The Addled Chick of Childhood

A favorite writer on another favorite writer? Almost too much to ask for, but that's how the day started: with Joy Williams' review of Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Actually, it's less of a review per se than it is Joy's attempt to set down the inexplicable, illogical mystery of O'Connor's character. But it's a beautiful thing. And I wasn't exactly surprised when my brother sent me the link to the piece just as I was starting to read the second paragraph.

An excerpt:

She entertained visitors. She liked fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie. She got away with what her friend Maryat Lee called “murder” in likening many of her smug fictional matriarchs to her mother, Regina, her “cross,” and killing them off in viciously creative ways. (“She don’t read any of it,” Flannery assured Maryat.) As biographers do, Gooch seeks the complete circle of a life, its stern fulfillment. He is puzzlingly enchanted with a bit of film shot when Flannery was 5, displaying a chicken she had “taught” to walk backward. He ends the book by referring again to this odd bird, though now the addled chick of childhood has become O’Connor’s “literary chickens walking backward” — against the grain, comic, tragic, queer, unnatural.

Flannery. When asked why she wrote, she replied, “Because I’m good at it.”

Click here to read the complete piece.

And here to read a short profile of Joy accompanied by unfortunate illustration.

Chainsaw, I Say

Track 5: Summertime
from Please
Jericho Brown

as performed by Janis Joplin

God’s got his eye on me, but I ain’t a sparrow.
I’m more like a lawn mower . . .no, a chainsaw,
Anything that might mangle each manicured lawn
In Port Arthur, a place I wouldn’t return to
If the mayor offered me every ounce of oil
My daddy cans at the refinery. My voice, I mean,
Ain’t sweet. Nothing nice about it. It won’t fly
Even with Jesus watching. I don’t believe in Jesus.
The Baxter boys climbed a tree just to throw
Persimmons at me. The good and perfect gifts
From above hit like lightning, leave bruises.
So I lied—I believe, but I don’t think God
Likes me. The girls in the locker room slapped
Dirty pads across my face. They called me
Bitch, but I never bit back. I ain’t a dog.
Chainsaw, I say. My voice hacks at you. I bet
I tear my throat. I try so hard to sound jagged.
I get high and say one thing so many times
Like Willie Baker who worked across the street—
I saw some kids whip him with a belt while he
Repeated, Please. School out, summertime
And the living lashed, Mama said I should be
Thankful, that the town’s worse to coloreds
Than they are to me, that I’d grow out of my acne.
God must love Willie Baker—all that leather and still
A please that sounds like music. See.
I wouldn’t know a sparrow from a mockingbird.
The band plays. I just belt out, Please. This tune
Ain’t half the blues. I should be thankful.
I get high and moan like a lawn mower
So nobody notices I’m such an ugly girl.
I’m such an ugly girl. I try to sing like a man
Boys call, boy. I turn my face to God. I pray. I wish
I could pour oil on everything green in Port Arthur.

Click here for Jericho Brown's website.

Frame #1: In the Glowing Rectangle

An American in Hollywood
from Watching the Spring Festival
Frank Bidart

After you were bitten by a wolf and transformed
into a monster who feeds on other human beings

each full moon and who, therefore, in disgust

wants to die, you think The desire to die is not
feeling suicidal. It abjures mere action. You have

wanted to die since the moment you were born.

Crazy narratives--that lend what is merely
in you, and therefore soon-to-be-repeated,

the fleeting illusion of logic and cause.

You think Those alive there, in the glowing rectangle,
lead our true lives! They have not, as we have been

forced to here, cut off their arms and legs.

There, you dance as well as Fred Astaire,
though here, inexplicably, you cannot.

Sewer. Still black water

above whose mirror
you bend your face. Font.

Frame #2: The Hard Gifts of Summer and Fall

In a Frame, It Matters
from Grace, Fallen From
Marianne Boruch

A laugh is genuine
or not. So we goofed around
until we forgot
the camera there. What was our

name for this? Please: we need
a record of childhood, of young
adulthood, of that vast cloud
in the middle, of the days

one is grateful to eke out
in old age. Outside the world
impossibly revives itself without anyone
looking at it. Even the squirrel knows

night is a darkness with a string of lights
at either end. But where did he
put them? The hard gifts of summer
and fall. In the earth somewhere.

