Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Direct Competitor / Field Notes / Nothing Blossoms

Get after it:

http://mentholmountains.blogspot.com/
____________

Most beautiful thing haunting me lately
is a line I can't quite recall
from a name I can't remember. It goes
something like this:

the music I make knows more about me than I do...

Think about that. Applied to your own situation.
____________

I now want to make a short film about that idea. Home movies; ice in the glass.
____________

Either / or
Neither / noir
____________

Snow is falling now and I haven't forgotten what you said about glass.
(Put that in the file of great opening lines in the letters we will never write. Scratch that . . .
decent opening lines, letters we might write.)
____________

What ARE you the secretary of these days? I am less interested than ever in your presidencies.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

And Robert Irwin

And Kafka

"One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory."

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Vallejo & Tarjei Vesaas

"...in all his acts, big and small, internal and visible, conscious and subconscious, and even when he sleeps and when he errs or betrays himself."

"We walk past like debtors/ because our life turned out easier."

Friday, January 7, 2011

Though the Sun's Not Up and You Weren't Looking for a Reply

Reading your comment this morning was one of those moments where physical distance just kind of eats away at me. It sits there with its precious silverware and feasts on my heart. Or laughs at me, like a Sphinx. I don’t know the answer to its riddle. What I’m saying, one of the things I’m saying, is it would be damn nice to drink about six hours of coffee with you. Or walk across a city with no bedtime.

First I need to clarify that moment in New York you referenced. I remember the exact point I was trying to make. And I remember that I was never, ever going to be able to make it that evening. I was speaking too clumsily, and you, my friend, were hearing too clumsily. Not that clarifying at this late date will eradicate any of the help or damage of that comment, but all I was trying to say then, for the sake of honest friendship, was that I loved the Novenas and wish there could have been more. I was talking about the way we change – as writers, as people – and saying that I really liked the guy you were when you wrote the Novenas. Probably part of me liked the guy I was when you wrote the Novenas. The guys we were. The place we were in. I mean, nights on bleachers reciting our own poems from memory . . . that was real. So, to come around to it, I wasn’t asking a big question about what you had become as a writer or why you had kept going. I was simply talking about the fact that we can’t write the same poems that we wrote when we were young – and that I liked the poems you wrote when you were young. The comment was probably a little bit selfish, but, in New York City, after 10:00, what isn't?

On, now, to the rest of it. I would put myself in the camp (if there is one) who feels that what you have “done” or “achieved” with your writing is no longer important BECAUSE it has turned you into the man you have become (and are becoming): A deeply good man. A deeply sane man. A deeply funny man. A man who is deeply alive. What’s my proof for this? Just being around you all these years. And I honestly believe that your engagement with language (forget calling it writing poetry or making art – it’s the fact that you roll around in the glorious slop of language every day) has carved you up in body and spirit . . . has delivered you to the world’s doorstep . . . exactly as you are and were meant to be.

You, my friend, are a version of freedom. But let’s go on a little further.

You are also a bundle of questions. Meaning, your freedom will never be without limit. Which makes it moral. I’m laughing now because you can never disprove any of this . . . try as you might, you can never walk down the street next to yourself and get lost in what that is like.

And further… Are you pursuing writing or a writing career? I think you have dabbled in the latter but never, ever waivered in the former. And there’s a cost in that. I don’t think it’s a big, lifetime cost. I think it’s a small, nagging cost. The economics are tricky, and I know you know them well. Art, to be noticed, needs a man in a suit who takes it as his job to sell it. The real artists I know can only wear that suit awkwardly, and for so long. But there are some semi-artists who actually prefer the suit. They look good in the suit. They enjoy its fit. And their small "a" art becomes an extension of the suit. It floats above all the other art temporarily. Because, when the suit dies, the art it held up falls to the ground.

I know I don’t need to explain this to you. I know I don’t need to say that the man who writes, steadily, out of the deepest part of himself, actually builds the day itself. He doesn't hold it up or show it off; he doesn't hock it or talk about it. He actually builds it! And holy shit that is hard and wonderful work. You should know... you've been doing it well for ten odd years.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

first shyku

God is how
old I am

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

A Philip Guston

said, “I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through.”

A James Crumley

first line:

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

Sunday, January 2, 2011

At The Medical Museum

Here we were, circling the same two block radius three days after Christmas, Philadelphia. Anna's cousin, Marie, and her husband had squeezed in a last-minute appointment at the hospital for what they thought would be hours--their first sonogram--and since we had driven up to the city early, decided to visit the medical museum. A foot of snow had fallen on Christmas Day. Mounds of it frozen solid along the sidewalks. There were no spaces free on South Street, but after rounding the block once more we caught an SUV pulling away from a metered spot on 22nd. The lady at the front desk let us in at a student rate--ten bucks less than full price--and after hanging our coats in the coat room off the foyer, we muted our cell phones and passed under the center staircase into the main hall.

It had the air of a 19th century study. In fact, the main room, two stories of oddities shelved and displayed behind glass, had all the musky, varnished orderliness of a mansion library. The upper level overlooked a lower, larger room; along the iron railing there were display cases of bone fragments, animal skulls, and, in one case, a two-foot length of leatherized human skin. We began at a display of forensic evidence and moved counterclockwise along the wall, which featured, in order: an otologists' collection of ear bones (fifty pieces, labeled); surgical instruments of Civil War field doctors; daguerrotype reproductions of amputees (shiny, blank eyes); six human skeletons accompanied by instructions on how to identify sex, race, occupation and manner of death; an adipocere mummy, "The Soap Lady", whose flesh had been preserved as a waxy putty of fat. After plaster models of various syphilitic ailments and tumorous growths, we reached the wall-length cabinet furthest from the entrance, and began reading the names, ages, and places of origin of forty-eight skulls set a hand's length apart and staring out at the faces on the other side of the glass.

On each the identifying details and manner of death were written in calligraphic ink on the cranial dome. And these, Anna pointed out, were enigmatic threads as well, extending from the mortician or collector's hand to our own. Weren't we also writing these names down, in our pocket notebooks? And was this a proper, respectful way of presenting oneself to the scavenged and the beheaded, glibly jumbled together and numbered? Their stories were minimal and far-flung enough; the hand felt enough emotion to write them down. From skull to hand, to pulped paper: skull of Adalbert Czaptieonesz -- age 51 -- Poland, Catholic, suicide -- cut his throat because of extreme poverty.

Whole lives were set down in fifteen words or less. Some were suggestive enough to mold features onto the naked slates of their faces.

An infamous Thai pirate, a Serbian assassin, a maid-servant who killed herself after being accused of stealing. On the shelf above was a mother who had been executed for killing her two children, alongside a young suicide who killed for love. Hangings, drownings, gunshot wounds, an old, hard-worn Russian who cut his throat at seventy and, due to a calcified larynx, lived for ten more years to "die in good spirits". Four rows of twelve each, the minimal remains of a single body flayed to pieces and leaping back to an original, undamaged oneness.

The afternoon crowd was busy, we kept moving, right to left. Before pushing on Anna pointed to one last, smaller skull at our knees. Gazing out of two eye-holes and a gaping nasal pyramid, rushing into brain matter mercurial, mood darkened and blinking: Andjrejew Sokoloff -- Scopzi (Russian sect that believes in castration), dead of self-inflicted removal of testicles.

The forehead was prominent, the teeth jagged and cadmium blue. The mortician's handwriting covered the left side of the skull. But the lower jawbone was missing, as with all of them. One would have to hold a skull like that to gauge how much it weighed. And have one just like it, to imagine how heavy.