A Miser[l]y Mash...Two, Three Things to Accompany Your Travels

Swaying, the Apt Traveler
Exited My House By John Ashbery

It is so easy to be attractive when
you're young, even if not particularly favored by nature,
even if nerdy, spotted, and pacific,
even in the wrong clothes, rumpled with anxiety
like a maze, even without interests
from the wrong side of the street.

Standing with one's bother,
wiping off the strictures of dark, demented doubt,
one believes what one lives in.
The air freshens the rooms.

I float from the dormer down
to the brick path darkened by the lawn sprinkler.
It seems I was inside once.
Oh I'm careless to tell the advantage of that pact
with truth I made as I undress.
The truth is it would have gotten to me
after five or six seasons of that sort of thing.
But it wasn't to be. Baby blushed anew at the air's demands,
and the pine tree fell over on the back porch, causing it to cave in.
That wasn't in my list of grievances though.
In fact there was never any list;
I coped by coping, living out life shred by shred
until a magma caught up with me. In the broken alley
one passed strollers and people pushing them. One comet caught my
eye
but it was too late, too late to praise she always says.
My pants were wet
and someone is coming up the road, some zombie
or other.
This tune I never asked for
is a different one, a furious clarion
shrilling a hornet's nest of replies.
The others will be older, other rapists
than the ones that were put down.

It would be time to plan an escape.
This is difficult in a hotel.
There are bands of bullies waiting to frisk
you, and on the esplanade the scenario doesn't get much better.
Even the little girl with the balloon is planning to annex half of
Western civilization,
and the ticket-of-leave man has his eye on the colored bastions
we plummet over, seeking release in the sea, the sea!
Two dolphins like two colons in a sentence
are rinsing me now,
pouring me out of myself.
I feel as though I'll never be big enough
to efface scars as an adult ideally should--
wait, though! I'm coming to the corner where
pockets of jasmine and lavender inhale--
Be my scope limited, it's something
just to have been in the intimacy of all the stories
down the stairway to where it ends, to have worn
linen and passed as a man in suits.
I'll tell you that one too
though you don't want to hear it,
though it's as old as the hills,
though displeasure is now rage, I'll canvass
for funds for it, not giving up,
not showing myself up this time,
too close to Mother and the difficult calm,
to the overextended fruit of this day,
this dream.

OASIS MALADE
Tanith dropped by today.
Like, I hadn't seen her in years,
But there she was at my front door
In her colonial helmet.

Custom made Burmese fan
Poised in one hand...
Ready to swipe at any passing disease-ridden mosquito.

She'd been in Belgium, she told me...
Studying the pyramids.
It took her years to find out
That there were no pyramids in Belgium.

I asked her why she left me so suddenly...
Why she'd been silent for so long.

Didn't I exist for her? Didn't we have something, well, special?

She asked me for tea in a plastic cup
With a well-fitting lid...Then she left.

PRITHEE
You make the sun shine...
Keep me warm at night.
Sometimes,
You are my guiding light.

When I'm weak or desperate,
You'll stretch out your hand...

It's a hand that offers courage...
It's a hand that calms me down...
And leads me to a land
That we discovered countless lives ago.

Still young enough to change this wicked world...
So tell me, Angel, where to now ?

Shall we chase rainbows?
Ride the stars by night?

Stay close...
Be my second sight...

Show me our tomorrows'
Cause I can't dream alone...

Shall we chase rainbows?
Ride the stars by night?

Stay close...
Be my second sight...

Show me our tomorrows'
Cause I can't dream alone...

Broken Social Scene - Lover's Spit

...as an adjunct for travel. Why?

I have neither felt fit for the cotillion, either.
But I wear it with confidence, this velvet, doublet
Cinched at the waist with cherry-twisted buttonholes
Like Napoleon's enlisted--cleft on the chin, at the door
Agape with all the tin buttons crumbling in the frost,

One who's taken, by the first offer, sucks it through
A drupe, a domestic shorthand, a plate half-finished
For some sign of my embodied lord, who I occasioned
And caused a blood blister to form, flow on the lower lip
By whose light I first read the dog-eared pages of the passion.

Juliette Binoche interview

I keep seeing the vague outlines of you or one of your sisters...