Brain that can't remember exactly
but he's back there,
winter-hungry. It was here, wasn't it?
And we looked like this.

Frame #3: Of Cognac and Bay Leaves

Clockwork Erotica: Why He Takes Off His Glasses When Telekinesis
      Fails
from If Birds Gather Your Hair For Nesting
Anna Journey

The white heather nods like automata
under my cypress. In my dream their calico
light in the antique theater is not enough
to dim the carved faces from two
wooden lovers--wound by clockwork
to perform sexual acts. The men
in the audience smell blackly
of cognac and bay leaves once
souped in my wet hair. I know a widower
sits beside me by the waft of nutmeg
tucked in his pocket--an apron's secret
lavender ties. From the second row he fails
to break the grand crystal chandelier
with his stare and removes
his glasses. The artificial woman's
moan hole, ovaled in planes of young olive,
blurs to his dead wife's parted lips,
their spittled edges. I know she once raised--
with her breath--a steaming
loaf of rough-grained pumpernickel,
that whole black hill, cooled.

The Sounds of the Night Coming On

from One D.O.A., One on the Way
Mary Robison

I'm not going to be able to manage with these people and the things they do.
         Collie, for example, my niece, was this morning a little girl, wearing a smock and her carrot hair in two long braids, come to visit her grandmother. Then the grandmother whisked her off and took her someplace where clothes are turned pink and braids chopped and heads shorn and left looking like sprouting pineapples.
         I could smack that grandmother unconscious and roll her out into the yard. She could stay out there a good while, pondering the harm she's done.
         Petal has arrived to pick up the kid.
         She stares straight ahead after experiencing a view of the haircut.
         I say, "Let us sit down here and smoke bags of dope at the dining table."
         The room twinkles around us with snowy linen and crystal-dripping chandeliers.
         "One thing you could do is kill your husband," I say. "He deserves it for being her son."
         "I was already going to, for other reasons," Petal says.
         "Adam?" she asks, halfway changing the subject.
         "Exists," I say with a nod.
         "So, where are they?" she asks. "They should be down here, shouldn't they?"
         I shake my head. "I can't speak for all wives about all husbands. Only for me, about mine. He is far too fucked to participate in the situation."
         The dope is burning a hole in my pocket. I keep offering it but nobody takes it up.
         The room, the chandelier light, the sad face on Petal, the sounds of the night coming on, the smells from the gardens around this palace, my longing, her longing.

Major Wood

Greetings from Mendocino, where it's raining outside, and where I'm writing from a coffee shop, where a nervous but sweet older black lab is sitting on a blue blanket not far from me. We've been on a real road trip, the kind of road trip that isn't attached to a reading or teaching, the kind of thing we don't get to do much of anymore. A fuller report when we're home, but in the meantime here's some brilliant redwood from the beach last night.

Four Dogs of February

Vanished Tower of Abstract Money

1. Mark's poem for Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker's Starting Today website went up this morning. Click here to read "Skulls Are So Last Year."

2. from "How the Crash Will Reshape America"
Richard Florida, The Atlantic, March 2009

In this sense, the financial crisis may ultimately help New York by reenergizing its creative economy. The extraordinary income gains of investment bankers, traders, and hedge-fund managers over the past two decades skewed the city's economy in unhealthy ways....Stratospheric real-estate prices have made New York less diverse over time, and arguably less stimulating. When I asked Jacobs [the urbanist Jane Jacobs] some years ago about the effects of escalating real-estate prices on creativity, she told me, "When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave." With the hegemony of the investment bankers over, New York now stands a better chance of avoiding that sterile fate.

3. "Money" from Season of Lights
Laura Nyro

Money - Laura Nyro

Flashed into the Air Above

from Kew Gardens
Virginia Woolf

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fiber beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves. Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above....

