bits of drift

 

Women, Dorothy Napangardi.

Dear Rushing & Impatient,

Here is a thing I am cleaning out of my closet: procrastination.  As a concept;  I think I don't actually even believe in it.  I propose we look instead for inclination and ripeness.  

Procrastination is entirely created by the pressure of people's expectations of you, and yes, I know, I know, sometimes we enter into contracts with others- at work, at school, etc., etc., etc.  So okay, give the people what they want on those occasions, but, but, but, on the other occasions, let us look for ripeness.  Let us be alert to the decisive moment; let things simmer on the back burner; because that might be all life is really, a constant simmering; never a 'doneness.'  If the simmering is the goal, that means you can stop fussing about setting the table, if you get my drift; never mind I shall continue snowing!  (25:25; but really, watch the whole thing, watch all the episodes, and then descend into grief, because there are no more!).

In the time I am procrastinating on finishing that sweater, I am actually, factually, working on it!  I am mentally muddling through dividing the yarn equally, deciding where to end the armscye, etc.  Damn it people, get this through your heads: time that you are leaving unfilled is actually the fertile field of idea and imagination- please, please stop plowing it up and sending the delicate soil into the air to come down elsewhere as nuisance dust!

get so lonely

 

Dear At Sea,

Can you believe they/we wanted it darker?  Well, I still can't.  Here, is one heck of a song for today- I hope you sing along and also, that you have a candle, so you too, can get a lot of reading done!

PS  Yes, I think that is a conch shell, that opening sound.

out

 

TV Dinner Tile

Dear Kyle

You know that I love you, really I do; and I know you love and care for me, too, as much as is possible in a diner/server relationship, but I just don't always want to know that your name is Kyle and that you'll be taking care of me tonight.  I don't want to be 'taken care' of; like you'd take out the trash, or deal with a plumbing disaster.  And, it feels all wonky in terms of a power structure, because you don't know who I am, what my name is, and it doesn't matter that we exchange names: I don't need your name as your bond of responsibility.  And I think you must feel this way too, don't you, Kyle?

One thing that constantly bugs me at my job and at my life, is the word 'my.'  My students, my class, my husband, my kid, my couch, my kitchen, ugh!  None of this stuff's most important features are their mineness.  They aren't really mine at all, and you don't have to be my server, either, you can just be 'the' server, and I can just be (as I always am, I guess) 'the' diner.  But, I am in such a stew about our interconnected collective lives that I may never go out again, anyway, Kyle, so maybe this is goodbye?

Yes, I know, I have gone all tu/vous and tu/usted on you, and you never liked studying language anyway, so why bring it up now, but these distinctions of familarity matter, somehow, in the struggle to stay out of the blind perpetuation of power abuses, no matter how minor, and so, yes, I think this is goodbye!

gather, miserablists

 

Dear Living,

I think I may have mentioned here, once, the kind of bolt you get sometimes, a sort of jolt of joy, out of nowhere; you might even be taking out the trash.  It's a feeling I might call happiness, but with extra euphoria sauce and a cherry on top.  In any case, one day I may write more on this frisson thing that sometimes happens.  I know for certain that I have mentioned my new best friend Viv Albertine?  I put 19 post-it notes into To Throw Away Unopened, and one of them was stuck on a Jenny Diski quote.  Now, Jenny is a gal I am not yet very familiar with.  I tried to read (I really did try!) The Golden Notebooks, and I swear to you on a stack of fifty unread books, I will try again!  Anyhoo, Doris Lessing was a sort of mother/(tor)mentor to Jenny Diski, who, in whatever it was I read, was said to be a difficult woman.  Jenny D., I mean, and yes, Doris L. was fabulously difficult too.  And I want to know them, as role models for my own emergent (dormant? latent?  consistent? continual?) difficultness. 

All this horizontal & lateral introduction and introspection, just to get you to here, a little thing that Jenny Diski wrote on happiness.

PS

If you want a song for today, a 'happy' song, you can choose one from here, if you like.  I don't think I want to tell you how to get happy.  Although, I will give you Get Happy, side A, and side B.

out on the wily, windy moors

 

Ellsworth Kelly.

Ellsworth Kelly.

Dear Moving Air,

What is time?  A river?  An arrow?  A goon?  A construct, a treasure, a collapse?  An ordering principle?  It feels like wind.  Here is your song for today.

it's just beginning....

overuse

 

Milagros; take two and call me in the morning.

Dear Contemporaries,

Do you worry about overuse?  My dj played this the other day, and she explained that it was her favorite* Neil Young song and she doesn't like to play it very often, because she doesn't want to 'overuse it.'  

