“Deep Eyes”, by Darlyn Avina

Deep Eyes

Eyes are like a hole,
a hole with a sparkle that shines.
Once you’re cursed with it in your life
there is no way out of that curse of a hole.
It feels so bad that you think your eyes
are falling into the moisture in your head.
Once that hole shines again it’s made into a shape.
Its background is white with a color in the middle.
Remember that curse you will see with for the rest of your life.
But after all that pain you will see everything.

-- Darlyn Avina

Last month at Poetry & Pizza we had a crew of poet teachers from California Poets in the Schools. I got from them last year’s CPITS anthology and started reading it on the BART ride home.

Children’s poetry. You know, I find I can like it as well as poetry by grown-ups.

Darlyn Avina was in second grade (Millview Elementary School, Madera County) when “Deep Eyes” was written.

The poem reminds me of certain translations; I’m thinking of ones I’ve read from Eastern Europe, or early French surrealists or dadaists. Also some primitive poetry – shaman songs. When I say the poem seems translated, I mean that it seems to carry over a strangeness from another language, a way of speaking that is taken for granted in that other language but which in English seems nonnative. I suspect English is Alvina’s native tongue.

The poem proposes things you probably hadn’t considered – your eyes are a curse? – but which, once suggested, seem peculiarly reasonable. Well, yeah, the eyes can be a curse sometimes. Eyes are holes? Holes. Windows is the usual metaphor, but, you know, I can grok holes. The poet speaks with authority, no hesitation about it, no I think maybe.

“But after all that pain you will see everything.” And that’s … a good thing?

source: My Song Is the Light: California Poets in the Schools Statewide Anthology 2007, edited by Mary Lee Gowland

exposed to the outside world

I’ve heard before that the sense of smell, unlike other senses -- vision, hearing, etc. -- is a sense operated directly by the brain. Not that I understood what that meant. Says Lewis Thomas in The Youngest Sciences: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher: “The olfactory receptor cells were known to be bona fide brain cells, the only proper neurones in the brain that are exposed to the outside world and act as their own receptors of information from the environment. … [T]he olfactory neurones [are always] replicating and replacing themselves in their positions at the surface of the olfactory mucosa, high up in the back of the nose. No other brain neurones have the property of multiplying or regenerating; once in place the neurones of the rest of the brain are there for the duration of life, and those which age and die off are not replaced.”

More recent research suggests this is not as uniformly true as Lewis makes out, that is, some other brain cells do regenerate.

“Another peculiarity … is that despite their exposure to the outside, and their location in a region of the air passages which is especially rich in bacteria and viruses of all sorts, the tissues in which they reside do not become infected. … It is now believed that the cells are somehow protected by the antimicrobial property of the mucus which is always present as a thin layer covering the cells.”

Didn’t the Egyptian embalmers pull the brain out through the nose? Maybe they knew it was already kinda sticking out there.

a profoundly ignorant occupation

In his memoir The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher, Lewis Thomas talks about training to be a medical doctor in 1933:

“It gradually dawned on us that we didn’t know much that was really useful, that we could do nothing to change the course of the great majority of the diseases we were so busy analyzing, that medicine, for all its façade as a learned profession, was in real life a profoundly ignorant occupation.”

Years of increasing success “in diagnosis and prognosis were regarded as the triumph of medical science, and so they were. It had taken long decades of careful, painstaking observation of many patients; the publication of countless papers describing the detailed aspects of one clinical syndrome after another … By the 1930s we thought we knew as much as could ever be known about the dominant clinical problems of the time: syphilis, tuberculosis, lobar pneumonia, typhoid, rheumatic fever …” Except, that is, how to “change the course of the great majority”; cure was up to patient’s immune system.

“The treatment of disease was the most minor part of the curiculum, almost left out altogether.” Sure, they were taught about “the mode of action of a handful of everyday drugs: aspirin, morphine, various cathartics, bromides, barbituates, digitalis, a few others.” But these primarily treated symptoms. They weren’t curatives.

Mostly what doctors did, Thomas says, at least when we’re talking patient care, was listen, hold your hand and act as though they were responsible for you. They were living breathing walking authoritative placebos – not much different from shamans.