Greenness

We were doing errands late yesterday afternoon when we came upon an organic garden, hidden behind a shopping center off Middlefield Road. It seemed to be a vestige of an earlier, sweeter Palo Alto--pre-internet, pre-three million dollar price tag for modest three-bedroom house—and all at once it made sense that the Grateful Dead had once spent time here. The vegetables made us very happy, especially the yellow-green cauliflower gleaming inside its blue collar.

When She's Ten Feet Toll

Yesterday, at one point in the gym, “Somebody to Love” came on the sound system. I sat straighter on the bench, not just because we’d just been talking about Grace Slick, but because I knew she'd grown up here, and I instantly connected voice to place. That voice! I hadn’t paid much attention to it for years, but all at once it sounded powerful and fresh and strange. Witchy. I felt it in my spine, a little warm and wet. Palo Alto would give you a voice like that, especially if you were restless with its culture of manners and perfect houses and good taste. I thought about the first time I’d seen Go Ask Alice, back in middle school, and “White Rabbit” pulsed during the tripping scene. I couldn’t get Alice’s glowing hand out of my mind, and for years I held up my own hand to the light, fixing all my attention to the palm, watching it go red, laughing a little, as if that act captured the essence of what it was to be high out of your mind. I, alas, was never an Alice, but Alice’s nurdy, bespectacled friend, the friend Alice left behind as Alice went on to be a bad girl. But that’s a story for another time.

(Note: Well, so much for the accuracy of memory: someone else appears to be singing "White Rabbit," and it plays over the credits rather than during the party scene.)

In Ears, Not Mouths

Another poem from Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker's website Starting Today: Poems for the First 100 Days.

When the Real American
Craig Morgan Teicher

When the real American
language said together,
somehow we heard against.
We couldn’t tell whether

it ever said just what it meant.
We heard free, almost inadvertently,
when it said surveilled. When we talked
and voted, we defined irony.

But the words spoke in earnest,
though each is its own opposite.
Meaning’s made in ears, not mouths, but
that’s more than words expect us to intuit.

Glowing Coals

Here's an excerpt from the nonlinearity presentation I gave at AWP last Friday. The answers here are extensions of a group interview on the same subject conducted by Carolyn Walker last month. The other contributors included Bernard Cooper, Suzanne Paola, and Abigail Thomas.

CW: If you write linear and non-linear prose, which comes more easily to you? Why do you think this is?

PL: If I was asked to describe my morning, I’m sure I wouldn’t tell it according to clock time. (I put on my robe; I staggered out to the kitchen; I made a cup of coffee, I stared at the orange tree out the window in a fugue state….) My character is usually impatient with linear storytelling. Part of that might be because I grew up around people who weren’t natural storytellers. Ask my father to tell a joke—I’m sorry, Dad--and he’s still telling it ten minutes later. So lost is he in the thicket of detail, in the excruciating work of putting one foot in front of the next, that he usually messes up the punchline—if he ever even gets to the punchline. I wouldn’t use this example if I thought this trait was particular to him. I’m just as inept when it comes to telling a joke, though I know better than to subject my listener to my fumbling with timing, delay, payoff. The point is I don’t think linearity has much to do with consciousness—or at least my consciousness at this late hour. When I hear my father trying to master an old, exhausted form, I hear him trying maintain some connection to the past—or more specifically, to a tradition that feels increasingly beside the point in a world in which the structure of our attention has been reshaped by the web and all its offspring: IPhones, IPods, youtube, blogs, Facebook.

It occurs to me that my earliest exposure to linearity was not through literature but through the half-hour sitcom. Miss Hathaway buys a car for Mrs. Drysdale. Mrs. Drysdale drives the car to the beach, takes a wrong turn, and plunges off a cliff. Miss Hathaway pulls said car and Mrs. Drysdale up onto the road with bare hands and all ends in wholeness and resolution. But what about those commercials? Those intense, sixty-second interruptions that emblazoned like coins on my imagination. Weren’t they just as compelling to my impressionable consciousness as the narrative they interrupted? And weren’t they essentially as much a part of Miss Hathaway’s story, whether Miss Hathaway knew it or not?

