though my running mate is out of town and my knees either inactive or flaming for the past two weeks, i decided at the last minute to do the kommen 5k this morning just to see. it was beautiful weather (for running on lower wacker) and i turned in a 31:09 (which is good for me). queued up at the start right behind the elite women runners and ate their magnificent dust. went straight from run to german class- which everyone takes very solemnly- and i got to be the first, when called on, to admit i wasn't following a bloody thing, so the teacher wrote on the board how to say "next person please" and moved on. p.m. dinner and drinks with m & l around the corner from an octoberfest headlined by the human league. saw that tomorrow night there are dorsky films down the street, brought to us by providence.

Last night’s poems: These poems are being made to reduce knee pain, therefore any and many use/s of turmeric and ginger. Curried quinoa pilaf with raisins and almonds, and ginger roasted acorn squash.

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Math Ados (or Word Problems)

There was a berry-picking on the line

to show the median of

the numbers displayed by the people

participating in the contest

plotting, numbers for pints

of berries picked at the end of the Earth day

…

Had five numbers been mean, and growling, woken you, with a flip, pinned you to stair, shaken you free of the near sixth iteration of snooze, mingled sleep with news of the ninety-seven pound carp, bighead, that lept the fish fence, electric, and is imminent to all our waterways, weighs ninety-seven pounds, water in charge of collecting the daily low temp of Faith had five sand bags to her name.

Got passport picture taken today. I am shifty-eyed and look like I am concealing drugs. In the hot pink and grimly paneled photo joint, a sign: Make checks payable to the Baltic Sea.

Liberal Media?

The Gray Lady is getting about as lame on her geopolit coverage as she's long been in the book review dept. But what's it about? Are there any words in the book itself?
Some clarification/keeping it tidy.
Or is tidy the new bias?

Then the old liberal is simply verbose?

Then: "Do you have an appetizer in your mind?"

Practicing our uuuuhhhhrrr, J getting sicker as the uhr progresses and our accent- not what you in the Midwest here call an O- progressing or sort of.. what do you call this? but this. what do you call a snooze alarm then? Nothing, we just wake up.

Oh man, Europe is kicking our ass in golf too.

Tonight's poems: oat bran banana bread and a quiche of thyme, gruyere and mushrooms. cleaning out fridge for perhaps a move as soon as next weekend.

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9 p.m. last night realized Colleen was in town and playing at the Bottle. Get there immediately. It is purely acoustic instruments, cello with the price tag dangling, sleepy effects pedals.. which is to say me likey.. more process on display than I would have thought, but what she does with a hand-cranked music box with distortion and loops is pure enchantment. In the Wire misc. of the event, she is preceded and followed by spleen-jostling aggression, though the latter was less spleen and more Brazilian Gold Chains meets Grace Jones, a.k.a. phat beats and lame (um, in need of a grave there).

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(Another niche market:)

In Art Institute today, in Art Institute gift shop, Look! There's Hiroshige on a wife-beater!

Just remove this city from my mind, tending Hiroshige or the 15th century in this morning’s to-the-skin elements. Good train karma this week, at least, knock wood. The weather that’s sent us in, making last night cranberry-pumpkin walnut cookies that decided to be little scones, and boding a weekend full of something to do with squash. Hopefully also The Waves, a last peek at the Callahan photos and film, a play, and German lesson number one. Another element of sport, use up the cabinets in advance of dubiously-imminent move. What to do with all those breadcrumbs, pistachios, or a guy on the phone who’s teeth sound very white. Oh spinach, be done with this outbreak already and return.

Reminded of this bit of Warhola by chance by looking at television last night after savasana beside an elevated stop, after wondering how a poem would say, We have accomplished a majority of what we needed to do and no longer need your services. Good luck with your art: "I was walking in Bali, and saw a bunch of people in a clearing having a ball because somebody they really liked had just died, and I realized that everything was just how you decided to think about it. Sometimes people let the same problems make them miserable for years when they should just say so what. That's one of my favourite things to say. So what."

Oh Design (swoon).

Thanks, Andy, for nudging my attention toward Rhinofest. Looks like there's a lot to check out there. I'm putting What Where, The Jesus Fields, and The Climb Up Mount Chimbouzo on my list.

Toward the end of The Immoralist the protagonist possesses no sympathy for others or humility as he regards his quest for life-knowledge supreme, and all others, especially “men of principle,” deluded by their removal from their essential nature. Previously a thinker, a scholar, enrapt with all the subtle beauties of art and the natural world, he says amid the trough of his demise, “Art is leaving me, I feel it. To make room for what else?” That somehow seems one of the more sinister passages of the whole book.

Putting this next to an anecdote told by the rabbi presiding this weekend over a friend’s wedding- since bride and groom were both artists, he mentioned a Kabbalist scholar who interpreted one of the texts dealing with the creation of the universe, saying that G initially filled all space, and there being no room for what he wanted to create, he contracted or withdrew part of himself to make space for man and his world. This, it was proposed, underscores how inseparable humility is in the process of creation. It’s a resonant metaphor, especially when creativity can seem like the most egotistic of pursuits. Anyone who can direct me to a name and/or article that mentions this interpretation more specifically I’d be much obliged to.

Terrible dreams of wounded animals. Again/still thinking (redoubled) of being expats. Fire drill planning a foray. Decembery, this week friends from overseas in plaid rooms. Riding bikes to Hamlet and back after dark weaving through early concert leaves around the museums. Hearing final strains as Tom Petty, alive is just down the street. Hamlet –and much else- enriched by time away and meanwhile years encountering the princes and nincompoops of the world. All week now with the squeaky knees and kale. Blood types, jammy pants. Trying to find a next place to live, trying to find out who keeps taking our mail.

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Such attention is the only thing that seems to make cheerfulness possible again, regardless of the ways the end is being written around us.

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today's poem output: roasted yam and black bean tacos with tomatillo salsa.

Why does the Merch Mart have snowmen in their windows? At nearer seeing, they are the hollow-bodied brides in Vera Wang. Didn’t know I was glassless in all this drizzle.

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Good fall for the MCA with the design exhibit Massive Change and Nov. Tuttle. Mau gives a talk on Saturday for anyone not attending nuptials.

in my sonosphere

podcasts about food, johannes ockeghem, daedelus tried and true mix on radio anda, elliott sharp’s inbox and persian 45's.

as a weather
convert ‘ve
been away
so long feathers, silverfish
fall out of books
kept next
to the bed when
was the page
where I picked up at “frost in the face”

This weekend: bloggers incarnate, D Series in its new space, thanks People Who Came, thanks mustachios, picking bindis and fruit salts, faking it at wine to get another pour, convincingly for the good stuff, the rules as we go, walking forth, just forth, and finally asleep under a spider armature of opera’s greatest hits at mil park on the first feeling night of autumn. Today raining around the coyote and baklava in the atelier.
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I thought I should be reading fiction, but then there would be nothing else to say.

away from poetry for a time for food
travels music and
running but the season of discrete
returns and monsters set me aright or so
says KSM “no I am not OK, you sat on me/oh well, enough about me”