we wore band-aids on our nipples for the pheromone tour because you’ve got to give some to want some. we went down below sliding on the banisters of shown skin. we sang with the unwashed clothes of the pips formerly of “and the pips” fame. we rediscovered the short life, the long night, the hourly bells, the way old watches used to move the air in overhead vent shafts where mice knew of cities done, of the light that blocks out the light as she fixes her hair with one last look in the bathroom mirror, the way our genes make the overhead fan turn and noise the wires to spark and chew mouths full of large organs, of less words in the thread, unraveled.

Thanks, Allen

Body I lose faith in you still.

Body the crestfallen have come back to you. Unlikely prodigals in the shape of a shoe.

Body I lay with you and overhead the satellites are wistful.

Why is it no one steps forth and announces us free?

Body we've been together a long time, and although the relationship has been fruitful, perhaps we should consider parting ways.

Body we've had a good run but the door is open.

In the night we waited under pillows and even then there was fear. The fear was black. The night was black. Black, black, black.

Body why the attitude.

Once when I was five I held my hand to the sun and I swear I could hear you through my bones.

Body don't look now but I think I've had a vision.

Bodies everywhere and why do they do it.

A massacre of thumbscrews. Televised canings and precision holographic nightmares. Three old crones still singing around the fire.

Body no one's forgotten oblivion but it's just not polite to say.

Cheat codes unlock the magnificent weapons.

Body up up left right down.

Body we shall recalibrate the soulless and toast victory with green tea.

Fifty-two years and what have we gained.

Body I don't think of my father. But when I do I think he was a good man. This is the softness of later life.

In purple fur we took to the streets to lay the new empire. Aloft the purple flags.

Body I don't believe in Rome or in anything.

Body where will it end.

oh my god my goodness

i will never be right again.

Sept.-Nov.07 Fiction/Non-Fiction Releases

NEW RELEASES FOR FALL 07

 

September fiction

Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (FSG); Sebastian Faulks' novel Engleby (Doubleday); Zakes Mda's novel Cion (Picador Original); Jesse Ball's novel Samedi the Deafness (Vintage Original); and Library of America's Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960 and On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking).

Percival Everett's novel The Water Cure (Graywolf); Valerie Martin's novel Trespass (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday); Brock Clarke's novel An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (Algonquin Books); David Leavitt's novel The Indian Clerk (Bloomsbury); Xiaolu Guo's novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday); and Edmund White's novel Hotel de Dream (Ecco/HarperCollins).

Booker Prize-winning author Graham Swift's novel Tomorrow (Knopf); Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead); Irene Nemirovsky's posthumous novel Fire in the Blood (Knopf); Paul Theroux's collection of novellas, The Elephant Suite (Houghton Mifflin); and Jim Shepard's story collection Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf).

Vincent Lam's novel Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (Weinstein Books); Gina Nahai's novel Caspian Rain (MacAdam/Cage); Northern California writer Peg Kingman's first novel, Not Yet Drown'd (Norton); Ann Patchett's novel Run (Harper); and Bay Area author Gail Tsukiyama's novel The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (St. Martin's Press).

Berkeley resident and former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass' Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (Ecco/HarperCollins); Michael White's Civil War novel, Soul Catcher (Morrow); David Peace's crime novel Tokyo Year Zero (Knopf); Oakland writer Erika Mailman's first novel, The Witch's Trinity (Crown); Adrian Tomine's graphic novel, Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly); Michel Faber's story collection, Vanilla Bright Like Eminem (Harcourt); Davis artist Spring Warren's first novel, Turpentine (Black Cat/Grove); Berkeley writer Don Waters' story collection, Desert Gothic (University of Iowa Press), Robert Alter's translation of The Book of Psalms (Norton); and Garrison Keillor's first Lake Wobegon novel in six years, Pontoon (Viking).

September nonfiction

Robert Reich's Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life (Knopf), Michael Hoffman edits The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry in His Own Words - Stories, Poems, Drafts, Letters (New York Review of Books); Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? (Grove); Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story (Norton); and Gordon Johnson's Fast Cars and Frybread: Reports From the Rez (Heyday/Baytree).

John Berger's Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches of Survival and Resistance (Pantheon); Edie Kerouac-Parker's You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac, edited by Timothy Moran and Bill Morgan (City Lights); George Saunder's essay collection, The Braindead Megaphone (Riverhead); and John Leland's Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of "On the Road" (They're Not What You Think) (Viking).

