Psalm 56

The Holy Bible: King James Version. 2000.
The Psalms
56

A Prayer of Trust
To the chief Musician upon Jonath–e'lem–recho'kim, Michtam of David, when the Philistines took him in Gath. 1.1--0.1 ; 0.21 ; 3.15


  Be merciful unto me, O God:
       
for man would swallow me up;
he fighting daily oppresseth me.
  Mine enemies would daily swallow me up:
       
for they be many that fight against me, O thou Most High.
  What time I am afraid,
       
I will trust in thee.
  In God I will praise his word,
       
in God I have put my trust;
I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.
  Every day they wrest my words:
       
all their thoughts are against me for evil.
  They gather themselves together,
       
they hide themselves,
they mark my steps,
when they wait for my soul.
  Shall they escape by iniquity?
       
In thine anger cast down the people, O God.
  Thou tellest my wanderings:
       
put thou my tears into thy bottle:
are they not in thy book?
  When I cry unto thee,
       
then shall mine enemies turn back:
this I know; for God is for me.
  In God will I praise his word:
       
in the LORD will I praise his word.
  In God have I put my trust:
       
I will not be afraid what man can do unto me.
  Thy vows are upon me, O God:
       
I will render praises unto thee.
  For thou hast delivered my soul from death:
       
wilt not thou deliver my feet from falling,
that I may walk before God in the light of the living?

massive attack - what your soul sings

The above video has been taken down due to "copyright" infringement. It is a sad commentary on the state of the world. You see, the above video modeled compassion, kindness, empathy, and realistic portrayals of the current state of struggling human beings just trying to live from one day to the next in collective understanding of each an every one of us's responsibility to honor each and every human being as precious and unique. The video was a statement of unification rather than dualistic, good/bad - like/hate - accept/judge - coexist/destroy 'otherness.'

Here is another version I found:

There are almost no public figures and certainly no media in the world today that model compassion, kindness, empathy, understanding, humanistic morality and ethics. Everywhere I turn there is yelling and fighting and bullying and name calling - from Fox News to MSNBC to every gossip show and radio DJ. No one is teaching the patience of whole-personhood. There is only malice, meanness, anger, hate, and it is a cancer that is destroying this world.


Took out some of the '99 audio CD's that I had made and found an oldy but a goody. Found this version on YouTube. There are some good computer graphic student videos to this song on YouTube. Correction. Some of the '04 CD's in there as well, which is where I found the version with Sinead.

Joni Mitchell - Woman of Heart and Mind Documentary (Excerpt 3 - Blue a...

Joni Mitchell takes me to the place of transcendent creative source coding. When i listen to her melodies, her lyrics, her words and her voice, I am taken to that Other place, where mysterious mists encircle me, free of my physical body and embraced by an open awareness of all senses, known and unknown. Sometimes, when I am truly free, in space, in nature particularly, on top of a tall mountain I’ve usually climbed alone, at that peak, in the clouds, I feel a vibration that connects me to my own source: the Art that I was born attuned to, the metaphysical mother wonder where I create, unhindered, and my sensual gifts are at their peak. If only I had a place, a soul to transmit, to conduit with, the connections I’ve missed. I mourn deeply. What for? I mean, really, this sensual curiosity that compels me? The heart of my deepest secrets of intimacy. I give it all the work, I have no other place, person, thing I trust with it.

President Obama: "I'm Really Proud of All of You."

This is the video I was talking about in my last post. The man is true blue - for every American.

Rachel Maddow - Time for the right to leave the bubble

Here you go, as promised: Maddow's Marvelous Monologue

Rachel Maddow's Brilliant Diatribe about Fact and Fiction, Dem's and Gop's

It's not on Youtube yet, but what Maddow just said on tonight's show will go down in history as one of the most -if not the most- succinct checklist of what the American people DO want, and what American's do NOT want. Also, her fistfull of facts monologue about popping the warm, fuzzy, feel goody bubble that the GOP has occupied throughout the 2012 election season/campaign was so precise, onpoint, witty, and freakin' amazing for the direction and energy she gallantly gauntleted the Republican party to throw down and start engaging in, as in real math, actual facts, and human-centered solutions, that I just have to find a copy of it and post it here asap.  You go girl!

