I moved

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Things I notice

Today, a Baptist church down the block. All are welcome. A boarded-up house with dirt for a lawn on Centinela. And a hydrangea bush tucked beneath a low balcony, breathing with beautiful blue globes.

And you shall live long and prosper

A sick baby possum in the grass. Andy sees it, that it's skinny and shaking, and crosses the street to find a box. A girl carrying a red patent leather purse is walking down the sidewalk. She notices the possum, and reaches into her purse. Maybe she's trying to feed him, Andy thinks. Instead, she holds her cell phone a few inches over the possum and takes pictures. Then she walks away.

Andy finds a box and tries to get the possum inside of it with a stick. A homeless man approaches. "Is it a bird?" he says. Andy says no, a baby possum. The homeless man leans over, "Here we go," he says, cupping the possum in his hands and placing it in the box, "he's not gonna hurt anybody." Andy and the homeless man look down on the baby possum in the box and remark on its condition. "Better hurry," the homeless man says.

The vet clinic says the baby possum is severly dehydrated and starving. They will administer fluids and let Andy know. An hour later, a nurse calls. When they took the baby possum out the box, he was dying. They had to put him to sleep, it was all they could do. His body was hardening, he was scarcely breathing, his gums had turned white.

"She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table."

Tell us about yourself

Hi Y-

Just got home from the opthalmologist, so can hardly see the screen. Will write more soon.

In The Rainbow, the last 100 pages are about Ursula Brangwen, definitely hot and cold, over the top in both directions, sometimes repulsive, arrogant, but pushing, pushing, pushing to be UNAFRAID. You make a lot of mistakes, errors, doing that, and you pay for them. But you are not a cookie cutter version of what the bourgeois masters (and mistresses) of convention insist you must be. Not an easy path to take.

All of the biographies of DH by John Worthen are wonderful. Now going out of focus.... More soon. Love.

Mo

puff puff

from: Sid
to: Yvonne

date: Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 3:10 PM
subject: Re: hi friends
(mailed-bycomcast.net)

Hi Y-

Denver has been unbearable, dangerous for asthmatics and people with chronic bronchitis, i.e., me. The ground level ozone has been worse than LA smog on the worst of days. 23 days straight over 95 degrees, several around 104, not a drop of rain, not a breeze. Unusual conditions caused by La Nina which has pushed the Jet Stream up across northern Wyoming and Montana. I got a serious blast of angina just walking in the park, and didn't know what was happening until I consulted OzoneAlert.com. Can I get a fuckin' break!

Susan at Station Hill just sent me three versions of the cover, all beautiful. We have to get the rights to one picture, and then I think we go to press. They publish three playwrights, Gertrude Stein, Lorca, and Richard Foreman, but Barnes and Noble, I don't think so. However there is a mah jong parlor in Chinatown, LA, called Yo Mah Mah. You go past the players, through a bead curtain, ask for Ray. Say, Baster Green? No MSG. Wholesale in lots of ten. Of course, I will send you one.

I'm so glad you love DH Lawrence. He's been so torn down in recent years. Fascist! Mysogynist! All bullshit. A poet and prophet in my book. Beaten up his whole life by everyone. The strongest women characters ever written by anyone, male or female.

How do I get to your web site? I'm still struggling with this digital shit. For instance, this message could really be coming to you from Donald Rumsfeld, now that he has nothing to do. Unless, of course, he's become a full time torturer. How would we know? Read all about it in the new book by Jane Meyer of the New Yorker. Or wait for the psychedelic version in The Rushes of Tulsa, years ahead of is time. Puff. Puff.

LA. I'd have to stay by the ocean. A little motel in Santa Monica? Arrange a reading for me a a hip bookstore. I'd come if I could breathe.

Much love,

Sid

The locks are manual

Five o'clock light on Sunset and Alvarado and its implications: You will feel deranged by the clarity and intensity and elegance of this light, the vacancy of this blue sky. You will find yourself squinting on the street corner, blinking at the glare. This traffic is thick, noisy. Has the signal changed? You will watch a group of Latino children dressed identically in navy blue shorts and starched white shirts, holding hands in a line. You will see a dead pigeon nestled on a bed of cigarette butts, cavities for eyes. And you will be approached by a friendly neighbor.

EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! I'M GAY AS A GOOSE, GAY AS A GOOSE. I'M HIV POSITIVE. LOOK AT MY ARM. SEE? I'M BLEEDING FROM MY RECTUM AND I NEED MY PRESCRIPTION FILLED. I'M SHORT $36.27 AND MY MOTHER IS ON HER WAY FROM ORANGE COUNTRY. HUMAN BEING, WHOEVER YOU ARE, OH PLEASE GOD HELP ME. I'M GAY AS A GOOSE.

You will give this person five dollars. Then, in this bright light, you'll sit for a moment on the stale upholstery of your driver's seat and stare at a happy couple sipping espresso and wonder, is it charity to give alms to a begging liar?

The Sea Close By

"At midnight, alone on the shore. A moment more, and I shall set sail. The sky itself has weighed anchor, with all its stars, like the ships covered with lights which at this very hour throughout the world illuminate dark harbors. Space and silence weigh equally upon the heart. A sudden love, a great work, a decisive act, a thought that transfigures, all these at certain moments bring the same unbearable anxiety, quickened with an irresistible charm. Living like this, in the delicious anguish of being, in exquisite proximity to a danger whose name we do not know, is this the same as rushing to our doom? Once again, without respite, let us race to our destruction."

-Camus, 1953

It's all in the gesture

I stare at the man who looks like Jack Nicholson circa 1972, and he does not stare at me. His hair is thinning in the appointed places, he purses his long Nicholson lips -slightly, yet tightly- and looks away in that perfected, indifferent manner. He's got those clever eyebrows.

I imagine this really is Jack Nicholson circa 1972. There he is, in the coffee shop, ambivalent to everything but his sunglasses, too cool for the world, way too cool for me. Sigh.

But I am Faye Dunaway circa 1972. My curls are yellow and delicate and smooth across my forehead. I only wear dresses. Or expertly pressed wool slacks with pockets. And silk blouses. My heels have dainty buckles. In this fantasy, I stroll by the coffee shop with a leather purse on a hip-length strap. I toss my hair discretely and turn to the right, to glimpse myself in the window. Instead, I see him. He looks at me now. The guy can't take his eyes off me.

Hello Jack.

In Apartment-land

Cats are meowing in stucco corridors, female laughter catches the breeze. The local car culture accounts for the luxury vehicles in the clean! new carpet! one-bedroom driveways. Balconies are made lush, or else barren with metal tables and well-worn ashtrays.

Santa in July, Found objects

"I don't eat chicken because I feel like I'm eating my cat's leg."

-Oma, Christmas Eve dinner 2007

Three-digit highs

The boy sits on the curb, kicking gravel, fiddling with his cardboard box of magic tricks. It is very hot out today.

An older child, an overweight girl, lumbers over and stoops in front of him. The boy is playing with a deck of cards now. She watches, mouth hung open.

"Is it magic?" she says.

"Yes," he says.

The girls stares.

"WELL CAN YOU MAKE IT DISAPPEAR?"

The boy shuffles the deck and then presses it into his stomach, looks off over her shoulder.

"No," he whispers.

the way you look tonight

What makes a person glamorous? A life lived necessarily on the edge? Fearlessness in the face of mortality? (Or is that terror disguised as indifference?) The line between glamorous and unclean is strangely uncertain.

1930

From an obituary of D.H. Lawrence, by Catherine Carswell:

"In the face of formidable initial disadvantages and life-long delicacy, poverty that lasted for three quarters of his life and hostility that survives his death, he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did. He went all over the world, he owned a ranch, he lived in the most beautiful corners of Europe, and met whom he wanted to meet and told them that they were wrong and he was right. He painted and made things, and sang, and rode. He wrote something like three dozen books, of which even the worst page dances with life that could be mistaken for no other man's, while the best are admitted, even by those who hate him, to be unsurpassed. Without vices, with most human virtues, the husband of one wife, scrupulously honest, this estimable citizen yet managed to keep free from the shackles of civilization and the cant of literary cliques. He would have laughed lightly and cursed venomously in passing at the solemn owls– each one secretly chained by the leg– who now conduct his inquest. To do his work and lead his life in spite of them took some doing, but he did it, and long after they are forgotten, sensitive and innocent people– if any are left –will turn Lawrence's pages and will know from them what sort of a rare man Lawrence was."