Charlie Savage's Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown); Edwidge Danticat's memoir, Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf); David Halberstam's final book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (Hyperion); and philosopher Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (Harvard University Press), winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize.

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan/Henry Holt); Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's essay collection, Other Colors: Essays and a Story (Knopf); Janet Malcolm's book on Stein and Toklas, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale University Press); James D. Watson's Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science (Knopf); and Bliss Broyard's memoir, One Drop: A True Story of Family, Race and Secrets (Little, Brown).

John Bowe's Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy (Random House); James R. Gaines' For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette and Their Revolutions (Norton); and Sports Illustrated senior writer and Northern California resident Austin Murphy's ode to college football, Saturday Rules: A Season With Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines) (Harper).

Charles van Onselen's The Fox and the Flies: The Secret Life of a Grotesque Master Criminal (Walker), whom van Onselen contends was Jack the Ripper; Charles Fleming and San Jose's Howard Dully's book on Dully's troubled life, My Lobotomy (Crown); Hanna Rosin's God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America (Harcourt); San Francisco's very own Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions); and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (The Penguin Press).

October fiction

Wanda Colmeman's story collection, Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales (Black Sparrow Books/Godine); San Francisco writer Diane Vadino's first novel, Smart Girls Like Me (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's); Bay Area author Alice Sebold's novel The Almost Moon (Little, Brown); and Millard Kaufman's first novel, Bowl of Cherries (McSweeney's).

Richard Russo's novel Bridge of Sighs (Knopf); Tom Perrotta's novel The Abstinence Teacher (St. Martin's); Philip Roth's final Zuckerman novel, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin); Fadia Faqir's novel The Cry of the Dove (Black Cat/Grove); Michal Govrin's novel Snapshots (Riverhead); and Bay Area poet Adrienne Rich's Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems: 2004-2006 (Norton).

Alan Lightman's novel, Ghost (Pantheon); Cees Nooteboom's novel Lost Paradise (Grove); Ursula Hegi's novel The Worst Thing I've Done (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster); Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Bad Girl (FSG); Joshua Henkin's novel Matrimony (Pantheon); Caryl Phillips' novel Foreigners (Knopf); and Iain Banks' novel The Steep Approach to Garbdale (MacAdam/Cage).

Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road (Del Rey), first serialized in the New York Times Magazine; William Trevor's story collection, Cheating at Canasta (Viking); W.G. Sebald's poems, accompanied by lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp, making up Unrecounted (New Directions); Law Lit: From Atticus Finch to the Practice - a Collection of Great Writing About the Law (The New Press), edited by Thane Rosenbaum; and Walter Mosley's new Easy Rawlins novel, Blonde Faith (Little, Brown).

October nonfiction

San Francisco author Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan/Henry Holt); Jonathan Miles' The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century (Atlantic); Judith Jones' memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food (Knopf); and University of Chicago Professor Cass Sunstein's revisiting of where the Internet has taken us thus far in Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton University Press).

Rick Atkinson's The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Henry Holt); Edmund Wilson's Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 1930s (Library of America) and his Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 1940s (Library of America); and Oakland's Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger's Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin).

Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont edit Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion (MacAdam/Cage); David Michaelis' Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (Harper); Shalom Auslander's memoir, Foreskin's Lament (Riverhead); and The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982 (Ecco/HarperCollins).

Half Moon Bay author Richard Rhodes' Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (Knopf); Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf); Marc Norman's What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting (Harmony); former Chronicle religion reporter Don Lattin's Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge (HarperOne); and Julie Kavanagh's Nureyev: The Life (Pantheon).

Award-winning Russian historian Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin (Knopf); John Updike's Due Consideration: Essays and Criticism (Knopf); Joseph J. Ellis' American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic (Knopf); and Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark's Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons (Walker).

Orland Figes' The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (Metropolitan/Henry Holt); Bob Drogin's Curveball: Spies, Lies and the Man Behind Them: The Intelligence Nightmare That Led to America's War in Iraq (Random House); Imam Sayid Hassan Al-Qazwini's American Crescent: A Muslim Cleric's Struggle for Islam in America (Random House); and Berkeley author Fritjof Capra's The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (Doubleday).

