Tuesday, February 23, 2010

I pushed "Faeries Wear Boots" and the jukebox died

ARAGHGRHIUHRIOAHBHO
ARUGHE
ARIGFHIRFKBNIOEF!!!
ARGH
ARIGHRIA

OH YOU LITTLE BAMBINO!
FUCK YOUR MOTHER!

ARUGHEAIGEH!

AFAEHIEHTIEH!

HAARG;HT.

the end

workie workie

The DSM V is online and open for comments. This is a revolutionary way to present such an important academic text. It allows the public the same level of access and input awarded to professionals.

DSM V

I am particularly interested in the renaming of "Gender Identity Disorder" to "Gender Incongrunce." It's still very controversial to include this aspect of human sexuality in the manual.

Being gay was codeable as a mental illness until 1987.

The new version also attempts to be more sensitive to cultural factors that contribute to a person's self. This should be common sense, no?

I spent several hours online looking over the revisions.

BMA

The Cezanne and American Modernism show at the BMA lacks energy.

Here is something that does not lack energy:



Thanks, Katherine, for the link to the LA Times article about Iva Gueorguieva. She studied philosophy at Goucher because, "I knew that I could paint a bucket to look like a bucket, but so what? I needed to learn how to think." Then she studied painting at Temple.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

whoa, tomorrow is Friday

SO many hours in the car this week, only about a third of them planned. I think the city should hire people to walk around with propane flame-throwers to melt everything down. I think it would be an awesome sight-- yellow jumpsuits with SNOW in a circle with an X, special goggles, gloves, little backpacks with propane tanks and the blaze, the blaze melting it all into the Harbor. Nothing could possibly go wrong...

Yesterday I woke up with a smile. I dreamt that James Joyce was texting me. I'm not making it up! Imagine-- I think Joyce would have gotten a huge kick out of the randomness and the language screwiness of texting. I wish I could remember what his text said, but that part of the dream is gone. I'll have to invent it.

The i.e. reading went well. Only a handful of people showed up, but that kinda worked in my favor. My voice cracked at times and I lost my breath more often than I'd like to remember, but I read my new stuff and it went over well. Michael Ball invited me back to read with Chris Nealson and maybe, quite possibly

Cole Swensen!

What an exciting thought.

My husband bought me the new Salt Hill. It's hands down my favorite journal. Here are a few good quotes from an interview with John Robert Lennon:

"The thing is, I really like flawed novels when other people write them."

"I think overwriting is the tendency not to exercise judgement in the accretion of detail... The eye and the ear of a reader want to go to certain places; the overwriter forces them to pay attention to elements chosen not for their importance to the story but for their significance to the writer."

"My other interests--music and photography-- inform and influence my fiction, to some extent, but for the most part they're the product of an excess of desperate creative energy that I lack the patience to plough entirely into my fiction."

Friday, February 5, 2010

Netflix for the weekend, books, books, books

In January I watched 15 movies. Here are the top three:

Lion's Den (terrible name)

Goodbye Solo

BRAND UPON THE BRAIN (awful, awful name)

The first two are instant-- so when you are snowed in this weekend, watch'em and let me know what you think.

Lion's Den is about a pregnant woman accused of killing her two lovers/tormentors and the Argentine prison system.

Goodbye Solo is so painful/beautiful to watch because of the exuberance of Solo, the cabbie. ( I have to say that I LOVED Chop Shop, though. This is also instant. It's by the same director, an earlier movie. Two children living above a chop shop in NYC, making it on their own)

BRAND UPON THE BRAIN isn't some anti-consumerism movie by Naomi. It's a gorgeous sci-fi/mystery/art film created on Super Eights. The first two chapters of the story are a little too fast, the director really hits his stride at chapter four. Mother issues? Yup, this guy's got them. It's freaky and sexy weird.

I only read one novel in January.

The Cave by Saramago.

I was so taken by his Death with Interruptions . I was surprised by how hard a time I had finishing this one. The last thirty pages are mind-expanding, though. I had a hard time with the book because it's all about normal life, normal worries-- like making a living, marriage, pottery. I could appreciate the story and the subtle message, but I've developed an intolerance for normalcy. The Death with book is an idea book and that got me off big time.

I hit the absolute book jack-pot in Westminster, MD of all places. I was out there for work and stopped at the biggest Goodwill I've ever seen. I took home 12 books:

A FIRST EDITION (hardback) Invisible Cities Calvino
Identity Kundera
A Wild Patience has Taken Me This Far Rich
NightwoodBarnes
Anil's Ghost Ondaatje (another first edition, hardback)
Anna Karenina Tolstoy (hardback)
Moscow Women, 13 interviews
Between the Acts Woolf
Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion
Virginia Woolf (bio)Gordon
And two art books.

What an incredible find! Usually I spend about two minutes in the book section of Goodwill-- long enough to see all the Clancy and romance novels and leave. This time, I spent about forty-five minutes treasure-hunting. I have (had?) a kindred spirit out there in Westminster.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Happy happy happy happy birthday Gertie!

Ah, the girl slow to realize. Not, no, not slow to realize. She knew right away and why not? It's Gertie's birthday today and it's strange how the dead still get birthdays and the unborn do not. That's because they haven't been born yet, obviously. Once you get borned you get to celebrate that even after you die. Being born is big. Which is true, they celebrate the father's birthday by spitting wine on the cold of December and they run in circles with the wine coming from their mouths onto the frost-bleached ground. But, they do not even acknowledge the death day, which happened in April, the "earth day" and a week or two after the girl's birthday and is April the cruelest? Of course not. Hey Gertie, how are things on this birthday that we are celebrating long after your bones have given up all their minerals? After the heavy brown burial gown is dry-rotted and brittle? It is a happy day to remember, the day you were a baby sucking at a servant's breast and pawing at her tender buttons.

Today is probably not a good day for the girl, even though it is a good day for Gertie. It is a good day for Gertie. It's always about the breast, full breast, come flying. Today the girl is taking stock and still shivering; it is more like a deep tremor coming from the inside of her dark torso. It happens in the legs, too, and the neck, it's clear that there is a disconnect, a misfire between the brain and eyes. There is only so much standing on one leg, that is, testing of one's balance. Suck down hard on a peppermint and the nausea will forget how to tumble. She expected as much.