A Portrait of S as a Young Girl

She is first determined to inscribe her name in books--
School-bright, she writes the initial treble in reverse,
Shoulders recurved in the loose bandeau retrace the body
That is the work, to have cast off and purled to herself.

J sur te pas...

Terminal Charges

I am frustrated when I am bound to people in a quasi-transactional way. Perhaps this is what divorcees feel like when they scrape at the pitiful amassments of a failed relationship... I am sure everyone wishes for the courage to just walk away.

When my father left my life I was relieved (and dismayed by his return), as I am sure he was when he stopped speaking to his father, a dollar-rankling dentist. Now that Dr. B. is dying of cancer, I must reemerge and care. He holds the carrot--he will die and leave the product of his investments for my so-called success at medical school. Why the failed attempt at generativity?

I feel sleazy, in addition to the fact that I might not be equal to the task even if all of the obstacles are cleared away. When things are inconvenient, my first impulse is to walk away, and I generally do. Why make yourself sit at a bedside when you really do not want to? Isn't it dishonest? Most people are savage in this way, and they do not expect sympathy when it is their turn.

J, Through an Eternity of Frames

J is alerted--muscles drawn--at the prospect of every risk, but struggles not to advertise this.
J sleeps occasionally with a weak, incandescent light in order to conjure trance states.
J wishes for four more years.
J anticipates her prepaid tattoo of the ouroboros, an emblem of eternal recurrence.
J avoids low-balling anyone.
J wears Army surplus socks for structural support and for the likeness of walking in a footsoldier's shoes.
J frames the East bedroom window with two specimens of Beaucarnea recurvata and an unidentified Musa.
J shrinks from any implications of her aggressive behavior.
J imagines an upcoming project about equestrian vaulting, that is, when her work is done.
J converses regularly with her mother about energy portals.
J tried to steal her X-ray films of her head after being rushed to triage for totaling her first Mustang on an interstate, during a snowstorm, at four am.
J likes Freud's use of language for its shock value.
J craves V8 juice all day long, a residue of her childhood penchant for tomato sandwiches.
J listens to Sirius radio by detaching it from the docking station in her mother's car.
J plans to purchase a model of all the spinal vertebra complete with interlocking articular facets, spinous processes to pull apart and put back together (not an easy task) when her hands are unoccupied, for instance, when watching television.
J ensures the integrity of the acid mantle of her facial skin through the liberal application of a toner.
J drives around the block to avoid the milkman's Wednesday, mid-day visit.
J shows her lighter side in the admission that the ouroboros also came to her from Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.
J needs to work on being less persistent with people, which might be construed as stalkerish.
J wants to figure out what makes Basmati rice aromatic.
J thinks her favorite Unto Ashes song is "Teach Me How to Drown".
J, in high school, subsisted largely on the blighted apples planted around the perimeter of the campus.
J's tendency to eavesdrop is reformulated as "indirect fact finding", because some things people say cannot be said directly to you.
J fears moreso of being sprayed by a skunk when she wanders in the alleys at night.
J tuned into David Attenborough obsessively on Sunday night as child.
J knows which plants are poisonous, but she splits the leaves of boxwoods, yew berries between her teeth to taste the bitter alkaloid.
J delays in putting in her request for a vacation this May because she really does not want to go, maybe she does?
J tries to diffuse the situation produced as a result of misunderstanding, of her own and of those of others.
J wonders who composed the tracts scattered around her ward on "autonomy" and "nonmaleficience".
J suffers periodically from a pinched nerve in her neck, instead of tendonitis.
J references the cohabiting members of her household as, "The Sorry Family".
J entered her phone information into her mother's phone as "Your Extracellular Daughter".
J wishes she could answer every aspect of the reader question in the "Ask Marilyn" column without looking at the answer.
J enjoys the poetry of the sentence found among French-speaking poets.
J reads Balzac with agony--for length AND precision.
J suspects she might be suffering from horror vacui.

