Friday, March 27, 2015

Excerpts from Girl in a Band, Kim Gordon

"People pay money to see others believe in themselves." Meaning, the higher the chance you can fall down in public, the more value the culture places on what you do.

...

I've always felt there's something genetically instilled and inbred in Californians -- that California is a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don't realize deep down they're actually afraid of what they want. It's new, and they're escaping their histories while at the same time moving headlong toward their own extinctions. Desire and death are all mixed up with the thrill and the risk of the unknown. It's a variation of what Freud called the "death instinct."

...

...I've always believed -- still do -- that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.

...

The most heightened state of being female is watching people watch you.... Loud dissonance and blurred melody create their own ambiguity -- are we really that violent? -- a context that allows me to be anonymous. For many purposes, being obsessed with boys playing guitars, being as ordinary as possible, being a girl bass player is ideal, because the swirl of Sonic Youth music makes me forget about being a girl. I like being in a weak position and making it strong.
  -- Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Poem Not Written in Catalan by Eric Gamalinda

Of all the things that are not eternal
I deny the patience of water, the divinity of salt, and the
persistence of the spider

I would like to write a suicide note in three and a half languages
and travel south on a Thursday towards
some form of life outside of earth

And although people will think I'm no longer there
I will live in geodesic domes
and count only in numbers below zero

Sometimes when I walk past trees in the city I hear them denying me
Normally this doesn't bother me but today
I'm not going to take any conspiracies

I deny bodies of water smaller than the Great Lakes
I deny any planet larger than America

I deny the fact that when I kill time, time is actually killing me
I am air, light, sound, all of which I deny
I deny the Buddha, I do not deny the Buddha

An exact copy of my life is being lived three million light years
away
If there's a way to prove it
If mathematics were the only religion

We are passing an era of turbulence
make sure your seats are in the uptight position

"When we come close to another a certain light ignites"

Love like an arsonist
steals into my life and burns down all my tenements

(In a court of law, love will deny me
and I can't prove a thing)

  -- Eric Gamalinda, "Poem Not Written in Catalan"

Thursday, March 19, 2015

sexy balaclava, Daphne Gottleib

I tried to rent the movie
about the protest,
but the store didn't have it.
In the film, the underdog wins.
That's how you know
it's a movie.
They are passing a law here
to keep people from sitting
on the sidewalk. Poverty
is still a crime in America
and I am looking more and more
criminal, by which I mean
broke, by which
I mean beautiful.
Holy. Revolution
is not pretty,
but it can be
beautiful, I'm told.
The protest was dull.
There was no tear gas
and there were no riot cops.
Nothing got broken
and nothing got gassed
and nothing got smashed.
There was no blood
and the world was not saved
so we went to the movies.
In the film,
people kissed
at the end.
The underdog won.
That's how we knew
it was a movie,
a pretty lie.
Revolution
is not pretty
but I don't care
about looks.
Set the dumpster
on fire. Break
the windows.
Don't kiss me
like they do
in the movies.
Kiss me
like they do
on the emergency
broadcast news.

  -- Daphne Gottleib,  "sexy balaclava"

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

"In Defense of Marriage" by Stephen S. Mills

There's no security in two men together,
no guaranteed payment, no signatures,
no witnesses besides the lady next door
who suspects our apartment is a one bed-

room like hers. We buy a dog for insurance,
have one bank account, and our initials
carved in the back of the TV stand: S hearts D
and D hearts S. I insisted it be mutual.

Tonight we fight, slam doors on each other
in our best imitation of love. I drive our car
in circles, discovering I am my father.
Your parents hope I won't return

and you'll settle for an Indiana girl
with big hips, low self-esteem,
maybe even children, but this isn't 1945
and you didn't just step off a boat fighting

a war people actually believed in, and I
was never your secret cabin boy,
all stars and stripes. In the morning we'll fuck
without condoms, and hold each other in spoons,

believing that security is the possibility of disease.

  -- Stephen S. Mills, "In Defense of Marriage"

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

After Making Love - Stephen Dunn

No one should ask the other
“What were you thinking?”

No one, that is,
who doesn’t want to hear about the past

and its inhabitants,
or the strange loneliness of the present

filled, even as it may be, with pleasure,
or those snapshots

of the future, different heads
on different bodies.

Some people actually desire honesty.
They must never have broken

into their own solitary houses
after having misplaced the key

never seen with an intruders eyes
what is theirs.

