Managed to get the heat turned on in my office yesterday morning and now can’t get it turned off. The only time it *sounds* like it’s off is when the knob is turned to 7, its highest setting. At the off position it makes a consistent hissing noise.
Reading:
Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. I feel like showering this book with hyperbolic praise but that’s not really the tone of answering back to this book. It’s something I’ve been looking for. One of the things. One of the types of thing.
Started Vanity Fair last night. Not sure if I’ll make it much further, with Reese Wisherspoon’s visage so firmly projected onto the Rebecca Sharp of my mind.
Finished Lying Awake, as all indicators suggest, in a few short hours. Picked this up mostly so that I could finally move it from the borrowed pile into the return to Catherine pile (which is bigger than you might think; Catherine’s a real big lender! The minute she walked into the room, I could tell she was a poet of distinction.) but in the meantime am now obsessed, not with taking vows, but rather with those types of temporal lobe epilepsy associated with hypergraphia. Somewhat old boring thoughts about linkages between writing, art-making and illness. Maybe some more interesting linkages, how can I know yet? Imagining the entire function of the brain on the model of unconscious or psychic experience-assembly.
It’s not taking vows, bur rather that I’m built around the form of answering the altar call. And then again when it doesn’t stick. Strong urge after yesterday’s talk on the militarization of the U.S. / Mexico border to live in the desert and distribute water. But where I am, I could be making some cold calls or writing letters. Of how to answer the call and still ‘feel it.’
At yesterday’s talk I also duh remembered that election day falls on the last day of Dia de los Muertos. Day of the Dead on this particular campus will honor those who have perished on or around the border.
Yarn-balls. Entanglement.
Thanks to the narrative, I have learned how to watch baseball over the course of the last seven days. Watch out! Next I’m learning how to throw.
Dana Ward sent me Helena Bennett’s chapbook, You Don’t Have to Call me Merle Haggard (Anymore) along with the recent Boog pamphlet of his own poems, what is the line from the last poem of that pamphlet that’s been with me – “the life we love/cannot be lived”? (but then Rankine answers. Responding to the woman at a busstop responding “it’s difficult to live now.”) Bennett’s poem about Ted Williams. Then randomly opening the collected lectures to Spicer dissing Ted Williams.
Spooky!
Thinking a lot about Spicer and craft. How it gets in the way.
In summation, and not to mean, finally, anything about their relationship to the preceding statement, the following books on my bedside table are also in process, recently finished, about to be started, or re-started:
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Eleni S, The California Poem
Juliana Spahr, Gentle Now Don’t Add to Heartache (not too much to use the word love here. One person I know said something about this work bringing Stein and Whitman close together. I’ve been bringing this one up in conversation even when there’s no connection because I like to say the title out loud.)
Larry Kearney, The Glue Factory (Another type of thing I need.)
Charles Bernstein, A Poetics
Rob Halpern, Rumored Place
Tanya Brolaski, The Daily Usonian
Isaac Asimov. Lots and fast.
And watched Willy Wonka yesterday until Augustus got sucked up the tube.
Using too much excel, too much to organize people with.
October 28, 2004 * 12:52 pm