Desk Hack Questionnaire

1 = Never; 2 = Very Infrequently; 3 = Sometimes; 4 = Very Frequently; 5 = Always

1. How often do you end your requests on an unstressed syllable, implying deference?

2. How often do you contemplate your overall dexterity with office supplies, their usage and reclamation?

3. How often do you marvel at your recall of office, departmental extension numbers?

4. Note the frequency of your misinterpreted, poorly-coded memos as they correlate to some degree of your self-worth?

5. Rate the frequency of your cued recall of the latest, and ever-changing, abbreviation or acronym?

6. How often do you take pride in being at the center of the "gossip hub" and/or "misinformation ring"?

7. How often do you find yourself unable to replenish from the fatigue of responding to the demands from disembodied voices?

8. How often do you place the desired document in the desired hands, on the first attempt?

9. How often do you find other people reaching into your personal space...as if you did not exist?

10. About how often do you need to reference something work-related at your internet-disabled workstation?

11. How often are you the poor unfortunate of a visitor's displaced hostility?

12. How often do you affirm your skills outside of your workstation, in your leisure?

13. How often do you accurately retrace every catacomb for people (like yourself) sign, arrow, and number illiterate?

14. How often do you enforce the company policy of "Friendly Fascism" with others descending from you on the (discreet and discrete) earnings scale?

15. How often do you attend to the color, even script as it applies to whiteboard neatness?

16. How often do you experience dry eyes from scrying at a computer screen?

17. How often do you pass on information to be later invalidated by others, more or less repeating the same information?

18. How often do you experience somatoform symptoms--like slow hands that will not grip a pen or a numb ass that circumnavigates via office chair?

19. Rate your day-to-day consistency with name-dropping.

20. How often do you adhere to the policy, "most of all, have fun"?

Laughter in the Dark

"A certain man," said Rex, as he turned round the corner with Margot, "once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That's what I like about coincidence." --Vladmir Nabokov, Kamera obskura, or Laughter in the Dark

The God of Inattention
by Averill Curdy

After the trumpets, after the incense
There were nights insomnia fathered gods
I then rejected as too angry or distracted,
Or whose appetite for submission revealed
Their own lack of faith. Say our names,
All synonyms for trust. Others spoke
In sugared paradox: To know is to know
All. To not know all is not to know. To know
All requires that you know very little,
But to know that little you have to know
All . And for a while, it's true,
I burned in the dark fires of ambivalence,
My attention consumed like oxygen.
I'd wake up tired, as I had with the married man
Whose strictures and caprice begat,
And begat, and begat, and begat
My love for him, harvesting the same
Silence from my bed. Who listens
To my penitential tune? Who accepts
My petitions for convenient parking,
For spring, for the self illuminated
Across a kitchen table, for . . . for
Fortitude? I've heard a voice, I'm sure,
Advising me to drop this sentimental farce.
Only to hold the smoke of their names
Again in my mouth I'd resurrect
The dead, or adopt the gods orphaned
By atheists, except the gods they've made
From disbelief no one's faith could tolerate.
Refusing to make the same mistake
Just once, I've cried out to the dark
Many names, most given up as routinely
As the secrets of friends. If you're a cup
Will my lips profane your own? If a comb
Will I feel your teeth against my neck?
If a wall I will be darker than your shadow.
And if a door I will unlatch you, letting in
All the little foxes from the vineyard.

Source: Poetry (May 2004).

I like how this poem resonates with my weariness for intervention. I am at work all weekend, and I have so much school work to do. Resignation is best for tackling the check-off lists.

...and What Remains.

The English Patient, a film that requires a perennial viewing

Seabodies

Naiad Maladies

Our hands divide and manipulate some raw-edged ruins
on an afternoon to wind and wheel about, you and a wet

Canteen, rushes, all the bent reeds and wadis until Khartoum

Side-glancing intimately, a perceived fault forms, from this springs,
From a pile of stones, slithering into the blue, serene beings

Otherwise grinning among the seascapes—rinse and repeat

Song of its silted leeriness choking of camel routes, yellow

Loess burying the so-called timeless peaks and valleys

Needless amplifications of the obvious now, but for the ether

Of entering it, turning up what is neither honest nor new...
Strained creek bed flecks off its light—a broken guitar all splinters
Strings embedded in what is being left to make decorative
Concrete, as I imagine some desolate beach awaits all
Petal-strewn sand dollars underfoot worked in razors and glass,
I cannot imagine us more a wreck apart, much less a week.