The Incomparable, Edward P. Jones

My favorite short story writers are Edward P. Jones and Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" from the book of the same name, is just brilliant. Of Jones' stories, my favorite by far (I haven't read Lost in the City, yet) is "Adam Robinson." I chose this story, first published by the The New Yorker in the December 2004 issue, for a short fiction class I took in college. My peers were peeved because it is a rather long story and we all had to read each other's picks and discuss...but, after reading it, most were glad that they had.

I bring up this story, because the Royksopp video I posted earlier reminds me of the sparsity and cavernous tone of Adam Robinson. Both have a heart and soul that feels, to me, to be holding to a kind of life force taproot as they navigate the post-modern, sort of dystopian, world that exists today (for me). There is this take your breath away, small and quiet witness to the end of old ways; an agoraphobic free fall setting in "Robinson" that I pick up also watching and listening to "Drug." It's like a zombie apocalypse, right before the first zombie staggers out; only the zombies are in the wrong movie. They are in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, loping largely, not undetected, but opaquely. Integrating  infecting, overtaking, absorbing the small, brilliant red and beating hearts of the old ways.

I find comfort in both works of art. There is a connective thread, for me.  

Röyksopp "The Drug" video competition winner

>

The drug is the music
The temple is the body
The Universe is the soul
The playground is the imagination
The dance is the conduit to the One
All is...

It's a dance off. Come, join me in the dance.

Nick Mount on It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken

>


Another brilliant lecture by Nick Mount. Tears fall down my throat, in pathetically desperate gulps, as I listen.

Start at the beginning, or, start at
17:40 and then peer into my own soul, too.

20:22 - Quest of my poetry, also.

22:37 - That voice, which is also versioned in my head. The one whose will asserts itself over my life, slapping my cold fingers as they tentatively flutter up toward the sun for their small share of warmth.

26:00 - is the key to the paradox. A culture that is a plastic diorama of an older culture...

28:09 - Yes, yes; that is why I seek cathartic relief from writing.

30:00 - Seth resonates with my soul. The one birch tree. My mother's wallpaper...a past that never welcomed me, but that which I continue to figure out the password for.

Nick Mount on It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken

Another brilliant lecture by Nick Mount. Tears fall down my throat, in pathetically desperate gulps, as I listen.

Start at the beginning, or, start at
17:40 and then peer into my own soul, too.

20:22 - Quest of my poetry, also.

22:37 - That voice, which is also versioned in my head. The one whose will asserts itself over my life, slapping my cold fingers as they tentatively flutter up toward the sun for their small share of warmth.

26:00 - is the key to the paradox. A culture that is a plastic diorama of an older culture...

28:09 - Yes, yes; that is why I seek cathartic relief from writing.

Sylvia Plath part 5 of 6

&gt

This documentary has been viewed 16,749 times. At least 1,000 of those views are by one DT. This section in particular, where Clarissa Roche, a friend of Plath's recounts...sets the record straight about "Daddy" not being a hateful poem, not being a poem about Plath hating her father...is a good lesson for any reader of poetry. It is best to keep an open mind. To read, digest, and then come back to the work, especially if one has had a visceral reaction to it. Especially if one has some conscious or subconscious perceptual agenda...toward the poet. The less one responds to the urge to frame a poet's work around a single issue, emotion, theme, topic, the more one gains, as readers. It's important to keep in mind. Poetry is such a gift from the One, the universe, from writer to reader (sometimes), that to treat it as mere fodder, ammunition, justification, is to miss the whole point of it. One only cheats the self. As a whole, this documentary is astonishing to take in. The most accurate voices for Plath in it come from Mr. Alvarez, Sandra Gilbert, and Clarissa Roche. It is so interesting to hear the very British i.e., very on Hughes side, Dido Merwin, wife of W.S. Merwin, speak  about Assia not being the main reason Ted left, and about Plath's behavior. Peace.

The Elegant Soft Boiled Egg

So, when I was 17 and working alone in Hamburg, Germany, I lived in a lovely little pension on Rothenbaumchaussee. The house frau served a wonderful breakfast of granola, or muesli, with yogurt, and soft boiled eggs on the side. This breakfast kept me going through a very cold autumn. With 12 appointments a day, all over the city, and not enough money to take taxis everywhere, I needed lots of fuel. However, despite my diet consisting in large part on the noble egg, I still came home at the end of the year with Pneumonia.

