I’m certain I’m the last person to have read this book, though it’s been at the top of my list since before it came out and she read from it in Providence in the spring of 2002. I remember then I –and it seemed like everyone I knew- was still so stunned by the events of the fall of ’01 and the proliferation of flags and the tough act our government was putting on for the world.. and while we were bewildered, Gladman’s vision cut right through this: to a microcosm of activists who are both uncertain and undeterred. At one point in reading I thought, “when people want to be inspired by words it’s really a desparate time, perhaps they have already given up.” The action here is of human relation and its sustenance of subtexts.. that when characters actually speak out loud it is like a tracery weapon- precise in its own right but revealing every contrast of truth made by its very existence.

At one point a reporter says, ”Now speech is hardly noteworthy. It’s only what one has thought.” Perhaps there was much to predetermine this, but it’s only now that some public debate has begun- 3 years after the invasion of Iraq- about the media presenting white house p.r. as factual news, the unseemly process by which preemption was justified, the choreography of “leaks”.. that average readers like myself can read this and marvel at Gladman’s perceptiveness in her ability to wage the insurgent efforts of a handful of characters who doubt themselves and one another at every turn just slightly less than they distrust a speaker who says, “We are all one.. against an abomidable enemy.”

Since Friday: At what point does Illinois give? Mapquest me. If I could swim. The X-burbs making a moat of traffic around the city. In time. For the best open mic ever at Woody P. Ro’s continuing Bicycle, surprise Lisa not yet in New Z, and afterwards. To the P’lish Falcon where TV was convinced away from hockey to the lip-reading edition of a VH-1 Jim B. Where balls were examined for signatures by George Bowering, where I was continually limbo to pool. Late. Saturday driving back past all the deer carcasses I would have killed the night before, and after brunch, walking, falling mid-day asleep to Cubs game. In this, thirty years unchanged. Out. M, L, and J confer. Being an asshole is the new nice. In this, pragmatism seeks a flair for the dramatic, like Skynard opens a wound. Monday: God save my technical difficulties, increase my bewilderment in other things.

Current reading has that Francis Bacon je ne sais quoi.

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Stories from a country pastor about driving a magazine delivery truck in Chicago, being pulled over and paying off cops with Playboy and Good Housekeeping (for the wife).

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Things found in a house from 1864:
2 pillars made of redwood, a photo of Alfred E. Newman, a hosiery box containing 1 dried rose, 1 woman’s hair bow, a lock of hair, coupons for hose guaranteed not to run, someone watching from the second floor.

Poem beginning with a line misread

one hundred clouds empty sincerity
one in counting
clouds one hundred of anything
empty one for me
clouds one hundred under one
sincerity’s once over
once over empty clouds
once empty one
empty sincerity
one hundred too empty
a number to number
to empty a cloud into a gauge
to number sincerity possibly
passibly
passibly empty
passible hundreds
one hundred empties
distribute into a shape
about everything

Didn’t notice Easter this year, didn’t have to be in a room with a ham.

Monday.. the taking, the talking, the clarifying, the finishing, the passing, the handshake of oral exams (J).

Photo of a blind and armless boy maimed in a WW2 bombing reading braille with his lips at AIC struck me more than all the modernists yesterday. Also the exquisite tile work and manuscript pages from 13th century Iran. Pouring the absence of depiction into calligraphy, the devotion to the word as the object of art.

Are we pissed off enough yet with our leaders?
Accountability several years in the making, though he did one good thing in office with the moratorium on the death penalty. Will that be discredited with him?
Pulitzer journalism, is the media making a comeback?
And Jules’ research gets a mention from a former supporter of the war.

three male purple finches on our porch today? i think.

started reading this today and will have much more to say.

so far
her opaline
epistemological wingbeats.

My reading yesterday took place in this room with the look and smell of my first grade class c. 1980. Fabulous. Reading amid the coda to last week's flu=The Mudra by Johnny Cash. Nice actually. Finally able to hit the low notes in It Ain't Me Babe too. Afterwards a walk through Uptown and a noodle sandwich amid streets of little Vietnam's phosphorescent sweets and beef steam.

I just finished 400 years of history in 3 days checking a thing that was the Mayflower through the W. years.. that's more violence than I can take without a $3 beer special at the end of the day. And so.. before the special, before everyone else's Good Friday furlough, for two hours well-killed, I gathered the Concerto Form under oaks planted when Northwestern U. meant of the far-flung territories and read in the sun and under the rain of seedy tendrils clicking off 40 feet above, noting other things in bloom: hyacinth, tulips (some), forsythia, daffodils, magnolia (just starting) and a flowering white tree I'm not sure (dogwood?). This is my parlor trick for- supplements my lack of stamina- my running mate, naming things. I need to study up. On this day in history: lincoln was shot, the titanic hit the iceberg and a grade school bully was born.

just as i finished the weather a bundle of bronze skull chaps. five goodies by inman, mead, sims, samuels and timm. sporty good weather for reading outside like good weather for fantasy/foosball. little here is the result of my looking for days at pre and civil war websites for the beige. oh you primary sources, i just may.. (add a pound?). other mail delights: "see the world through tut's eyes... and save!" misread: "one hundred clouds empty sincerity."

