Today: Churlish like a Chloe at computers, a Tarzan something makes my day after morningvendorjerkism. Wind patrons rubbing gusty, particulate eyes sitting down to mango lassi following, that is, we, last night’s flashlight on fish readiness (BBQing in the night). Damn it all, vendorguy in indiscriminate city giving me e-lip, Oprah and the World Cup’s successful coup on our EuroJune. So what. It’s nice out. Finally. Back to Plan A to get out of town to perfect my grammar and frequent usage mistakes that impede or distort meaning? TGITarzan and lovely rubricspeak.

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“why are you walking like that?” tells me it’s a good day to forgo the run.

Happy bday lavamat.
Your present will be a blanching
of this moldy backdrop, a tepid white,
this year’s must-have, and do that
without losing
history or other muckings up.
In a physical phase, a daily
run and writing in the margins
“peace and so forth.”
I’m yours, vicarious,
gleaning my common stains-
olive oil, ice cream,
wine- the pastimes of managemen.

current reading

in glowing paypal eyes i misread
petroleum hat oscillates at a higher velocity than even spin
bed bath and beyond redemption
as if i needed convincing the brilliant line
i was too sleepy to get out of bed
to write down ended in afford's adjective sense

**

overheard on train:
"sometimes i think that if i was horribly injured by an accident and didn't die i'd be so grateful to still be alive that i wouldn't even sue anybody."
"not me."

low res "is going to be a hit hit hit"
fela koti, dishwasher safe
high res Rue with a beard of food
sweetening the b-
actor in the sound booth
sound more angry you history
pre-contra low res shadowy
insurgent restless leg

Someone stole some laptops in the office over the weekend. Dusting for fingerprints, a plush frog only knows. This weekend, revisited 1994, determined I’m (old/)in wardrobe and lyric-knowing only there anymore. Visited the “position of getting all initial responsy on your ass.” And popmodernism.org. Took a beachball in the face for art, part of a performance about intelligent design. Today I like your skirt/hair/shoes/eyes/nose. Thanks figured it was time to bring the legs back out.

At strange metabolic odds with myself this week, the result of an inherently lazy person starting to run. Jog. Dash. Tread. And drink coffee. And stay up late. Cultivating the frequent sensation of wanting to simultaneously nap and leap. It aids 2 a.m. yammerings that first generation NY School is sweetfully decoy by degrees. That thankfully it’s there saying that one isn’t always singlemindedly stroking a horse or stroking that horse algebraically. And being told by a psychologist over beers that we do a good job of analyzing ourselves is either horrifying or a comforting, new disorder. Like not counting little imaginary things, for example my Points disability. Or, more accurately, my lack of faith in points. My troubles include: sports points. Being a teacher and being expected to enforce Points. Edible points otherwise known as spaghetti. My jerk streak says they're just another iteration of heaven.. the leftover carrot/stick of our animal origins. Call me a hungry crank with an achy vastus medialis. Oh let the random air bring me the office sprite bearing sweet, sly meeting-edible things who I haven’t seen all week.

I also learned last night that in spite of lenten promotions, bowling alley vegetarian sandwiches are inedible. Or is that unedible? I was too busy watching the children behind the counter toddling near the deep fryer to notice that my sandwich was a hoagie roll concealing a mess of blue-green sweet relish and a sheet of plasticine cheese. Looked like it was leaking antifreeze.

Discrete’s tonight. Please come. Flyers for the French event are actually made. In advance.

“Days/
are shorter, more limpid, are like a kiss,/
neither dry nor wet nor on the lips/
that sends a light shock in rings/
through all the surface of the skin.” (from Going, James Schuyler)

I need to mate my phone with my home computer to bring here some fuzzy pics of my lunchtime peninsula, how I always forget, my thoughts too peninsular, that work is a ten minute walk from this- is it man-made, a spit? This is where I sat with a marching band audibly distant. This will later be inserted. A silent campus bets you the lines are down at Mt. Everest. I bet it is quiet at the buffet Everest. I haven’t heard these kind of waves in months, more than one, several harmonicas. Are these waves just now, a buffet progression.

now he'll never let me sleep past 6... bean made famous by zafusy.

also, jordan is kind.

this all reminds me of the film of tokohiro sato making one photograph. over the course of several minutes we watch as he swims to various points off a rocky shore and shines a mirror back at the camera (video and still cameras in the same location). swim. repeat. a lengthy process of relaying light. a lengthy process of relaying one moment.

more legitimate dangers. um, yeah. the oil bone connected to the war bone connected to the debt bone, but only over beers would the rapture solve anything, settle a bet. didn't realize rapture anticipation was national policy. put the environment on its to-do list.

the news isn't all bad. just in time for our trip to spain, a chilled out eta.