Well, it has happened to me; I used to love some song, and somewhere along the way, someplace while I was getting it into my cells, into my blood, listening over and over (or as they say now: 'on repeat'), breathing and sleeping it, I fell out: out of lust, out if infatuation, out of the desire to consume it wholly.  What does that mean?  Not to you, but to me?  Am I so fickle?  Is there only so much daily enthusiasm?  Is it so that familiarity breeds contempt?  Ooh, I sure hope not!!!  

But, overuse;  In my shoulder there is a thing like that, and if I had it to do over, I'd have saved it a bit more; I would have turned the crank of the press with my left arm, might have taken some care when I was painting to stop now and then, as I do now; to stop knitting before two hours have transmuted themselves into three inches of cloth; I have this Thera-putty now, which I squeeze and twist around in between some number of rows now; I don't know if it helps, but, it is kind of fun to squish this stretchy yellow goop- it's kind of unstructured, compared to the repeated yarn loops.

And, what about relationships? Or chocolate, sugar, caffeine, alcohol?  And, ooh, what if one day you woke up and suddenly analgesics didn't work for you?  It'd be a hard rain that fell that day, and you'd have to face all these endless little headaches and sprains, pains and bruises with nothing but ice and tears!  

It isn't our topic, I know, but I would be, umm, under the weather, feeling delicate, nearly every day if it weren't for these medical marvels of medication.  I won't list my ills or my cures, but, I think often how uncomfortable I would be without the things I 'take.'  Without, for example, sunscreen.  I have a friend, who maybe doesn't wear it?  In any case, she has to subtly maneuver you to the shade when you run into her and stop to talk.  It's a weird, distracting feeling; you know her mind is on something else, but what?  Over years I have realized what it all is, and so now I say; let's move over here, into the shade.  But still, just saying goodbye in the driveway at the car is a problem for her- she is always, everly, antsy, on her way to out of the sun.  Her world revolves around the not-sun.  Think of it.

Anyway, I want to mention it here, because I think we have an odd relationship to medication here, in our culture.  I think we think we have failed, we are losers in the game of health, when we need a prescription balm to ease things.  We seem to feel that it is actually dangerous poison, prescribed by sadistic Dr. Frankensteins, and that anything else, even lighting candles and praying to the Big Head in the Sky would be better than to take this pill.  I ask you, I ask myself, why would anyone make a cure that would harm more than it heals?  I know, you are going to tell me it is about money, and I am going to say no, I do not believe that.  You are now going to tell  me that they are ignorant, foolish; '"they used to think smoking was good for you!!!"  Well, that fallacy isn't worth a response from me, either.  Your world of dehumanized idiots is not the one I live in, even though you are right next to me.  I am fine with you just hating yourself for needing medication, but I am not, not, not fine with you acting like only weak, failures of humans need or take medicine.  So you are going to have to contemplate all that; that big, fat cognitive dissonance in your brain, and if I were you, I'd see a doctor about that.

*Hmm, what is mine???  Now I feel like I have to find one, and quick!  This is the nature of competitiveness, isn't it?  Out of nowhere, you have to have or do or be something else.

PS  

I have, and I invite you to join me, spent some time, many inches of knitting, and square feet of painting and drawing, considering why I may have harbored this 'medicine is for weaklings' crap, and I can tell you that you grow up in it; it is there when you are just 15 months old, and you fall, and you cut your lip, and you howl out in the pain of all that misery and shock, and you are told to 'stop crying.'  It is there when you hear your people talking about how so and so needs to take such and such now, because they are old, and will die soon.  So, yes, we are afraid, and that is fine, but the medicine is not what we fear actually, is it now?

Wailing Woman

 

Dear All,

My DJ played this a few days ago, and ooh, what a La Llorona it is!  I hope you will gritar y llorar along!  If you don't know the weeping woman that can be heard at night in the arroyo near you, here is a short introduction.

Re-done, and better than ever!

 

Schoenen, 1886, Vincent Van Gogh.

Dear Y'all,

I think I have spoken of the sublime sad & long goodbye of The Load Out, but Somebody's Baby, well, it wasn't my baby, until now, because this is The Greatest!  It puts me in mind of another couple of songs.  Like this song, an odd conflation of feeling: the lyrics are about confusion, questioning, maybe even begging, but listen to the sound-  it is surely the most upbeat song ever, as in Hurray!  I want you but you maybe don't or I maybe don't and this muddied misunderstanding is so great!

