This week’s poetry output: oatmeal raisin cookies (critically acclaimed), green bean and chickpea curry w/ raita (to the tune of "paperback writer") and baked sweet potato fries. All reading lately is how to: work specs and recipes. It's like the brain on new math.. or how it's supposed to… simplify eventually… toward the elegance of no remainders. A clerk waiting for me to pay him for a magazine and me waiting for him to give me a receipt. "Transform your anger" he suggests, pointing to the copy on the front of my magazine. "Oh, I'm not angry, I just forgot how to pay."

my regional and language hearts go pitter pat when the discussion turns to chicago dialect...
vouching for most of this, it's stuck on me, especially after a few beerce. or when i call my parents who live far enough away from the lake to have totally different weather: what's it doin by you? "how's by you?" made it into a poem last year, but it's never gotten a single caw of recognition when i've read it out at readings. ah well.

Caution Mathias, the lavamat is where memes go to die, but anyway..

Brain gargle book- The Anti-Aesthetic: essays on postmodernism edited by Hal Foster
Xanax book- I-Ching
Tofu-pressing book- Life Style by Bruce Mau
This week's train book- The Immoralist by Andre Gide
Giddy book- something something Jacob Delafon by Keith Waldrop
Book that I just lent out based on some random conversation that I hope I see again- Black Elk Speaks
Human heart book- Some Thing Black by Jacques Roubaud
"My neuroses could be even more jeweled" book- The Atelier Tovar by Guy Maddin
Book that I wish didn’t mean Poetry to most people I say "poetry" to- that navel-gazing verse by Jewel, whatever her book's called
"Maybe next year" book- Ulysses
Absinthe book- The Last Days by Raymond Queneau
Air guitar book- Polyverse by Lee Ann Brown
Book that makes me want to wear a doublet- Hamlet
"It’s all been thunk before" book- Silence by John Cage
Book that I always want to be reading- Your Ancient Sea Through by Hoa Ngyuen

last weekend, driving: john wayne’s birthplace, stereolab through prophetstown, the history of the beatles’ revolver, corn is high, tassled and the road not afraid to be boring, no radio or cds for most of the trip and I am not afraid to be bored, ronald reganalia, driver at a rest stop lurching onto sidewalk takes out a planter- concerned iowans immediately repot the flowers- driver then casually exercises his poodle.

last weekend, still: horse stance, virtual poets are real and eat african food (thanks again, anne!), movie starring john wayne, movie starring jet li, feeling an abdomen (not mine!) for a foot, qi-conscious and fairie-like orbs in my photos of a construction zone.

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this week
cooking like mad:
almond-fig muffins
seven vegetable moroccan curry w/ couscous

(tonight)
wilted greens (Red Russian Kale, a.k.a. Ragged Jack) from Jenny’s garden, wild rice w/ pine nuts & cranberries and poached sole w/ lemon, thyme and white wine

(tomorrow)
spicy sesame green bean salad
mango sticky rice

j:
veggie chili
dissertation (!)

dusting off my Discrete helmet and getting things ready for the fall season- see sidebar- and came across this interesting blog and post by kass. she's the one writer i know who makes expansive and crystalline creative use of the cultural critique i often hear lit-critically minded folk talk over beers. well beyond the kvetch scale, where the onus is usually assigned to those arbiters of one convention or another, she reassigns the onus to herself- and hopefully, by example, us (sentence fraternizers).

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i'm hitting the road for omaha early tomorrow morning. what else clears the head like an 8-hour drive through corn? bringing a friend's dictaphone to try a new process.

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fell asleep on albert brooks' real life, but will attempt another watch when fully lucid. the ungainly helmeted cameramen attempting to blend in while "real people" "act natural" are hilarious. apparently long before the advent of reality television brooks was spoofing it.