sunday memory

this morning i remembered how my grandmother used to recite the alphabet backwards

i remembered how amazed i was as a kindergartner at the sheer awesomeness of it all

i miss her tremendously

The Beautiful South - A Little Time

sad into unsad...

for lent...how people change

facebook

well i have now entered the ranks of 18 year old college students everywhere by getting a facebook page...

here are some things that i didn't foresee:

1) accepting students as friends...i won't ever accept current students but what about former ones...especially if those former ones can also become current in any given semester

2) totally getting friend requests from people i went to high school with...dude there is a reason why we have not stayed in touch why would having a facebook page be any different?

3) i have become preoccupied (to the point of a minor obsession) with checking my page at least 500xs a day

4) the potential for epic lulz by looking at student profiles who do not put their pages on private

why day friday

why IS 1 the loneliest number?

why aren't bush and cheney being tried for war crimes?

why do people drive like idiots when the weather conditions are so bad?

why do my neighbors always have to slam their damn doors?

and, inspired by the blog "what ladder?" (look to the left)

honestly, why HAVEN'T we had sex yet?

_the stand_

these are the images that go through my mind as i read this text

insert catchy title here

insert interesting and/or provocative text here

a hiatus?

i don't know....yeats said it best "things fall apart"

i guess we will see if i can start gluing these things back together again

but how many times can something be repaired before

it is rendered a lost cause?

ah, 2009, if anything...you are not failing me in your

absurd objective to disappointment

the violence of rhetorical silence

i believe that rhetorical silence can be violent. i think that i want to start doing research on the act of dismissiveness and of NOT talking...of actively ignoring. i have noticed how on many levels of my life i have been violently ignored by others as i myself have violently ignored. the act of actively ignoring is a way to claim power over one's body while also attempting to stabilize the ecology of one's established place.

and yet in actively ignoring a person some people make a point of NOT ignoring you. of asserting their selves upon you when you are clearly attempting to ignore them. this act of assertion is most definitely violent as well...a war that wages between speaking as intrusion and silence as defense and counter attack. in this latter example this rhetorical silence is reactionary...attempting to claim power over words levied against my "self" and at the same time quietly rebutting a rhetorical attack (unsurprisingly [in this instance] generated from 'straight' while male subjectivity).

because my silence is, in my mind, justifiable for solidifying and simultaneously protecting the borders of my self, others' reactionary silence and dismissiveness against me is most certainly and violently and absurdly reactionary. i saw one such person the other day. i turned my back, caught a reflection of this person in the window of the door i was staring at. the silence was thick and yet sharp and i could not help but feel the hatred radiating from their own narcissistic subject position. it's paradoxical. in a way, i don't care but yet in other ways i do. i care enough to write about it in the very least.

why day friday

1) why do i always feel like i'm running late even when i have no place to go?

2) why is annie lennox's song "why?" so damn good?

3) why does it seem so damn cold when we're supposed to be globally warming?

4) why is bush not being impeached?

first snow fall

why day friday

why is it that when my "gaydar" is off it's atrocious but when it's on it's perfect?

why is it a proven fact that every time a gay man fems it up a straight man cries?

why does george michael's voice still sound so good after all of that crack?

why is it that people with the most to live for commit suicide?

being thankful...srsly...

why day friday

why is it snowing so early this year?

why can't this economy just get over it?

why are jobs so hard to find and the price of gas is lower?

why are steven king novels so damn addicting?

why are vampires so cool?

why am i a geriatric goth and not a geriatric emo?

why day friday

why am i always being held to someone else's time frame?

why is it so difficult for me to be concise?

why do people use their car horns for doorbells?

why do i always misspell "definately"?

why do the smartest students never speak up?

why am i not impressed?

song for sad thursday

red house painters

"Uncle Joe"
-----------
Where have all the people gone in my life
I'm looking at the ceiling with an awful feeling of loss and of loneliness
The after late night television pain, I'm running out of strength
I'm running, running, running out of strength

And it feels so wonderful
To swim in our fears
And divide inseparable
The awakening of life

Oh, Uncle Joe, could you tell me about what you know?
Of being having mental problems and their solutions, too
I'll give anything a try once
I'll try anything three times
I don't care, I don't care
I don't care, I don't care

But there's no company
That can stand to be with me
So my dependency on you grows
And I am not very well read
And consider I will lose my heart
And can you spare me of my pain
Can't you spare me of my tears?