For contrast, try this song, on a similar theme; the tick tock regular rhythm of it pounds out a yes/no yes/no.  The confusion is deep and aggravating- "esta indecisión me molesta"- and the steady banging beat sounds like frustration.

This one,* on the other hand, is nostalgia incarnated; the sound and the lyrics.  Nothing I have ever heard feels as nostalgic as this, and I tell you, it felt exactly the same hearing it in 1977.  I really love this one, but it's kind of junk food, isn't it?  Sort of empty calories, like pink frosting, but ooh, it sure is nice to feel your teeth hurt like that, isn't it?

*  Also note that his Marianne has walked away- I am so proud of you, Marianne!  Amie should probably have committed more fully to walking away; I know they'd both be somebody else's baby in a trice!  And so would you, if you find yourself constrained, held, or pinned in some way that you aren't sure about anymore: walk on.

PS  Maybe you like to geek out a little bit on culture and meaning, and you wonder about the dates of these songs' first releases?  Somebody's Baby- 1982.  The Load Out- 1977.  Amie- 1972.  Should I Stay or Should I Go- 1982.  More Than a Feeling- 1976.

four

 

Dear Whomever is Listening,

That greeting isn't meant to be pert, I just sometimes don't know who all is out there, you know?  It's been a lot of years of writing you here, of calling that lonely phone booth on Mars, and I know you are busy with other things, and you don't always have time to write and reassure me that you care.  It's okay; I know that the wheels are turning, that atoms are zipping all over, willy-nilly, and who knows where they land or what they might mean to a person.  I don't want to be one of these humans who needs endless validation, but still, occasionally I wonder who is in this big electronic void that I am whispering/yelling into on the regular.

Anyhow, what I wanted to tell you is that it takes just FOUR pages for me to fall in love with another beautiful memoir!  Four!  I have always been impulsive and lightening fast to crush on people and things;  I was Boy Crazy and a Clothes Horse when I was younger; I chased boys day and night, it embarrasses me now to think on it- worse, the few times I managed to corner a hapless boy, I had no idea what to do with him- I didn't see the right kind of movies, you see?  I was raised on all these films where the boy leans over to kiss the girl; the boy edges closer on the sofa, the boy puts his arm over the back of the theatre seat.  I would get them in range, and then freeze, dumbly, waiting for a move from them.  Waiting.  All through the picture.  All through the drive.  All through the night.  

Of course now, I think what a little idiot I was, just to stand there looking at the fruit and never trying any, but that was a long time ago, and riding my bike past your house late at night just to see if you'll notice me seems shamefully stupid now; so don't bother to go to your window; I won't be there.

I was very poor reader of boys and men in any case; I always thought their hungry, starving eyes were for me alone, when actually, half of them were high, with unseeing eyes, and the other half were hungry for any attention, from anyone.

Now, the beautiful love I have for this book, though, it is quite another thing!  It is pure, unspoiled by my insecurities, it is Real.  Also, who the hell is Viv Albertine, anyway, and why, why, why didn't anyone tell me to ride my bike by her window???  How did I miss this powerful life force up until now??  I feel sure that if I had listened to the Slits I would have known what to do with these cornered boys, or better even, I might not have chased them in the first place.

PS  I know, I know!  I loved it before it arrived in the mailbox; I loved it when I saw the title; and who in this entire world would not love a book titled To Throw Away Unopened?

in motion

 

Dear Passengers,

I take a lot of these blurry photos out of the car- there are reflections of the inside, and smeary roads, bright halos, all kinds of un-photogenic artifacts.  I get a real thrill taking crappy photos, because, well, you know, I was kind of raised by a pack of shutterbug snobs, and boy! did those folks hate an an out of focus shot!  Whooee!  Like it was a cardinal sin.  I don't usually send you any of them, because it is hard to step out of the known and into the 'that isn't any good.'  By the known here, I mean the tenets of 'good' photography these vociferous wolves raised me to believe in, and by 'isn't any good' I mean all of, everything in the world that ever was or could be that doesn't fit into the tenets.  It's a lot, come to think of it, all the pictures with the heads cut off, the ones with crooked horizons, the poorly exposed, the low contrasted, the out of focused.  Maybe this is something you want to address yourself, all the dogma of what is good in photography.  Maybe you want to grab that camera and take a snapshot of your feet, or a picture of a tree while you wave your camera.  It might feel good to you, too.

Hightail House

 

the heat

 

Tropical Tidbits.

Dear Unseasonably Warm,

In time, we won't use 'unseasonable' as a qualifier for the weather- right now, we can say something like this:  "In a warming climate, what we think of as summer weather will extend well into November, and it will begin earlier, as well; making for nine months of summer temperatures."  Phooey on that, it is too soft for me on this roasting afternoon:  "During these early years of the human caused climate catastrophe, we will have to endure much hotter days, and a hell of a lot more of them, than we used to."  

