perpetual huddle: 04

bad poetry and good

i was recently asked to ghostwrite
another blog. according to the author,
this is a perfectly reasonable request
because "all [i] do is steal [my] [material]
from [her] all the time anyway!!"
i refused, but promised to at least
give credit where credit is due,
for this great quote she found
in sound and sense. perrine
via carles, tells it like it is
for your general edification:

And here, perhaps, we should discuss the kinds of poems that most frequently "fool" inexperienced readers (and occasionally a few experienced ones) and sometimes achieve tremendous popularity without winning the respect of most good readers. These poems are frequently published on greeting cards or in anthologies entitled Poems of Inspiration, Poems of Courage, or Heart-Throbs. The people who write such poems and the people who like them are often the best of people, but they are not poets or lovers of poetry in any genuine sense. They are lovers of conventional ideas or sentiments or feelings, which they like to see expressed with the adornment of rime and meter, and which, when so expressed, they respond to in predictable ways.

april

she's no lucy, but
beagle or something's
keen reminder of fall
on a warm spring morning
caught me off guard,
i was suddenly grateful,
nostalgic, and wary.

my first baby box

one of my co-workers brought back
a kit for new parents as a resource
for each toddler-room teacher
from a meeting she attended downtown.
basically, the kit is a mint-green cardboard box
covered in photos of multi-ethnic kids,
a little thinner than a shoebox,
with a plastic handle on the top.
inside it has a bilingual board-book,
Frisky puppies play.
Frisky puppies chew.
Los perritos retozones juegan.
Los perritos retozones mordisquean.
and a magnet for california's
less catchy equivalent of mr. yuk,
the "poison action line,"
along with a bunch of brochures,
pamphlets and booklets
about early childhood development,
full of clinical, but cheery, bulleted lists.
When you discipline your child:

Talk your child in a serious, but loving, voice.

the whole thing was a little troublesome
for a woman whose chosen career
is often seen as a kind of
extended mommy-training...
that said, it was immensely
satisfying to carry a briefcase
for a day, cardboard or not.

dad's night

i'm like the dad.
i have one night
a week to cook.
last week i made
the easy meatloaf
from allrecipes.com
this week i made
the chicken marsala
from epicurious.com
i think the leap from
watery beef and ketchup
to shallots and fresh sage
is pretty impressive,
but i don't think i can maintain it,
and i don't know where
on the internet to look next.
maybe i'll call mom
and ask her for one of
her famous soup recipes...
or maybe i'll call and ask dad
if i absolutely have to have waffles
for a legitimate "breakfast for dinner,"
or if he thinks i can squeak by with pancakes.

punch, roll, & crimp

as a former officemax copy center
employee i got excited about
the durable and attactive
spiral bound menus
at tawans, but i had trouble
describing the coil inserter
to my dining companion.
this australian chick
does a much better job.

taste / gustation

tonight the velo rouge cafe screened
two documentaries by local directors
one about native american salt songs
and the dying culture that needs them
one about a man-made salt sea
and the dying birds that need it.
i ate a lemon pasta dish
topped with fresh ground pepper.

happy anniversary

i can't believe its been
six months already!
i'm still trying to catch up
on polishing up my drafts,
but they've multiplied
from 9 or so to about 75,
a good sign... i think...
but a little overwhelming.
one day at a time, right?

psychic dojo

my best friend ordered psychonauts from gamefly,
for old time's sake, because we both loved
it in college. she wrote a final paper
on it and i featured it prominently
in a presentation i gave to the local rotary club.
its still the coolest video game ever created!
in it you're a little psychic kid at a special
summer camp for honing your mental powers.
you collect figments of imagination,
sort mental baggage,
and fight the internal censors.
most of the action takes place
in other people's minds,
and all the levels open off
the collective unconscious.
seeing it again,
i'm not only reminded
how great the game is,
but how lucky i am
that i still get to hang out
every day with a person who
can truly appreciate gems like this:
He isn't dead, his astral projection
just got kicked out of my mind.
And I'll kick your *ass*tral projection
out of my mind too if you don't get moving!

inbox: upcoming

if you live in new york city
and don't see as much serious
avant-garde dance as you should,
go to prism on monday april 23rd at 8pm.
an old acquaintance of mine, biba bell,
emailed me with news of her upcoming show,
and i thought i would pass along the invitation.
the performance will occur in judson church,
a great venue with a remarkable history.
i saw urisov (her choreography collective).
perform once, in a garage, a couple years ago.
i watched from the slanted driveway
with a drippy cup of spiked lemonade.
the girls wore only nylons and turtlenecks,
the boys wore turtlenecks too, and false eyelashes,
the rainbow kind, and nobody cracked a smile.
despite the cold, the cement, the cheap booze,
and my personal bias against dance without music,
the sheer intensity, in particular, of biba's
creative spirit and the power of her
presence as an artist held me still,
kept me absorbed. each breath
was deliberate, and audible.
rarely do i get to experience art
so very cerebral and so very physical
at the same time. this new level in her evolution
sounds exponentially more absurd (jogger-dudes?),
and abstract (repetition, refraction & lack).
i just wish it was happening
in my neck of the woods. so, again,
point is, you go, and tell me all about it, ok?

terrible twos

ingredients for a mouse mess:

ritz crackers
oreos
corn flakes
milk
cheese
apple
orange
banana
jam
peanut butter
sugar
manzanilla olives
pickles
catsup