So no surprise that, as an adult, I’ve become impatient with writing that doesn’t find ways to make use of interruption, breakage. Build-up or suspense or connective tissue? It’s the image of the gleaming Cadillac flying off the cliff, not so much the route that led Mrs. Drysdale there. Emma Bovary’s muddy boots. Mrs. Turpin’s hogs “panting with secret life.” The man o’ war on the beach in The Liar’s Club--those are the things I take with me. As Bachalard says, “Memory does not record duration.” What memory records is a series of spaces, a chain of locations, linked by emotional, rather than an imposed, logic. I wonder sometimes whether linear narrative could be described as an attempt to reproduce duration. But if anyone actually craves duration, I suggest he wait in line for forty minutes to mail a letter at my local post office in New York. Duration does not equal depth, though we’re often led to think that a latter is an inevitable result of the former. And you see why we tend to undervalue the flash or the short in a publishing culture that puts pressure on prose writers to develop, develop.

CW: How would you describe or define non-linear writing?

PL: Nonlinear writing, to my mind, typically has a fluid time structure. For whatever reason, it needs to escape the straitjacket of chronology. A nonlinear piece might be associatively structured, or it could be a basic linear through-line stitched with flashbacks. On a larger level I think nonlinear writing is interested in a different pattern of meaning-making than linear narrative. It wants to make a place for fragmentation. It doesn’t so much care about wholeness and resolution, though it would be a mistake to assume that it’s not concerned with the shapeliness of art. Think of Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary essay “Street Haunting,” which dramatizes the writer’s search for a pencil on a London night. The whole in that piece is never exactly more than the sum of its parts. By the time we’ve reached the end, the writer has her pencil, but nothing has been tied up for us, nothing transformed; what we have is a container of glowing coals, each giving off a heat of similar intensity. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Dailiness as a handful of intense moments that might not add up to anything but beauty after beauty after beauty. The writer reading the world in front of her. The search for a pencil. Might that be enough?

On the Swish, On the Smash, and the Bang

Diane Williams is the editor of NOON, the literary magazine, and the author of IT WAS LIKE MY TRYING TO HAVE A TENDERHEARTED NATURE, among other books. The following two pieces are from Seven Stories in the March 09 issue of Harper's.

If You Ever Get Three or Four Laughing You Weren't Soon to Forget It
Diane Williams

Marg Foo had been flirtatious with me once. Now she sits in her Avenger as if it were an upright chair and tells me, "What could you do so that I would forgive you?"

So now it's showtime. In the best of times we are nibbling. Fix your mind on the sweep of the action--on the swish, on the smash, and the bang.

Marg left, perhaps for the rest of her life.

Tim kept to himself. Gertrude married again.

I am going to pick up Mr. Reed in the basement.

                         * * * * * * * * * * * *

Glee
Diane Williams

We have a drink of coffee and a Danish and it has this, what we call--grandmother cough-up--a bright yellow filling. The project is to resurrect glee. This is the explicit reason I get on a bus and go to an area where I do this and have a black coffee.

I emphasize, I confess, as well, that last night I came into a room, smiled a while, and my laughter was like a hand on my own shoulder. As I opened up the volume of the television set, I saw a television beauty and a man wants to marry her and she says, "I don't do that sort of thing."

While in their company, the woman changes her clothing and puts down an article of clothing and folds it. There's a continual flow of efforts. Even as we have that behind us, the man speaks. His sidelocks are worn next to his chin, and his hair is marred by bright lights. The woman's head is set against a dark-purple shield of drapery. But when something serious happens, I am glad to say there is a sense of crisis.

And for Vera and me--we are no exception. I've lived for years. In Chicago our sunsets are red creases and purple bulges and we can amuse ourselves with them.

If the Structure Begins to Lean

please advise stop
from The True Keeps Calm Biding its Story
Rusty Morrison

(Note: as you read this, imagine the right margin justified.)

how to hold what remains but not refine it stop
the door will only open if the structure begins to lean stop
a dark blue satin scrap between two fingers prizing and vexing stop

let me mortalize and not try to appease the skin when it is cold or
        still please
afterwards is achievement if it subsumes all apologies stop
a room only seems blind because of the speed with which all its
        surfaces see me stop

in the humic concentrate of backyard soil feel bodies in their
        orbits stop
observing my hands as they disappear stop
scent of eucalyptus impassable road in even the mildest winters
        please advise

It Was a Rainy Night

In less than a week our temporary neighborhood makes the news. This huge tree fell on the street behind us, damaging the house, pulling down the wires, crushing the neighbor's car.

