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The last neoen K Mart, Tim Anderson

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Applying to PhD programs in the #metoo era is wild. Even as media is purged of (some) predators*, academia—the most perfect hunting ground outside of organized religion—remains relatively silent. The biggest revelations are reserved for the dead. I seek out those secret lists and cross check programs against them; I cross off Stanford, Duke, Berkeley. I wander the internet for the list that will tell me about Harvard, Yale, Brown. Each application submitted feels like some cliche or another: a blind plunge into a minefield; my fingers spinning the barrel once more in this endless fucking game of Russian Roulette that is being “woman.”

I am not afraid for myself, exactly, but for what would happen if I ended up in another department warped by conspiracies of silence. I don’t trust myself to hold back. I will blow it up, that silence, even if it immolates my career. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I would survive. I always do.

Or I will put off the doctorate—though I want the power it would grant—and stay where I am, in my own excellent job or one like it only with higher pay. Even months off, the decision is a miasma.

*(though not their enablers. A crucial lack, for how will change occur as long as the people who protect monsters remain? & how are Louis C.K., Toback, Weinstein, &c. &c. anything more than sacrificial lambs when the people and system that made them remain? When even some of the smartest female critics I know cannot give up W. Allen & Polanski? When I can’t let go of Hitchcock? We are so colonized by violence.)

#Lady Lazarus

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The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou is on a Netflix and I watched it even though it’s one of Wes Anderson’s two worst movies. Milena Canonero’s costume design elevates the film. (It always does: she’s a genius and a global treasure.) I love the wetsuits–especially Willem Dafoe’s wetshorts.

#today i watched #wes anderson

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It’s been one of those difficult relationship nights, up for hours fighting through demons and miscommunications, trying to whack away at the bramblebushes that grow up in the space of silence. It was good, ultimately: nothing solved, but I at least feel the peace of having tried, at having started in a vicious spiraling fight and ended someplace cleaner.

The thing about that galvanizing argument though? It was about the correct understanding, origins, & pop-culture representations of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Which is simultaneously some nerdy sublimation shit & also maybe a very valid thing to fight over?

In the broadest strokes I learned what I already know: relationships are hard and I intellectualize incorrigibly and, worse, weaponize my education. But B is a treasure. How lucky I am.

#bathysphere #a lover's discourse #self portrait

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What I have been watching: Toni Erdmann, Millennium Actress, Dekalog (1&2), Nocturnal Animals. All very good except for Toni Erdmann and Dekalog which are straight masterpieces you should watch them immediately if you haven't seen them. (Even tho they are, respectively, 3 and 10 hours.)

#today I watched #film #Toni Erdmann #Millennium Actress #Dekalog #Nocturnal Animals #krzysztof kieslowski #satoshi kon

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The year doesn't need to be over for me to declare "Five Years" the recurring motif on my personal 2017 soundtrack. "I heard telephones, opera house, favourite melodies I saw boys, toys electric irons and T.V.'s My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare I had to cram so many things to store everything in there And all the fat-skinny people, and all the tall-short people And all the nobody people, and all the somebody people I never thought I'd need so many people"

#David Bowie #the little phrase #music

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Successful satire has to be good the day after tomorrow.

Dorothy Parker, who was born on this day in 1893 (via theparisreview)

Dorothy Parker slays Twitter.

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From Cave Canem (on Twitter): https://cavecanempoets.org

#poems #lucille clifton #the human condition

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Teenaged holy trinity right here. Still love them all.

PJ Harvey, Bjork & Tori Amos

#music

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Against the hegemony of the blonde Alice. In order: Charles Robinson, Peter Newell, Bessie Pease Gutmann, Hume Henderson, Dusan Kallay.

#alice in wonderland #looking glass #illustration #children's books #namesake

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one of my favorite poets ❤️

anne carson has a grip on my ankle and is dragging me over the cobblestones to the center of town

#anne carson #poems

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Pages from Emily Dickinson's herbarium. Full book: http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/4184689?n=1&imagesize=1200&jp2Res=.25&printThumbnails=no&oldpds

#emily dickinson

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For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. … To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons.

Aldo Leopold's 1947 elegy to the passenger pigeon. Read it in full, weep: http://faculty.fortlewis.edu/dott_c/bio%20250-swecol/Activities/On%20a%20Monument%20to%20the%20Pigeon.pdf

#endling #Aldo Leopoldo

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On Falling (Blue Spruce)

Reading instructions:  STOP. No, really, don’t scroll. Don’t let your eyes touch this poem unless you are alone, or at least in a place where you feel comfortable reading outloud. 