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blogger has been foul the last few days so here's hoping it's going to recall posting a post without all the template scurvy. how's to.

name that fungi.

this morning on train a man next to me talks softly, taps, points to consecutive bags of dried mushrooms. beautiful specimens all, hooped together on a silver ring. like carpet samples. i have to break his concentration to leave. wishing general thoughts of good luck on all mushroom tests.

dreamt of an uber nasdaq that was like the polls reporting in, a daily rating in dollars in the stock we put in celebrity, like any other brand(ing). i open a newspaper with new purpose and there in the fineprint, as if i were first learning to read, is Britta right next to Brittany Spears. now i understand business, i think. Brittany's got to cut in front of somebody in line at the Walmart today to boost her share.

another consecutive thing.. a series of graffiti pieces- some roof, some building- crossed out in memory yellow and the large, bad handwriting above, "smile you are being watched."

great post and comments going at tony tost's regarding online poetry culture. until online journals and blog community are deemed legitimate by the institution wing, it strikes me as a euphoric time/"place" of quality work enjoying an even playing field. the unassociated phenomenon in austin sounds like it was a progressive chapter in virtual community making a segue into actual, fleshy community too. how long can it remain a secret? shh.

**

coincidentally, jameson is giving a lecture at northwestern on 4/3.

**

kind of related- a woman i've never met here in the office keeps bringing me food. three times this week "psst. kerri!" has preceded a croissant or fruit salad being passed to me like a drug deal. i haven't asked how this started or what it's all about, just nod conspiratorily and accept the offering.

repeating myself, oh my god, was that (reading last night at danny’s) good. it was like a séance for berrigan, ginsberg, others i am leaving out who have picked poetry up and moved it a mile down the road for a better view. and not just because chuck wrote some extra howlers into a supermarket in california, or that the spitfire candor of susie when she reads is something one can see jump off the page and join her.

but because i was too agape to take notes, because chuck said godforsaken computer that the greeks chose not to name, and because susie said i like tits but only my own.

someone with a press or just money, please bring her work back into print.

influx of several good, new books in the last week, I’ve read the first page of them all, maybe next to read the second page of them all and on, glitch rock for far sight and antsy.

see also: kenny g’s letters

what was the yummy trappist beer poured in a tulip-shaped glass we were drinking that ended in sous? someone who also drank it please comment in.

"when's this bitch gonna feed me the good wet kibble?"
right now, early, so's i can scoot to danny's for chuck and susie's reading.

Type A morning but delightfully tourist to others' everything as points points. And J unexpectedly on my block for lunch and to Thai place B where we decide so many things are lining up Buckminsterly. He has some mail that he's brought all this way because it looks unexpected, a happy package of surprise book from James- thanks James!- and something forwarded from former employer as a love letter from one of my ladies which is really hate mail and not meant for me but someone else on the staff with a similar name. "The stirfry stinks! And you misspelled Goulash!" Universe, thanks for reiterating.

**

a very good ides of march getting (J) palpably closer to done/doctorism, a final concert to be put on next month will be anything but "a 40-minute stretched out moth fart."

**

here heres (or is that hear hears?) to stephanie's consideration of avatar manipulation amidst an awp roundup that, like many other roundups, sounds like it was more dazzling- all out woodstock- than the chicago year when there wasn't nearly as much of a nexus of unassociated activity. was it that the unassociateds were less eager to vacation to a chicago march when true march is upon every other last nether? like tonight: 2-4 more inches of snow coming. goundhog, how you vex me.

Today, eaten and misreading: elf-like leaving of houjicha, aggressive sidewalk flyering now being done by cheerleaders who bellow spirit at non flyer takers down the street, my one chance to feel festive, you are spam personified, I yell, or want to, there, on the floor, flourishes a parole, worse than the mcd’s sidewalk pep crew, bread, bread, need a new gig, make that several, packing lavamatic bags for new space, think of ten things to say when entering someone’s personal space, my hoop has four right angles, do we fit? or just, my hoop! my hoop! “this all has to go” and other reveries of capital, “wouldn’t be bad marketing,” perhaps we ought to feel up the imagination, used to be ashbery before my flip-this-house astigmatism, happy pi day to my rate of deceleration, happy tattoo, math friend.

