for the rest of my life.

throw down your arms

Chinese Phrase Book (War Department: Washington, Dec. 10, 1943) Dissemination of restricted matter – the information contained in restricted documents and the essential characteristics of restricted material may be given to any person known to be in service of the US and to persons of undoubted loyalty and discretion who are cooperating in Government work, but will not be communicated to the public or to the press by authorized military public relations agencies.

Chapter 1: Emergency Expressions

Please help me : ching BAHNG MA-AHNG
Please come and help : ching LA-EE BAHNG MA-AHNG
I am lost : waw MEE-EE la / LOO!
Where is there a village? : SH-UM-muh DEE! Fahng / yo R-UN J-YA
We are American soldiers : waw MUN / SHER! may GWAW R-UN
Are there soldiers near here? : FOO! JIN! / yo MAY-EE yo / BING
Are they our enemies? : SHER! DEE-EE run ma
Don’t try any tricks! : la-oo LA-OO SH-ER SH-ER duh
Did you hear what I said? : TING J-YAN! la / MAY-EE yo
You will be rewarded : YO-OO BA!oo cho / GAY-EE nee

your hallucination is under new management

I recently mentioned poets being compared to other poets and how that sometimes irks. Of course it’s not confined to poets - also actors, artists and other writers are compared to their predecessors and contemporaries. I’m sure this bugs them, too. Still the publishing industry seems to think that, rather than originality, comparing writers to other writers is a good marketing strategy. Check out this advertisment for Elizabeth Kelly’s Apologize, Apologize! from the NYT.

*”Begs comparison with Daniel Wallace and JOHN IRVING.” (Caps theirs)
*”With the linguistic mastery of a Carol Shields or a JULIA GLASS, Elizabeth Kelly’s debut novel comes down hard and strikes the bell.”
*”Meet the Flanagans, a quasifunctional family that might give JONATHAN FRANZEN pause.”
*”Part GREY GARDENS and part THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS… “
*Dave Eggers fans should enjoy Canadian journalist Kelly’s rambunctious first novel.”
*”An imaginative and energetic triumph…Think of Dostoevsky on laughing gas.”

That's it. I have to say this really blew me away. What a crutch! Hardly a word about the writer herself or her book except in relation to other writers or other books.

Ok, so the real question now is if you want to read this. Because maybe you do.

the rain is done gnawing your discarded saltines

Hey I have a poem up at Juked.
It's my 10th poem in Juked, which is a pleasure, and also means they'll be contributing to my social security payments.
Thanks, Juked.

from train 21

mind the gap mind the rush
pigeons on pronged claws

mind the cologne overdose
every separate death
mind the uniform that moves the broom

don’t look take it easy have a great day
step fast from the doors upon disembarking

mind the pigeons
plunging through the sky
like a dirty hand through water

till the eagle grins

I finished the first book of my book challenge over a week ago – The Crimson Petal and the White. It was okay. Enjoyable but not really satisfying, what is typically called –for better or worse- a romp.

I’m now halfway through Helen Vendler’s Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, which has helped humanize Stevens for me. I love his poetry anyway, and if anything, this book only makes it better.

I’m also nearly done with Down and Out in Paris and London, which I started on the train to Paris last week. I was under the impression the book was non-fiction/reportage, but when the narrator at one point is asked to write some political articles and says he has no political opinions, I was thrown for a loop since Orwell certainly had political opinions. I looked on the back cover and it says “fiction.” So let’s call it autobiographical fiction, and more autobiographical than fiction, unlike the “memoirs” you see these days that turn out to be frauds. It’s an excellent book.

When my mother arrived last week she not only brought me some books I’d asked for, but also a stack of books she planned to read herself, including Netherland, The Reserve and The Sorrows of an American, all of which I will inherit before she leaves. In exchange she gets my copy of Continental Drift. It is ridiculous considering the number of books she is going to leave behind, but I love that book so much, I am almost tempted to tell her she can’t take it.

