Listening to Elmore James.  He needs to find his "kind of woman before the sun goes down."  A well played blues always inspires me.  James is one of the greats.

*

Close to finishing What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, the recent collection of LT's nonfiction writing.  A ranging and beautiful volume.  Recommend it.

*

Verso has released a one volume edition of Critique of Everyday Life by Henri Lefebvre. It's still on sale (for 50% off) but you need to act quickly if you're interested.


 It's quite a brick of a book.  But I'm excited to have it.  I read the first volume years ago.

*

I see Amazon has increased the discount on my recent Dipstick(Diptych).  I'm just sayin'.

*

OK. Back to wrestling with Appearances.

*

I was cooking Saturday and managed (not with a knife but with an edge on an exhaust hood) to deeply slice the tip of my right index finger. Crap that hurt!  Still hasn't closed up properly.  Which isn't helping typing, let alone guitar practice.  It's always something.

*

I'm a questioner, not a explicator.  

I don't know what you know, but I'd like to ask you about it.

I ask myself questions and make things of that.

When I retired from the Health Dept. at the end of 2011 I told myself that my new job would be to write my "novel"--Appearances.  The plan was to collage together a novel from 365 fragments.  More accurately the plan was to try to write a fragment a day for a year and then to revise it into whatever its final state might be.  I've been at this project for about 2 and a half years now and just completed fragment 290 in the first draft.  So, best laid plans and all that... It's the longest, craziest writing project I have ever attempted.

*

Appearances isn't a novel in a traditional sense.  My friend Thomas Fink says that it is my epic poem.  I don't know about that, but maybe he's right.  There are many quasi-allegorical elements to the text.  Characters appear and disappear.  The characters I'm currently working with are: the Virtual, the Real, History, Politics, Science, Love, an (occasional) Other, the Ventriloquist, the Projectionist and the Hypnotist.  (FYI: the Ventriloquist, the Projectionist and Hypnotist together comprise the performance art group known as Vaudeville without Organs.)

*

Here's the most recently completed fragment (290):

The Real climbs up on a bar table and takes off all of its clothes.  Its body is revealed to be a map of crisscrossing sutures.  There is nothing seamless about the body of the Real.

*

Short of being a baby, a literal newly born baby, can any of us claim an unfettered view of things, an unmediated view of reality?  And even a baby, really, might not be so unfettered.  I remember that when B. was pregnant with our first we were obsessed with Keith Jarrett's Koln Concerts, played them over and over.  When M. was born, and in the house, we played that music still. She seemed to recognize it.  It settled her down. So that's something to think about, no?

*

I spent the morning with my grandson Ryan. He's six. We're becoming better and better friends.  Starting to key in on one another's senses of humor among other things.  We make great animal sounds together.  I do a great combo number in which a cow and a cat work together, "mmooomiaou!"  I'm just sayin'.  I've got a million of them.

*

Poetry, for me, is an always unfinished project in which one tries to find out what one can recognize and maybe know.

*

Have had internet issues for the last week.  Think I've finally worked through them with the cable company.  It's been frustrating, but such is the fabric of virtual life.

*

Jim McCrary's memorializing of his times with William S. Burroughs proceeds apace.  This time he chronicles a visit from a famed gonzo journalist.

*

Was listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan.  Just switched over to The Black Keys.

*

In Sex, or the Unbearable, Lauren Berlant writes:  "To me, the great pleasure of any collaboration is multiplying idioms and infrastructures for further thought that neither of us could have generated alone."  (111)

Exactly.  The pleasure of  true exchange, truly articulated.

*

Writing is a solitary art in many ways.  One is alone with the screen, pad of paper, chalk on the sidewalk, spray paint can aimed at a wall.

One sends one's work into the world and hopes to connect.

*

Am at the local library with my ancient laptop since I don't have access to the internet at home at the moment. Have spent hours upon hours these last few days trying to correct the situation, but to no avail. Hopefully all will be resolved tomorrow afternoon when the cable company comes out.  In the meantime, though, I'm frustrated.

I know...this is an uninteresting post.  So it goes.

"IN THE NAME OF MASS HYSTERIA"

for Angela Simione

All the smoke detectors

in our house

wear pocket protectors

and shout

like plumbers from Brooklyn:

"HOWYOUDOIN?!"

"HOWYOUDOIN?!"

"HOWYOUDOIN?!"

"HOWYOUDOIN?!"

New at ASK/TELL

New at Ask/Tell: my Interview with Angela Simione, an extraordinary visual artist.

orchasm

Serious rain falling.

*

Just got a rough draft of the lyrics to my song down.  Now trying to think through a rough idea of notes and phrasing before firing up the Strat.

*

Another tornado watch today.  Hard to know how concerned to be given the way local media hypes things.

*

Read and recommended:
An Army of Lovers by Juliana Spahr and David Buuck
&
The TV Sutras by Dodie Bellamy.

*

I've got an idea for a song that I want to try and piece together on the Stratocaster.  It might be the case that I don't have the chops for this attempt, but I think there's an outside chance that it could work.  If I can work it through over the next few days I'll record it and try to figure out how to post it here.

*

Bad storm rolled through last night.  Lost power for about 6 hours.  Water in the basement.  Around 6 this morning was on a ladder cleaning out a downspout.  Feeling like I haven't slept.

*

It's wet and green outside.

I'm listening to the great but underappreciated Bo Diddley.  I'd love to touch his box guitar.

*

One of the books I've been reading lately is Sex, Or The Unbearable, a philosophical dialogue, by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman.  One of the questions Berlant asks, in the section I just completed, is:

"How to articulate structure and noise?"
 (79)

That's a question which resonates deeply with me.  I'd go so far as to say that it is a question that is foundational for the innovative poetry zeitgeist.

And how about that cover photo?!

*

It's really humid.  Raining and thundering off and on.  The humidity doesn't agree with me, but it helps to keep my acoustic guitar from getting too dry, and the flowers look happy.  The pansies on the front steps are perking up.  And who doesn't like a perky pansy?

*

Wrote a new section of Appearances today

*

A couple of days ago I picked up my grandson Ryan at his school.  We spent a few hours together.  One of the things we did was draw.  Ryan's 6 and  enormously patient and detail oriented when drawing.  I love seeing him totally absorbed in doing something creative.

*

Yesterday's weather was beautiful--the first time in over 6 months that we hit 80 degrees F.  Heaven.

*

Listening to Hall and Oates because sometimes they really hit a sweet spot for me.  Inevitably I end up singing along.

*

Also reading An Army of Lovers, a novel, by Juliana Spahr and David Buuck.  Fabulous.  Hoping to write something about it at some point.

*

Having great fun working on an interview with Angela Simione.

*

The bit I wrote for Appearances earlier today took the form of a dialogue between the Virtual and the Real.

*

I know I haven't been posting here much lately.  Life is complicated and messy sometimes.  I'll try to do better.

*