Amy Silverstein's medical memoir, Sick Girl (Grove Press); Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal (Norton); Gary Wills' Head and Heart: American Christianities (The Penguin Press); UC Davis history Professor Andres Resendez's A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (Basic Books); John Lukacs' Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Winston Churchill and the Speech That Saved Civilization (Basic Books); and Dana Frank's Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California's Kitsch Monuments (City Lights).

Venture capitalist and Hewlett-Packard board of director member Tom Perkins' memoir, Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins (Gotham Books); The Emergence of Memory: Conversations With W.G . Sebald (Seven Stories Press), edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz; Craig Unger's The Fall of the House of Bush: How a Group of True Believers Put America on the Road to Armageddon (Scribner); David Mas Masumoto's Heirlooms: Letters From a Peach Farmer (Heyday Books); and KQED "Forum" host and San Francisco State Professor Michael Krasny's Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life (Stanford University Press).

November fiction

Michael Rothenberg edits The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (Wesleyan University Press); John Ashbery's Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco/HarperCollins); and Ha Jin's novel A Free Life (Pantheon).

Ronan Bennett's literary thriller Zugzwang (Bloomsbury); Peter Ackroyd's novel The Fall of Troy (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday); Peter Hoeg's first novel in more than 10 years, The Quiet Girl (FSG); and Chris Ware's ACME Novelty Datebook: Vol. 2 1995-1999 and ACME Novelty Library No. 18 (Drawn & Quarterly).

The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (Granta), edited by Richard Ford; The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Stories From the Pulps During Their Golden Age - the '20s, the '30s and the '40s (Vintage Original), edited by Otto Penzler; Andrea Barrett's novel, The Air We Breathe (Norton); and Steve Erickson's novel about Hollywood, Zeroville (Europa Editions).

Stewart O'Nan's novel, Last Night at the Lobster (Viking); the anthology The Book of Other People (Penguin Original), edited by Zadie Smith; and Yannick Murphy's novel Signed, Mata Hari (Little, Brown).

November nonfiction

Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating (The Penguin Press); Silvana Paternostro's My Colombian War: A Journey Through a Country I Left Behind (Henry Holt); Peter Gay's Modernism: The Lure of Heresy - From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (Norton); Lachlan Whelan's Contemporary Irish Prison Writing: Writing and Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan); John Richardson's third volume of his Picasso biography, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Knopf); and novelist and story writer William Boyd's Bamboo: Essays and Criticism (Bloomsbury).

Ed Sikov's Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis (Henry Holt); San Francisco writer Alex Frankel's Punching In: My Unauthorized Adventure as a Front Line Employee (Collins); Thomas Hines' The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG); Umberto Eco's essay collection, Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism (Harcourt); Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris' The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (The Penguin Press); and Judith Freeman's The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Pantheon).

Alicia Castro and Ingrid Kummels' Queens of Havana: The Amazing Adventures of the Legendary Anacaona, Cuba's First All-Girl Dance Band (Grove Press); The Paris Review Interviews, II (Picador Original), edited by Philip Gourevitch; The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (Harper), edited by Charlotte Mosley; Ronald Brownstein's The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (The Penguin Press); and Conrad Black's (yes, that Conrad Black) Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (PublicAffairs).

The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service 1967-1980 (Atria), selected and edited by David Hilliard; Bill Boyarsky's Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics (University of California Press); Steve Martin's memoir, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life (Scribner); Adam David Miller's memoir of growing up in the Jim Crow South, Ticket to Exile (Heyday Books); and a book not likely to be sold next to where you pick up your Frappuccino, Taylor Clark's Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture (Little, Brown) .

 

 

Louie's

To delineate
To encircle
To congratulate and
to weep.

Whenever anyone adverbalizes
uncontrollably
it always to my mind
brings the bowels,
the exploding wanton
love
of the bowels, of all the parts of you,
nether
or otherwise
even those alien and
antithetical, the hummingbird
or clockspring
that took you last Tuesday
to Louie's,

the bar I never
go to, on
the street I care always
not to see.

Louie's, where
you stood
two drinks too long, through
two too many
glasses
of wine.

I don't want you
to tell me
his name,
or at what drink it was
he paid
instead
of you,
or how
beyond
the basic
physiological
structure
his cock
worked differently
from mine.

I spend entire
evenings
considering
those differences.

