I meant: savage [anthropomorphic] rains are attacking San Diego in Southern California. Like, someone said, “Please go see Apitchatpong,” and I loved it. [Which ones did you see?] The first one I saw was Tropical Malady. [That was the first of his I saw, too, and it’s a very strange film to see with no preconceptions.] I had no preconceptions. All of his films fold in half. I love the way it echoes without echoing too specifically. Very LSD, that film. Deeply primordial. But instead of footprints in the frosted static there’s only the other hand, which loses the hammer in the grass. By then / there was no going back, so he sprayed / the turtle’s head with Raid / and wrapped it in up a bath towel / and threw it into the garbage bin … It feels like I’m stepping on a bag of marbles when I say this. So Melodie and her husband (I think he’s her husband) made Falling Water out of gingerbread. Is love possible, your question was hanging over my tranquility, yes, whose and whose, eating at the mountain when the moon sits on it? Sabes que, hombre? The desire to keep my living expenses low became reckless. I would carry into the store a bag, a plastic bag from W.F., and I’d place it in the cart and, as I’d shop, I’d place things in the bag, and I’d place of course many many groceries outside the bag, but there were certain items, certain expensive items, that I’d place in the bag—such as sirloin steaks and blueberries (for a while they cost 5.99 a carton). I’d drink an expensive ginseng tea. There was this hot sauce I’d steal, pure extravagance of course and I knew I had turned sloppy, yet I knew… [You know the thief’s main virtue is modesty? A modest thief never…] That’s
right. [I’m guessing. I’m guessing.] Mayakovsky in Vermeer’s kitchen, reading the email, about some dude named Davidovits … earned German Doctor Degree in Chemistry … world expert in ancient cement and archaeology … member of the International Association of Egyptologists, President of the Institute for Geopolymers and Consultant to the European Union Commission … honored by French President. His latest book is entitled Why the Pharaohs Built the Pyramids with Fake Stones: The Construction of The Great Giza Power Plant. At the heart of which a room with a rhomboid skylight, full of ‘seemingly miscellaneous [seemingly] found objects’, of course there’s something not-quite-right about the ambience. Within a few weeks, yo u can beco me a co llege graduate!- Fo llo w Yo UR Dreams- Live a better life … This is a rare chance. Now all I have to do is quietly wait for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern, thinks M, but what are the odds that’s going to happen? And yet … and yet … as Issa put it, let us wear the bees’ hat. “The artist goes back to the fish.” There is always a monkey in the works and that particular primate is clu, the program designed by old man flynn, which went rogue and now runs ‘the grid’ like 5:00 shadow and morning breath. Three dancers in the park roll their T shirts to their ribs, flip onto their hands. Have you noticed how common the handstand is? For everyone speaks about violence. Or, as Frank Stanford put it, “In Another Room I Am Drinking Eggs from a Boot”: old and small: that is how my body left me, it’s an apartment much larger than the
apartment I lived in for all those years, ten, twenty, sixty plus. It takes a central inarticulateness as a kind of style sheet. Someone tells me tears aren’t clear anymore; they’re a strange gray color like weird steam. More about eggs, or do I mean more about the apartment-body? It’s two meters high with two wheels underneath. And it’s made from sack bags and bamboo splints and wood chippings and grass seeds. Under the dinner table, you notice everyone is masturbating, even if it’s just hands gliding over knees. When the toast talks to you at breakfast and says, “you sir have no hope!,” then there’s an easy solution: yell “BORING” to keep judgment at bay -- Now that I’ve visited an étang I always had visited one -- I knew these swamps. You are here**. **The footnote is gone. Perelman asks Benson: Were you here when Chairman Mao visited in uh ’61? Benson: Chairman Mao? No, I missed him. I was in the city … It was a weekend. But what does it matter. “Wherever the red sun of Chairman Mao shines, there is light,” and I can see Chairman Mao’s presence. All hail to Tinguely! We need houses to live in. Fire burns as the novel taught it. I’m feeling more bingo than slot machine, I’m feeling more peanut oil than hand on forehead, more VALETH! than SHAREB! Today I look at the faces of passers-by and I think: it figures. The banks have the money to buy counter-revolution, this wino has no money. He's nice enough, so is that girl in the flamingo summer dress on wobbly heels. It’s September 12, possibly the prettiest day of the year. The blue has never been so pure around the chimneys — “Almost like—a cartoon!” says the dental hygienist.