Muse-Unintended

Afterthought

The experience of running into the wall of an insolent young man has taught me that any of my pretensions to rigor or forcefulness are false. As I have gotten older, I suppose it matters less.

"Besides the Kritios Boy, the preeminent examples of this persona are the bronze Benevento Boy of the Louvre, the Antinous sculptures commissioned by the emperor Hadrian, Dontatello's David, and Thomas Mannn's Tadzio in Death in Venice. The Apollonian is a mode of silence, suppressing rhythm to focus the eye."

Before Night Falls

Memphis Skyline

Copy-Paste Spree: Ansir Thinking/Working/Emoting

The big reveal : Thinking: Evocateur; Working: Visionary; Emoting: Healer ... Profile Boss: Healer. I ask you the same question...(ellipses-making friend) keeping in mind the ambiguity that all of this must cause...

Thinking: Evocateur
...
Belief is the sum of information acquired from books, opinions, and experiences, which is stored in mind as knowledge. Belief is the mill that grinds the grist called logic. When enough logic is strung together, it becomes a line of reason for rationals to follow. Ego is belief's representative that interacts with others—according to, and in strict accordance with, belief. Additionally, eager-to-please ego, filters and excludes incoming information that does not fit or match belief's criteria. Evokateurs have no ego, so they have no doorman screening incoming possibilities. They place little faith in belief, as with knowledge comes rules, which to them are more restrictive than necessary.
Put a rule on the table and watch Evokateur butter bread with it. They know full-well what rules are, but their nature is to question, not bovinely swallow and regurgitate. (Fortunately, they tend to have a cellular code of ethics that makes it inconceivable, that they'd be other than love-inclined and improvement-tended. No human or global destruction was, is, or will be invented by Evokateurs. If things turn out that way, the fault lies not with it's inventor's intention, but with it's interpretation and application by others). In Evokateur-world there are no rules; anything goes. Possibilities are urged to roam and range with infinite freedom, speed, and grace. Logic is for explaining, not for creating.
...

Working: Visionary

...
Their life purpose dictates they overcome and prevail, despite opposition. Visionaries do not have the luxury of time. They're here now to make a betterment difference. It is not enough for them to envision alternate realities, not enough to theorize and ponder abstractly—they must think, express, and do. That means their egos must be strong enough to break with old rules; ignore ostracism to outrage, and ride roughshod over the naysayers and bottom-lines that get in their way. Whether in business, politics, arts, or academia, Visionaries often butt heads with status quo. Intuitives, like them, frequently experience frustration in a logic-run and ruled world. Logicals tend to view their visions as deviations from the normal, and Visionaries as peddlers of snake oil.
...
Regardless of field or job, whether the opportunity be business, art, or science, Visionaries can go anywhere and experience success....if they love what they do. They often form a tight team or network of associates they can trust to get things done their way, meaning flawlessly and promptly. The team qualifiers are: personal ambition, taking direction well, and meeting objectives independently. Visionaries are not baby sitters. They resent being distracted from their own work by details that should have been discussed upfront, by problems that should have been addressed upon arrival, or by those who cannot deliver as promised. Incompetence, dishonesty, apathy, or any combination thereof, are cause for dismissal from Visionary-led teams.

They are very good teachers. Thorough and comfortable with authority and responsibility, they use wit and allegory to bring their points home. But don't fall asleep in their class. Not only do Visionaries work toward and expect full comprehension by lessons end, they tend to measure their own ability by student performance. Pupils don't fail the course; Visionary teachers do.
Emoting: Healer

...
Loving and accepting all equally is as natural for this style as breathing for others. There's a delicate vulnerability about them that draws others protectively toward, for Healer is warm and approachable. While others meet cheery welcome, they soon realize their protectiveness is unnecessary. Healer needs no other. Few are as self-contained and self-sufficient as them. They enjoy all and participate enthusiastically, but they do not depend on others for fulfillment of their purpose, like Visionary; for fulfillment of self, like Scintillator; for fulfillment of love, like Empath; or for exclusive support and companionship, like most others.

...
Healer is here to experience, risk, and share their experience-wisdom. Nothing less than an emotionally-sophisticated mate can or will interest them long.