With the facts in mind, and with intention to adapt, mourn, and witness the disruption of these patterns, check out Weather West- especially the very interesting Office Hours live on YouTube.  Also, please have this, your song for today, The Rosarita Beach Café.

voice & notice

 

Buzzard, from Dog Ear series, Erica Baum, 2016.

Dear Reader,

Why, or how, are there voices in written words?  I was reading an article, and I recognized the voice, or maybe style?  It's not the one I hear in my head, it's not just the sound of my own lips moving.  I was taught to read silently, and not to move my head across the page- why the fuck, anyway, I wonder?

I am moving my lips like mad these days, and yes, I am pretty sure it is The Texbook Indication of The Right On Time Signs Of Dementia*, but what matters now is that I even catch myself making sounds- I have been a talk to myselfer for as long as I can remember... and when my brain talks to me, it says things like:  get a horse.

So, what gives a series of words, a sentence, a particular voice?  And another thing, I know you don't need me to tell you what the genius of a song is; I know you have noticed it too; so why tell you?  I guess because the verb to notice, the word notice as verb is a kind of affirmation;  I sometimes worry I won't get it all noticed in time.  In time, you know, to die.  It's a kind of weird and personal form of reverence, but for me, just noting it isn't as good as writing it, too, and what about the voice of that written noticing?  I wonder.

*  The Signs of Dementia is a pretty good band name!  "SoD" printed on the bass drum!

Fall (down) again.

 

Watercolor leaf, Renilde De Peuter.

Dear Today,

A few days into Fall, now, and here is that old feeling.  The summer this year was hot, relentless, bleak (although everything is relative, and no summer yet has been as bleak as the smoky-hot summer of 2021).  Fall makes me see that my Romantic proclivities are partly, maybe increasingly, Melancholic.  

The years I spent in graduate study on the Palouse painting and reading difficult post-modern texts could have been subtitled: Discourses on Melancholia, The Sublime, and The Void.  Those were the things to grapple with, vis a vis meaning in art and existence in general.  It isn't really important now, except as a signpost of where I found that to recall is to experience melancholia, and Fall, ooh Fall was made for melancholy!  It is delicious, actually, if you can keep in mind that sadness is sometimes a choice.

So, the sun lessens, the days slow down, growing things are disintegrating, with only a few stubborn ones continuing to bloom; the longer darkness gives us time to reflect, and boom!  You have your melancholy!  Add a cherry and whipped cream, while it is still hot, because soon it will be too cold for even these cold and benumbing thoughts, and you will have to focus on the turn, the solstice and the starting up of the signs of spring.  It happens very fast here; it has barely become that lovely complicated gray tan, and then boom! again, you have green fuddling up the subtle winter colors. But that is later, for now, baby, let me follow you down into the sweet melancholy of fall and the gorgeous autumn leaves.

Skate Day 2300 -Autumnal Equinox

 

Dear People,

Here we are again, where we meet every one hundred days and I try to encourage/exhort you to roller skate!  It's the first day of Fall, too, and isn't that an auspicious day to begin your own daily roller skating thing?

I know, I know, you have your reasons, but let's begin by throwing out all the big excuses!  Just for one day, one hour, one minute, you are not afraid of falling, you are not afraid of looking silly, and you are not 'too busy.'  Oh, and you don't have any place to skate, well, that's not valid today either.  You can use anything flat and nearby: a garage, a street, a tennis court, a basketball court, a living room.  I, as I have most days this last year, will be skating in my house- is it big enough?  No, not really, but any skating is better than no skating.

Now that the place and the objections are overcome, what do we do next?  How about watching this short clip?  This kind of small group thing is often called shuffle skating, and it is kind of the pinnacle of what I aspire to- early on when I got my adult pair of roller skates (16 years ago or so now) we had a rink in town that was open every weekend for three-quarters of the year, and one day a group of these kind of skaters came in and left in their wake total awe and admiration.  They were 5 people skating as one- impossibly, magically- to this great song, your song for today, which, with any luck at all, you will listen to while you skate around your small or large, in or out door, glassy smooth or asphalted bumpy, space!