For more, here's the story as reported by San Francisco's Channel 7 News.

Rainy Night House (Live LP Version) - Joni Mitchell

Flooded

I keep wondering why AWP seems to resist my attempts to interpret it, report on it. For some reason, I don’t think I can write today without first saying a word or two about it, but now that I’ve set down to do that, I think I’d rather be folding clothes.

What I’d like to do is make a long, long list of all the great, sweet people I saw over the weekend. I’d like to say that hearing Thomas James’ poems in the voices of Mark, Rigoberto Gonzales, Tracy Smith, and Mark Wunderlich broke my heart. I’d like to say that being a part of Renata Golden’s memoir panel was delight—-not just to give my talk on nonlinearity, but to listen to Beth Kohl, Christian Sheppard, and Erin Hogan on their ideas for refreshing the form.

So, for those of you who went… (8,000 people? Really?) Are you still as shredded, flooded as I am today?

Below: I sit on Hilton hallway floor in complete exhaustion.

Glacial

from "Suite for Emily" in The Collected Poems
Lynda Hull

Everywhere the windows give up nothing
but frost’s intricate veined foliage.
Just engines shrilling pocked and frozen streets
wailing toward some new disaster.
No bright angels’ ladders going to split
heaven this Chicago instant where the pier’s
an iced fantastic: spiked, the glacial floes
seize it greedy like a careless treasure—

marquise diamonds, these round clear globes, the psychic’s
crystal world spinning in her corner shop
when I passed, a globe boundaried with turning
silent winds and demons. Out here the pavement’s
a slick graffitied strip: There’s more to life
than violence. Someone’s added Yes, Sex and Drugs.
Hello, Plague Angel. I just heard your wings
hiss off the letter on my table....

(The Gulf of Mexico? No, Lake Michigan at around 4:00 PM yesterday.)

An Afternoon at the Art Institute

East and West

--Avalokitesvara (Buddha of Limitless Compassion), late 6th-Century, Art Institute of Chicago
--Cinnamon Rolls, Ann Sather Restaurant, Belmont Avenue

A Few AWPictures

Introducing Kimiko Hahn!
Introducing James Allen Hall!
Introducing Mark Doty and Jericho Brown!

Text to come.

Sparks (Or: Hello, Chicago #2)

from "The Palatski Man" in Childhood and Other Stories
Stuart Dybek

He was an old man who pushed a white cart through the neighborhood streets ringing a little golden bell. He would stop at each corner, and the children would come with their money to inspect the taffy apples sprinkled with chopped nuts, or the red candy apples on pointed sticks, or the palatski displayed under the glass of the white cart. She had seen taffy apples in the candy stores and even the red apples sold by clowns at circuses, but she had never seen palatski sold anywhere else. It was two crisp wafers stuck together with honey. The taste might have reminded you of an ice-cream cone spread with honey, but it reminded Mary of Holy Communion. It felt like the Eucharist in her mouth, the way it tasted walking back from the communion rail waiting for Father Mike to stand before her wearing his rustling silk vestments with the organ playing and him saying the Latin prayer over and over faster than she could ever hope to pray and making a sign of the cross with the host just before placing it on someone's tongue. She knelt at the communion rail close enough to the altar to see the silk curtains drawn inside the open tabernacle and the beeswax candles flickering and to smell the flowers. Father Mike was moving down the line of communicants, holding the chalice, with the altar boy, an eighth-grader, sometimes even John, standing beside him in a lace surplice, holding the paten under each chin and she would close her eyes and open her mouth, sticking her tongue out, and hear the prayer and feel the host placed gently on her tongue. Sometimes Father's hand brushed her bottom lip, and she would feel a spark from his finger, which Sister said was static electricity, not the Holy Spirit.

