Author (#19)October 2007 Archives

Today is my third day off gluten. I'm for real this time. I finally bought a gluten-free cookbook last night (The Gluten-Free Bible, by Jax Peters Lowell). I bought it because, from her picture on the back cover, Jax seems like a pretty nice lady, with rosy cheeks and a sassy, motherly demeanor. And her name is Jax. I'm going to be really dweeby about this and keep a food journal. You can beat me up if I cheat.

So far:

BREAKFAST

Strong coffee, on an empty stomach.

LUNCH

Veggie bowl at Laughing Planet (mostly beans, brown rice, and lots of broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, and cabbage - I could have made this at home, but whatever. It was only $4.75, and I had leftovers.)

By the way, Laughing Planet is a totally dorky, un-hip place to eat, and you shouldn't go there unless you're desperate or want to be LAUGHED at.

IN THE INTERIM

More coffee.

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Easy enough. After I'm fully wrecked from the caffeine, maybe I will cook up some quinoa and chickpeas.

The other night, Greg and I joined our friends Adam, Brooke, and Rosemary for The Go Team show at the Doug Fir. I found them (the band, not our friends) to be repetitive and dull, a false spark. Good, wholesome fun, but kind of a dud. I'm not a big fan of bubblegum pop, and there wasn't much variety in their repertoire besides bland...bubblegum, the kind that loses flavor after 30 seconds. To extend the simile, they were like...Chiclets! The ones that cost 25 cents out of a machine. But, the ear plugs are partially to blame. Wholesome ear protection + wholesome pop music = guaranteed ennui. After they played "Bottlerocket," the only song that I recognized, I went upstairs and sat brooding at the bar, wearing my old, cheap Army surplus gloves that somehow smell like Christmas ornaments and baubles and the fake snow my grandmother used to spray on the windows. I started drafting notes for an essay that I am writing for a zine that I am creating with Nick J. Each issue will have a theme. For the first issue, we decided to both write essays about walking and watching. These are only preliminary dribbles.

I have been thinking of the concept of "zones." What Chris Marker refers to as "a space outside any dimensions of time, anchored therefore in a pure and eternal present from which any recollection tends to be gradually eradicated." In Sans Soleil, he is referring specifically to a space in which memory and perception are disrupted and re-built through digital means, the tweaks of a computer synthesizer, the camera eye. A space in which linear time is a hallucination. "If you don't like the images of the present, then change those of the past." The weapon of perception, cleaving possible futures.

Signs,
this land first speaks to you in signs.

Lately, I have been receiving migratory visions, either during meditation, the cusp of sleep, and most vividly, the tuft of REM sleep that has intensified in recent weeks. The dreams I remember are either shrouded in Lynchian ambiguity, or are so vast, yet enclosed, that they are unapproachable. Like a perfect film (I'm thinking of my experiences with Tarkovsky and Bergman, especially), the kind that makes you want to rush home and produce something, wildly. Forge something that is at least a fraction as beautiful. My experiences with personal intimacy also bring visions, lately a scene of irregular, post-industrial buildings erupting up through the dirt like fists, surrounded by steam clouds.

That's all for now. I'll post more figments and fragments as they develop.

Favorite songs this week: "Is There a Ghost" (Band of Horses) is on repeat, "In the Mausoleum" by Beirut, "Videotape" from the new Radiohead, "Roscoe" by Midlake, and "Soma" (remember the Smashing Pumpkins?). All of my friends are on this Phil Collins bender, and it's infectious. Genevieve and I did a "Sussudio" duet at The Ambassador a few weeks ago, and people sure got the itch. I think I've finally convinced Nick to do an acoustic version of "In the Air Tonight," although the best part of that song is the drum machine break-down in the middle. I love that the song has its own Wikipedia entry.

Ok, coffee headache. Good night.

~a.

From the inside everything is matter, walking. - Leslie Scalapino

Yesterday Orland, Matt (two of my people I love the most!), and I flocked to a very top-secret location in the deep woods and plucked pillow-cases full of beautiful, golden chanterelles. I wish I had batteries in my camera so I could take a picture of the box sitting in my fridge right now. I keep shoving my face in the box and taking in a long drag. It's like...a sex-fruit. Deep, earthy, and robust (quintessential foodie word). Remember that line in Lolita where he describes her vagina as "biscuity"? It's sort of like that, but with under and over and in-between tones of apricot and apple.