Patients these days miss that kind of doctor, the handholder, the man with the bedside manner. But, says Thomas, though he understands and sympathizes, he wouldn’t trade the many actual cures we now have for a kindly smile.

cotta

word of the day: cotta

context: Dave “had visited this very church, St. Matthias, as a chorister. He had owned a clear, sweet soprano voice in those days and, in a red cassock and starchy white lace-trimmed cotta, with his blond hair he’d looked angelic. He hadn’t been angelic, but that was another story.”

definition: a short surplice reaching to just above the waist, worn by clergy, acolytes and choristers, in the Roman Catholic Church and in some Anglican and Lutheran churches -- MS Word Dictionary

source: The Little Dog Laughed: a Dave Brandstetter mystery, by Joseph Hansen

deodars

word of the day: deodar

context: “The woman … looked at him with frightened eyes through a screen door of bright new aluminum that contrasted with the weathered shingle siding of the house. The house crouched under gloomy deodars behind a shingle-sided church.”

definition: a Himalayan cedar with dark blue-green leaves and drooping branches, that is highly valued as a timber tree in India. Latin name: Cedrus deodara -- MS Word Dictionary

source: The Little Dog Laughed: a Dave Brandstetter mystery, by Joseph Hansen

sprechstimme

word of the day: sprechstimme

context: “’Foundations’ … begins with a crackling solo piano figure, expands into the sound of a full band, and barrels into a chorus in which [Kate] Nash abandons her habitual sprechstimme for clearly melodic singing.”

definitions: the voice used to sing; see also sprechgesang -- MS Word dictionary
Sprechgesang and Sprechstimme (German for spoken-song and spoken-voice) are musical terms used to refer to an expressionist vocal technique that falls between singing and speaking. -- Wikipedia
A form of dramatic declamation between singing and speaking, in which the speaker uses lilt and rhythm but not precise pitches. -- American Heritage Dictionary online

source: The New Yorker, January 14, 2008 issue

each of the state’s 550,043 lucky residents

I was born in Alaska. Though my parents divorced and my mother brought me and my brother with her to California (her home state), her love affair with Alaska continued. Mom had a whole kit of Alaska materials (walrus tusks, Eskimo crafts, postcards) that she would take with her on teaching jobs. By the time I was paying attention to politics Alaska seemed to be deeply Republican. I assumed it had always been so. Sure, my family is liberal – even the ones still up there – but isn’t that stereotype about rural people being Republican true enough? Most of Alaska is decidedly rural.

Chuck Thompson was born in Juneau (he has quite an attitude about my native Anchorage), and in his book Smile When You’re Lying: confessions of a rogue travel writer Thompson pinpoints the Republicanizing of Alaska:

“1982, with Alaska dripping in crude, the first Permanent Fund Dividend checks were issued by the state government to all Alaskans -- $1,000 given away to each of the state’s 550,043 lucky residents, every penny based on investments made with oil revenues. A pittance for corporate oil even then, but a $6,000 payout for families with four kids, like mine, was big money. Some call the Permanent Fund Dividends pseudosocialism, but the truth is less complex: they’re a bribe. Alaska’s once-liberal voters haven’t sent a non-Republican to Washington since the day that first check was issued. Alaska today isn’t so much a GOP stronghold as it is an oil fiefdom.”

The Republicanized Alaska proudly ties on his ideological mask – “self-sufficiency and rugged individualism” – but behind the mask those squishy individuals glue their lips to the tit of the state. Thompson, wryly, concludes, “The importance of independence myths is inversely proportional to the degree to which any society has surrendered its sovereignty.”

outright lovers

I’d heard that there was a gay element to the close friendship between Gilgamesh the king and Enkidu the wildman. But when I read translations I didn’t come across much evidence. Sure, they were buddies, but we’re all familiar with the ultra-het buddy flick, right?