But that would be too horrible of me.

i'm making life too complicated

I am not wearing brown today
I am wearing black and I invite you
to believe in a shirt that’s purple
Fashion makes demands
like should the socks match the slacks or the shoes
I am living the wrong answer
Then the question of mixing gold with silver jewelry
and the shorts best suited to ugly legs are called pants
I will never achieve a black belt the same shade as my bag
Unfortunately when I fell to earth I woke up
in a country where socks clot sandals
which is confusing
The other day we visited a department store in Paris
took the escalator past lingerie
My daughter asked what is lingerie
Before I could begin to think
my husband explained underwear
simple as that
beyond me to say

unbuttons the tongue

Check out the new Literary Bohemian, where I have some wine blurbs in the form of postcard prose . As we say here in elsewhere, "welcome you enjoy." Of course there's lots of other good reading to be had in this issue, including Dave Rowley's Letter Written on a Paper Crane.

3 tokens

sportscar: She’s touching the wheels when the call comes; she’s young, tonguing the hood in the mannish slang of the last century. Lipsticked, she’s a sport, a shiny body.

thimble: You thought it a helmet, dainty with immunity; you thought you’d hide in bed but we snuffed out the thumbsuck, the meat stuck under your fingernail.

horse & rider: Imagine this could go on: collecting profits, paying dues, rolling the dice to land on the carpet, where it’s your bluff. Imagine rearing up and exposing yourself. As if you cared: As if no one would snicker at your haunches, made of chalk, while on the boardwalk the rains start.

où sont mes fruits

After a few last minute mishaps, we’re off to Paris tomorrow. My daughter will turn 13 there on Sunday. I told her any visitor who turns 13 in Paris, who enters their teens, will have a good love life when they’re older. She bought this, and I was glad she accepted it as a superstition possibly in currency beyond her own mother’s mind. I think of how my father and step-mother told me they’d had an astrologist do everyone in the family’s charts –I was about 13 at the time– and they sat me down one day and said oh how we hate to say this but your chart shows that you’re going to have a life of suffering - a sad suggestion I often refer back to.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to Paris, also to suffering there. I’ve never been much of a francophile, but I do love the country’s red wines, the perfumes of Guerlain and Chanel, the word fromage, which is so droll, and especially Eric Satie and Guillaume Apollinaire, whose “Montparnasse” is one of the few poems I know by heart. I learned it in French by singing it to the music composed for the poem by Poulenc.

acknowledgements

I am eternally grateful to cabbage.
There is an orange farmer in Spain whom I can’t thank enough.

To John, from the bottom of my heart! From the bottom of the bottomless blue blue blue pool.

Thanks to my mom with a capital O.
Pastilles have earned my abiding affection.

My deepest gratitude belongs to skank of all sorts.
I’ll never forget Molly. Molly, you old dog.

Somewhere there’s a small grouping of ants I owe a number of revelatory moments to.

I’m forever indebted to Bank of America.
I couldn’t let this opportunity go by without mentioning Ms. Schmeling, former nun and niece of Max.

Particular thanks to every Wednesday.
To my colleagues at the university. I tender you my grateful acknowledgement.
Have I overlooked someone?

For all his time, emotional support, suggestions, insight, the car, the fur coat, the pillow plumping?

I gratefully wish to acknowledge.
I wish to gratefully acknowledge.
I acknowlege the grateful wish.
Gratefully I acknowledge to wish.

With grateful appreciation?

I owe many evenings of vacant pleasure to candle wax dripping down bulging chianti bottles swaddled in straw. Thank you, thank you.

I am grateful to those journals that rejected me shortly before going under.

It’s been my privilege to continue sleeping on a 14-year old futon the dealer said should last five years.

To all the natives who invited me into their homes.
To Miranda W. for her generous guidance without which I would hardly be able to brush my teeth!