[Note: Sources: among other things, bits from the authors of SPD’s 50 best-sellers of 2010, 2 from each row of cover thumbnails (noted as “(SPD)”). Brent Musburger, towards the end of the 3rd quarter of the Maaco Bowl (Boise St v Utah); JBR, play on K’s beastlike, which she inserted in Musburger’s purple prose, as she was utterly boggled by it; Nathaniel Dworsky and Darren Hughes, in conversation, as quoted in Hughes’ “Manifesting the Ineffable: A Conversation with Nathaniel Dorsky”, at MUBI, 2 Oct 08 (SPD); Elyse Fenton, “Clamor”, at Cleveland State University Poetry Center (SPD); Suzanne Buffam, “Two Hands”, at La Petite Zine (SPD); Rachel McKibbens, “The Day After the First Time We Ran Away From Home”, as quoted in Barbara Jane Reyes, “Rachel McKibbens, ‘Pink Elephant’ (Cypher Books, 2009)”, at Harriet, 20 Oct 09 (SPD); Zachary Schomburg, 1977-2050, at Verse Daily (SPD); JBR, re: Melodie, “Falling Water Gingerbread House”, at Garden Melodies, 14 Nov 010; Etel Adnan, “There”, at Electronic Poetry Review 1 (SPD); John Murillo, “Santayana, the Muralist”, at Reading Between A&B (SPD); Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch, “Hot Sauce”, at Electric Literature (SPD); JBR; email from Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation [info@piramidasunca.org], “FOUR RESEARCHERS WHO FOREVER CHANGEDTHE WORLD OF THE PYRAMIDS”, rec’d 23 Dec, 3:20-something in the a.m.; JBR, out of the same email, conflating the work of Chris Dunn with that of Joseph Davidovits; JBR, ekphrasis re: Anne Hardy, Untitled VI, embedded in email from the Saatchi Gallery, “Saatchi Gallery Talk : New Directions in Contemporary Photography”, rec’d 23 Dec 6:09 a.m. (some of the language is derived from the Saatchi website’s description of Untitled VI); email from Emmett [Emmett@rsi.com], addressed to everyone at UCR whose first name is John, rec’d 23 Dec 12:43 a.m.; Frank O’Hara, “Mayakovsky”; JBR, riffing on “Julian Cowley, Some Liner Notes on Charlie Morrow, a Retrospective View” and Wyndham Lewis, as quoted in same, at Poems and Poetics, 23 Dec 010; Richard Lopez, “tron (legacy) 2010”, at Really Bad Movies, 23 Dec 010; Julie Carr, “Letter Box”, at Tarpaulin Sky, “59” from 100 Notes on Violence, at Ahsahta Press (SPD); Frank Stanford “In Another Room I Am Drinking Eggs from a Boot”, at Poetry Foundation.org (SPD); Adam Golaski, “Prologue (from Color Plates)”, at absent magazine 2 (SPD); Mark Sussman, “eugene marten”, at Mark Sussman.org (Marten is SPD); Alissa Nutting, “Wolf Rainbow (a.k.a. The Beautiful Actual)”, at La Petite Zine (SPD); JBR; “Architect lays egg on streets of Beijing”, at Archinect, 13 Dec 010; Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, review of CA Conrad, The Book of Frank, at Bookslut, May 09 (Conrad’s SPD); Alice Notley, “The Islanders Remember That There Are No Women and No Men”, at The Nation, 7 Apr 08 (SPD); Tisa Bryant, blurb for Renee Gladman, The Activist, at Krupskaya Books (Gladman's SPD); JBR; Steve Benson, “Views of Communist China”, in The Kenning Book of Poets Theater 1945-1985 (eds. Kevin Killian and David Brazil) (SPD); Kenneth Koch “The Construction of Boston”, in Killian/Brazil; Robert Farnsworth, “Fiction”, at From the Fishouse (SPD); Kaia Sand, “Déjà vu Love Boutique”, at Arthur; Bertolt Brecht “Das Badener Lehrstück Vom Einverständnis” (tr. Robert Grenier), in Killian Brazil; Michael McClure, “The Feast”, in Killian/Brazil; Phillip Lopate, “Allende”, at Poets.org]