It is city tradition to dye the river green and move St. Patty’s up to the weekend before so that Saturday and Sunday may be for parade-making and unceasing green merry. Like New Year’s we have no part of this. It may have slimmed the turnout for last night’s Jules reading at Myopic, and that of Bill M. who in the end abstained, or just told us about his reading which he said was the same basic thing as the reading itself… made for a special-feeling, private darkened corner of bookstore reading- Jules'- with slides of Ronald Regan. And the new book- Jules'- really very new- in existence for 3 days- and the work an exhilarating rhetorical smash-up that made me want to drop everything and get political. Afterwards drinks at Rodan where Bill said it was the end of copyright awareness week and J who explained the films he remixes without so far getting sued joined us just prior to the arrival of food. There was talk of surveillance, cyrptonesia, identity theft, the once-held belief that one could cut open any part of the body and find evidence of insanity. And there was staying up late and feeling sadly not enough weekend left, and waking up this morning unusually before the alarm and hour of snooze, more unseasonable warmth- fog and in the sixties going to work followed by bp elevating frustration at crashing old operating systems, so much so that I had to go to the gym in the building and get on a machine and pretend to be chased. Then outside to get lunch and the police have the building surrounded, flashing cars parked askew blocking roads and yellow tape. Thinking: bomb threat? No one evacuated the building, I’ll just get some quick noodles and issue self a reminder that tonight 24 is on, maybe Edgar really didn’t get killed. Getting back inside you eat noodles and forget about potential got-the-building-surrounded danger and see an email that explains debris was blown off adjacent, under-construction building . Isn’t that right, second person? Yes, and more snow is expected this evening.

first jacketless day since... plus miraculous sun. long walk and walked right into the st. pat's- forgot!- preparations idling. the step dancing kids warming up next to the oscar meyer weiner mobile- the only motorized food? went to lake against the throngs of green. we're in red forgetting florida used to be FLA until- thanks Lou Reed. MB on his way there now after bon chance sushi thursday- that preceded lie low friday.. not the fish but the drinks and no sleep. sweet jane. J, "you could learn this one."

100,000 marched for immigrants' rights today in Chicago

Suddenly perfect Seattle weather today- 57 and moist- something innate, natively pleasing. Noticed on the train that the Army/Navy store next to the Belmont stop is being demolished, for new condos that will bear all the architectural distinction of my cubicle, and as we sat loading in commuter freight I looked at the reluctant buckling of 100 year old boards, layers of space where I piled on the Soviet clearances in my late high school-early college years. If I were off today I would take a long walk and write another piece for my new Walks series (oh, don’t say that word, must find something akin to “the Scottish play” for “series”). But since I’m not I’ll try not to be too bitter about it. I have to give a presentation this afternoon about something I know very little about owing, mostly, to my perpetual lack of corporate fluency. Bullet points so phallocentric, numbers, letters, big and small even worse. Oh for a rhizomatic workplace. Give me Euro-June (may be back on). Vamanos Berlin.

**

Uh oh. Condi's making her "we're about to bomb you" face.

**

Also noticed a sign of decade-old gentrification in decay—the beige back end of a building facing North Ave. by the Sedgewick stop peeling away to reveal years of unchecked graffiti like back when Manhattan was dirty. Somewhere near this building was an old funeral home that became a sculptor’s squat, briefly, where Jeff played a gig with Issa and Manolis that had a convenient platform for his drum kit, i.e. where the corpse got displayed. I have a vague memory of something unfortunate happening with Nikos and a wooden hulk of a chair with wings jutting out at its sides, drawing words out of a hat for some sort of parlor game and a fragrant bonfire somehow then permitted in the middle of city.

To My Eye-Hand Coordination

My problems with elevators in the morning even when empty aftershave’s full olfact and thinking Amelie of other people’s affectations am the first to jab the point of our destination in common to a degree of plot-foiling holdover years accidentally preserved in the center of a restaurant most vulnerable to attack in case of ninjas be seated with no back turned in case of ninja attacks I want to be reading Schuyler instead of trouble shooting a very Brady nine-part square asking what constitutes interaction bonusly asking “what time of year do most tornadoes ocurre [sic]“ from Wichita —now— into the basement in fact.

