Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Maansa Sukunsa

After the inmëösten, the fading gold
Kutenberries in single file

End of time’s maansa
Sukunsa of patience, tuota of the ancillary pencil

Naisten: was she really?
Muutaman: the last tango was missing

Yesterday’s Selvää, tomorrow’s dream
Taivaaseen, in the rocky pillage of

Palvella Arkun: most eminent Dairy Queen
Eloon in the park, we were dancing

My sister’s picture—voimaa
Laulunjohtajalle, the glossalalia of time

Huonosti juicy fruit and I am wary.

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Friday, January 26, 2007

QUANDARY 13

I don’t think I’ve actually been inside the lighthouse
Light visions of fiscal mirth

Ancient of daze, ancient of the roundhouse mooch
Rimbaud in the afterhaze of visual streaming

Fog that fills the afterwave
Allegiance pledged on the roadways

Allegations on the floating bus
Yellow maze of labyrinthine pleasure

I do not get the fish, I do not get the flavor
When the walls come down, vision splinters

Java beans, java anvils, java tanks
We are the big boys now, playing in big boy dreams

Ask not, want not
You may think, that I think, that our love is through

But I think, that our thinking
—the thinking man’s Quandary:
Thirteen stripes of aftershave

I am a disco person
In the days of the Holy Ghost

In the blaze of the Very Most
High. How do you actually give…tours?

“There are instructions. There’s a menu.”
And then you wave.

I’ve told people I want a tour, but
No one will give one to me.


My penguin is only 44 days old.

Monday, January 22, 2007

ÍSLAND

Bobby fischer
Blue lagoon snow
Geothermal bobby fischer
Blue lagoon snow, blue green algae—

The exiled north, banished from europe’s hard shadow
Snorri sturluson is killed fleeing tyranny
White silica mud, the water is saline
Stone throwing / abysmal poverty

The Althing
Erupted in 1389

Fishery limits are extended to 4 miles
Fishery limits are extended to 12 miles
Fishery limits are extended to 50 miles
Fishery limits are extended to 200 miles

Bobby fischer.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

The Earlier Rise of Heart

“It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.”

Against the Day, page 805

Saturday, January 20, 2007

Pynchon Party

Two weeks ago, I finished Thomas Pynchon's new novel Against the Day. Not sure of Mr. P's intent, but I do know for many of us pynchonistas/os out there, it was a long luxurious Christmas gift to ourselves, whether bought at the midnight hour, or - as in my case - cyberqueued up for one of the eight copies rolling into the San Antonio library (a system that insists - am I so out of the loop these days that this has become de rigeur? - on cataloguing Gravity's Rainbow and V as science fiction). I think I have accidentally been the first to check out...well, come to think of it, I queued up for McCarthy's No Country for Old Men and managed a virgin copy of that, too, with decidedly less happy results than I just had with ATD. (I love McCarthy; I even finally muscled up for Blood Meridian, and found it starkravingly gorgeous in its own horrifying way, but NCFOM was, for the time being, NCF this old man...)

In truth, I thought I was probably done with Pynchon. I stood reverently in the 18 year queue following GR, still too young and foolish to realize that you probably don't follow up a GR with another GR, but I remained smitten enough to just be happy back in Vineland, no matter where he might want to take us. Mason and Dixon, on the other hand, broke me, and in that breaking is where I felt that we were likely to part company. Though in my heart of hearts I still maintain that M&D is first and foremeost a love story, it was hard for me to hold onto that thread through all the convolutions, much less feel that the thread made the 800 pages worth reading. In fairness to Mr P, I was probably woefully out of reading-shape, and I was also four or so years into my own fiction-writing, which was and is (and should and ever shall be) completely unpynchonesque. The vastly simpler writing voice I was discovering left me bereft of ear and will to sit down to the grand pynchon buffet.

So, it came as some great surprise to me that, sometime in late November of last year, my surf-noodle veered sharply into a Pynchon-google, finding out about the imminence of his new arrival. Very quickly, again surprisingly, I was hooked, completely swept up in all the Mardi Gras of expectation, verily, as I said, even queuing up to the bar. I peeked in at the wikis and bloggers, laughed at the audacity of reviewers pro or con, I mean, come on.

I'm aware of Pynchon readers being tagged as pretentious, reading for the sake of saying we have read. This is bullshit. The only pretenders, of course, are those who say they have read him and haven't. There is no status conferred by our X number of readings of GR, there is simply the luxurious, riotous, cacophonous splendor of the time spent with the teller and the extended tribe we must all feel ourselves to be, because, come on, kids, for all his megaton splendiferousness, P is, above all, a devilishly noodling Thelonius to all his giggling and attentive little fireside/piano-side kiddies. Those big mile-wide words? Soap bubbles or smoke rings blown so we can all go ooh and ahh. And we do, we do. Oh, how we do. Look at the cool colors on that one, Mr P!!

So, surprise, surprise: I loved Against the Day: got swept up, lost several times, but settled into a nifty reader's groove about midway, when I made damn sure I sat up in bed and did not try to balance its heft on my belly: gotta stay at least focused and AWAKE, kids.

When Larry McMurtry got his Pulitzer for his magnificent Lonesome Dove, even though it was years after he'd started writing, I thought, what a drag in a way: this man will write on for years (as he has) and never ever get close to another LD. Forget the prizes, just the pure rough magic of that book. Funny, I never had the same feeling about Mr P, after the Denali of Gravity's Rainbow. We all must have known that there was a Sagarmatha lurking there, over the next ridge. A-and who knows, our latest Christmas treat may have just been Annapurna in the stocking...