David Damrosch gives some backup to the homoerotic rumors:

“[Gilgamesh’s mother, the goddess] Ninsun [predicts] that Gilgamesh will ‘caress and embrace’ Enkidu like a wife, using the same verbs that described Enkidu’s lovemaking with Shamhat.” Shamhat was the (female) temple prostitute sent to tame the wildman who was running around the forest freaking everybody out. She was quite good at her job. “Ninsun’s language suggests that Gilgamesh and Enkidu have [an] intimate relationship, and [Ninsun’s interpretations of Gilgamesh’s dreams] slyly insinuate that they may be outright lovers. This hint is given by the choice of objects that Gilgamesh starts to love and caress in his dreams: the words for ‘meteor’ and ‘ax,’ kisru and hassinnu, strongly suggest two sexually loaded terms: kezru, a male prostitute, and assinnu, a eunuch who would take the female role in sexual rituals at Ishtar’s temple.”

source: The Buried Book: the loss and rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh, by David Damrosch

chasing his laughing partner through the house at dawn

Though he occasionally apologizes for it, sheepishly confessing to a paucity of wisdom, Edmund White, even when writing nonfiction, often makes use of the tools of fiction. In the passage below he employs a narrator’s omniscience to peel back the façade:

“Today I saw two men walking along Eighth Avenue in New York, holding hands absentmindedly. They were both in their forties, one badly scarred from an ancient case of acne, both a bit Neanderthalish from their hours at the gym. Their eyes scanned their path like minesweepers. The one on the right had the overly male, deeply unpopular look of a double-X chromosome – I’m sure he had anger management ‘issues.’ The other one seemed happy to have a lover-friend all in one person. He didn’t seem proud or possessive but just relieved. He was no beauty. And yet I could never imagine them flirting with each other or the double-X chasing his laughing partner through the house at dawn. Maybe flirtation would have made them snicker with evil embarrassment like Beavis and Butt-head. Maybe they were too unevolved from their primitive masculinity to live with women.”

It sounds like he knows them. He doesn’t. White doesn’t get the genetics right, for one thing (does he mean double-Y? the extra masculine man? an XXY is not known for looking “overly male” but rather for feminine characteristics, like breast development). The idea that one could have “a lover-friend all in one person” seems foreign to White. Really? White casts his speculations in a maybe or two, but he speaks with authorial authority – the sort of authority I readily grant a fictional narrator but one of which I am deeply suspicious in writing presented as non-imaginary.

Early on in my gay reading life I took a dislike to Edmund White because he has the habit of pronouncement. He tells us what gay men are like, what gay men do. As my feelings often ran counter to the White-ian ur gay, I stopped reading him. These days his testimony doesn’t bother me so much, partly because there are plenty of other gay perspectives available, partly because I don’t need him to tell me anything, and partly because his prose style is finely crafted and interesting whatever the substance of the remarks.

source: My Lives: an autobiography, by Edmund White

What do Ashurbanipal, Hadrian, Queen Elizabeth I, and Mao have in common?

Ashurbanipal was the ancient king in whose library was discovered the Epic of Gilagamesh. The king was literate, a rarity for the time, even for kings, who didn’t need to read, after all, they had scribes to do that. But as a literate man Ashurbanipal liked to have books around him and collected what was probably the greatest library of the age. Plus he wrote poems. You know he did!

In The Buried Book David Damrosch quotes a few lines attributed to Ashurbanipal:

Often I go up to the roof in order to plunge down,
but my life is too precious, it turns me back.
I would hearten myself, but what heart do I have to give?
I would make up my mind, but what mind do I have to make up?
O Nabu, where is your forgiveness,
O son of Bel, where is your guidance?

Unusual exposure of self-doubt & vulnerability for a king. Glorifying was more the order of the day in kingly lit. Even when it were self-glorifying.

Damrosch lines Ashurbanipal up with his peers: “Ashurbanipal’s poems can be compared to the verses of the Roman emperor Hadrian or, much later, England’s Queen Elizabeth I and China’s Chairman Mao, all of whom wrote some excellent stanzas and a larger output of lesser quality. All four leaders can best be described as talented amateurs, and more specifically as talented amateurs whose audience was not going to risk offering much in the way of constructive criticism.”

EXIT GISTUBAR!

David Damrosch’s The Buried Book is a lively account of the early archaeological triumphs and shenanigans in and about Iraq & the British Museum, particularly in regards the rediscovery of the “Great Epic of Gilgamesh.”