After-Random-Thoughts

After viewing No Country for Old Men last night, I have to read the novel again for exchanges like these between Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his deputy: "Here last week they found this couple out in California. They rent out rooms for old people, kill'em, bury'em in the yard, cash their social security checks. Well, they'd tortur'em first, I don't know why. Maybe the television set was broke."

After sleeping with my reading light blazing into my eyelids, with three alarms set, I arrived at work nearly two hours late.

After reading solution bottles, like Dakin's and tetrachlorodecaoxide (TCDO), I came home and wrote it down in a Moleskine notebook...for later digestion.

After noticing that central venous catheters look just like straight arrow fletchings, I have started on a modern day, medical Temptation of Saint Sebastian among involutions of spring flowers. I will finish it in a couple days. I especially like the juxtaposition I am suggesting of the revivifying powers of human intervention/interference, which often expresses itself in puncturing the body full of holes (to receive the therapy), which are not mortal wounds, anyway. Sometimes I am amazed by the extent to which someone will suffer to stay alive, without question. How admitting oneself to the care of others manifests itself so completely...While I do not judge others who "capitulate" in this way, I will never be so passive.

The Resurfacing Effect... What Would Modern Life Be Without These?

Jacqueline took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Strives for a life rich in activity and experience..." Click here to read the rest of the results.

Four Rune Cast

I am interested in divination to the extent that Feuerbach, and then Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, considers religion, divination, a necessary currency, "or the system of symbols by means of which society becomes conscious of itself." Delving into it, one enters the intersection of the mind and the body. If one considers divination as a means for discharging energy, how can one form be any more correct or true, if all that is required is to complete the pathway? The same way that neon or xenon gas tubes or tungsten filaments are capacitators for heat... the brain is a biochemical capacitator whose workings can be crudely translated into tea leaves, bone fragments, divining rods or runes of a split fruit tree...

Excerpted:
The bottom rune represents the foundation that forms the basis of the issue. Nyd represents many things, most of them unpleasant - heed it well. Constraint, delay, loss, need, and sorrow are all frequently seen in this rune. Nyd speaks most strongly of pause, the hallmark of the both the timid and the patient, and is often interpreted as foretelling a delay in the effect of other runes that it accompanies. Fortunately, even where there is misery and danger there are valuable lessons to be learned - the trick is to learn them before you are overtaken by despair.

The left rune represents one of the forces acting on the issue at hand. Wunjo is the rune of Joy. Since joy is least frequently a solitary emotion, this rune often represents mutual or communal bliss. Wunjo is also seen as a rune of the gods and a rune of perfection, carrying with it the elation that blazes from the creation of a perfect work - perhaps this is the true joy of the gods, that they can create perfection. That aside, this rune does not focus on the struggle for perfection or on our inevitable imperfections, but rather on a job well done and the satisfaction that comes from it.

The right rune represents another of the forces acting on the issue at hand. Algiz plainly shows the antlers of the elk that it represents. The elk is the object of the hunt, and hence Algiz speaks to the pursuit of goals and the thrill of that pursuit. The rune is currently shown reversed, so this could suggest a failed endeavor or a lack of effort. Algiz is also representative of a protective hand (fingers open wide), so the reversed form may indicate a failed defense.

The top rune represents the conclusion to which your strivings can carry you. Isa is the rune symbolizing Ice - cold, stagnant, frozen, and unchanging. This rune suggests heat removed not just from anger or conflict, but from passion as well. Paradoxically, Isa conveys images of slippery slopes and unsure footing, but also of circumstances that have crystallized and become utterly immutable. Remember that in the cold north, ice is not just THE challenge to be overcome, but the very nature of the environment. Be courageous, for you work against this element every day. Will you fight alone or with others against this, our common foe? Is there much worse than lack of change?

You, Too, Color the Facts

Jacqueline took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Shelves her ambitions and forgoes her desire for p..." Click here to read the rest of the results.

Kiki Smith on her Stuart Collection project.

Kiki speaks unabashedly with her hands. Sometimes the most intimate moments occur when one is focused on the modesty of hands. Where else is an area with the densest nerve beds in the body
ever exposed, and wielding?