Books for Cigarettes

I was in the park over the weekend and some guy hawking wares on the grass traded me two books for two cigarettes. Such is the value of good literature or a good smoke.

Columbia Celebrates Beat Poetry

I submitted some original poems in hopes of reading at an event for Columbia students and Alumni celebrating "Columbia's Beats" which I think is kind of funny because I think all of the Beat poets who went to Columbia eventually dropped out. But it would be fun to read at such an event.

I read a really chilling bit of magical/post-realism this week. Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingells. Amazing and creepy story of a housewife who has a secret affair with an escaped frogman/monster. Very erotic at times but very clean and straightforward, a quick 125 pages. Some English authority cited the book as one of the 20 Best post-war American novels, although Ingells is basically an ex-pat living in London. The book has the feeling of a really great Twilight Zone episode. I highly recommend.

I had some interesting craft talks this week with Cate Marvin, Timothy Donnelly, and Matthew Zapruder. Tim urged me to submit to LANA TURNER which I really just need to force myself to do. Cate suggested I submit a poem I wrote equating chess strategy with seduction, and Mr. Zapruder seemed very interested to talk about semiotics and linguistics and the challenges of describing the unnamed, but we had little time and I'm going to have to e-mail him later this week. I'm excited because I really like having theory involved dialogues.

Cate also told me that she thought my poems were "hip" and that my use of violence was "like Tarantino", and that my poems "were like they were stepping out of an American Apparel ad." I don't think she intended for any of these to be compliments. But Tarantino is one of the highest grossing "indie" directors, who may not be so indie anymore, but still makes movies on his own terms, and American Apparel advertisements are notoriously provocative and sexy, gender politics aside, the kind of viral exposure American Apparel achieves in advertising is really something worth noting. Still, Cate's ultimate and excellent advice was that I must essentially put more human vulnerability into my work to avoid operating solely in a comfortable, humorous, and worst of all, gimmicky zone. I wrote two pages of long couplets I think she'll be happy to see.

I think it is wise to believe that if your work ever becomes very easy, you are probably not making the best work that you can. It's no secret that amongst great artists and writers the greatest trick is only making it appear easy.

Ghost Time

I've been spending a lot of time lately just in ghost time. Being a ghost. Feeling like a non-entity. Exploring self-loathing, reading about gonzo pornography.

I guess I've lived with roommates almost my whole life. When I did summer educational programs at Skidmore I had my own room, but it was in a dorm, and my life was scheduled, I was mostly in my room alone at night. When I did the Harvard summer program I had my own room, in a dorm. But my neighbors were nerds and I avoided them. My room was very large and had luxurious windows and I spent a lot of time by myself smoking cigarettes or eating hamburgers. I watched the entire of the State short videos before I found some friends, i think through my search for pot.

I met Lily, who described herself as a 'bio-girl' and a lesbian, and spent the whole summer fucking my friend Stein, who was into death metal, and getting fucked up. Andreas, a friend of Lily's from Cleveland, showed up. He was/is an anarcho-syndicalist and we talked about how much we hated the g20 and yuppies and stuff like that, he taught me how to use a rolling box to role my own cigarettes. Since my room was the biggest, and the liquor store in Cambridge didn't card me, we spent a lot of time in my room sleeping all over the floor and the bed and smoking weed and drinking.

When I was a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence I spent Thanksgiving alone, drinking mostly, and watching TV on my Computer. I think my roommate Liz was there, but she spent the entire weekend in her room (presumably) fucking her boyfriend who was visiting, although their presence went by unnoticed by myself.

I watched the entirety of Radio Free Roscoe, a young-adult canadian program I had originally encountered on The N when I would come back from sneaking out to dinners or to get high. The experience was very sentimental and by the time I had finished the season, and much whiskey, I wrote a rather bleary facebook message to my ex, whom I felt I'd lost touch with. It didn't amount to much.

Over XMas break, all my current roommates have left. My parents keep calling me because they are lonely, and they tell me they miss me, but I really don't want to go home. I almost wrote, "i get nothing accomplished at home" but then realized that I've gotten nothing accomplished here either.