Considering
a yellow
car ride,
a purple
stairwell,
bedspreads,
Tuesdays,
Louie's,
the end.

ordinarily

Ordinarily
the empty.
Ordinarily
the blank.
The finger-smudged
convex, the perfect
eyebrow, and tell me
what is
older: the shotgun
or the mouth? the heart
seen only
as a bird's nest
of ink. the realization
of one forty three,
of thirty five zygote
and egg.

"for miles the city"

for miles the city
for inches the night
for centuries the ice
for five years the fingernails,
your face

for miles the night
for miles the knife
for miles the trees
for miles your belt
for miles the question
for miles an answer,
the right

for centuries the ice, the highball, the glass

for miles the wind
for miles the thinking
for miles the sent

for miles the insinuation
for miles the grief

for miles your fingers
for miles the ringing
of the telephone

for miles the photograph
for miles the gray

for miles the ending
for miles the end

for miles the ringtone
for miles the bend

featherbound

Featherbound
Oraga
Gypsum and moss
Clevinger post

Why did I
walk away from you

I wasn't happy then
and I'm not happy now

The daylight cuts into the water
The ocean swallows the sunset
The minnow swallows the whale

Why did I
walk away from you

In a thousand blank rooms
and your breasts I can barely
remember

Transfer slips
Drink rings
Fingerprints

There used to be breathing
in the blackness
The morning
you dropped your scooter
There will be
no more omelets
There will be no more
tea

All the people here wouldn't
fill a glass of you
If I could
be anyone I'd be
the man who told you different

Why did I
walk away from you

Twitter

1. A condition of twittering or tremulous excitement (from eager desire, fear, etc.); a state of agitation; a flutter, a tremble. Now chiefly dial.
1678 BUTLER Hud. III. I. 83 The ancient errant knights Won all their ladies' hearts in fights, And cut whole giants into fritters, To put them into amorous twitters. a1734 NORTH Exam. I. iii. §31 (1740) 141 The Attorney-General..was in a Twitter; for some of his Friends told him he would certainly be questioned for it in Parliament. 1802 G. COLMAN Poor Gentleman I. i, If I ben't all of a twitter to see my old John Harrowby again! 1825 J. NEAL Bro. Jonathan II. 151 A leap of the heart..and a sort of tingling twitter through all his blood. 1861 THACKERAY Four Georges iv. (1862) 198 In a twitter of indignation. 1869 TROLLOPE He knew, etc. xxxi, [She] was in a twitter, partly of expectation, and partly..of fear. 1869 L. M. ALCOTT Little Women vi, Beth hurried on in a twitter of suspense.
b. A suppressed laugh, a titter; a fit of laughter. dial.
1736 LEWIS Isle of Tenet Gloss. s.v. (E.D.S.), He is in a mighty twitter. 1847-78 HALLIWELL, Twitter,..(2) A fit of laughter. Kent.
2. An act or the action of twittering, as a bird; light tremulous chirping. Also transf. a sound resembling this.
1842 BROWNING Waring I. vi. 35 As pours some pigeon..her melodious cry Amid their [swallows'] barbarous twitter! 1849 W. S. MAYO Kaloolah v. (1850) 40 The hesitating twitter of the sleepy birds. 1871 BLACKIE Four Phases i. 43 A mere swallow-twitter of inarticulate jargon. 1902 J. C. SNAITH Wayfarers xvi, The ceaseless twitter of the rain on the road

TRS-80: Cliff Evans

march of the stanzas

It was exactly everything:
two brown arms and
the southward-pointing wheel.
The blackbird didn't
have time for your theories
and no one lived
in the concrete
but us.
Remarkably beautiful us!
And about now is the
time for a question.
Or is it?
You asked the blackbird
exactly why we bother
and the blackbird answered,
wings.

OK, for the part
about productivity,
I lied a bit. When
building the tower one
should usually strike
for up. And away! The joyous
lark and
hangover. Don't ask me
to stretch it in all directions,
to translate from the Russian
to your fears. My brain
is a puddle
of infinite depth.

I am a kitten eating cracker jacks.
a shoelace in the trees
a ruby-throated billboard
and a bite off Chekhov's inseam.

How many forevers
will I be able to see
the tree held in sunset light,
leaves bright and brushed
by the wind.
Already
it is gone.

We are out of the night.
We are arrived.

We're in
the dark days,
or so the advertisements
tell us.
Hopped up on facecream
is not the worst
way to die.
Screaming bombs! Screaming
babies!
Why can't we all scream
quietly!
Sometimes
the exclamation mark
is a wondrous
invention. I remember now
I had pledged to scream
Eureka! at least
once last night and at that
I have failed.