In a section talking about the decoding of the cuneiform in which the poem was written Damrosch says, A “major complication in the process … was that cuneiform had originally been developed in southern Mesopotamia by people who spoke Sumerian, an ancient language completely unrelated to any other known language. The script had then been taken over by speakers of Akkadian, which became the most commonly written language for much of Mesopotamian history. Yet the Akkadian scribes continued to learn Sumerian as they mastered the script, and they often employed Sumerian loan words amid their Akkadian texts. It is as though, in reading an English text we would often have to pause and determine whether pain meant ‘suffering,’ as in English, or ‘bread,’ as in French.

“Conversely, a sign might have the same meaning in Akkadian as in Sumerian but a completely different sound: when used to mean ‘sky,’ the star symbol is pronounced an in Sumerian, but shamu in Akkadian. Names in particular could be tricky, for Assyrian names often included Sumerian elements, along with Akkadian symbols. This would lead George Smith [a self-taught linguist responsible for the first translation of Gilgamesh], for example, to misread the name Gilgamesh as ‘Izdubar’; he didn’t realize that what looked like two Akkadian characters, iz and du, were actually Sumerian signs pronounced ‘giz-ga’ or ‘gil-ga.’ He then guessed incorrectly on the final syllable, which was Akkadian as he assumed, but which can be pronounced either ‘bar’ or ‘mesh.’ … The reading of ‘Gilgamesh’ was finally established twenty-five years later by Smith’s friend and successor Theophilus G. Pinches, in an article triumphantly entitled ‘EXIT GISTUBAR!’”

the only way to divert criminal desire

The usual theory of parent/teenager conflict has it that the teenager is testing boundaries, seeking autonomy, differentiating from the family unit, full of hormones, acting out. It’s the teenager who has changed.

That’s obvious. The child is changing into an adult. Both parent and child are new at this.

In his My Lives Edmund White puts more of the onus on the parents:

“Through friends my age I have noticed that as teenage boys and girls become more and more beautiful their parents are reduced to continual spluttering rages against them. It’s enough for a slim-waisted, broad-shouldered lad to come skateboarding up to the curb with a flick of his full black hair and two dark red roses surfacing in his white cheeks to make his balding, stooped father yelp with hate-heavy vituperation. I suppose hate is the only way to divert criminal desire – or an equally disagreeable acknowledgment of envy and spite.”

“I don’t want that slimy shit on me.”

Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzalez’s investigation into what leads people in extreme situations to an outcome other than death, includes a number of dramatic survival stories. In one a sailboat founders. The crew manages to inflate a life raft, but the sea is rough, and the wind chilling.

“At last, Kiley hit on the idea that they could cover themselves with seaweed for warmth. An inventive approach to using the materials at hand is a hallmark of survivor thinking. Although it was a good idea and eventually worked, Mark’s initial response was, ‘I don’t want that slimy shit on me.’ You can often tell early on who is going to make it and who is not. If Kiley’s story had been a Hollywood movie, everyone in the audience would know by now that Mark was going to die.”

Partly cuz, you know, it wasn’t the first clue.

pile of reading

My Song Is the Light: the California Poets in the Schools Statewide Anthology 2007, edited by Mary Lee Gowland
… We had four poets who teach under CPITS auspices read for Poetry & Pizza last Friday. It was a good reading, a little long, what with four poets each getting feature treatment. I told Susan Herron Sibbet that I’d had a poem in the CPITS state anthology back in … 1982? Maureen Hurley and Zara Altair had taught an after school CPITS class at my high school and it opened my world to poetry. Poetry as freedom, rather than restriction. Invention rather than convention. Excitement rather than moderation. The other poets at P&P were Cathy Barber, Tobey Kaplan, and Emmanuel Williams.

Circus World, by Barry B. Longyear … Back in 1978 and ’79 I was buying every new issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I would read Isaac Asimov’s introductory essay, and typically read other nonfiction, like book reviews, but I wasn’t reading many of the stories. I remember seeing Longyear’s Circus World stories. The only Longyear story I actually recall reading, however, was “Enemy Mine”, a novella which, coincidentally, had a dual-sex alien, thus might be said to be of gay interest. Some years later I saw a paperback of Circus World selling for cheap so picked it up, thinking it a novel sequel to the stories. When clearing out the house after my mother died I threw all the old IAsfms into the recycle bin. But I brought back to Berkeley boxes of paperbacks. Circus World, the book, is not a novel but a collection of the short stories that appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (Barry Longyear calls it, “a series of stories that … constitute an episodic novel”). I’ve now read my first Circus World story. Not bad. Well, now I’ll know what I was missing all those years ago.