The Color Green

Old Navasota

"It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid. In June the trees were bright dizzy green, but later the leaves darkened, and the town turned black and shruken under the glare of the sun. At first Frankie walked around doing one thing and another. The sidewalks of the town were gray in the early morning and at night, but the noon sun put a glaze on them, so that the cement burned and glittered like glass."

-Carson McCullers

Three by Cesar Vallejo

To My Brother Miguel, in memoriam

Brother, today I sit on the brick bench outside the house,
where you make a bottomless emptiness.
I remember we used to play at this hour of the day, and mama
would calm us: "There now, boys..."
Now I go hide
as before, from all these evening
prayers, and I hope that you will not find me.
In the parlor, the entrance hall, the corridors.
Later, you hide, and I do not find you.
I remember we made each other cry,
brother, in that game.

Miguel, you hid yourself
one night in August, nearly at daybreak,
but instead of laughing when you hid, you were sad.
And your other heart of those dead afternoons
is tired of looking and not finding you. And now
shadows fall on the soul.

Listen, brother, don't be too late
coming out. All right? Mama might worry.



Black Stone Lying On A White Stone

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,
on some day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris--and I don't step aside--
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.

It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down
these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on
wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself
with all the road ahead of me, alone.

César Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him
although he never does anything to them;
they beat him hard with a stick and hard also

with a rope. These are the witnesses:
the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,
the solitude, and the rain, and the roads...



Weary Rings

There are desires to return, to love, to not disappear, 

and there are desires to die, fought by two
opposing waters that have never isthmused.

There are desires for a great kiss that would shroud Life,
one that ends in the Africa of a fiery agony,
a suicide!

There are desires to. . .have no desires, Lord; 

I point my deicidal finger at you:
there are desires to not have had a heart.

Spring returns, returns and will depart. And God, 

bent in time, repeats himself, and passes, passes 

with the spinal column of the Universe on his back.

When my temples beat their lugubrious drum, 

when the dream engraved on a dagger aches me, 

there are desires to be left standing in this verse!

Central Standard Time

Sex & the City is brilliant because it mocks insipid women while preying on their girlish desires. And it does this with complex characters. So what we have in the end is the story of four complex (and kind of annoying) women who happen to love clothes. If there is a lesson it would be one in complexity. And that weddings (as we know them) are bullshit. Not marriages (necessarily), but weddings.

And we have the fans, so many of whom are the women who have these weddings. What does such a bride think after seeing this movie? Does she think at all? Will we ever know?

For all the bags and shoes and la-di-da, Sex & the City has a pretty enlightened take on weddings. We live in a society where the typical wedding costs something like 30 grand. That's just what I read. Many people I know have spent at least double, or triple. The national divorce rate is a household figure. There is no sense to this, and there is no explanation. Or no explanation that isn't mean I suppose. But oh well let's be mean.

Every once in awhile you meet a girl who says she never entertained Cinderella wedding fantasies as a child. I am not one of those girls. When I was little, my fantasy was literal in the Cinderella sense. In high school, I thought I wanted to have a wedding with "fairies" in an "enchanted forest." Then I had visions of big bands and Jay Gatspy. Then it was bagpipes. Then probably a few other things I can't remember, and then it slowly came over me: I can't stand it. Suddenly I understood why my parents had a small family-only wedding, and why my mom chose to wear a simple, short dress- something that had previously been incomprehensible to me. This is all while actually being in love. It's not as if I got dumped and became cynical. I just came to realize that I absolutely loathe weddings.

Not all weddings. I went to a wedding in Connecticut in the backyard of a modest lake house a few years ago. The groom's dad grilled steaks and salmon for the guests. After the ceremony, the couple rowed out onto the lake in a dingy, and ended up jumping into the water in their wedding garb and swimming to shore. There were about 60 guests. It was lovely. My sister chose to put a single long-stem red rose on each of her wedding tables, and the subtlety was beautiful. No florist necessary.