Last night I smashed
my lamp against the wall.
Time for a new lamp!
Time for therapy!

You pay for the privilege.
For the white flat front
of the bus.

And then into the folds of your apron
you tucked the knife.

In the yellow-cake colored paperback in the basement
was the story of the woman double-dipped in gold paint
who died when men covered up the small of her back,
the last breathing spot.

In the thick encyclopedias layering the shelves
was the story of the Temple of Kyoto, where elves
(well, monks) painted urushiol lacquer over all gold leaf
to preserve it from thieves.

But in a lost tale a daughter in the back seat
of a van with dozens of glittering, under a blanket,
bottles, lacquered, and boxes like jacquard, of liquor--
gifts for customers,

or a heist? -- is a mess of poison ivy under the blanket
with the spirits gilded and boxes elongate;
untouchable, though not dying. Spirited
away like a scratching anti-Juliet

-- Urushiol by Ange Mlinko

many times

many times in darkness
have i listened
to the last guitar chord
bequeath itself
to the still.
many times hand on
myself have i thought
this is it, the end, no more
root beer. many
times have i ground
the ax, many times
have i wished to be
more a man.
but what else is there?
many times in the darkness
have i wished
for more darkness,
the utter kind, the
soul-sealing
box, but
that's not the kind
they make. apparently.
many times
many times
many times.

Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop.
They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs
and wives. We thought they didn't read our stuff,
whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,
or those that end, and he was as silent as a carp,
or those with middles which, if you think
or the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch
or beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights
in the woods, they've read every word and noticed
that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex
and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello
from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs
is the revenge school of poety, with title like
"My Yellow Sheet Lad" and "Given Your Mother's Taste
for Vodka, I'm Pretty Sure You're Not Mine."
They're not trying to make the poems better
so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook
or electrocution, as a group
they overcome their individual senilities,
their complete distaste for language, how cloying
it is, how like tears it can be, and remember
every mention of their long hours at the office
or how tired they were when they came home,
when they were dragged through the door
by their shadows. I don't know why it's so hard
to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,
not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball
of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man
with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence
was his presence, his present, the Cheerios,
the PF Flyers, who taught me about trees,
that they're the most intricate version of standing up,
who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know
that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy.
A bomb. A bomb that'll go off soon for him, for me,
and I notice in our fathers' poems a reciprocal dwelling
on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared
as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted
the rocket cars, as if running away from them
to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers
wasn't fast enough, and it turns out they did
start to say something, to form the words hey
or stay, but we'd turned into a door full of sun,
into the burning leave, and were gone
before it came to them that it was all right
to shout, that they should have knocked us down
with a hand on our shoulders, they they too are mystified
by the distance men need in their love.

O my pa-pa by Bob Hicok

From one of the books I'm reading, Half Life, by Shelley Jackson. I'd like to think she and I are related, but we probably aren't.

(background: narrator is one half of a conjoined twin, and she's talking about when she and her sister read different books together)

This left a particular legacy. I cannot reread a certain energetic tale of derring-do without a feeling of melancholy bushwhacking me in the middle of a gunfight, at just the point her sob story made her bawl. Or read a particular love scene without bursting out laughing. Every book sems to me to have a second story under its skin, a narrative not of incident but of emotion, at odds with the one on the surface. Even when, for school, we had to read the same books, I reached the sad parts with a feeling of déjà vu when she had been there a page before me; she scooped every story, except the ones I scooped first. More often, it was a matter of chuckling or weeping over a grammar book. And when we found the battered Playboy by the highway, the day before a math test, √2 made my pulse gallop, and still does.

Also, I think this is an interesting short film. As one of my friends put it when we were talking about it, this is what dying of boredom looks like (it's 13 minutes, but worth it, and you probably won't be able to look away anyway)

joanne kyger @ city lights

Joanne Kyger Thursday, July 12th, 7pm Joanne Kyger celebrating the release of About Now: Collected Poems, published by the National Poetry Foundation

missing the 20th century

The Underdog

http://www.myspace.com/spoon

"You got no fear of the underdog.
That's why you will not survive."

Spoon, "The Underdog"

annie wilkinson

Art by Annie. More info on her site, and more pictures on flickr.