Soft boiled eggs are the most delicious way to eat an egg. My grandmother always ordered her eggs cooked soft boiled. As a small child, I would to cringe at this, but now, I see that this preparation is the best way to experience the dynamism of an egg. Well, maybe the delicately whipped eggs sprinkled with caviar that I once had at Maxim's, in NYC, top the soft boiled egg, but mostly for the presentation: the eggs were served with little silver spoons that had been warmed, and that fit neatly inside the shells, which had been cut open in a perfect circle. The caviar was the best I had ever had at the time. Ah, modeling was rarely so grand, but it certainly helped to develop my tastes as an adult. 

So, I just finished my morning meal of soft boiled eggs and a slice of Ezekiel bread. Yum! Really messy, but so worth it.           

A Fable by Richard Wilbur

"Black Rook in Rainy Weather" by Sylvia Plath

On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident.

To set the sight on fire
In my eye, not seek
In the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Leap incandescent

Out of the kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then ---
Thus, hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largess, honor,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull ruinous landscape); sceptical,
Yet politic, ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As if to seize my senses,
Haul my eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again.
The long wait for the angel.
For that rare, random descent.




So, this poem speaks to my orientation, a profundity of isolation and longing. A black bird in the rain the only sign of possibility, in a waning optimism's heart. The self deprecating acknowledgment of the need, yet doubt over miracles and the prison of one that is unabated -- by friendly comfort, the love of the lover. Missing. That ironic loneliness when a marriage fibrillated between quicksand, imprisonment, and betrayal. As Sylvia Plath's and Ted Hughes' marriage did, back in 1962-63.

Another Brilliant Concert that I Didn't Attend

The coolest woman alive today.

Don't Worry. Be Happy.

Bjork and her fierce self. You go girrrrrll

Thom York's Harrowdown Hill

Don’t walk the plank like I did
You will be dispensed with
when you’ve become inconvenient

Up on Harrowdown Hill
The way you used to go to school
That’s where I am
That’s where I'm lying down

Did I fall or was I pushed?
did I fall or was I pushed?
And where’s the blood?
And where’s the blood?

But I'm coming home
I’m coming home
To make it alright,
so dry your eyes

We think the same things at the same time
We just can’t do anything about it

We think the same things at the same time
We just can’t do anything about it

So don’t ask me, ask the ministry
Don’t ask me, ask the ministry

We think the same things at the same time
There are so many of us
So you can’t count

We think the same things at the same time
There are so many of us
So you can’t count...

Can you see me when I am running?
Can you see me when I am running?
Away from there...
Away from there...

I can’t take the pressure
No one cares if you live or die
They just want me gone
They want me gone

And I'm coming home
I'm coming home
To make it all right
so dry your eyes
We think the same things at the same time
We just can’t do anything about it

We think the same things at the same time
There are too many of us so you can’t
There are too many of us so you can’t count...

It was me walking to the back of Harrowdown Hill
It was me walking to the back of Harrowdown Hill

It was a slippery, slippery, slippery slope
It was a slippery, slippery, slippery slope
I felt me slipping in and out of consciousness
I felt me slipping in and out of consciousness

I feel me...


Sums it up for me...hmmm...what's on my mind...think I'll take the acting gig I was just offered...no great canonical poem to be mined in these stunned cells and obese dendrites, at present. The play is a connection of sorts, and that's enough for this doorway dweller. No one's been keen for friendship; no one I can let it all hang out with anyway.

I'm listening, Universe: it's time for me to pull my compass from my vest pocket. Thrilling - my own life without banana peels and jeers -

"Did I slip or did you grease my heels?" What a great line, in context, as it was.

Litany

You are the bread and the knife
the crystal goblet and the wine...
-Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner,
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's teacup.
But, don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.

Billy Collins

"A Fable" by Richard Wilbur

Securely sunning in a forest glade,

A mild, well-meaning snake

Approved the adaptations he had made

For safety's sake.

He liked the skin he had--

Its mottled camouflage, its look of mail,

And was content that he had thought to add

A rattling tail.

The tail was not for drumming up a fight;

No, nothing of the sort.

And he would only use his poisoned bite

As last resort.

A peasant now drew near,

Collecting wood; the snake, observing this,

Expressed concern by uttering a clear 

But civil hiss.

The simple churl, his nerves at once unstrung,

Mistook the other's tone

And dashed his brains out with a deftly-flung

Preemptive stone.

Moral

Security, alas, can give

A threatening impression;

Too much defense-initiative

Can prompt aggression.