PS  Here's a sweet new spot to skate- it just opened!  Fresh pavement!  And, if you feel nostalgic, try this little memory, which includes a clip from Charlie's Angels with a roller skating chase scene.

guest list

 

Dear Celebrants,

It's weird, but for the first time, the Naked Ladies were late for my birthday!  They are so late, that I had given them up for lost.  I have been out under the window looking, prodding at their swollen bulbs, for weeks!  Nothing.  Last week, I stopped bothering to look- and I know you know where this is going- and today, I looked at them quite by accident, the way you might glance at an unwatched pot, and, there were the buds!  They bloomed at my Mother's a few weeks ago, right on time, and along the road at the place where there used to be a house, and in ditches, yards, and gardens for 300 miles, but the ones here, the ones I call 'mine' were late; I mean, they are late.  We will have a cake anyway, I think, to celebrate their arrival!  This cake, which I call Valerie's Vanilla Cake, because it is based on Valerie Gordon's recipe from her fine cookbook Sweet.

Valerie's Vanilla Cake

7.5 ounces of butter (if you use salted, and you can, don't add the salt in the recipe)

1 cup of granulated sugar

1 tablespoon of golden syrup (or light corn syrup, or honey, or just skip it anyway, this isn't rocket fuel!) 2 tablespoons vanilla extract (or the fabulous vanilla paste)

Beat it all up to fluffy.

2 tablespoons sour cream (or crème fraîche*, or heavy cream, or yogurt)

3 whole eggs

1/3 teaspoon salt (or not, see butter above)

Whisk the eggs and cream together, in a separate bowl.

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1/3 teaspoon baking powder

Mix that up a bit, in a separate bowl, and then add the dry ingredients and the eggy mix to the fluffy butter/sugar in three or four alternating batches.  Once it is combined, smooth it down into a 9 inch diameter, 2 inch deep greased and floured pan.  Bake it for 28 to 35 minutes, at 350, rotating it halfway through the baking.  Let it cool in the pan, then unmold the cake and frost it, or eat it.  

I put a cream cheese icing on this one; and you can too, by beating up some butter and cream cheese with confectioner's sugar and adding vanilla.  I use a lot of vanilla, the lovely paste kind, about a tablespoon, and I am not at all measuring in my proportions of the rest, but, say 3 ounces of cream cheese, and 2 or 3 of butter, a pinch of salt, and then maybe 2 to 3 cups of confectioner's sugar?  Add the sugar in 1/2 cup increments, and stop when you think it tastes right.    

* Make your own, if you like: a video, a written recipe.

9/13 through 9/16

 

My Black Sedan

 

Notebook Page: Addendum- a thing added or to be added, ca. 1968.  Eva Hesse.

Dear People,

If you are 'my people' you will know exactly what I mean, and maybe you don't even need to read this letter, but, if you are anyone else, you will want to hop into my Black Sedan, and let me tell you about the things I have been reading.  It is all memoir and auto fiction for me at this location in the mapping of my present via a fitful and clumsy reviewing of my past (revisionist history?).  Okay, you can call it the same old existential crisis, but I think maybe it is just living.  In any case, I am waiting for the leaves to fall, like I do, and I am reading all these great women writing their experience of living.  The thing that is so wonderful is that it feels like home; like a mirror; like this mirror.  

Maybe all we can ever have is reflections, but these images feel close to what I think could be true.  Jenny Erpenbeck says "...we want to write because we find it hard to make ourselves understood.  Because we find that things fall by the wayside when we speak."  Sing it, sister!  My wayside is littered with the things I meant to say and the questions I wanted to ask.  Like this one:  What, then, do I do instead of trying to get people to like me?  Or this one;  Why did you keep on giving me all that false hope? 

Claire Dederer writes that you find yourself "...flying the flag of idleness and melancholy.  You find yourself not just wanting to do nothing but somehow needing to do nothing.  Maybe a woman's version of a midlife crisis involves stopping doing stuff?"  And haven't we said things that amount to this to each other nearly every time we meet?  Déjà vu!*

Which, because I am reading also Biography of X, brings me to the notion of conviction in making art.  I have often found intention to matter, to be required for making art, but I am ready to let conviction be the one that got away.  I wish someone had told me it was fine to let ambivalence be my muse, but, let's not cry over that spilled milk, let us instead assert that ambivalence is just the ticket for art making, and even for living.  My years of desperately seeking conviction should not be your story; maybe you will want to tell a story that goes like this:

One fine Spring day I set out to make my way in the world, and I met many strange and wonderful beings along the way, and I hoped they would like me, but I also knew it was okay if they didn't.  I could give them things, little trinkets I found, an acorn cap, or a stone, and it was only just that: a giving that neither made or unmade me; their acquisition was not my diminishment.  The little things they might give me, magic passwords and permissions, well I was free to use them as long as I liked, but also free to discard them if they began to feel confining.  The continuing exchange of ideas and words and deeds was the main thing, the quest was just sort of there so if any dolts should ask you what you were doing, you could answer that you were seeking the fair princess imprisoned in her turret.