You must be reading this poem outloud the first time you experience it. Or you must hear it from someone. Perhaps go to my source, the sadly-silent podcast All Up in Your Ears, and listen to episode two and hear it read to you. Please don’t read it before you speak it or hear it. Not this one. 

That’s the proper way to approach most poetry, of course, and you know this, of course. But who hews to best practices at all times? Not me:  I read poems on the bus with headphones in but not on; I read them on the quiet floor of the university library because, unjustly, that is also the poetry floor; I read them in class when the light from outside fails to mix with the overhead fluorescence and I can’t listen or speak because the feeling of it is like the sound of walking through broken glass in a parking lot. I get it. I read new poems silently all the time and it’s fine, of course, and you know this, of course, because the only real rule of reading poetry is that you should need it. 

So disregard my instructions, if you need to. I only give them because I want you to have the experience that I had when I first heard this poem: that sharp physical wrench of beauty when a line or a stanza catches you. By surprise, yes, but also and or: catches your breath, catches you out of the air out of a soar or a fall, catches you like a fish or a cold or a trap. This poem did that for me, several times. 

Maybe it won’t do this for you. There isn’t any universal to this. But I hope it does. “I picked it out just because I find it consoling,” said the voice who read it to me, as introduction. Me too. 

On Falling (Blue Spruce)

Dusk fell every night. Things fall. Why should I have been surprised.

Before it was possible to imagine my life without it, the winds

arrived, shattering air and pulling the tree so far back its roots,

ninety years, ripped and sprung. I think as it fell it became

unknowable. Every day of my life now I cannot understand. The force

of dual winds lifting ninety years of stillness as if it were nothing,

as if it hadn’t held every crow and fog, emptying night from its branches.

The needles fell. The pinecones dropped every hour on my porch, a constant

irritation. It is enough that we crave objects, that we are always

looking for a way out of pain. What is beyond task and future sits right

before us, endlessly worthy. I have planted a linden, with its delicate

clean angles, on a plot one tenth the size. Some change is too great.

Somewhere there is a field, white and quiet, where a tree like this one stands,

made entirely of hovering. Nothing will hold me up like that again.

-Joanna Klink

#reading instructions #poems #joanna klink #podcasts #these fragments #reasons mainly sonic

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beautiful perfect poem

April 16, 2017: An Ordinary Composure, James L. White

An Ordinary Composure James L. White I question what poetry will tremble the wall into hearing or tilt the stone angel’s slight wings at words of the past like a memory caught in elms. We see nothing ahead. My people and I lean against great medical buildings with news of our predicted death, and give up mostly between one and three in the morning, never finding space large enough for a true departure, so our eyes gaze earthward, wanting to say something simple as THE MEAL’S TOO SMALL: I WANT MORE. Then we empty from a room on Intensive Care into the sea, releasing our being into the slap of waves. Poems break down here at the thought of arms never coupling into full moons by holding those we love again, and so we resort to the romantic: a white horse set quivering like a slab of marble into dancing flesh. Why remember being around a picnic table over at Brookside Park? We played softball that afternoon. My mother wore her sweater even in the summer because of the diabetes. Night blackened the lake like a caught breath. We packed things up. I think I was going to school that fall or a job somewhere. Michael’d go to Korea. Before we left I hit the torn softball into the lake and Michael said, ‘You can’t do that for shit James Lee.’ Going back I realized the picnic was for us. It started raining in a totally different way, knowing we’d grow right on up into wars and trains and deaths and loving people and leaving them and being left and being alone. That’s the way of my life, the ordinary composure of loving, loneliness and death, and too these prayers at the waves, the white horse shimmering, bringing it toward us out of coldest marble.

==

(I’ve been debating whether to send this poem for years. That second-to-last paragraph gets me right in the solar plexus.)

Also by James L. White: Making Love to Myself

On this day in:

2016: Verge, Mark Doty 2015: Reasons to Survive November, Tony Hoagland 2014: Unhappy Hour, Richard Siken 2013: Just Once, Anne Sexton 2012: Talk, Noelle Kocot 2011: Why They Went, Elizabeth Bradfield 2010: Anxiety, Frank O’Hara 2009: The Continuous Life, Mark Strand 2008: An old story, Bob Hicok 2007: you can’t be a star in the sky without holy fire, Frank X. Gaspar 2006: For the Sisters of the Hotel Dieu, A.M. Klein 2005: Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem, Bob Hicok

#poems #the human condition

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Here are some pictures of Thaddeus T. Cat! Posted for no particular reason except that the photos from my phone uploaded themselves into cloud storage and so I am suddenly, unintentionally able to share them. In order, Thaddeus: understands civic duty, loves iced tea, hates sweaters, and is a hellbeast. Best cat!

#my cat