Tender Is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald … I started reading this Fitzgerald novel before going on our last trip but I didn’t take it with me. I haven’t gotten back into it. I prefer to read only one novel at a time (Proust excepted), but I’ve lately been reading short stories, and I started Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting at Hill House as my breaktime book, so the space for fiction is crowded. I note that I began reading this because I feel like I ought to read Fitzgerald again and, perhaps oddly, because I like “Tender Is the Night”, the song by Jackson Browne.

Otherhood, by Reginald Shepherd … I summoned this book of poems from another of Berkeley’s branch libraries after I read Reginald Shepherd’s account of a recent hospitalization. In comments I said, “I understand when somebody's reading a poem strength flows to the poet. So I'll go get one of your books and sit down and read.”

The New Yorker, February 5, 2007 issue … At my library we have a box where people can drop off (& pick up) recent magazines. Issues of The New Yorker appear there frequently and earlier this year a fairly complete run of 2007 enticed me. The last piece I read was a rather discouraging account of the damage inflicted on Sublette County, Wyoming via increased natural gas drilling there. The more development the greater the damage to the environment, yes, but it seems violence and drug abuse increase hand in glove with the drilling, too.

Crashing the Gate: netroots, grassroots, and the rise of people-powered politics, by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga … Jerome Armstrong founded and still runs the Democratic activist blog MyDD. Markos is the “Kos” of DailyKos, the Big political blog, which I discovered when it wasn’t nearly so big about five years ago. I was interested in reading their Crashing the Gate, so when the Friends of the Library got a copy I snapped it up. “Those of us who became energized ever since Bush and his circle of fiends took over in 2000 … must now act to take back our party and our country.” Fiends! Aw. I like this book already.

The Ten Cent Plague: the great comic-book scare and how it changed America, by David Hajdu … I like the cover illustration by Charles Burns. Hajdu starts the book with a sympathetic portrait of an artist, Janice Valleau, whose career was cut short (destroyed?) by the anti-comics hysteria of the 50s. In an appendix Hajdu lists 15 pages of “artists, writers, and others” whose careers were hurt in this particular subwar of the greater War on Culture in the United States.

Welcome to the Monkey House, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr … Perhaps it was Vonnegut’s recent death that made me decide to reread old Vonneguts. I decided to start with this collection of short stories, partly because it contains some of Vonnegut’s earliest fiction. (I don’t think I will reread Vonnegut’s first novel, however. I did not like Player Piano.)

Ploughshares, Spring 2002, edited by Cornelius Eady … I added this to the browsing paperbacks collection at Claremont. After two years spinning on the rack (and 3 check-outs) it was time for it to retire. So I brought it home.

Fence, Spring/Summer 2004, edited by Rebecca Wolff … Remember a few days ago I said, “When I look through a long list of a literary magazine’s contributors, it surprises me that after 25 years of regular poetry reading so few are names I recognize. It is true that I’ve been delighted by a poem then discovered that the poet who wrote it had work in other magazines or anthologies that I’ve read. Suddenly the name sticks out.” That was when I was talking about Sorry for Snake, remember? Well, glancing at the editorial staff of Fence a name suddenly sticks out. One of the Sorry for Snake poets I quoted is Poetry Editor of Fence. Funny.

Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Levi-Strauss … I was assigned a section of this book in an Amazonia class in college. I read that section but kept the book figuring one day I would read it through. Last night I was charmed by the opening: “I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions.”

The Buried book: the loss and rediscovery of the great Epic of Gilgamesh, by David Damrosch … In his introductio Damrosch describes some of his research, including this trip to the British Museum’s misleadingly named Central Archive: “I made my way to the Central Archive, which is reached, oddly, through an unmarked door at the back of the British Museum gift shop. Once through that door, I walked through a series of darkened, echoing rooms filled with empty bookshelves (the books having been transferred to the recently constructed British Library), then came to a warren of small offices, among which is the Central Archive. Of the seven days of the week, it is open to the public for five hours on Tuesdays.”

you gotta have hope

More and more over the years I’ve come to recognize that “hope” is another one of those words that actually means a buncha things, maybe some not quite compatible. When I was struggling, miserable and feeling trapped, I kept hoping things would somehow get better. My hopes would stand in the square and everybody would give them space, a lot of space, as though my poor little hopes standing out there pressed together for comfort, were at best embarrassing, at worst a bit revolting. Unmet, they would stand there till the evening gathered and brought the indifferent darkness. I grew to loathe them myself.