  -- Stephen Dunn, "After Making Love"

Monday, March 16, 2015

Autobiography of Eve, Ansel Elkins

Wearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
my own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake—
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.

Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.

I leapt
to freedom.

Friday, March 13, 2015

The Uncanny Valley by Amanda Nadelberg

Fireflies careening the fields regardless
of charm, without attention, jesters slid
into the sea and time was forthcoming.
There was a story being told.

The lake asked nothing. (It was late
and certainty required that you talk less
or at the very least move over.) Under
the song he said ‘no more peonies’
buttoned the door back on its frame, the
street a ceremony in and of itself which
made cars implements, plain miracles
capsizing baskets in candied fields.

The men and women were useful, abolishing
daisies, and every time the band plays
I’m Ursula wondering still at the door
a terminal of the face (such is any incident
on the way home) a field of aftermaths,
a horizon because of boats.

Cloth begot embrace while television
considered fish, flowers by Mary and the
fonts belonging to the post office coterie.
While the room is recreated and the woods
are just outside, denouncing, there’s styled
behavior in the country in the city nonetheless,
there are sermons in the sky, tonight, whole
haggled systems, photographs abiding and
I create nothing, I broke his collarbone
and went away, listened to a song and pulled
the world up around my head. Today is a long
time in any number of places we don’t go.
No one says thank you. They get older and
they fake it whether or not we’re there.

  -- Amanda Nadelberg, The Uncanny Valley

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Final Section of "Mayakovsky," by Frank O'Hara

4
 
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

  -- Frank O'Hara, 4, Mayakovsky

Monday, March 9, 2015

watch your tense and case, Daphne Gottlieb

oh baby
i want to be your direct object.
you know, that is to say
i want to be on the other
side of all the verbs i know
you know how to use.

i've seen you conjugate:
i touch
you touched
you heard
she knows
who cares

i'm interested in
a few decent prepositions:
above, over, inside, atop,
below, around and
i'm sure there are more
right on the tip of
your tongue.

i am ready to spend
the present perfect
splitting your infinitive
there's an art to the way you
dangle your participle and

since we're being informal it's okay to
use a few contractions, like
wasn't (going to)
shouldn't (have)
and a conjunction:
but (did it anyway)

and i'm really really glad
you're not into dependent
clauses since all i'm really
interested in is your
bad, bad grammar
and your exclamation point.

  -- Daphne Gottleib, watch your tense and case

Saturday, March 7, 2015

“Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently” by Raul Gutierrez


Trees talk to each other at night.
All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.
Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.
Tiny bears live in drain pipes.
If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.
The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.
Everyone knows at least one secret language.
When nobody is looking, I can fly.
We are all held together by invisible threads.
Books get lonely too.
Sadness can be eaten.
I will always be there.

  -- Raul Gutierrez, “Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently”

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Undoing Gender, Judith Butler

Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.

 -- Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

"Each from Different Heights" by Stephen Dunn

That time I thought I was in love
and calmly said so
was not much different from the time
I was truly in love
and slept poorly and spoke out loud
to the wall
and discovered the hidden genius
of my hands.
And the times I felt less in love,
less than someone,
were, to be honest, not so different
either.
Each was ridiculous in its own way
and each was tender, yes,
sometimes even the false is tender.
I am astounded
by the various kisses we're capable of.
Each from different heights
diminished, which is simply the law.
And the big bruise
from the longer fall looked perfectly white
in a few years.
That astounded me most of all.

  -- Stephen Dunn, "Each from Different Heights"

Monday, March 2, 2015

excerpts from Henry and June, by Anaïs Nin

At moments he can say the most delicate or profound things. But his softness is dangerous, because when he writes he does not write with love, he writes to caricature, to attack, to ridicule, to destroy, to rebel. He is always against something. I am always for something. Anger poisons me. I love, I love, I love. p 50

To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction. What we analyze inexorably, will it die? p 65

What is left out of the journal is also left out of my mind. At the moment of writing I rush for the beauty. I disperse the rest, out of the journal, out of my body. I would like to come back, like a detective, and collect what I have washed off. p 113

I have a mischievous awareness that he expects me to become interested in him, and I don't like playing the game while knowing it is a game. Yet my interest is sincere. I also tell him I don't mind any more whether he admires me or not. And that is a victory over myself.  p 134

"Of course," he said, "you are a narcissist. That is the raison d'être of the journal. Journal writing is a disease. But it's all right. It's very interesting." p 136-7 (Henry as related by Anaïs)

  -- Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1932)