Re: Cheney

The Cheney Vice-Presidency

 

this monkey's gone to heaven

edwards drive-in

the conformist by bernardo bertolucci -- a lot, not a little bit, of genius going on here. it's about the weakness of the masses, but told through one individual, the way an individual can want so bad to be part of something. it's not just political, it's sexual and funny and maybe a little bit drunk. the movie is also beautiful just to look at. my favorite movie in months.

Let's Start Digging

I have long suspected
that when you got down to it
Gomorrah was a lot worse than Sodom.

You hear a bit about the Sodomites,
after all. They were the proud
purveyors of sodomy

But whatever they were doing in
Gomorrah was some bad shit.

God struck it down so bad
that even the bad behavior
didn’t survive in language.

Sodom got burnt &
Gomorrah got buried.

in response to "fake empire"

six minutes and counting

21 bus line—door jamb to curb

a panhandles puddled cement

orange juice banging against my thigh

I reached out all breathy and tired

your cool forehead, your hot cheeks

beneath a spiky Mohawk

all fawna and flora

you lie.

milk thistle tears

the glistening kind

full of pin-pricks

we waited and rocked

knees to a chest

I saved part of the infection in a small plastic bag. A grievance.
You didn’t want me. To turn down your covers, or generate
a low tone. You were wet with radiation sickness.
A pair of eyes came out of you. A pair of wisdom teeth,
a practice…

Eventually, I pinned your left hand behind your back. I sang you,
that boat, that heaven, the three-armed love. Whether there was
a blind wind on... When the sash blew we knew it was close.
The hoodlum tundra, the icicle full of pills. When the first
and perfect, and each one its own tome…

Even my breakage. In the closet, I shook the vehicle… In the
back of the closet, I examined my own fur.

-Danielle Pafunda, from Pretty Young Thing a.k.a. the next poetry book i plan to read if i can track the damn thing down.

forewarned is forearmed

I have a microchip
Implanted in my heart
So if I try to escape
The robots will blow me apart
And my limbs will go flying
And land before the ones that I love
Who would wail and would weep
But the robots would keep them at bay
While I shut my eyes
For the very last time.

--from Citizens of Tomorrow, Tokyo Police Club

oh!

Oh blackened pit of despair!
Let me take you by the handlebars.
Let me fluff for you the pillow. My guts
are fruit punch,
Hi-C fucked open
at two ends
by metal.
It is a good day, the sun
appallingly bright and the sky--
OK, the sky
is hazy. The hydrocarbons
are having a field day, even if
it's the white ribbon kind
that even the fat kid can win.
No prize
for you, blackened pit! Today the trees
are weeping black
lullabies and my sadness
shines like a far boat
on the bay.

there was red lighted door two doors down from the house
where she left a note for me in her underwear
that I found as I slipped them off
the note said “stay out super late”
it said I lived in a fake empire
that I was half-awake

I crutched the city
turned the bus-stop over with my hands
there was one minute and ten minutes
there was my friends scattered across any distances
people reaching into their pockets as if it would never mean anything again
there was a gay boy with a black eye who gave me the softest kiss I ever had
there were bell systems, gun shots, seven and nineteen minutes
a woman who looked younger than she is up in her room with her plants
an unknown musical organism pissing on public trash cans

her parents were lovely in how obvious they loved her

there was a woman with a big ass in a short skirt
and a tattoo on her thick left sky
mostly I was alone out there so I brought the big dictionary I bought at costco with me
pictures of people I used to know in a wicker basket
two and fifteen minutes
homemade camper shells and new friend love businesses
I went down with all the same things I always thought

tail fin

professional-like

i-pod wars

"Blood and Love Tonight!" was written
on our tombstones for us
In the silence of these graves
I was digging and up came the whispers
They said:
"The Right will switch sides"
We'll have our bride
And I will love my enemy tonight!

"We invite you all to join us here for this union."
The notes were all received by the vanguard
early this morning.
"Please come tonight, our allies.
This great divide
Has kissed us with a surprise bride."

I've got blood in the palms of my hands
It's only blood they'll understand

In the dead of night you better hold on tight to
your loved ones.
The rumor is the truth, the furies are here upon us.
Ask: "Who switched sides?"
My bride.
And this fight moves on
Outside the cemetery lawn.