  

*  Olivia Rodrigo is another of the real, non-animated Disney Princesses, like Annette Funicello, Selena Gomez, Zendaya, Demi Levato, Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, etc.  

Notes:  Erpenbeck, Jenny.  Not a Novel- A Memoir in Pieces, New Directions, New York, page 143.                    Dederer, Claire, Love and Trouble- A Midlife Reckoning, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, page 9. 

 

Ground Plane XIX

 

a whole lot of medicine

 

Three Sheep, Henri Moore, 1972.

Dear People,

Your song for today.  While we are listening, let's pretend we are somebody else.  I'll go first:  I am a shepherdess, camped in the high mountains, but soon it will be time for me and my flock to head to the foothills.  I have a little caravan I live in; there is room only for slow things; a guitar, pens and paper, knitting needles, some watercolor paints.  I have been writing to you all summer, trying to tell you about the deep quiet in the darkest part of the night; how it is sometimes broken by a disturbance in the flock.  When I get down to the foothills in a few more weeks, there will be people to talk with and spend time with, and I wonder, will I remember how to speak in the language I haven't used since May?  What will I say when they ask 'what have you been doing?'

on outdoor sofas

                              







Dear Furnished,

The couch on the porch is gone now.  How did it come to be on the porch, I would ask myself-  it is a marker, I believe, of white trashdom.  It was one of only two sofas we had growing up.  The first place I remember, a house; had two sofas.  One was a dark blue, nearly a night blue, with orange and other, less indistinct colors of flowers on it.  I think there was a red, a purple.  It had a flounce, a ruffle at the bottom.  The other couch was a bamboo armed thing, with a chair that matched, in a kind of bumpy green striped upholstery.  Celery green, a pale gold, dun, and off white narrow stripes.  I remember both of these fabrics, the feel, the look, with an intense fondness, even though the stripe was rather scratchy in a polyester way, and the floral was a canvasy twill that you couldn't call soft, either.  I think maybe it was the closeness I am fond of.  I could lie face down on these fabrics, I could turn and face the back cushion, I could pull my legs up under me on these fabrics.  There was a snugness.  Also, it was a place to be near other beings.  A communal coziness, then.

There was a couch on my best friend's porch when I was growing up; it was astoundingly long, with orange and ochre flowers on cream; bordering on chintz in its exuberance.  We would sleep there, on that couch, on hot nights.  

I do not know what became of the dark blue floral, but the bamboo moved with us to the house I spent most of my childhood in, and when my parents moved to a bigger, newer, closer to town place with horrible carpet, wallpaper, and generally soulless spaces (a downsizing of charm, even as it upsized radically in every other way), the old sofa was given to me, because the new house's rooms demanded new, larger things.*  

I had already been given an old couch, a kind of overly ornate carved oak thing from maybe 1910, that my Mom acquired in a lovely wine colored velvet, which she re-upholstered in carmine fabric with green and blue dashes running through it diagonally.  After 6 or 7 years of that davenport, I gave it to a friend of my Mom's, and I bought a walnut stained old thing circa 1960.  It came with gold-green fabric that cat claws snagged on sight.  I had it re-covered in boat vinyl; a warm gray fake ostrich.  It was an unusual kind of sectional: two identical halves; one with a right hand arm and the other with a left, two seats in each half.  I liked to put our fuchsia painted coffee table into the corner position.  Which is why, when I was given the bamboo couch, the only place it could go was the porch.  Which was fine, because all we had for porch furniture was some collapsing wicker chairs, and a wooden rocker whose seat was giving way.

A handful of years ago, we put a respectable piece of 'outdoor furniture' on the porch where the outdoor couch had been; a beige sort of futon thing in sturdy fade-proof outdoor upholstery: if I didn't know it wasn't, I would call it a couch.  It is bland, and purpose made for being on porches, and the stray cat sits on it when we aren't looking.

 *I think maybe I still hate that big house for being so needy.

September

 

Dear Ones,

Your song for today is Silver Dagger  (also known as Katie Dear, Awake, Ye Drowsy Sleepers, etc.)!  From every link, a heart doth dangle.

Katie Dear #1

O! Molly Dear Go Ask Your Mother

Awake Ye Drowsy Sleepers

Who Is at My Window Weeping

Little Satchel

Oh Katy Dear

Silver Dagger (2)

Who's That Knocking

Awake, Awake You Drowsy Sleepers

Silver Dagger (3)

Silver Dagger (4)

Kairosis: or, Another Exhortation!