(Above: snow falling on Franklin Street last night.)

Big on All Sides (Or: Hello, Chicago)

from Record Palace
Susan Wheeler

In hazed heat, mid-September, walking north from Chicago’s Loop, telling myself I was exploring the new life, I dogged as much for tonic, gin. A sign swung beside a basement door, in, out, mirage: RECORD PALACE: J ZZ. Inside I found Acie.

Knuckles scraping rutted paint as the door opened; inside, a form on a stool blocked most of the store, and I spooked. Don’t let on. Only two front bins of records beneath a low, bare bulb; I’d click through them, leave. Then–Acie’s voice. Indifferent.

“They are standing on end so as the men do not have to pull them out to look at the covers. Men get distracted on account some gal has got herself big headlights or big taillights, and then they end up with some shit music for some wrong reasons.” My own chest flat as rain.

He paused and I looked at him then.

“You in the market for anything special?” I saw his right eye staring off the side of his face while the left fixed on me. He was big on all sides, top included. A hairnet, the hair below the net long and limp with oil. Green stretch pants, flip-flops, a thin black U-tank taut across Sumo folds. Maybe a hundred bins were blocked by the wall of him.

I was alone, in that sea a new city is, using my flippers to feel out the surf. Most white girls would leave, I thought. Not me. My new brave life.

It Turned Him into a Verb

I came upon this Marianne Moore poem in a used bookstore in Venice on Sunday. It made me inexplicably excited; I suppose I was thinking about it in relationship to something I was working on in my head.

Above: a bird in the birdbath out back. The sun came out for just a minute yesterday, and the shock of warmth rendered him all but unrecognizable. As Mark said, "It turned him into a verb."

Off to AWP! More from Chicago later today, I hope.

I May, I Might, I Must
Marianne Moore

If you will tell me why the fen
appears impassable, I then
will tell you why I think that I
can get across it if I try.

Alive with Current

Dustin Brookshire asked me to contribute a piece to his ongoing WHY DO I WRITE? series, and I thought I'd pass mine along, even though the paint's still wet. The scene described might be familiar to some. It evolved from a blog post all the way back in September....

I was walking down the street one night last fall when I had a thought about an actress who lives on the block behind us. Not so much a thought exactly, but a sense of her physicality, an arm or her face: a face from one of her roles. It occurred to me I hadn’t seen her in a while; had she left the neighborhood? And just as I’d had that thought, I was looking into her face, her actual face, not three feet away, moving toward me. I didn’t say, hey, I'd just had a thought of you. I didn't want to break the code of privacy that makes New York possible for us. But my brain might have been jolted alive with current. The fact that she was famous matters little to me, though I admire her work. I’d have felt wrenched awake if the same thing had happened with the mailman. Whatever you want to call it—intuition, premonition, awareness—is also beside the point. I went into the supermarket, both humbled and awake to myself, as if I’d been sent a reminder that said, we don’t know the half of it when it comes to understanding what consciousness is.

Which felt more like a promise, finally, than a warning.

I walked back to the apartment. I opened the mailbox in the vestibule. Inside the single envelope in the mailbox was a letter from my gym telling me I owed an additional penalty for a charge I’d taken care of months back, even after I’d been assured that I’d never have to worry about it ever again.

My face burned. You can guess which incident shadowed the other.

I write because my life would be taken over by second incidents if I didn’t have the means to make order of the randomness—the revelation on the sidewalk next to the annoying, the absurd. I’d be flotsam, done to, a feather flying around on a current of air. Nothing makes me feel more solid, or present, than when I’m sitting at my laptop, even when it’s slow, and the sentences strain against the contours of my speaking voice. At least I am making something. At least I am listening--or trying to. Looking at moments, the dimensions inside moments. Thinking. It’s as necessary to me as food or sex. It’s prayer. And I couldn’t imagine the day without that act of attention being a part of it.

The Blue Direction

the cliffs from Loose Sugar
Brenda Hillman

For a while, the great secret
wasn't apparent to you: what you thought
you should become, you wouldn't...