I hover many hours raptured with generosity.
To Dr. Beykirch, neurologist and human being.

Is he strong? Listen bud,

Yesterday I read 150+ pages of The Crimson Petal: 361 pages to go.

Yesterday I home-made tomato sauce; today it’s hamburgers.

Yesterday I was killing myself in increments; today “go forth and prosper.”

It should be warm and puny today but now it’s damp and mismanaged; Yesterday it was cramped and overcast. I took a shower. This is an advertisement for rain.

I’m not eating my Wheaties, loving my neighbor, taking out disability insurance; time is money.

I got up around 7 am yesterday; today it was 5.30. Yesterday was a holiday.

I politely asked Carlo to roll onto his side last night when he was snoring and my effort was a great success; today who knows.

I hate tv; tv hates me.

Carlo is taking Luisa to an opera tonight; Miles and I are watching Spiderman. He’s got radioactive blood.

The insects will outlive everyone.

didactic cognac

I had a poem accepted at The Dirty Napkin this morning - "Emergency Substitutions." It's a somewhat older poem and I'm glad it found a home. Two other poems were turned down, so of course after my blip of happiness for "Emergency Substitutions," I began lamenting for the other two poems. Maybe they're really bad, or stupid, or maybe my older poems are better than my new poems, or boring, or spastic, or mabe I'm spastic, or old, or maybe I should just accept the blip of happiness and then shut up. Anyway, "Emergency Substitutions" includes cognac, heat deaths, tv news, cooking, eggs, medical research and all kinds of stuff and I hope you will read it when it comes out.

It's a holiday here and Luisa and I have ruined two cakes! The first one simply failed and the second crumbled. Ach, who cares. We're lounging around, reading books and spooning cake crumbs into our mouths.

9/9

Since we're five months into the year I figured it was about time to join a book challenge. Last year it was the Booker Challenge, and this year it's 999 from Goodreads - read nine books in nine categories. Shouldn't be too tough. Here's my list.

1. The Crimson Petal and the White – Michel Faber (Historical Fiction)
2. Down and Out in Paris and London – George Orwell (Non-Fiction)
3. Like You’d Understand Anyway – Jim Shephard (Short Stories)
4. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With – Sherry Turkle, ed. (Essays)
5. My Mother, My Self – Nancy Friday (Feminism/Psychology)
6. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out Of Desire – Helen Vendler (Literary Criticism)
7. Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer – James Swanson (History)
8. Winter’s Bone - Daniel Woodrell (Contemporary Fiction)
9. Butcher’s Crossing – John Williams (The American West)

I admit to being a bit lukewarm on some of these books, namely the essays and the Nancy Friday book, but I should read them so this is a way to get me to do it. I'm reading The Crimson Petal now and it's quite good, but since it's 894 pages long I resisted putting David Copperfield on the list. I think it's even longer. I'd like to read it "in the near future," but I'm not making any written commitments. Of course there are a bunch of poetry books I'd like to read, but everything I have, I've read, and I don't know when I'll get a new batch.

Charmi's doing the challenge with me, I hope. If you're on Goodreads and want to join, please join!

What I Read in the Paper

Everything about sand storms and aircraft and sleep.
Everything about offshore.
About fires wailing across the west.
Great amounts of wheat.
Everything about drones and rooftops.
The moon on the rooftops.
The moon’s poverty on the rooftops.
Attention. Details.
About face.

paintball

I didn't know what it was. I didn't want to know what it was. But it seemed to come up so often I couldn't avoid eventually finding out what it was - like waterboarding, back in the day. Except I thought waterboarding was a water sport, and it turned out to be an "advanced interrogation method." And I thought paintball must be something like skee ball, but it turned out to be a advanced form of torture.

the smell of worn pennies

I finished John Banville’s The Book of Evidence a couple days ago. I really enjoyed it, mostly because I enjoy despair and self-loathing, especially if it’s couched in a good story by writer with a fabulous vocabulary.