 

Colette is very photogenic!

Dear Ones, 

Oh!  I want to read this to you, sitting very close; I want to be the one to show this thing of beauty, but, but it won't be intimate enough, you or I will feel clumsy, or unsure, and then it will just be another pile of words. You must read it alone; you must be awed by it and face the wonder alone.

My dearest literary love (at this moment, because I reserve the right to change my paramour parameters) is the memoir-ish sound of womens' voices.  This one, and this one, and this one, this one, this one, and oh!  Claire-Louise Bennett most of all right now.  I hadn't near enough of these kind of voices when I was younger- I had a few, to be sure, Ursula LeGuin, Madeleine L'Engle come to mind, Jeannette Winterson: but now, well, now my shelves are overflowing with good guidance and the words of my people.   

Don't leave me waxing and gushing, hyperbol-izing, and superlative-ating all over the place; please, if you have ever done a thing (which was hopefully to read Helen DeWitt!) will you now, please, also do this one thing, too???  Pond, Pond, POND!!  

PS  More wonderful women writers that might lead you to a "moment of psychological integration in time:" 

Annie Ernaux

Colette

Jenny Erpenbeck

Sheila Heti

Lauren Groff

bell hooks

Carrie Brownstein

Patti Smith

Tove Jansson

Kelly Link

Annie Dillard

Lydia Yukanvitch

Sandra Sisneros

Amy Sillman

Rumor Godden

PPS  Now, maybe, maybe you have finished it, and you want a little more about it, and in that case, but no sooner, you may want to read this.  But, do not read it before you read Pond!

PPPS  Okay, well, since you asked, I love it because I don't think that I am using my first language, either, but if I were, if I could, it would sound just exactly like Pond.  Also:  

There was a storm, an old storm, going around and around the mountain, visiting the mountain again perhaps after who knows how long, trying to get somewhere, going nowhere.

Where it would immediately alight upon the dreadful contents therein and deliver the entire catalogue to those parts of the imagination that will gladly make a lurid potion from goose fat and unrefined sea salt. 

 

Not a metaphor, nothing like that- I'd never want the monster to stand for something, that's for sure.

As if making the world smaller because of all the intact explanations that need to occur in order for one thing to become another thing. 

It's a devil to know what to take seriously.

And didn't I immediately discover that melancholia brought something out in me that felt more authentic and effortless than anything I'd previously alchemized. 

It's been watching me all along, all my life, coming and going- and I don't know what it sees as it stands there, I don't know that it is not in fact becoming a little afraid of me- and I have to be doubly careful I think, not to frighten it away, because between you and me I can't be at all sure where it is I'd be without it. 

 

 

 

Lines: what to move: the paper or the hand?

 

Flying with Friends, drypoint, 2000.

Dear Drafters and Pencil Wielder's,

You may have recalled me gushing over what is sometimes called an action art work of Tom Marioni's; a drypoint made by people jumping and simultaneously marking a copper plate.  I love this print, and I want to draw your attention to the the amount of marks- this is where someone (I am guessing it was Tom Marioni) made a decision to stop adding.  The how is big, of course, but the when is also very important.

Up to and Including her Limits, 1973 to 76.

Next, take a look at Carolee Schneemann's wonderful drawing/space made by suspension in a harness.  It's so poetic to think of her floating and marking, of course, and that would be enough, but there are also all kinds of delicious decisions she has made: how long the lines, when and where, how many, what color.  As you see it here, it is being displayed as a relic of the performances, hence the monitors.  All those should be hauled away, and the harness, too.  

Pink Mound with Eruption, 1993.

Lastly, let's look at another terrific drawing, by Carroll Dunham; dun't you know him?  He is Lena Dunham's Dad, and I love some of his drawings, but not all.  Why just some?  Well, it's got to do with a thing that I have about Philip Guston, too.  Sometimes, and by sometimes I mean in some of the pieces, it is too much-  too much comic* book subject matter, too much pinky, bloody, bodily colors, too much stupid male humor.  This drawing, well, it isn't anything but 'just right,' with the exception of the slightly puerile title.  

Let this be your project for today; marks (which you might decide to call a drawing) made through the application of a system or structure, or both.

*R. Crumb indeed, but he isn't really Our Crumb, he is someone else's, surely?  All those lines, all that facility, all that paper; the question just cries out:  what if he had used his powers for good instead of being culturally clever?

PS  Lena Dunham's Mom is also an artist; Laurie Simmons.