Too abouty. I find this hand drawn criticism in some poetry volumes, beside selections in lit mags or anthologies that I prowled through a few years ago in my hey day of policing anything that appeared too blindly trusting of the signfier. This was the same period of time I stopped listening to music with lyrics because it seemed to incessantly reduce (intrude upon) the scope of the music’s (own) (thousands of) possiblities. A straight diet of IDM and prepared pianos if only to stay away from the iron-clad Thought/Point A and Word/Point B. Now I hear and read Thought/Point A, Word/Point X, Y, Z. Don’t know if this is always being asked of the work, but it’s my reading condition.

What got me toward a charge of Aboutiness in my own writing lately: First I thought, I don’t want to write “good” poems, just poems. Then, I don’t want to write poems, I just want to write. I don’t know if this is mathematical. Euclid was a three-block street, with, I think, a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

dreamt I found out that I'm a year older owing to a lifetime of faulty math.

*

on photography..

but an oscillating reference, the light
stops halfway toward the viewer
or description like a thunderstorm over
the desert, one can see it end
to end distantly contained

today:
-retiring pismo- her replacement is in. now to move everything over just so.
-found out i'll be reading at woodland on 4/21. i think i'm also reading at a branch of the chicago public library on 4/15. going to have to look into that.
-i want to kiss librarians for stuff like this.
-my loose thought ends are going away. instead i'm thinking "time for a haircut."

this weekend:
-hometown (for all intents and purposes) now has a planned parenthood which has brought out all of the fetus-waving crazies to block traffic on main road through town.
-on attempts at revision.. to just leave these old pages out to be covered by a new snow.

Having cable means that television’s previous use as sleeping pill now causes slight sleep deprivation because I want to stay up and watch things. Like last night was the first I’d heard about the thousand+ year old cisterns modern-day Istanbul is built on, these cisterns, rows of stone columns literally bearing the weight of a metropolis. Que Calvino. Plus the columns were made of the ancients’ junk heap, a carved head of a Medusa used as a shim.

Now I realize what all of this antsiness is about… with my itinerant and adjunct employments and student status I’ve always had a block of time off to look forward to catching up with my thoughts, but I haven’t had a week off since last February, which was also the last time I went anywhere requiring an airplane, and a year is too long to stay still. How on earth did Americans get talked into this 2 weeks off per year deal? Feels interminable. No wonder we’re all depressed, too tired to take political action, on meth.

So I’m thinking of one dislocating week off I could possibly do— writing, meditation and touching a piece of nature or two would be a guaranteed part of the scenario if I did a week at Naropa’s summer session. Just a little Week 1, Joan Retallack.. cue heavenly light. Should I?

oh, media

can't believe the tribune is giving a forum for such views! (and all this time i thought keillor was easy listening, crocheting by the fire fare.)

maybe he can lead the charge of minnesotans against another round of trade center footage before the pr team reinfects the rest of us. do they really expect this to work.. again? haven't even the staunchest supporters of the war tired of having their fears played like a fiddle?

Biopics, nuclear waste, via Swiss

Watched Walk the Line last night. And two things, a. I’m still waiting for a biopic about an artist that acknowledges the centrality of the creative process to his/her life. The most extraordinary individuals are rendered to formula like so much bacon drip: the innocence shattered by a devastating sibling incident that will haunt __ through adulthood, dream, marriage, stardom, drinking/drug habit, marriage on the skids, redemption. And b. actors never convinced me they were Johnny and June. Reminds me of something Maddin wrote about Tom Cruise, scrubbed so free of personhood, he’s an excellent surface for characters. Not a compliment. See also: flatness. Aw shit, now everyone googling Tom Cruise is going to end up here. Hello. Not a fan. J asked if this was a symptom of their iconic status, if that makes it impossible for a celebrity to really be absorbed by the viewer as a complete character within the world of the film. If I’m expecting too much from a Hollywood film or if I’m just expecting too much. I don’t think so. I do think that Keanu Reeves was meant to play an ecumenical orthodontist however.

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My wistfulness about Spiral Jetty yesterday was due in part to CLUI, a valuable resource in my recent moonings over environmental structures- natural and built- and poetry. I’m having a hard time thinking of writing under the aegis of Poetry, Prose or Prose Poetry, so I’ve decided to just scrap it all and call them walks. I hear an epigraph:
“When walking I lose authorship.” Thank you Lygia Clark. I knew that thread would someday resolve. 5,827 more to go. What I also found on the CLUI website is that the radioactive remains of the first sustained nuclear chain reaction are buried in the woods not far from where I grew up. That will trump my previous excuse- “I’m selfish and lazy”- for shirked duties.

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All this and a new dusie!