Banville is the saint of sumptuous sentences. Check this out:
“I drank my drink. There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter.”

Okay, that’s three sentences. It’s mostly the center one I mean, but also the sequencing - 1) the simple set-up, 2) the sensual ravishing, and 3) the kill-off - is masterful.

I did a somewhat longer gush on Goodreads, but here I mostly want to point out his mastery of the “as if” construction.

1. “I had not thought paper would make so much noise, such scuffling and rattling and ripping, it must have sounded as if some large animal were being flayed alive in here.”

2. “His left eyelid began to flutter as if a moth had suddenly come to life under it.”

3. “She drove very fast, working the controls probingly, as if she were trying to locate a pattern, a secret formula, hidden in this mesh of small deft actions.”

4. “Her pale colouring and vivid hair and long, slender neck gave her a startled look, as if some time in the past she had been told a shocking secret and had never quite absorbed it.”

5. “When I spoke to her the poor girl turned crimson, and winclingly extended a calloused little paw as if she were afraid I might be going to keep it.”

6. “I have always loved that hour of the day, when that soft, muslin light seeps upward, as if out of the earth itself, and everything seems to grow thoughtful and turn away.”

I recommend this book (although Athena is better). I warn you that the murder is horrible and sad. Also, the characters are horrible and/or pathetic. A lot of reviews I read complained the main character was too despicable. Still, I recommend the book to anyone who thinks the “general awfulness of everything” can be redeemed by art.

donnez moi pour toujours une chambre à la semaine

How long have I been telling my mother that someday we'd visit Paris when she's here? Well, finally I booked train tickets and rented an apartment for two nights. It'll pass as a Mother's Day present, although we won't be going until the end of May. Whatever! Beautiful city, Paris is. Can't wait to tell her.

Thanks to Carlo, who speaks French, and who argued for staying over rather than just going in the morning and coming back at night.
And thanks to the kids, who promise to cooperate in sightseeing without too much complaint.

Image courtesy of Montreal photographer Irene S.

morning meeting

There’s nothing worse than showing up for the daily huddle with your fly undone.
You could show up with some funky bedhead and it wouldn’t be as bad as arriving with your fly undone.
You could come with a button unbuttoned and folks would just think oh you know he fumbled and it wouldn’t be as obliviously embarrassing as showing up with your fly undone.
You could come with an untied shoe and your boss would point it out without a problem because it’s not as delicate a matter as having your fly undone.
You could arrive with poppy seeds and cream cheese between all your teeth and it wouldn’t be as bad as huddling with your fly undone.
Ok wait yes it would be as bad it would be worse because coming with your fly undone is human but coming with poppy seeds and cream cheese between all your teeth is inhuman.
And if you came with your shirt on inside-out it would indicate there’s something seriously wrong, not just rampant neglect or a simple hurry but something worse than blowing off brushing your teeth or arriving with your silly fly undone.

goldfinger

When I still lived in America, it was my job to ensure that the square footage of wall-to-wall carpeting accounted for a minimum of 18% of all geographic surface area, not including Alaska and Hawaii. I went all around the country in my donkey cart measuring this. I liked to start in hotels, virtual layer cakes of carpeting. As I gained experience, it got so I could calculate everything in my head, without using my ruler. I just multiplied the number of floors and subtracted the bathrooms. Throw rugs and orientals, popular in the nicer hotel lobbies, didn’t count. This was a job to be done barefoot, to connect with all textures – the high or low pile, woolens and shags. In homes and convention centers, churches and offices, I went around on all fours with my ruler and my recoiling fiberglass measuring tape. I saw carpeting the color of corn and of ruby and every shade of beige. I saw shoes, and sandals holding painted toenails. Sometimes I pocketed a sprung button or key. I found the pits of fruit under couches and spied mucho chewing gum under movie theater seats. I saw coffee stains, red wine and juice splashes and puke and dried peas and I was enriched by the presidents’ faces I saw embossed on a million lost coins and I know wall-to-wall carpeting isn’t the only thing that makes America great.