The day before the blizzard I saw True Grit with Austen and Andrew, then had expensive but delicious drinks at the Ace Hotel. The Ace Hotel, decorated like some weird old Anglo-American library, struck me as both sinister and comforting. The comfort I associated to the amicable indie rock radio selections and overstuffed but decidedly 'tasteful' sofas. Andrew said the sinister feelings were probably attributed to the snippy waitress, who working on Christmas eve in a santa hat and hipster t-shirt, probably hated us, the patrons. There was also something sinister to the relative emptiness of the bar. And I was definitely put off by two men, one older and dressed like a businessman, and one younger dressed like a 20-something. The two man sat in total silence at a table while drinks or food were delivered.

The night of the Blizzard, Ghost Time felt very palpable. The world was in a presumed crisis. There was all this white snow in the air and the wind was very aggressive. There were dump trucks with flashing lights and snow plows moving all the snow around and people were literally parking on the BQE to take the ice off their windshields. It seemed like surviving alone was doing something. I took out some art supplies and listened to This American Life from the This American Life iPhone app, and also listened to Dirty On Purpose. I took out some art supplies and set myself aimlessly to equating a charcoal drawing of lines that i hung on my wall even though I do not like it.

My internet went out at some point and I watched some movies I had saved on my hard drive. I found both When in Rome with Kristen Bell, and Cabin Fever 2 to be disappointing, I deleted them from my harddrive.

Today I read a little over a hundred pages of Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai. I'm perplexed that I had discovered this book at an age when I wasn't seeking out contemporary literature, but remember being attracted to the cover image (a katana) at a Barnes and Nobles, and at the time was into Japanese things like fighting and weapons. Rereading it I'm even more impressed with the scope of the book, and how like either intelligent or well researched DeWitt proves herself.

Any story about geniuses reading Homer in the original greek at age 6 will make me feel like I'm wasting my life. I've tried writing lately, but I'm at a loss for inspiration, which sounds as lame as it is. I'm not sure if I want to write poems or prose, and I've been writing mostly neither. I've been playing guitar but it feels pointless without a full band. A lot feels pointless.

There is a great line from The Last Samurai which I'm quoting here from memory.

"I couldn't stand the idea of going to bed just to wake up to another day. "

Get the Dogs Ready

My sister just called me and asked me to "get the dogs ready" because they are going to the groomers.

I thought, how can I mentally prepare my dogs to go to the groomers. They've been there so many more times than I have. It seems condescending for me to tell my dogs about the groomers, when they be better suited to explain the groomers to me, except that they are dogs.

My notion of the groomer's is something like 'grooming stations' where the dogs are attached to a pole by a 'non-threatening' chain and then covered with water and soap and then...blow dried?

I like to imagine that not all the dogs are chained to poles. And that the women (i assume it's women) who are grooming the dogs gossip, sometimes about the dogs, sometimes about the dogs' owners.

Revival

I've revived this blog. The previous posts are very old, but honest. I guess they aren't well written or concise. I don't value long blog posts as much as I used to. It seems to me that shorter posts are more digestible and thus better. Tonight is saturday and I stayed in which makes me feel very lonely and bad.

I read all of Sasha Fletcher's when all our days are numbered marching bands will fill the streets & we will not hear them because we will be upstairs in the clouds.

This is my review of Sasha's book, written without composing myself and just speaking to what I'm thinking.

Sasha's book is sort of a novella and sort of a collection of attached micro-fictions. It functions. For what that's worth. There is no sense of catharsis, there is almost no sense of conflict either. Sasha's book deals with two issues, physicality and transcendence. Much of the book is preoccupied with two facits, that of an interpersonal relationship, and that of a terrestrial confusion. Sasha is very concerned with the weather, which exists in the air, and the manufactured state, which is something that we contain on the ground. To speak to the latter, passages relating to the construction of a garden, or of the police as a body to be ground into a beach, relate a sense of mis-appropriation. This is mirrored in Sasha's appraisal of the weather, which is something that happens in the sky. Sasha tries to communicate between the terrestrial, and the astral, by invoking bird imagery in way in which the narrator controls birds, or keeps birds in their mouth, or understands the movements of birds, but places them in terrestrial landscapes. He seems daunted by the ability to move plants from the form-space of earth into the space of air. While invoking the parable of the Titanic, it seems as though the fable of Jack and the Bean Stalk would be more appropriate - As Sasha is particularly interested in the idea that we can create structures, and that we can create structures to house ourselves in the astral fields. This is exemplified in Sasha's creation of plants made out of organic passages. Although, nothing seems entirely organic, or everything in the universe, cruise ships, ice bergs, etc, is organic as it is filtered through Fletcher's organic scope.