"Who switched sides?!"
Our bride.
And this fight moves on
Outside the cemetery lawn.

cemetery lawn, by the rosebuds

OCD

recommendations for 30 yrs

live life
like a razorblade. become
beautiful
whenever possible.
encourage
light, spread and
take
sips, sometimes
gulps, sometimes
the whole damn
enchilada all
at once. yours. make
every effort to
surpass
the common verity. read
as much as
is humanly possible,
then ever
so slightly
more. and maybe most
importantly never
forget to
rock,
rock and love,
love and rock and
more of that,
onward, double-bass drums,
howling,
the night.

lupo rima

What we gave
to the wolf
can never be recovered. Even
the strongest
of similes will eventually
leave us, black
as a pocket or
bottled
like the sky. So
don't. I am here
to give you
the rafters. I am
the wolf
with the butterfly's heart.

not finished yet but still

How many more sad
poems than happy ones!
It's all right.
Why borrow another's
broken razor
when what's really wanted
is one's own private hospital
for lost birds.
We all want to be
Frank O'Hara but
it simply isn't practical.
For example,
the single size of pants.
There is so much
to suffer, ice cream
to spill and everywhere
we walk may be
the 101 in rush hour:
to the bathroom at night or
to the kitchen to say,
I need you.

new yorker article excerpt

In 1969, the Congressional Joint Comittee on Atomic Energy held a hearing at which Robert Wilson was called to testify. Wilson, who had served as the chief of experimental nuclear physics for the Manhatten Project, was at that point the head of CERN's main rival, Fermilab, and in charge of $250 million that Congress had recently allocated for the lab to build a new collider. Senator John Pastore, of Rhode Island, want to know the rationale behind a government expenditure of that size. Did the collider have anything to do with promoting "the security of the country"?

Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.
Pastore: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Pastore: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. . . It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are partriotic about . . . It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

adjective as a noun

hard as an eskimo pie.
hard as as a sheep-shackle.
strong as a bathtub.
strong as a corkboard.
strong as a lipstick.
black as a shoelace.
black as a dollar.
black as a susan b. anthony dollar.
black as a plate.
black as a theory.
theoretical like a beer glass.
theoretical like iggy pop.
hard as crutches.
theoretical as birds' wings.
black as a pocket.
strong as a pocket.
strong as a tub.
bottled like the sky.

two from the iggster

"All I liked to do was walk around the streets with a heart full of napalm. I always though 'Heart Full of Soul' was a good song so I thought, What's my heart full of?
I decided it was basically full of napalm."

"What happened was by the time I finished Raw Power, my standards were different than other people's. That's the only way I can put it. I wanted the music to come out of the speakers and just grab you by the throat and just knock your head against the wall and just basically kill you."

The London Apartments - Streetlights Are Soldiers

what else are you taking with you? (old)

Kat grabbed a cigarette from a pack on the coffee table, lit one, and lay back upon the couch. She put the cigarette to her lips and inhaled, savoring the acrid taste. She heard the crinkle of the tobacco burning, watched the thin ember ring work its way up the cigarette as it turned white paper to ash. She counted the rings on the stem of the cigarette, the tiny striated lines marking the paper that held the tobacco. How many rings per drag, per breath, she wondered. She inhaled and watched the rings disintegrate into ashes. The rings of a tree, she thought, rings of the cigarette that mark time’s passage, our life together. This ring for when I met you. This one for when we first slept together, and in gratitude you told me that you loved me. Here for your birthday, when we drank too much tequila and I broke all the plates.

Alipio

certainly he
can take it,
man the beseiged,
alipio americanus,
chicagoan he who
takes it every night on
3am sidewalks.
the mechanism
is one handed,
american industriousness,
with one movement
the blade, but
the sentiment to use it seems
a most unamerican undertaking,
by this i mean one
must act unencumbered
by forethought, repercussion, as
if one were already
dead. no one
ever stops at 3am, and
thus it is
a wash, a thousand
knives into the eyes
of a thousand draining
shadows,
bootheels and
bootheels' echoes soon
will all just sink
away.

whiskeyface!

his dreams brightened. the vanished world returned. kin long dead washed up and cast fey sidewise looks upon him. none spoke. he thought of his life. so long ago. a gray day in a foreign city where he stood in a window and watched the street below. behind him on a wooden table a small lamp burned. on the table books and papers. it had begun to rain and a cat at the corner turned and crossed the sidewalk and sat beneath the cafe awning. there was a woman at a table there with her head in her hands. years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. shelves tipped over. some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. he picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. he'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. it surprised him. that the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. he let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the cold gray light.