Made it back among the living and strength returning by the hour after strange morning of near-aneurysm. Reading The Weather and “spring seems begun” got me out and buying flowers, making bouquets and leaving them secretly in the cubicles of the never-get-outs, the stressed, the menstruating… lovelies all... count that one point against the beige.

Watched depressing film full of great chasms between art and life. Very NY, very 80’s, which helped to discredit it enough for me to not completely abandon the rest of the day.
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The signal bell of rush hour trains. The blinds slapping the dusty sill with sun. Basketball being played in the alley outside my window- one of the few irregular rhythms of the city- probably why it drives us crazy. Give me the el. Behind in everything. Virus featuring fever, day three.

William Carlos Williams, the heartbeat of America.

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misreading: I'm writing sentences here of an unbred resort.

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week please end.

If it’s an 08 Jeb I’m moving to Berlin.
If it’s a night at SonoTQ it’s an I Ching of muggees and expats telling me to move to Amsterdam.
If only we had a vital union movement like France.
I’ve been tattooless this long and haven’t yet gone to Japan.
If I’m managing to get any work done today someone who’s still talking about Janet Jackson’s nipple will opine “…classy. Probably one of the most positive movies about cannibalism ever made.”
If I miss the Danny’s reading tonight it will be for making up a sleep debt.

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My photo “my” is up at UES this week and just Sunday I noticed that that building is up next for demo’ing.

Saturday will begin our search for a place like “my” to live in that is further away from the devilish forces of spiffing.

I want a T-shirt that would make my el stop proud.

saturday, part 2: what we do to be near fire.. bon voyage party of a friend going to build a desert utopia: “you know in star wars where they went to buy the millennium falcon? it looks like that.” and party was 20 feet up a shaky ladder positioned in gangway to old tracks where a living room had been made of lamps, hubcaps, bonfire, tables and chairs. eventually this will be a “linear park” but now is the most roguish fun one can have steps from fully gentrified bucktown seeping west. we walked to california along this high up and weed trees were full of birds and humboldt blocks typically raucous were silent. thinking of getting down, were told an embankment one block west existed for those who preferred a mere scurry to the steep, shaky ladder descent. stories of the homeless brandishing screwdrivers near said embankment and general paranoia as we stepped over charred mattresses and strewn clothing denoting camp did not prevent us from seeking the scurry option. scurry option cut the height in half, but resulted in 10 foot drop to the street which we declined. thinking of going down the ladder with much trepidation, a woman ascends replete with sandwiches, entire platter in one hand. thoughts of bathroom and not having to climb with sandwiches aided my descent.

missing our former hood and a block from our old place where we learned never to assume that green means go because someone is frequently making an escape through the red, two cars attacking each other with a smash and continued pursuit past us with parts akimbo like mel gibson was clutching the hood equaled a night beyond the usual taco cap.

saturday, part 1: pierrot lunaire at the mca
i like spectacle, i like gamealan shadowtry, but on puppets, as in the production here, i still range luke warm to fully creeped. especially when their handlers are a squeaky-floorboard, unmasked crowd.. doesn't do it for my suspension of disbelief. that said, the first piece on the program and the schoenberg were beautifully staged and performed, especially by 8th blackbird musicians who move around the stage and are a very animated part of the whole. the costuming for pierrot was also notable- the flutist's garb resembled a highly constructed upside down tulip, the carinetist resembled an inverted bell of his instrument.. a quilted, straight-jacket theme unifying the ensemble with the whimsy of a midsummer night's dream. the soprano rendered her struggle with the muse with precision and moxie with a presence and tone more debra harry than brunhilde. it's reassuring to see "experimental" music given such resources and venue, but really, this is part of the canon, so it ought not be that unusual. this piece is nearly 100 years old.

more for the bin of the never-saw, but just discovered the website: Art: 21.

as soon as there's time, more to say on pierrot lunaire with creepy puppets, how to get up and get down from a party on abandoned elevated train grounds, 2 a.m. smash-up derby and car chase down north ave. perpendicular to a green light and us, car signaling pursuit with the vibrato of a perpedicular wheel. remembering when scary was fun.

Tuesday Tuesday Tuesday!