Finally, desperately, I rejected them. A relief! Truly. A relief. My hopes had taken so much energy. It was better not to have any. Just do whatever, what needed to be done now. Hungry? Eat until the emptiness doesn’t hurt. Don’t feel like getting out of bed? Lie there.

“One of the toughest steps a survivor has to take is to discard the hope of rescue … There is no other way for his brain to settle down.”

That’s a quote from Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzalez.

He continues: “Dougal Robertson, who was cast away at sea for thirty-eight days, advised thinking of it this way: ‘Rescue will come as a welcome interruption of … the suvival voyage.’” [ellipsis in orig.]

I generalize from “hope of rescue” to “hope of change” or “hope of something better.”

For some time I kept a button affixed to my backpack that said, “I feel so much better since I have given up hope.” But I tired of it catching on things. So I took it off.

Lately I’ve been wondering if there might be a sweeter form of hope, a non-virulent strain. Perhaps if mild enough it might be good for you, like an inoculation. Or might be a stimulant, like strychnine.

play

I’m always reading several books at once. I like to have one of them be a naturalist’s account of watching animals.

In a chapter on hyenas in her Innocent Killers Jane Goodall describes a play session between two pups:

“Master Beige … was full grown, whilst Brindle was still only about three months old. The game began when Brindle pounced on a rather large and very smooth roundish stone. Opening his mouth as wide as it would go, he struggled to pick it up, but it was just too big and his teeth kept slipping. Just as it seemed that he had, at last, managed to get a grip, Master Beige ambled up, seized hold of his small sibling’s ear, and pulled. Brindle sprawled on the ground, but in a flash he was up and again trying to pick up his stone. But Master Beige, by worrying the scruff of Brindle’s neck, yanking at his ears and pulling at his cheek hairs, made it impossible for Brindle to get a grip on his plaything.

“Suddenly, Brindle left the stone and darted to seize his tormentor by the tail, hanging on tight with his sturdy legs braced as Master Beige turned to bite at him. Gradually they moved farther back, Brindle still gripping his brother’s tail. And then, as fast as his short legs would go, Brindle ran back to the unguarded stone. But Master Beige was too quick for him and grabbed the toy himself, running off in the moonlight with his head turned back over his shoulder, inviting pursuit. Brindle lumbered along behind. Master Beige slowed his gait until his sibling could bite at the stone in his mouth, and then he dropped it on the ground. Brindle once more tried to get a grip on it, but always, if it seemed he might actually pick it up, Master Beige pounced, picked up the stone himself and loped off with it for a few yards. Brindle followed, Master Beige dropped the stone again, and so it went on.

“After a while Brindle, it seemed, gave up. He wandered away until he reached a thorny plant and pulled on a twig until it broke off. Master Beige watched him. Brindle shook his twig, dropped it and pounced on it. Master Beige could resist no longer. He loped across to join his sibling in a tug-of-war. But the moment one end of the twig was firmly in Master Beige’s mouth, Brindle dropped his end and raced back to the stone. Still, of course, he could not pick it up, but this time, as his big brother bounced back to grab the toy, Brindle firmly sat on it.”

my hero

Toward the back of a generally favorable chronicle of Madonna’s life and work Lucy O’Brien covers some pages with “celebrity moments.” Bad diva.

This one is my favorite:

“Madonna went with Sean Penn to Helena’s, an exclusive club in Los Angeles. Sean didn’t dance, so she brought her choreographer along just in case she wanted to hit the floor. The only snag was, he had to leave his gay lover outside. Witness to this event was Dennis Fanning, a no-nonsense policeman who was helping Sean with research for his role as a cop in Colors. Fanning went to the door and pulled the man in, telling security he was with Madonna’s party. ‘I sit his ass down next to his boyfriend, turn to [Madonna], and go, “C’mon, you want to dance with him? Dance. But why should his boyfriend be outside on New Year’s Eve? The fuck is that all about?” She’s looking at me like she hasn’t been talked to like that in years.’”