I felt famished and dehydrated by the time I got home, but the only thing I wanted to do was sit on the floor in my dirty boots and sort through them, wash them, throw the imperfect, moldy, mushy ones in the compost (which my landlord ended up intercepting for herself). After giving her a third of my bounty, I still have a few pounds left! Tomorrow they will go into a cream sauce that will melt tongues (and minds). Of the pocket-ful of people who read these drifty annals, I'm sure some of you are vegetarians and/or vegans (Dan, close your eyes), but I made this recipe last week, and people went into an eye-rolling, belly-rubbing, food coma satorigasm. So I'm making it again tomorrow night and will be pickling the rest. I'll try to be a better documentarian this go-round.

+

This weekend, a blot of manic winds. We all felt so wild on the ride to the [top-secret] mountain milepost. I was coasting on hours of espresso-strength coffee, but the Zen focus of the mushroom hunt, the huckleberries and the hazelnuts, and lots of dark chocolate tempered me. After we got back to the car, we drove up to the [top-secret] look-out and saw five summits (Jefferson, Hood, Adams, Rainier, and St. Helens, if one were to view them counter-clockwise), arising from a billowing desert of pink clouds and quiet mists. An unbroken rose world. Seamless tableaux of a sleeping planet, an arm's length from soma.

The melancholy set in today. My friend Nick spoke thusly of melancholy, in an old issue of eye-rhyme, a literary magazine we used to publish at Pinball:

The Greeks thought that this came from an excess of black bile. But where does this black bile come from? Are you born with it? Do you inhale it somehow? Is it related to diet? Does it start off a different color and then turn black? How much time can you spend thinking about black bile before you start to get sick?

This sadness isn't to be tossed aside. This sadness will take you somewhere. It will admit you to certain clubs. Clubs you want to be in. Let it take you.

Everything has taken on this trace of melancholy today. The two cat tails poised in a vase on my desk, the ones Greg brought me after he shaved his beard and cut his hair and came over to surprise me. They were part of a bouquet of red daisies and kangaroo feet, a palliative in the event that I didn't like his new look. The ripped up t-shirts my mother used to wrap breakables in a recent care package, t-shirts that, gauging by the size, belong to my step-father, who is dying of liver cancer. She attached a note to one of the t-shirt shreds that reads "Use these to dust your furniture." The fact that my cat might have a bladder infection. That I lost one of my favorite fingerless gloves in the forest, collecting mushrooms. That I've lost one of almost every pair of earrings I own. The forest relics. The care packages that include little Ziplock baggies of mascara and lip gloss my mom bought but didn't like. My landlord and her six dogs, and the new neighbor Peach, who is a fire-dancer and a seamstress, who, for a living, makes tiny dog & cat houses that match their owners' houses, down to the paint and the trim and the shutters and everything. That I have poor night-vision, and that, just as I was typing that sentence, Bill Callahan sang "my vision is failing," in the song "Fools' Lament."

Now I'm just steeping in the crisp sadness, listening to Smog and to Nick splashing around in the bath-tub. He was supposed to start his sublet tonight, but the key he has doesn't work, and he was planning on sleeping in his car, and I just can't let a friend sleep in his car. Not on a night like this. So he came over, and I fed him risotto and peppermint tea, and now he's taking a bath, and I myself need to go to sleep and let this wobbly melancholy teeter and trail off until tomorrow.

Lv,
A.

Pieces parsed. Old college notes from English class.

1866-1869

We do not always know the source of the smile that flows to us. Ned tells that the Clock purrs and the Kitten ticks. He inherits his Uncle Emily's ardor for the lie. (315)

My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but to cross the floor to stand in the Spice Isles. (315)

The Landscape of the Spirit requires a lung, but no Tongue. I hold you few I love, till my heart is red as February and purple as March. (315)

Still I have the Hill, my Gibraltar remnant.
Nature, seems it to myself, plays without a friend.
You mention Immortality.
That is the Flood subject. I was told that the Bank was the safest place for a Finless mind. (319)

Dreamed of your meeting Tennyson in Ticknor and Fields -
Where the Treasure is, there the Brain is also -
Love for Boy - (320)

Bringing still my "plea for Culture,"
Would it teach me now? (323)

My Breakfast surpassed Elijah's, though served by Robins instead of Ravens. (326) - (an allusion to I Kings 17.6)