But returning to being mean. Why are we still subjected to these horrendous princess diva fantasy delusions? And why do couples still choose to subject themselves to it? I don't have the answer. It has nothing to do with men. I feel bad for the men. Women are crazy! There is the problem of entitlement, the "it's YOUR day!" malarchy. This is the line used to justify the hysterics and the 4-5 figure gown resembling an unappetizing cupcake, among other absurdities. And based upon the copious photographs posted by my old high school classmates (turned brides) on Facebook, the results are usually forgettable or just okay or utterly dreadful. No one says that of course. We all say, "OMG you look perfect!"

And this Sex & the City movie is about contradiction and wonder and independence, and not buying into that marketed perfection. It lures all these doll faces in with beautiful dresses and ugly purses which are supposedly stylish and the nomenclature of decadence, but tells them finally that it's folly. The dresses and purses themselves are insignificant; it's the ideal. Where women imagine they are princesses, they are fools.


*This ramble dedicated to Ashley, Maile, and Meg- trailblazers in matrimony.

Look Up

Photo by Jacques-Henri Lartigue.

A Wicker Basket

Comes the time when it's later
and onto your table the headwaiter
puts the bill, and very soon after
rings out the sound of lively laughter--

Picking up change, hands like a walrus,
and a face like a barndoor's,
and a head without any apparent size,
nothing but two eyes--

So that's you, man,
or me. I make it as I can,
I pick up, I go
faster than they know--

Out the door, the street like a night,
any night, and no one in sight,
but then, well, there she is,
old friend Liz--

And she opens the door of her cadillac,
I step in back,
and we're gone.
She turns me on--

There are very huge stars, man, in the sky,
and from somewhere very far off someone hands
me a slice of apple pie,
with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it,
and I eat it--

Slowly. And while certainly
they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket
of these cats not making it, I make it

in my wicker basket.

- Robert Creeley

Good Country People

There were two gentle knocks on the front door this morning. I looked at the clock, decided it was too early for human interaction, and lay there for awhile wondering who on earth would have been knocking on the door at 7 am. Clearly someone who doesn't know me. Later, when I went out to get the mail, I found a pamphlet rolled up in the door handle.

Would you like to know more about the Bible?

Yes, a Jehovah's Witness (or two) came to my door, and I missed it. The Southern exoticism of it is thrilling. What would I have said? What would they have said?

This pamphlet included a hand-written note asking if we'd like to learn the Bible's answers to such important questions as: Why do we grow old and die? What is the purpose of life? How can you find real happiness?

I would LOVE to know the answers to these important questions, but at the moment D.H. Lawrence is sufficient.

The note goes on to say that they look forward to speaking with us personally in the near future. I look at my neighbor's doors- no pamphlets. Then I wonder if it's because of our Obama signs.

This is paranoid, but it might be true. We've been tacked on their map. New York Times on the stoop, Obama signs, Volvo in the driveway- a liberal trifecta of sin.

A few excerpts from the pamphlet:

-"Being 'moderate in habits' contributes to good health." (How Aristotelian!)
-"By 'cleansing ourselves of every defilment of flesh and spirit' we avoid damaging our health."
-"Knowing the truth about wicked angels alerts us to the dangers of spiritism and helps us to understand why there is so much trouble on earth."

If they only knew!

I imagine their return. Andy invites them inside, and indiscretely locks the door. Please, won't you sit down. No, please! Make yourself at home. This is our cat Simon, he's Jewish. Can we get you anything? Are you sure? Cup of coffee? German cigarette? Feather boa? Pack of low-hormone birth control? Personal lubricant?

... No?

December 30, 1998

The lobby of the Helmsley Palace Hotel, Upper East Side, Manhattan. The old man shuffles his way to the house phone. He leans against the wall and lifts the receiver. He dials carefully and waits, adjusts his large glassses. The sound of sirens can be heard outside. The lobby is pristine, freshly waxed, fragrant. The old man parts his lips as if to speak, hesitates, and starts again.

"Loooouizzzze," he says. "I'm in the looooobby."

end.

*photo by Lee Friedlander

Country Fair

If you didn't see the six-legged dog,
It doesn't matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,

One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.

Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.

She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.

-Charles Simic

Well Who Woulda

I've recently learned that my biological, paternal grandmother was Lana Turner's leg double in Hollywood.



I have a hunch she lived on Sierra Bonita.

so difficult and so easy to love people

*photo by Walker Evans