from the road by cormac mccarthy

friday

here
my heart
is nothing, her
forehead, tears, her
handkerchief, if
only i had
loved you, streetlights, why
all i see are things
that lie
behind us, baby, i
would have
been brighter, better,
another man
entirely.

not quite weller

hello i am a nothing salesman
i sit alone and wait for endings
once a year i suffer the old folk
it's always good to know where you're heading

that's entertainment
that's entertainment

at age twelve i was a brilliant young lightbulb
by eighteen a pock-faced nightmare
thirty-five and now i know nothing
it's just the wattage that's what i'm saying

that's entertainment
that's entertainment

art store

this is by john pylypchuk.

see more of him here

i-pod wars

when our mouths are filled with uninvited tongues of others
and the strays are pining for their unrequited mothers
milk that sours is promptly spat
light will fill our eyes like cats

and they shall enter from the back
with spears and scepters and squirming sacks
scribs and tangles between their ears
faceless scrumbled charcoal smears

through the coppice and the chaparral
the thickets thick with mold
the bracken and the brier
catchweed into the fold

when our mouths are filled with uninvited tongues of others
and the strays are pining for their unrequited mothers
milk that sours is promptly spat
light will fill our eyes like cats
light will fill our eyes like cats
cataracts

---andrew bird, from the album armchair apocrypha

Pagan Kennedy

Pagan Kennedy
Makeout Room
Writer's w/Drinks
Saturday, April 14 @ 7pm

gulliver's travels (for john)

So

So the promise of happiness?
he asked a frog

then swallowed the frog
And the buzz of memory?

he asked the page
before lighting the page

And by night the sliding stars
beyond the night itself

-- Michael Palmer

cymbal chimp, you're okay

at the rack

frankenstein took the three-pound hammer from the wall, found the hand-sized area on the anvil that rang the clearest and gave the most bounce to the hammer’s head—the anvil’s “sweet spot”. everything has two meanings, he thought, our simplest, smallest words branching off into the storms and whirlpools of sex, warfare, worship. therefore the words do not work. he breathed shallow while the wet coal at the fire’s edges coked up, the sulfur cooking out of it and filling the shop with lung-stinging fumes. “coked up”—the verbal thing there made him wonder if he wasn’t just doing this to be doing coke, if the part of him that literalized all words, the undeciphering, dreaming part of him, believed he was here getting high. several nights of sick dreaming had preceded his relapse. various dreams but they all happened in the same place, a city he must have visited once and couldn’t remember anymore, depopulated now, vast and silent stadiums, motionless streets. the man in the dream was no longer himself; it was some other fool, some other drugged maniac, and he, frankenstein, watched the rest of it from a place beyond, like a moviegoer—a dreamgoer. he’d never before had a dream and failed to be in it.

from already dead, by denis johnson

Dear Mr. President

Dear Mr. President,

You should be careful
how you handle
civil wars.

Word
on the street is:

they're highly
contagious.

Yours truly,
Democracy

treatment

The camera begins on a pane of glass, looking from the inside out, and a wet hail weakly taps the window. Outside can be seen a dour winter, snow on the ground, a northern mountain town. Cars move slowly down the streets, early day, everything gray in the pale gray light. In fact it is Christmas.

As the camera pulls back into the room, turns, we can see we are in a bedroom, a man's room, nothing on walls, wooden floor, the kind that echoes too loudly beneath one's heels in the still of night. A pile of clothes in the corner, work boots, a bed and a cluttered bureau. Upon it change, scraps of paper, receipts pulled crumpled out of pockets, a lamp and several mostly-empty beer bottles.

A man sits in the bed fully clothed. Jacket and boots on, waiting. He holds his ski cap in his hands, looks out the window. Lucas Raley.

spit

sister spit reading, mon apr 9 @ edinburgh, i don't know if men are allowed

start a war

you could have it all

millstone

I used to be such a burning example
I used to be so original
I used to care I was being cared for
And made sure I showed it to those that I love
I used to sleep without a single stir
Cause I was about my father's work

[drum kicks in]

-- Brand New

edwards drive-in

when did ryan gosling become edward norton jr.? just watched the believer and half nelson back to back and I'd do it again. cause I'm an internet using motherfucker, or with hyphens: an internet-using-motherfucker.

"john, the internet using motherfucker"