to the dr.

today for italy clearance. and the dollar is diving ever lower. i think my head is burning. so here's a guitar in a tree for you all, and a bed on the land. there is nothing from the sea, though. nothing from the sea.

hats: a small part of what saturday held

stage, set, match

after going to see August, Osage County last night (belated v-tines day piggybacked onto the celebration of irishness), we stepped out to this view:

in between the theaters on 45th st. After being transported to a small town in oklahoma and spending 3+ hrs in the home of a family that epitomizes the idea of dysfunction, it was an interesting and welcome juxtaposition. The play contains one of the more hysterically vicious characters I've ever come across and seems to suggest that even though offspring often try their best to rail against and distance themselves from the things in their parents they like least, in times of crisis we can't help but become a resting place for those very same qualities. And then we flee. And then we flee. And then we

There's a lot of other stuff to chew, but I need to clean and pretend I'm not lazy.

If you've spent the time to read this, check out the book that's just come out from Flying Guillotine: http://flyingguillotinepress.blogspot.com. Maybe even consider buying a copy so that Sommer and I can make more books!

winter tempermental

so my head's full of fuzz today. i want to be able to accomplish all of the things i'm supposed to accomplish. yesterday i listened to a woman talk about the american state being dumbed down, but her talk was full of holes and her mouth was full of words with holes in them and her mouth made me feel like my head was full of fuzz and her voice was kind of similar to a talking fireplace that doesn't know its burning. looking at one thing and not seeing one's way all the way around it makes for animosity in me.

tomorrow my students will be carrying handsized objects into class that carry some kind of value for them. i hope it's important junk. all of our junk is important, o maybe not, but a lot of it is much more important than what that woman said. and a mixed metaphor has nothing at all to do with how simply a politician speaks to his or her audience, dammit.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=49328288&sc=emaf

if you choose to listen to this, be forewarned that she's grating and her methods are fairly sloppy. it's a valid concern, i believe--to take issue with the sinking level of american intellectualism, but to carry a voice that is this addled with infallibility, she should be required to create an argument that isn't so gap filled. what's the difference between using the term 'folks' and saying that a politician is having a 'chat' with the populace? in both cases it's posturing to draw a closer circle between the listener and the perosn addressing the listener, unless i'm missing something. and visual literacy is going to be, has already become, an integral facet of our daily existence. nevermind the information about email and distraction...if you listen let me know what you think.

my head is full of fuzz, so this is probably pretty fuzzy too...

Pictures of things with pictures in them

Are we scared of what we really mean?

This will be formal-ish and pseudo-inteligent. inelegant... Ladies and gents, after reading a well wrought entry on http://quoileternite.blogspot.com/ (feb 5 and feb. 7), i decided to prattle some.

Firstly, I don’t like typing into a box. Firstly, I don’t like typing. Firstly, this is faulty since it’s the third thing. In reading what a few people have to say about schools of definition for writing and the such-and-such arts, I want the inside of my head to say—"no wrong or right"—like someone dragged their spraygun up through the varied holes in my face and started to tag at will and use quotation marks.

A good poem is a good poem because someone says it is and what makes it “good” is completely decided by that person’s eyes/tie/class/education/tongue texture. Not to say that that person can't sell a "you" on what makes a poem good (is this a form of education?). What I continually see in discussions of writing and the such-and-such arts is a mode of exclusionary thinking, people set up camps and look out at others who are not similarly minded and throw things at them—refuse, a bottle of rice written words, the labelmaker in its entire wheeled fury.

Now I know it’s not up to the writer of things to completely parcel out the intended meaning of a thing being written, and I’m all for multiplicity of meaning and misreading and mishearing and distorting sensory input, but I know too that there are people out there who like things to mean what they say they mean, and who like to be told a story—since however much we want to reformulate “story” as socially conscious, educated people who know of the restrictions of the cannon and its monochromatic configuration, we cannot discount the fact that on some level “story” as it stands is essentially human (insert discounting comments at will).

This is not to say that when writers refuse the idea of narrative or the idea of the lyric entirely, as many writers choose to—or at least distort those ideas beyond a layperson’s recognition, so that a reader, when cognizing, has to sort the pieces out--they’re not making another kind of narrative or another kind of lyric, they are. But this act also turns reading into a different kind of work, maybe a more productive work (and what the product is here is often discernably intellectual, rather than a tingly thing of the body--though again, my bias may be at the ready here--there are often too many buffers for me to get chills from something I've had to think long about) and I know there are readers who love doing this work, too. This is also essentially human and so is the want for labels and the act of labeling.

So where does that get anyone who wants to discuss writing and the such-and-such arts? Well, the school of being silent and the avant-poster and the new and the new and the new and the people who refuse labeling and the labeling of the refusers as that and the want for an outside from the in and an inside from the out, I doubt will stop. However, I don’t think it’s wrong for writers (since that’s mainly who’s concerned with this whole idea of labeling and portioning out the known map of the world in a handful of colors—or wait, maybe not) to work in any of these modes and if anyone out there is spending their time building a hierarchy you are no better than classicists, but from here I can’t say what’s essentially wrong with them or with you. Just be sure to back it up and let other people enjoy what they enjoy freely.

I enjoy coffee, so I’m having some now. The critics can circle and buzz, saying "I don't like to mean. What's said."

OR: If I was from Canada...

the best invention has had to be procrastination. the bed phone at 5 in the pm, a lingering taste of salt on the lips. i have been conversing with people who i'm concerned with about my concerns--we agreed that the terms of the agreements we reached were not fully agreed upon but solved a minor issue of discretion and personal value. clipped: not so much a leaning toward prescribed conscription as much as a more civil union. clipped, a leaning toward i wish it would snow. the cities and towns we've sworn in grow hushed, the streets evaporate their lines and everyone gets a cup of something warm to drink. ideally, people like each other more and more and make less war. make less of others and noise.