My hero! Butch police officer stands up to diva over her mistreatment of little gay boy. Now dance.

source: Madonna: Like an Icon, by Lucy O’Brien

the heterosexual assumption

One thing that has noticeably degraded in my lifetime is the hetersexual assumption. It’s nice. Sure, most people most of the time figure if you have a sweetie she’s a girl, if you’re a boy, and vice versa. But once in awhile comes the realization that there is another option. Boy could be with boy?

Usually when I hear someone refer to her “partner” I figure she’s referring to a same-sex partner. But aware straights have picked up the term, too. I like the ambiguity. When Lucy O’Brien in her Madonna: Like an Icon recounts how she came around to appreciation of the pop star as artist she says: “We are from the same generation. Like her, I was a lapsed Catholic girl fired up by feminism. I played in an all-girl band and knew the thrill of performing. Like her, I was drawn to punk and the underground club scene. Like her, I focused on my career until I met and married my partner later in life. Like her, I had two children (a boy and a girl) after I turned forty.”

Married. Partner. Is this partner male or female? As O’Brien uses the word “married” I suspected the partner is male as gay people don’t yet get to toss off that word so easily. There are places where we can marry, however, and some claim the word even when the marriage is not state-recognized. Further explanation is typically forthcoming in such cases. As “husband” could easily be switched out with “partner” the easiest guess is that is what O’Brien means. But from what she’s said so far you can’t know. I like that.

Sorry for Snake

I found issue #3 of Sorry for Snake, a digest-sized, saddle-staple lit zine, on the poetry shelf at Pegasus. The editors are Sara Mumolo and Jack Morgan, both former members of the Trainwreck Union. My post about the Trainwreck Union still has the DIR record for number of responses – not to mention kerfuffle! Not long after the Union fissioned, it seems.

Jack Morgan has gone on using the Trainwreck blog, though it’s his personal blog now. He started a press, Stormy Petrel, and it’s under that aegis he’s produced Sorry for Snake. I’m guessing all the work is solicited as no “writers guidelines” appear in the magazine or on the Stormy Petrel site. But it looks like it’s gonna come out pretty regular, as Jack’s now offering subscriptions.

There are 9 poets in the issue: Matthew Rohrer, Feliz Molina, Jared White, Mark Cunningham, Trevor Calvert, Gillian Hamel, K. Silem Mohammad, Juliet Cook, and Erika Staiti. Only K. Silem Mohammad is a name familiar to me. When I look through a long list of a literary magazine’s contributors, it surprises me that after 25 years of regular poetry reading so few are names I recognize. It is true that I’ve been delighted by a poem then discovered that the poet who wrote it had work in other magazines or anthologies that I’ve read. Suddenly the name sticks out. When the poem was just one of many that made only a glancing impression its author remained unseen. Of course I become familiar with names for reasons other than delight – could be that they just appear over & over such that even the tired eye begins to see. Or the poet is also an essayist or publisher or vigorous self-promoter.

K. Silem Mohammad is one of the flarf poets. Flarf, if I understand it right, is a method of composition wherein the poet generates text using Google. Not sure if there are rules other than that.

Here are some lines from Mohammad’s “Heavy Horses”:

Matthew Broderick breaks his collarbone after falling off
this unknown German No-Wave project with no foundation
he states that it is obvious how humans reproduce
this oblique reference to screwing is an attempt
to protest about the type of horse he used to fix the lightbulb

*

I found a performance on youtube that Mohammad gave at a 2006 Flarf Festival. He has good timing.

And in the interest of future remembering here are some random lines by other Sorry for Snake poets:

Matthew Rohrer: “Don’t let them / turn me into a song / ok? I only drip / like the rain.”

Jared White: “But eventually everything becomes community service and / Abstentions. I have a habit of getting big when I feel small / And pulling muscles in the legs. My liver doesn’t ever strain // But the eyes do.”

Gillian Hamel: “there is a figure skatingness about the overbright lights and slick / surfaces, / half of you changed colour due to rain.”

underminedetermined

Miekal And and Maria Damon coin some words in a poem, “Inbetween Detritus”, that appears in the second issue of UR*VOX:

underminedetermined

trashisions

eclecstatic

ontolopportunity

genilimnital