The Question

 

Kairos; more on kairosis in a future episode, because; acausal connecting principle!*

Dear Y'all,

I was at a party, and you know, I got asked that awkward question from the Trader Joe's checkout line:  What are you doing this weekend?  Trader Joe's associates put it in a little more contemporary language, like, "what are you up to today?"  Or, "have anything good planned for your weekend?"  Anyway, you know what a sudden and precipitous fall into a slippery sided and deep well this question is.  My mind goes frantic looking for something appropriate to reply; a lie even, anything.  Ideally something that makes me sound cultured, intelligent, interesting, fun, and generally a person with Important Things to Do and Places to Be.  And, you know, I am not.  I am actually kind of dithering, pottering, puttering, and loafing, like I love to do.  

Well.  You can imagine!  And this is why I love you so, you would never ask me such an existential crisis of a question, but, sometimes, even people you like ask this question, mostly out of awkwardness, I suspect.  I find myself often talking in these weird cipher phrases, kind of on autopilot, with my mouth forming inanities just as fast as jiminy.  But, that isn't important right now; what is important is that I got asked this question at a party, and so I looked to my mind for help, and all I could do, because I'd been reading a book for most of the day, was to sort of describe the place my mind still was, the world of the book.  I am pretty sure I sounded geeky, and not in a cute way; I think I also probably sounded snobby, and bewitched; and of course, of course, I sounded old, because I am.

The book, oh, yes, it was good!  A delight.  It made me see things I thought I had witnessed from sides I didn't know there were, and really, is there anything better than that?  A deepening of understanding of events, humanity, and your very own personal self?  So, let me try again with that dread question:  What did I do today?  I read an amazing thing that put all these little instances, all these small talks, into a massive tapestry of story and being, golden threads pulled me here and there, and time was at my command; I could look right or left, or travel up or down, and the field went on forever.  There were old friends, and old times, and old ideas, all sitting around waiting to gab with me, to sit close in the sun and watch the day go on.  How about you?

*  At the very same time as I was writing to you here, another of the Dodo's esteemed readers was pressing the big Donate button!  As clear an acausal connecting principle as any, but, I suppose, in truth it could be explained by chance, too.  But, oh pshh, chance is for children's games and fortune tellers; our lives must be a teeny tiny bit more than just that?  Oh, and I almost forgot: Here's Where the Story Ends.

jumping out

 

Dear Looking for a Good Time,

Oooh, I found another one!  A sentence that leaps off the page and smacks you down flat with utter veracity and solid groove resonance.  Here it is, from Sido, by Colette.  

Her house resembled her in its untidiness and shared with her a grace denied to orderly places and people.

 

This is a description that I feel I am already partly embodying, and I intend to strive even harder than ever for disorderly grace.  Although, something tells me maybe striving isn't the way to arrive at it?  Maybe what I mean is I will remove all impediments to slumping ever further towards such a grace.  A kind of wilting, maybe?  

And you know, if you are going to read Sido, and I hope very much that you will, you might as well also read My Mother's House.  In the copy I read, they were very comfortably together.  I can't wait til there is a new translation, so I can read them again!  Or maybe, I will try to clobber through them in French, with my long ago college language classes and a really big dictionary.

status: still pissed.

 

Elsa Lancaster; an early Skunk.

Dear Sisters,

Ooh, I keep thinking I have been pissed off enough, that now all that is left is the open expanse of set freeness; but no, it is like the maze of the minotaur, and when I think I am at the last corner of pissed off, I turn and find another corridor of anger, another inner chamber of rage.

I suppose all this further insight into the twisted fucking patriarchy should feel like progress, but it sends me reeling with futility.  When, I ask you, will I be accepting of this crap?  When will my crystal vision be all that there is?  Landing with a thud, yep, there it is.  Thunk.  Not anything to get your feathers fluffed about, just another example of how Man has screwed us all over, and himself, too; probably on accident, but whatevs.

I think about making cookies, about making them to give to people, to say, to mean: here, invite me in, take some nourishment from me; I made them so that you may feel pleasure, that's all.  But cooking, at home, unpaid, is the purview of women's work; mothers, sisters, aunts, wives.  And so what does that make me, as a person who made you cookies?  Just another woman embodying a stereotype, adding to the problem.

  

PS  Here is a film that I never saw before, and I don't know how I missed it, but, then again, maybe a few days ago was the right time for me to see it.  I really hope you will watch it, though; I know, I am asking a lot: listen to this, read these lines, make this, click here, think about that, study this, watch that.  It's a lot, isn't it, that I am asking for?   A whole lot.