You faced the blue (the favored?) direction
and hoped for something beyond 'the permanent'--

So: this sorrow you're experiencing again; you don't
have to "work on it";

if they show you a candle uncovered
in the sea cave can't you just
approach it like an ocean

from which nothing was selected
        but everything had been kept--

A Presence Next Door

A sad thing happened at the house next to us. We weren't home longer than an hour last night when we heard a knock at the door. It was the man from down the street, who told us our next-door neighbor was killed in a paragliding accident near Pacifica. Today it's a top story in the local papers, the local news. There's something poignant (but completely expected) about having been here for five weeks and not ever having seen him, even though we were well aware of a presence next door. The huge live oak, the swing hanging from the huge live oak, the orange tree, the lights in the second story windows: these signposts of his have helped to make us feel a little at home here, as most of our windows face his front yard. Earlier today, a car pulled up in his driveway, and young children--his children?--came running out onto the grass, laughing. It's been quiet since then. The windows are dark tonight.

I Am a Strong Dog

Dog and Me from Varieties of Disturbance
Lydia Davis

An ant can look up at you, too, and even threaten you with its arms. Of course, my dog does not know I am human, he sees me as a dog, though I do not leap up at a fence. I am a strong dog. But I do not leave my mouth hanging open when I walk along. Even on a hot day, I do not leave my tongue hanging out. But I bark at him: "No! No!"

(Above: a strong Los Angeles dog.)

On the Literature of Los Angeles

Aimee Bender
The same thing I hate about L.A. is also what I am starting to love and appreciate: It’s a swollen overblown mass of city. A place like San Francisco, a city I love without question, is nonetheless containable. If some god figure wanted to give a city to another god as a gift, they could box up San Francisco with wrapping and ribbons, and it would be the hit gift at the god party. But Los Angeles, behemoth that it is, cannot fit in any box; it always, always spills out, and resists its own stereotypes. Every container it’s put inside doesn’t quite work. Who even knows where it ends and begins? This, ultimately, is one of the things that makes it an exciting and dynamic city, and this is why I resist the idea of an L.A. literature.

D.J. Waldie
The former literature of Los Angeles is nearly finished--the literature of Anglo unease with race and sunshine in our ruined utopia. The literature that runs from Nathanael West to Joan Didion is passing away. The literature to come isn’t here yet. When it is, it will finally be comfortable with the autumn heat and the pitiless light in a season of drought.

Its writers will be more familiar with the real streets of Tehran or the imaginary ones of Tenochtitlan than those of Greenwich Village. They will be disturbingly frank about the presence of God (or gods) in the suburbs. They won’t be Emersonian. Because many of them will have gone in a day--not in a lifetime--from birthplaces in villages and barrios to East L.A., Glendale or Long Beach, their writing will be crowded with ancestors whose grievances cannot be dismissed by our longing for perpetual adolescence.

Carolyn See
Sixty years ago, if you looked for Los Angeles literature (instead of Hollywood novels) you came up with Hans Otto Storm, and that was about it. Hollywood novels were--and still are, I suppose--a dime a dozen, generally the products of homesick Eastern writers who were lured out to Hollywood, furiously disappointed, and who then issued standard jeremiads about the bogusness of this place: Flowers here had no scent, and fruit no taste. There were no seasons. “Love” meant nothing, and you couldn’t even smell the bland Pacific.

They couldn’t see what was here--a vast, tactile, easy, ferocious, comfortable splash and sprawl, a context so infinitely elastic that anyone, literally, was capable of becoming anything. Southern California--Los Angeles--has always had in reality what the rest of America only parroted as rhetoric. This really is a relatively classless society, a place where we can become what we want to be. The question, though, then becomes: What do we want? And what do we want to be?

(The above three quotations come from a piece titled "L.A. Lit (Does it Exist)," which appeared in the April 25, 1999 edition of the Los Angeles Times.

An Afternoon in Venice

I just saw that I'd used this title for another post back in December: oh, well. These shots come from Abbot Kinney Boulevard, which Mark had wanted to take me to. Afterward, we went for a walk out on the pier, then up along the ocean to Small World Books.

In a few minutes, I'm off to my reading in Los Feliz.