Poem by William Stafford

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.



This poem is so well-crafted, so seemingly simple, yet really very tricky with its word play. It holds secrets the way Plath's poetry holds secrets. You have to dig. It is an action of thought process' that requires me to pull the reigns back, twitch, circle back, move forward, pull the reigns back...  

My week with Marilyn - That old black magic.wmv

Muggy night in the borough. Went for a stroll at 10 pm. Down the middle of Water and Omega and School, I walked twirling my arms and singing. trying not to run into people, I ducked down alleys laughing. I am at the beginning of a creative manic spell. Writing well for the first time in a while.




Enjoy some of the sensuality I felt tonight.




That Old Black Magic




Just read an article on The Chronicle of Higher Education by David Yaffe titled "Some Artists Really Are Too Cool for School." Yaffe quotes Leonard Cohen: Leonard Cohen not only has a literature degree from McGill but even went to grad school at Columbia. (He described his year there as "passion without flesh, love without climax.")




Reading this, doesn't the period come after the parentheses, even though it's a quote?? I can't find any rules on this in my searches. Doesn't a period overrule a parentheses at the end of a sentence? Yaffe orders his grammar as above in two sentences in the above article.




Anyway, the way Cohen describes grad school is the way I would describe my state of being at present. Well, actually, over the last 13 years.




Alarming - I am noticing whole words missing from my posts once I post them, and I have read them through and made sure each sentence is complete. My mouse jumps from paragraph to paragraph frequently. I'll be typing and then next thing I know, whole sections are erased, or I am suddenly typing in a paragraph other than where I started.

A Deafening Lecture

If you are among the "lucky" few who can still focus and concentrate in this I wanted it immediately before I became aware of its existence instant-gratification, terminally diseased culture, then take a listen to Alain de Botton's lecture about we slow-to-evolve Pavlovian miscreants. It's actually very validating (yeah, I used that word) and soothing. Mr. de Botton is someone I could be friends with. In real life, not on Facebook, well, there too, but across from one another would be better.    

Poem by Ted Hughes

For my father - still waiting for him to crash from the Heavens and reclaim our name and place. This poem speaks to me in the way that Hughes deals with the low, criminal, seedy ranks of the haters.



"God Help the Wolf After Whom the Dogs Do Not Bark"

There you met it - the mystery of hatred.
After your billions of years in anonymous matter
That was where you were found- and promptly hated.
You tried your utmost to reach and touch those people
with gifts of yourself--
Just like your first words as a toddler
When you rushed at every visitor to the house
clasping their legs and crying: I love you! I love you!
Just as you had danced for your father
in the home of anger - gifts of your life
To sweeten his slow death and mix yourself in it
Where he lay propped on the couch.
To sugar the bitterness of his raging death.

You searched for yourself to go on giving it
as if after the nightfall of his going
you danced on in the dark house
Eight years old, in your tinsel.

Searching for yourself, in the dark, as you danced,
floundering a little, crying softly,
like somebody searching for somebody drowning
in dark water,
Listening for them - in panic at loosing
Those listening seconds from your searching--
Then Dancing wildly in silence.

The Colleges lift their heads. It did seem
you disturbed something just perfected
That they were holding carefully, all of a piece,
Till the glue dried. And as if

Reporting some felony to the police
They let you know that you were no Jonne Donne.
You no longer care. Did you save their names?
But then they let you know, day by day,
Their contempt for everything you attempted,
Took pains to inject their bile, as for your health,
into your morning coffee. Even signed
Their homeopathic letters,
Envelopes full of carefully broken glass
To lodge behind your eyes so you would see

Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter -- your floundering
Drowning life, and your effort to save yourself,
treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give-    
                                                  Whatever you found
They bombarded with splinters,
Derision, mud - the mystery of that hatred.
        

Beethoven and Love

It does not matter what Beethoven or Giulietta Guicciardi looked like - to each other, to themselves; it was his love of her, whatever of her spirit she fed him, birthed in him, this, energetic shape: a profound, deeper passion, resulting in Piano Sonata No. 14, or, Moonlight Sonata, is what Love looks like. It is 4 dimensional.