As I said, conflict exists as secondary function to Fletcher's contrived garden, (pictures of plants drawn on cardboard planted in the earth). There is no struggle in Fletcher's work except a struggle to comprehend Fletcher's prose, which shifts and accepts impossible irregularities (ex. a cop coming through a water faucet) as a normalcy to be accepted if not understood.

Where Fletcher's book would seem to succeed is in this conflation between the authorial voice and the direction of the text. While the book all but fails to construct a resonate narrative, the text manages, and deftly, to contort the reader's understanding of plot structure towards a dream-state in which a method of '...this happens, which resulted in this, which happens and then, and I did this...." which satisfies as long as you can give yourself over to the ride.

So ultimately, willingly, I gave myself over to the current, (and considering Fletcher's use of water and rain as an image and motif, current is appropriate) and in giving myself to the work, the work was not inclined to give anything back to me, but to drag me out to the middle of an ocean, or in the scope of the novella, a lake, and thusly quietly drown me in the procession of imagery and action. Considering the title, a procession, like a parade, like a marching band, feels sufficient. And I would recommend the easily ingested book to anyone fed up with the overinflated sense of plot and narrative most commonly attributed to the novel.

Fletcher, as a disclaimer, is a friend of mine, although I was not sold on the book to begin with, as I felt the overtly long and clause-heavy title could be most easily read as a contrivance. But to read the book as a contrived experience between both the reader and the author, an active exploration of the themes of fate (fate as in the fate of the river to flow into the ocean) and action, (as in the action of throwing oneself into the river) - I did, in fact, enjoy the book and can draw from it not just a sense of odd belonging in a universe of creation and phenomena vying for unspecified relevancy, but a place of illogical assertion creating a sense of site specific relevancy for a young lover whose motivations are led by confusion at the natural world and a reluctant sense of self-accountability for the very creation of such bizarre situations as being in love with a person and striving against all things to create a space for such a love to 'take root'.

a legitimate update

I meant to write a legitimate update tonight, but then I didn't.

I feel really upset because the only girl in my workshop who I think has the capacity to understand my work had dropped the class. I don't think that I'm better than the other people in my class, I just don't think they're equipped to talk about my poems. This workshop, like so many others, is going to be a waste of my time.

I'm really excited to put out a zine soon. It won't be my best work ever or anything, but I think it will feel really good to just put something out. Perhaps too good.

Titles I'm considering for the zine:

Sorry So Sloppy

PoemCo Industrial Catalog Volume 1

Words And Images Non-Congruent

I feel partial to the last one.

I feel a little upset that Megan Boyle didn't respond to my e-mail, but I'm actively trying to feel okay about it. I wish she had responded and sent me a short story I haven't previously read. I'm reading Murikami but I want to read more Megan Boyle. I want to stop using proper nouns and end this blog post.

POETRY STRIKES ME

I read one book and it made me want to read more by Tao Lin. I found out that he was

one of those people who does a lot of stuff on the internet and thought that I am savvy

to that sort of thing that people are doing today. But not as hip as maybe somebody who

was really good at blogging and had a strong internet presence. I found his thing on

Google and found other people who wrote in a similar way and wanted to read more so

I did and found that I liked to read more but was distracted by the urge to do other things.

And then I felt that I recognized elements in my own writing that I wanted to bring out

the way other people do. That happens to me whenever I read poetry that I like. I like a

lot of different kinds of poetry but doubt that there is anything important left to say.

Then I read a poem I like and discover that there is but that somebody else has already

said it. Then I stay up all night and smoke a whole pack of cigarettes. Sometimes I think

of lighting a cigarette and realize that I’m already smoking a cigarette and I am able to

laugh at myself for a moment. I want to read more blogs and poems on the internet.

I don’t know anybody who thinks that the same things I think are important are

important. I want to show somebody my poems but I don’t know why. I very vaguely

want some certain people to like my poems. I very vaguely want to like some certain

people but I don’t know why. If I had something really important to say, I

don’t know who I’d tell. Maybe I would post it on twitter. I think that’s what I like about

blogging.