We all read as we read, and as heady as Mr P is, I'm still a bear of relatively little brain. I do's what I can do's, makes of it all what I can, and enjoys the ride. I'll come back again (I always do) and miss more stuff through each cruise. But, I have to say, this book, all its brilliance notwithstanding, was lovely. Lovely. And wonderfully warm, and yes, I think this has everything to do with Daddy and Husband and walking son to school Pynchon. Face it: brilliant detonation that Gravity's Rainbow has been in our lives, our Tunguska Event, Against the Day is the aftershock, the what we do with it in our lives now that it's here...

Folks have ragged on the anarchists. Screw that. P shows us two things about anarchy: vengeance is "reactive" to the pillage, and more importantly, anarchy in its purest form is not about violence whatsoever: it is the dream carried forward that humans can blend and cooperate and love without authoritarian interference: it is our truest heartbeat.

I feared that it would be a long time before I could settle into another novel, so I've spent the past few days doodling with Barthelme, just for pure goofiness and distraction (very poor rendering of Don B, as Thomas P would be the first to agree), but this evening I picked up Joan London's Gilgamesh and actually felt as if I were reading within the covers of ATD, that its "web-traverse" was mapping myriads of levels of connection among us, and lovingly gathering us in...even into all those others by the fire...

Peace, love, and soul, Mr Pynchon. And happy dancing...

Friday, January 19, 2007

RED SUITE

The assignment was monosyllabics, save for the occasional digression.

[red tracks]

foul star:
you plant thorns
blown by hell’s
fire. ask these
used souls: red
tracks at fear’s gate.


[crawled red]

nails seen at the gate,
you saw men anviled
by loss of care. we
ate fear at the bridge
of fate, crawled
red tracks through
fire’s waste.


[aching red]

foul stew, wretch’s brew—
storm of red plenty.
ache of hell’s thorns,
soul’s fear at the gate.
fire tracks fear,
asks none who
is first, blue men
blown, wall blown down.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Wake the Penance

After the raj
& the naked twins
the cessation of hostilities
the resurrection of splendor
negotiation of bliss
retaliation of knowledge at the western gate:

Hollywood dream
bollywood sentimentality
resolution of mist.

Unseemly doings in the doorway
eventual habituations—
“I was aghast at the midnight wake”—

the penance of feeling
down by the juniper purgings
awash in the coming tide,

we followed. The sane
were missed. The reliable were
sanctioned. The
sanctuary exiled in
darkest blood. Cried

the minions, the armies,
the prisoners of time,
the daughters of truth. Thieves

built the prison that
swept us into
the ghosted night.

The star was emerging.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Noo Goo

The Muses be rumblin' again: poetry for the next 12 weeks at WSSA: seems time for low-maintenance show and tell. Here's what's been rumbling so far.

[You are music nazi now leave]

You are music nazi now leave
Will you bring my headphones
I keep thinking it’s third period

Mouse—mouse is not a word
But if I capitalize it,
Is it jay and silent bob?

No, it’s boo boo kitty truck
I just fixed it
After the gold rush of your smitten dreams.


[jividen road trip]

She’s probably taking her sweet time
Suing taco bell
All the jalapeño blunders, sweet
Mystic rednecks in fifty urban flavors
Suing since time immemorial sweetly
Singing, sweetly the aftermath
Sweetly the calculus of schmooze.


[colloids]

It’s more
not less
mayonnaise
that we need

the salad dressing
is curdling
and I have
no
more patience

with it.

[colorado]

greed beats her frozen lottery—
a place known by its hard farrow,
words that start a red mist
down in the belly of your marrow—
looming sound, glare of red moss,
this home, this virgin shirt, this
redness all round.


[Algebraic]

He attended:

Why was I an alcoholic she left behind?

“Yesterday I saw him”

catching a glimpse—

a better arithmetic—

actors who look like me between the pages.

Can students predominate?

We paint and are weakly understood.

I see you: does it matter?


[funky shrk: up and down the social ladder]

Brown man feels good in his bio grafia
Scorpio tango man
Ark of nothing boat for the water
ship out on the FOAM

electric light blues and funk
shrkskin english hurricane polished chrome tar
Italian opera-man doing splits
Mannish boy—

Bolster this hip, famous flame
Symposium of shatterdome
boca negra sex machine eucharistic springtime
man made the trains

had his Ferrari’s clutch
dismantled and realized
always tellin’ him to go
take off their fancy—


[global chorizo and fresh celery day]

Coarsely chopped fatty
cheeks seldom encountered
in Europe, rather than chopped
at least 3 centimeters.

Random armed minions,
deep reddish color,
generally known as foo fat
in the skillet.

Two ingredients blend:
longanizas can also be made
(or even tuna)—
consumers are not always aware.

Be terribly spicy.
After the sixth disappointing
third place finish,
extensive tourism.

Among others,
Lucbán is known as
St. Isidore the Farmer;
Lemon Bay, the name of the author
of the unusual crime.

Hat Mystery most priggish,
Harvard-educated
Double, Double,
Apium graveolens dulce, AND
Falconer-made rhombics—

white cultivars most crisp and tender:

Pascal celery after the stagnation of winter.


and a collaboration with some of the kids:

[Just Randomness Messy]

Automatic external defibulator
It’s anything you want it to be
I have a wardrobe with an orange robe
It smells like my ex-boyfriend good
Casey’s naked
& eating parsimonious marshmallows
In the shower
With crunchy marshmallows
& Lucky charms
Slightly burnt (that melt in your mouth sexily)
I sing naked…………………….in the shower (be nice)
Top flight: red fish blue fish
One fish two fish
The toughest leather
Monkey pants at the taco stand
We don’t want no fajitas
Honey Bunny
It’s King Kong in the truck
Transformers—more than meets the eye
Robots’ sweet disguise.

[Stephanie / Danielle / Jacob / Pascal / Casey / JD / Rachel]


shouts to Mr Brown (1933-2006)