My fleetingly brief moments being in Love have sometimes been misunderstood as melancholia, but were, in fact, nirvana. Especially when fulfilled - not only psychologically but sensually as well. In fact, for me, I cannot experience the latter without the former.
Like Beethoven’s frustrations over going deaf and his resulting isolations… my having been misunderstood by most - my experience with being misunderstood as a result of others being deaf to me - regarding just about every action and word I have given life, has made me seriously pessimistic about Humanity - not to mention the havoc wreaked because of the way I looked and the various circumstances, out of my control, that have shaped the decoration of my life. Decoration has often been as deep an investigation into me as others have bothered to endeavor, resulting in the oft off the mark (mis)understanding of my entire character, my integrity, my very foundation of being.    

"Ever since my childhood my heart and soul have been imbued with a tender feeling of good will. But just think, for the last few years, I've been inflicted with an incurable complaint. Though endowed with a passionate and lively temperament, I was since obliged to seclude myself and live in solitude. I could not bring myself to say to people: speak up. Shout! I am deaf. My misfortune pains me doubly, in as much as it leads to my being misjudged, I must live like an outcast. How humiliated I have felt. If somebody heard a Sheppard sing, I heard nothing. Such experiences almost made me despair. And I was on the point of putting an end to my life. The only thing that held me back was my art. For, indeed, it seemed to me impossible to leave this world before I had produced all of the works that I had felt the urge to compose. And thus, I have dragged on this miserable existence. Almighty God, who look down into my inner most soul, you see into my heart, and you know that it is filled with love for humanity and a desire to do good."

quoted from In Search of Beethoven, a documentary written and directed by Phil Grabsky.

So yes, obviously, I am no Beethoven, but his sentiments could well have come from my mouth; I would replace his protests of "speak up" with the words: See me! Hear me! Let fall away the false trappings of Americanized oversimplifications, illogical fears and your domestic-bred misperceptions and take a real look. Have a clear listen. I am - 

 Do I need to speak up, shout!? Are you deaf? 

To My Soul

                                                                                Jeanne Illenye's Orange Glow

Will I miss you

uncanny other

in the next life?

And you & I, my other, leave

the body, not leave the earth?

And you, a child in a field,

and I, a child on a train, go by, go by,

And what we had

give way like coffee grains

brushed across paper...

 poem by Jean Valentine

The New Yorker, April 23, 2007

Poem by J.D. McClatchy

Mercury Dressing

To steal a glance and, anxious, see
Him slipping into transparency--
The feathered helmet already in place,
Its shadow fallen across his face
(His hooded sex his counterpart)--
Unsteadies the routines of his heart.
If I reach out and touch his wing,
What harm, what help might he then bring?

But suddenly, he disappears,
As so much else had down the years...
Until I feel him deep inside
The emptiness preoccupied.
His nerve electrifies the air.
His message is his being there.

The New Yorker, April 23, 2007

The Kill Box

Was reading a post on Switchback Books about Girlesque Poets, feminism, the Woman question and the warped template, the exclusive bible of patriarchal histories. Below are some quotes that ring with me: 

"I have never thought there was one way women did or should or could write: style, form, structure, language, rhetoric are all tools consciously and unconsciously used in the deep agency of writing. As Woolf said in A Room of One's Own--certain material differences between men and women are still constructed and perpetuated in our society, and it is the job of feminism to resist these, to try to dismantle these, and, as well, to understand their impact, which can be considerable in the case of artists. This is the importance of feminist reception and writing inspired in the general matrix of ongoing feminist critique."

--Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work

"For writers, and at this moment for women writers in particular, there is the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored. But there is also a difficult and dangerous walking on the ice, as we try to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into, and with little in the past to support us."

--Adrienne Rich, "'When We Dead Awaken': Writing as Re-Vision"

"I am an instrument in the shape

of a woman trying to translate pulsations

into images for the relief of the body

and the reconstruction of the mind."

--Adrienne Rich, "Planetarium"

"...who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"

--Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One's Own"

"Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies -- for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text -- as into the world and into history -- by her own movement.

Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible.

If woman has always functioned 'within' the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this 'within', to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of."

--Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa"

Sharp shooter, put your boots back on - the dryer's buzzing like a dog pound leash.

I must contort this peony furnace into pliable beige, flip the roast, stir the pot.

Wipe the glaze from your chin. I must get back to being what I am not.  