A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend...I never try to lift the words which I cannot hold. (330)

Of our greatest acts we are ignorant - (330)

...but dying is a wide Night and a new Road. (332)

Secrets are interesting, but they are also solemn - (332)

We bruise each other less in talking than in writing, for then a quiet accent helps words themselves too hard. (332)

1870-1874

- who knows how deep the Heart is and how much it holds? (338)

There are no Dead, dear Katie, the Grave is but our moan for them. (338)

Mother went rambling, and came in with a burdock on her shawl, so we know that the snow has perished from the earth. (339)

Did you know about Mrs. J --? She fledged her antique wings. 'Tis said that "nothing in her life became her like the leaving it." (339)

The incredible never surprises us because it is the incredible. (342)

Women talk: men are silent: that is why I dread women. (342a)

My father only reads on Sunday - he reads lonely & rigorous books. (342a)

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way. (342a)

How do most people live without any thoughts. There are many people in the world (you must have noticed them in the street). How do they live. How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning. (342a)

When I lost the use of my Eyes it was a comfort to think there were so few real books that I could easily find some one to read me all of them. (342a)

People must have puddings. (342a)

I wd. have stolen a totty meteor, dear but they were under glass. (342b)

Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our minds? (342b)

Life is the finest secret. (354)

To shut our eyes is Travel. (354)

How lonesome to be an Article! I mean - to have no soul.
An Apple fell in the night and a Wagon stopped.
I suppose the Wagon ate the Apple and resumed its way. (354)

Each expiring Secret leaves an Heir, distracting still. (359)

The heart keeps sobbing in its sleep. It is the speck that makes the cloud that wrecks the vessel, children, yet no one fears a speck...Sorrow is the "funds" never quite spent, always a little left to be loaned kindly. We have a new cow. I wish I could give Wisconsin a little pail of milk...How are the long days that made the fresh afraid? (367)

Steam has his Commissioner, tho' his substitute is not yet disclosed to God. (369)

I don't know what to do with my heart. I dare not take it, I dare not leave it - what do you advise? Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it. (389)

Vinnie drank your Coffee and has looked a little like you since, which is nearly a comfort. (392)

My flight kept time to the Words. (412)

Thursday night Genevieve and Calina and I all went to the Maiden in the Mist for tarot readings. Despite the fanciful name, the place is actually really nice and not hokey like I expected it to be. It's billed as an "industrial" bar on its website, but it seemed more velvety and mysterious. It's non-smoking, dimly lit, operated by cute, attentive girls. And they have really good deep-fried tempeh sticks. I even got a free "mistake" drink, so this place wins.

We stuck to singularities, six cards. I asked her to focus on the course of my writing, and the ways in which my anxiety and over-analysis have toothed away at it, but how I feel as if I am at this threshold of finally feeling comfortable enough to share my work, through publication, readings, etc. I'm private to a fault. And her reading was a needed affirmation, that the pores are anxious to receive (heart and mind cards, both open grottoes, lined in carbonate), the inspiration is there, curdling, but considering the fact that the death card was the card around which all the other cards revolved, it's going to take a significant shift in ego, intellect, letting the nether speak, like Benjamin's "dialectic of awakening," but under strictly organic intoxication. Working along the channel.

Perception is not a perception of things, but a perception of elements (water, air...), of rays of the world, of things which are dimensions, which are worlds, I slip on these "elements," and here I am in the world, I slip from the "subjective" to Being. -Merleau-Ponty

My goal is to have my first chapbook in print by next summer, with a two-week writer's residency at Caldera in the interim.

The tail-end of the reading was about love, the ten of cups. Swimming in love and fulfillment.

Time now for some coze. One of my high-school best friends is visiting from Seattle, and we're about to pop his Powell's cherry.

Currently reading:

Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card (re-reading, loving)

Books I want to pick up soon:

Dune, Frank Herbert
Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that Shape Embroys, Donna Haraway
Seth Speaks, Jane Roberts
The Secret Life of Puppets, Victoria Nelson (one of my favorites; Brannon stole my copy)
Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, Michael Taussig

And a nice book on gluten-free cooking.

Listening to:

Midlake
Bone Thugs 'n Harmony (so realish)

The village used to be all one really needs,
That's filled with hundreds and hundreds of chemicals
That mostly surround you.