1. mix together
2. watch 15 toddlers
drop their jaws in awe.

aunt flo's nut cake

journal; the short life and mysterious
death of amy zoe mason
is just as insipid as you can imagine
a mystery novel in scrapbook form
written by sisters who halfheartedly
claim they "found" it, would be.
its full of victorian etchings,
yellow lace, pressed flowers,
and vintage postage stamps,
with a "secret" plot so obvious
the clues are literally highlighted
for the reader. as i was eating
my best friend's perfect
half-vegetarian lasagna
i made her look at the book.
she quickly pointed out
that it is chock full of recipes,
and that we should make one for dessert.
we didn't. but adam gopnik's article,
cooked books, about that very trend
(elaborate food prep descriptions
and recipes in current fiction.)
popped up in the new yorker
during my after-dinner visit
to the loo. he makes a bunch
of scopious and fussy points
about cognition and cooking,
but reading between the lines
he seems to be saying recipes
are lazy writing. in the case
of aunt flo's nut cake
i couldn't agree more.

you are the chosen one

for a non-fangirl it was awfully fun
to watch joss whedon's
not-so-blond future slayer
go from ambivalent
kick-ass chick
(hair down)
to all-grown-up
kick-ass chick
(hair up.)
conquer your fears!
take your own
hero's journey!
slip all 8 issues of fray
one-by-one out
of their plastic sleeves,
and read them in full view
of the public on the bus to work.

hindsight

i was surprised to see in an
onion interview with mindy kaling,
who i only knew as kelly from the office,
that she'd co-written and starred in matt & ben.
as soon as i read that fact her image lit up
and i recognized her in retrospect,
always such a weird sensation.
i saw matt & ben many years ago
at a tiny theater in new york,
in what seems like another life,
with a big group of friends from rpt.
i'd love to say i was a trendsetter,
but i'm sure we went because the tickets
were dirt-cheap. in fact, we took turns standing
while we watched... i miss those guys.

boring zine wins me over

my latest random find from the main library's

"graphic novel" cart, the snakepit book,
is a collection of daily 3-panel strips
by a guy in the austin punk rock scene,

who's life is painfully tedious and shallow.
its page after page of the same...

...go to work, get wasted, see a show,
go to work hungover, get wasted,
go to band practice, watch a movie,
get wasted, go to kinkos hungover...

... for 100s of pages. i constantly wondered

why i was still reading. but, i did keep reading

and by the time i was done, i liked it.
maybe its because the main character
is essentially a smiley face,
and all those pages of smiley faces
activate a primal happy-reflex,
or maybe its because it reminds
me of my bike-messenger artist
ex-boyfriend, or maybe
even though my life
is tedious and shallow
in a totally different way
from his, the book captures
the hum-drum pleasures
and pains of an ordinary life
so perfectly, that something
in me can't help but applaud.
plus, you can see his drawing skills
slowly improve over the years, which is fun.

classic rock

speaking of the postmodern novel,
how 'bout some collaborative hyper-fiction?
http://www.myspace.com/176387641
is a work in progress, not for the squeamish
or the internet-illiterate, about a pervy janitor
and a few other residents of fairlawn, plot tbd.

block quote: we cannot skip

"Kaatu," Gladys said in a mysterious howl, and here we could skip ahead if you know what I mean. It is always tempting to skip past words we do not understand, the parts of a relationship which confuse us, and arrive at a nice clear sentence-- "They clearly weren't in love anymore," or "The yellow-billed magpie can be found exclusively in the coastal valleys south of San Francisco Bay, and there are three common words beginning with the letter A that describe it," or "She was wearing some sort of cape," all of which appeared in the report filed by the surviving and more talkative detective. But we cannot skip to that or it wouldn't be a love story. We cannot skip the way we look in photographs, or our own affectations, or the way we like our coffee, or the way the people we love like their coffee, even though they like it some bad, bad way. We must suffer through all of it, without skipping any tiny thing, and anyway it was a shawl she was wearing.

--daniel handler, adverbs

this grown-up book
by "lemony snickett."
claims to be about love,
but it's more an exercise

in language for its own sake.
it interlocks carefully,
without being neat.

it layers and loops back

on itself; the vocabulary

becomes personal. i don't

recognize his version of love,

but the way he describes it

reminds me of the difficulty

of trying to describe

what any certain important

word means, like when i try

to explain what i mean by "loneliness."

this particular effort is so keenly

in evidence that i can't decide whether

or not to forgive the book

for the elements that make me

want to dismiss it as just more

annoying postmodern fiction.

the action is beside the point,

always on the verge of flippant.

the prose is stylized, too pop

and too pretentious

at the same time.
i'm on the fence.
i should reread it.
i skipped too much.
have you read it?
can you weigh in?

perpetual huddle

Friday, April 27, 2007

bad poetry and good

Thursday, April 26, 2007

april

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

my first baby box

Sunday, April 22, 2007

dad's night

Friday, April 20, 2007

punch, roll, & crimp

Monday, April 16, 2007

taste / gustation

happy anniversary

Saturday, April 14, 2007

psychic dojo

inbox: upcoming

star trek: the next generation

Thursday, April 12, 2007

terrible twos

Monday, April 9, 2007

aunt flo's nut cake

Saturday, April 7, 2007

you are the chosen one

Thursday, April 5, 2007

hindsight

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

boring zine wins me over

Sunday, April 1, 2007

classic rock

block quote: we cannot skip