TED-x Videos, My Current Read and some...minor Preoccupations

So, I'm watching a TEDx video about Death in the 21st Century and what I've just learned from the soft-spoken good Doctor, Peter Saul is depressing me. Namely, that many of us will live to a "great age"; not old age, which is somewhat of a new buzzy phrase for me, but sadly, many of us will die of a "dwindling capacity," that leads to frailty, and finally, to death. He shows a Klimt painting about the separation of Death and the living, observing the terror on the face of a woman who's afraid that he's coming to claim her (he wasn't). However, what keeps distracting me is his watch. He and I appear to have similar tastes in watches, as I think he's wearing a 1946ish, 18k, Baum & Mercier with a blue sapphire windup and a dark brown leather band. He likes his watch very much; he flashes it and glances at it frequently, much like one of Bob Barker's hostesses would.


So, I'm reading Him, Her, Him Again, the End of Him and enjoying it. Marx's writing is contagious. I find myself, inside my head anyway, to suddenly be more quick-witted and sharp, which is just me trying on her coat while I'm reading her. Coincidentally, I read an article this morning on Yahoo by Virginia Heffernan entitled "Will Obama's Julia Celebrate Gay Marriage?" And her prose is rife with Marxisms; Pat's not Karl's.

On to TEDx Warsaw and Renata Mienkowska-Norkiene's  talk Working Out Conflict.

later  

Gabriel Yared

mmm.....  so good - another musical rapture, so few.  so precious.

Finished Enduring Love

Great pace and emotional yank-factor funhouse energy and wit. It's nice to be the author. You create a protagonist who gets it right almost every time, and exposes the misperceptions of just about everyone he comes into contact with. And boy do they pay for it, as does he.

Now, on to the next book: Him Her Him again The End of Him, by Patricia Marx. Already through Chapter One and have also had many laugh out loud moments. I can't read enough lately, I am going through books as if they were gossip magazines. Voracious is how I would describe it. My brain just wants more more more and I've got enough to feed it, for now.

Sleeping 12-14 hours a day has really helped my brain bounce back. Lately I've been back to the old speed of ideas and manic sort of writing ready pages first draft. I am happy, singing and dancing as I cook or drive. I sat today for 2 hours listening to a biographical documentary on the English monarchy while writing on here and reading drafts for revision.

I am tired now. My sleep is calling.

Gorgeous amplification.

"Wind" by Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Alu

Well, I heard Alu on John Diliberto's Echo program, and I was immediately curious. He was playing "Martian Rendezvous" at the time -- I had one of those NPR fundraiser moments, where they remind listeners of how many times we've sat in our cooling cars in order to listen to the end of an enthralling show; I searched her and got a listen to the rest of Lobotomy Sessions at cdbaby.com.

Alu, in my 'not going down without a kick and a scream' opinion is at her best on the last three tunes: "Amy," "Martian Rendezvous," and "Luna." While her lyrics are sharp as the toes on a Dorsey Cut pair of heels, her voice is truly showcased when she drags her vowels out like slow, wildly colorful, warm taffy. The haunt --and the hot-factor, happens in these three songs far more authentically than the first seven.

Poem By Maura Stanton

I finally had some private time today to read. I picked up a book I had bought used over the winter. fanning the pages, I could smell a faint musky perfume inside the folds. I think I would have liked where this book lived before I became its owner. I wonder what scent will be left on it when I am through?

What piqued me most was that I had written the short short in the previous post early early this morning, and the first poem I opened to in Stanton's book is this:

The Snow House

I could kick down the children's igloo
in two minutes, telling them how dangerous
structures of snow can be, or merely
fall against the roof...
They watch me gravely, expecting
admiration for the ice welding
done with the garden hose for permanence.
But I remember my husband's story
recollected in irony:
how the neighbor children
sealed him in their snow fort
& when he burst through, was it
imagination? His lungs hurt--
That night I dreamed of ghostly children
passing me in a snow field.
"We have buried him!" they chanted,
melting as I ran blinded
into the white dark of the blizzard.

Remembering that dream, these children
frighten me with their innocence.
Their eyes would darken
if I described suffocation in their ice palace,
how adults fear their small fists
smashing towards them in visions
trapped like kaleidoscope designs...
infinite, made with a few stones.
That child in the red hat
is me, moving across the snow, singing.

Crawling inside, the blue walls
remind me of my brother's snow house
where I hid once in anger,
licking the ice until my tongue stuck.
"Let's pretend to freeze to death!" the children
shout from outside as I imagine
turning silver before their shocked eyes
the way I wanted to then, absolute
under my mother's wild hands.
Outside, I wipe the frost off my cheek
praising their fierce construction.
If I kicked their snow house into snow,
I'd return each night
to build it up, flake by flake...