all the old fevers

I have a poem called Monarchs in the new issue of DMQ Review. The artwork in this issue leans towards the comic, but it works. I particularly like the pieces they matched with the poems Naked Air, and The Secret Language of Feet. If you click on the artist's name on the homepage, he'll explain what canaries mean.

abandoned dancing

books in my bookbag
the book of evidence – john banville (p 91)
the complete posthumous poems – cesar vallejo (“my chest wants and does not want”)
the manifest destiny of desire – jennifer key

treat
yesterday I bought myself the pendant pictured here from a woman who likes to break plates. Here’s her shop. I also like to break things, but lighting my hair on fire often seems more appropriate. Can’t do it as often.

discovery
this looks like the 4th issue of sixth finch, but it’s my first. The poetry is good, but what’s really cool about this ezine is the artwork. Instead of combining poems with images, everything gets its own page. I like that. In this issue, I especially like S, J and J. I admit to being lured in by the initials. I like the retro of it, the matte. I like the framing by branches, buildings and water. The temperature looks perfect. But mostly I like the energy. Have these people just been shot? Are they doing some absolutely abandoned dancing? Are they gymnasts? Who the hell knows but pass me a daquiri and I’ll pull up my park bench for the duration.

morning shuffle
the book of right-on – joanna newsom
flowers of guatemala – rem
any major dude – steely dan
who by fire – leonard cohen
motorcycle mama – neil young

ill fiction

The EU will no longer use the term "swine flu," it says, because it gives the wrong impression about the safety of pork. Okay. This of course has to do with the subsidies poured into the agriculture/livestock industries. Instead they will call it "novel flu." Lame, and apparently they don't give a shit about booksellers.

You will also no longer be able to get the chicken pox, salmonella or bird flu. Scarlet fever will turn some other color, preferably a shade not found in fruit. You'd think they'd devote more time to finding new terms for illnesses that are really offensive, like genital warts.

switch to diminish

I have two poems in the new issue of Hobble Creek Review - Ghazal at Ebbtide and Inside the Little Picture. Hobble Creek does poems of place, and it's an interesting issue that also includes Rachel Mallino, Nic Sebastian and CE Chaffin. I was happy to have some poems accepted there.

My mother tells me it will reach 88 degrees F over in NJ today, and since heat figures in the poem Inside the Little Picture, here's the top of it -

Inside the Little Picture

In the kitchen, I’m fishing pieces
of cork rot from the bottle’s throat,
as if a little care and precision
could cure the world of its decreptitude.

coat perfect fits

My poem yesterday was about Monopoly pieces. I still need to do the wheelbarrow, the shoe and the cannon, and spruce up the top hat.

I’ve never enjoyed Monopoly. It takes too long and it’s mean spirited. Nevertheless, on those occasions when I’ve had my arm twisted, my parental guilt stirred, or just lacked an excuse for not being available, I usually choose one of the homier tokens to be me on the board, ie the wheelbarrow, the shoe or the thimble. Of course, pyschologically, this reveals my lack of ambition. I never want to be the cannon because it’s obnoxious. And the iron, although among the homey pieces, looks too fragile. I’m lukewarm on the others. I read on the Hasbro site that the race car was voted the all-time favorite piece. Keep in mind the people who vote on that are the people who like Monopoly.

After the selection of the totem vehicle, Monopoly falls apart for me. It’s no fun unless you’re winning. And if you find winning Monopoly a pleasure, you’re something of a sadist.

When I moved to Germany it was disturbing to find out how the Monopoly street names were German streets! No more Marvin Gardens, no Park Place, no Baltic Avenue. This shouldn’t have surprised me, but it made the game all the less appealing. I mean, if I couldn’t visit the old haunts…