Oh, Uncle Joe
Uncle Joe
Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe

And suicide's intentional
When I spin in your fear
I am over-influenced
By movies
And you should've gone
To the fear
To my hope
The darkest hope
Did you know?
Lies become the sky
That's all gone
To the fear
To my hope
The darkest hope
Do you know?
Lies become the sky

this is a wallace steven's kind of day....

music score: The Emperor of Ice Cream by roger reynolds



image/installation: The Emperor of Ice Cream by Varujan Boghosian


The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

--Wallace Stevens


I love Helen Vendler’s expository (and poetic) interpretation of Wallace’s poem:


For purposes of experiment, I have put the details the poem gives us into the form of a first-person narrative; I see the poem as a rewritten form of this ur-narrative, in which the narrative has been changed into an impersonal form, and the linear temporal structure of narrative form has been replaced by a strict geometric spatial construction – two rooms juxtaposed. Here (with apologies) is my conjectural narrative ur-form of the poem, constructed purely as an explanatory device:

I went, as a neighbor, to a house to help lay out the corpse of an old woman who had died alone; I was helping to prepare for the home wake. I entered, familiarly, not by the front door but by the kitchen door. I was shocked and repelled as I went into the kitchen by the disorderly festival going on inside: a big muscular neighbor who worked at the cigar-factory had been called in to crank the ice-cream machine, various neighbors had sent over their scullery-girls to help out and their yard-boys bearing newspaper-wrapped flowers from their yards to decorate the house and the bier: the scullery-girls were taking advantage of the occasion to dawdle around the kitchen and flirt with the yard-boys, and they were all waiting around to have a taste of the ice cream when it was finished. It all seemed to me crude and boisterous and squalid and unfeeling in the house of the dead – all that appetite, all that concupiscence.

Then I left the sexuality and gluttony of the kitchen, and went in to the death in the bedroom. The corpse of the old woman was lying exposed on the bed. My first impulse was to find a sheet to cover the corpse; I went to the cheap old pine dresser, but it was hard to get the sheet out of it because each of the three drawers was lacking a drawer-pull; she must have been too infirm to get to the store to get new glass knobs. But I got a sheet out, noticing that she had hand-embroidered a fantail border on it; she wanted to make it beautiful, even though she was so poor that she made her own sheets, and cut them as minimally as she could so as to get as many as possible out of a length of cloth. She cut them so short, in fact, that when I pulled the sheet up far enough to cover her face, it was too short to cover her feet. It was almost worse to have to look at her old calloused feet than to look at her face; somehow her feet were more dead, more mute, than her face had been

She is dead, and the fact cannot be hidden by any sheet. What remains after death, in the cold light of reality, is life – all of that life, with its coarse muscularity and crude hunger and greedy concupiscence, that is going on in the kitchen. The only god of this world is the cold god of persistent life and appetite; and I must look steadily at this repellent but true tableau – the animal life in the kitchen, the corpse in the back bedroom. Life offers no other tableaus of reality, once we pierce beneath appearances.

From The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Columbia UP.

somewhere in my imagination i hear a greek chorus singing about sleep, numbness, what counts and what doesn't...but, most importantly, who gets to decide.

why day friday

why do i see xmas trees already?

why does coke taste better than pepsi?

why can't the weather make up its mind?

why does 30mph seem so slow?

why do i feel like i'm a repeat offender all of the fucking time?

an open letter to florida

dear florida,

you are the land of my birth where palm trees, beaches, strip malls, humidity, and tourists make up your many landscapes. people automatically love you it seems. the very mention of your name, no matter where i am, brings out the daydreamer in anyone that asks me where i am from. indeed, my sanity is often questioned by my decision to have left you. but these daydreamers don't understand. they think that you are warm and loving with a very laid back personality and a voice made out of the sound of waves and seagulls. these people honestly think that to live with you is to inhabit a state of perpetual relaxation and where mickey mouse and cinderella stroll hand-in-hand down well manicured and extremely clean sidewalks and every night there is a parade.

i know better.

we have had a very volatile relationship over the past forty years. me hating you for your conservative, unfair, and oppressive stances against people who are anything but "normative" and you not caring for anyone but the rich and religious while stealthily breaking your own moral codes in the many rest stops that dot your landscape along I75 or I275. unwisely, you elected jeb who nearly ruined you and now you have charley sneaking around the ruins of any type of dignity you might have had had you really thought about what pain and damage you have caused. you allowed katherine harris and her ilk to steal an election thus opening the door to the eight years of hell this nation has endured. i even saw you prohibiting voters at the polls like the fascist you know you want to be. yes florida, you have made some bad decisions in the past; and even at this moment, you are still making them. i suppose you always will. but i was surprised last night florida. when i hesitantly checked the polls i noticed that a voice of reason was announcing itself in the results that i was looking at. when the final tally was in and i saw that your color was blue i must say that i was proud. are you learning something florida? or was this a moment of temporary insanity on your part...a bad choice made while drunk that you will regret the next morning? either way, it doesn't matter. i am glad you are blue and at least in this historic moment you're not the biggest asshole on the block. for that: i thank you.

does this mean that all is forgiven? does this mean that a new leaf has been turned over? certainly not. i am not coming back to you florida...i still do not trust you and i never will. but i am proud of this one moment. for once i am not cursing your name and regretting our association with each other...i am sure it will go back to "normal" in a day or two but at least in these five minutes i can smile and say that "yes, i do know you."

cq

why day friday halloween edition

why can't ghosts have babies?