The structure of this poem is so smart. The child in red... I am a woman in red lost in the palace of winds...

Addendum: At the same time I was writing my post below, my daughter was taking her final exams. When she came home from school, she said in her final art exam, students were instructed to go to the internet, choose a picture, and write a story to it. She chose a photo of a woman sitting in a tree in the desert from the 1900's. The woman was wrapped in white gauze. Collective unconscious, indeed!

Kenneth Koch's "One Train May Hide Another"

(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)

In a poem, one line may hide another line,

As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.

That is, if you are waiting to cross

The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at

Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read

Wait until you have read the next line--

Then it is safe to go on reading.

In a family one sister may conceal another,

So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view

Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.

One father or one brother may hide the man,

If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.

So always standing in front of something the other

As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.

One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide

The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another

On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe;

One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia

     Antica one tomb

May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another,

One small complaint may hide a great one.

One injustice may hide another--one colonial may hide another,

One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath

     may hide another bath

As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.

One idea may hide another: Life is simple

Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein

One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory

One invention may hide another invention,

One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.

One dark red, or one blue, or one purple--this is a painting

By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,

These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin

May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician

Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but

One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.

A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides

Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in

A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag

Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.

In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by

     the mother's

And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker

May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee

Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love

     or the same love

As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers

The better love lingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts"

Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that"

And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the

     Garden of Eden

Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.

Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.

When you come to something, stop to let it pass

So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,

Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory

Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,

The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading

    A Sentimental Journey look around

When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see

If it is standing there, it should be, stronger

And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore

May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk

May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and

One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs

Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the

     foot of a tree

With one and when you get up to leave there is another

Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,

One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man

May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.

You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It

     can be important

To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

Björk - Play Dead (Official Video)

Roll out, roll down, my darling.  Oh, no,

marbles hit the floor, break into shards.

Eyes that searched and found what they were

not looking for shatter over what they see.

I keep telling the truth; my sight is too vivid for sleep.

I keep pointing out facts. My words are sharp and ring

sweet for the few, mammalian ears. Pour it in, alien,  

there, inside. Pour what falls innately. Heed, petty votaries

even the Rabbit is dressed for school.  You raise your hand.

Ask why it was and how it is that things disappear.

I stare at the back of your head, invisible, wanting to touch you.

Chalk dust, the torn fingernail, drifts into the corner where my desk sits.

You don’t look around. You don’t look at all. You keep asking

for answers from a carnival gypsy – she’s a dummy in a box, behind the glass

Charles Bukowski on Depression

Ted Hughes on Thinking

This is an oldie but a goodie that I listen to frequently. I can invent any kind of pig my thoughts dare. My pig could suddenly come back to life, be magical, glow florescent blue, be sinister... This lecture is like comfort food, to me. All my best thoughts flee before the page is written.

Louise Gluck

The Pond

Night covers the pond with its wing.
Under the ringed moon I can make out
your face swimming among minnows and the small
echoing stars. In the night air
the surface of the pond is metal.


Within, your eyes are open. They contain
a memory I recognize, as though
we had been children together. Our ponies
grazed on the hill, they were gray
with white markings. Now they graze
with the dead who wait
like children under their granite breastplates,
lucid and helpless:


The hills are far away. They rise up
blacker than childhood.
What do you think of, lying so quietly
by the water? When you look that way I want
to touch you, but do not, seeing
as in another life we were of the same blood.

from The House on the Marshland. © 1975 Louise Glüc

A Hymn by Fanny Howe : Poetry Magazine

A Hymn by Fanny Howe : Poetry Magazine

I'll never be able to say it better than this, well, maybe with my hands and mouth.

How to Kill a Living Thing by Eibhlin Nic Eochaidh

This poem was posted as a creative way to use my voice to protest & express my distress over the level of hatred, sexism, misogyny, and misinformation people use to justify violence against others, especially, women and the LBGT community. For further reading, please see chapter 2 of Miguel Ruiz's The Four Agreements: Be Impeccable with Your Word.  


Neglect it
Criticize it to its face
Say how it kills the light
Traps all the rubbish
Bores you with its green

Continually
Harden your heart
Then
Cut it down close
To the root as possible

Forget it
For a week or a month
Return with an axe
Split it with one blow
Insert a stone

To keep the wound wide open