2003
Wednesday, January 1, 2003
⇒ I make figures in Play-Doh with Sevi and when I crumple them back into the can, Sevi asks “where’s the snake, papa,” or “where’s the person, papa?” I say that they’re now inside the ball of play-doh. “I want to see them again,” she says, it being a matter of their simply re-materializing, crawling back to life out of the material.
⇒ Sevi’s “Ls” very Russian sounding, very “lully” linger in her mouth, as in “Mabel Mabel strong and able, Get your elbows off the table!”
Thursday, January 2, 2003
⇒ The icy cold of the bags eating into my fingers as I rushed home from a Coop shift.
⇒ A woman eating a bag of nuts came rushing back into the Coop, agitatedly announcing a car must be moved! as she spat white flecks of nut onto her lips and out onto the Exit worker—me.
⇒ A feisty loquacious woman commenting on my reading some “lurid novel” which turned out to be “Guns, Germs and Steel”. “Oh I know that book,” she said. Said she didn’t agree that environment made all the difference, it had to be genetic. It was her understanding that people living in the Fertile Crescent, argued the book, had gotten certain mental attributes…but she hadn’t read the book, so. I suggested maybe she should because she was getting it wrong.
Monday, January 6, 2003
⇒ Feeling that our country is like a bad habit the world ought to be cured of—alluring but destructive. Our gearing up for this oil war is evil. How can our intentions possibly be good, when we flaunt our dominance and drive the destruction of the natural world? Our leadership is a sham. How does one come up with something worthwhile to say to the world artistically, if not to decry this evil? Film art, we are repeatedly told, ought not to preach any agenda. Ought it then to toe this awful line? There’s a decadence being enforced on our population—pressure to live within a bubble and disregard the ruin we cause. The reply is that we are naïve. Pragmatism dictates this course, always has. The argument goes, if some aren’t willing to be thought evil in this necessary aggression, then real evil will be brought to bear on our defenseless people. As if there is no alternative. I believe this war is being mounted by greed and the concomitant drive for glory. The real glory that’s possible is discounted a radical pipe dream.
Friday, January 24, 2003
⇒ Camille Foe – comme il faut
⇒ It annoyed me that he very consciously trotted out these darling little French expressions- bete noire, eminence grise, roman a clef, enfant terrible, comme il faut. He knew to stay away from je ne sais quoi, but early on in his franglicizing career he wouldn’t have hesitated. Oh, also found of latin – infra dig…
⇒ Yesterday, Sevi threw up, multiple times at the Coop with Rebecca, then on the way home all over herself in the stroller in 10 degree weather, then several times after that and in the crib on her pajamas twice. Some kind of stomach bug we think, which had parted by this morning. Sevi woke up saying she felt much better. This was her first bout with something like that—never vomited once before, ever. Made me realize how blessed we’ve been that she’s been in such good health. I don’t think she got sick once her first year. Last winter she was sick periodically, but only once did we go to the emergency room and got antibiotics for an ear infection. She’s only had antibiotics that once. Physical accidents have been virtually none that have been consequential. The worst was the “nursemaid’s elbow” incident that happened early this fall, did I ever write about that? Popped this tendon out when we were swinging her by her two arms walking down the street playing our counting game, 7-8-9. That’s the last time we play that one for a while. She howled and held her arm down at her side like it was the arm of a marionette that had lost a string. “Paralysis” occurred to me immediately, then, “dislocation”, “broken bone”—terrifying. She wailed whenever we so much as touched it. I took her to the emergency room and they IMMEDIATELY knew what it was. Turned her palm in and bent her arm (it was the left one) toward herself, which poped it back in. She was back to normal inside half an hour.
January 28, 2003
⇒ Name for children’s book – Clouds in Disguise
⇒ Disgust of Wind
⇒ Eliminate the harmonics that storm my thoughts while preserving those that fill out my vision of life.
⇒ There is being okay about being exhausted around your child, and other times in horror of the apprehension that you’re neglectful, that you’re a bad parent, which further enervates you, making you a worse parent, a negative feedback loop that casts you as the embodiment of joyless duty.
⇒ These famous poets coddled and pumped up to the point of irrelevancy.
⇒ Any given street at any given time is a carapace. Where are the people? Where is the life? Furtive, but there. Warm pockets of love and care carved away from view.
⇒ I’d love to be though an artist with the freedom it implies, the freeing of my instincts and emotions from the stifling tyranny of worries over survival. To be called an artist, supported as an artist, and above all thought an artist would confer that grace. Until such time, if it ever comes, have the consolation of saying, “yes, an artist, but at what cost to be so recognized today!! Timid voice—in many situations there is a cost, isn’t; there?
⇒ rangy crazy stranger who infuriates you when you walk into a diner at 6am, who smiles at you as if to say “I’ve been waiting for you!”
⇒ Ken Burns—every story the same: Trim off those interesting details that don’t hew to the tired elegiac storyline.
⇒ We clean your attic asbestos we can
February 2, 2003
⇒ short film about the specters that keep coming back up in your mind—people from memory, souls who represent various kinds of failure and threaten you. The horrible rankling of the thought that you are such a failure you take up such a role in the mind of someone else.
February 5, 2003
⇒ Last night, before I made dinner Sevi sat in my lap looking at a picture of a serene, female-looking Buddha on the cover of a brochure that arrived in the mail from the Chakrasambara Institute and said, in these exact words, “When she was a little girl, she loved her mama.”
February 6, 2003
⇒ Short doc called “Malcontents” interviewing people with chips on shoulders, bones to pick etc.
February 7, 2003
⇒ L-swear
⇒ Underwriter
Like a litigator
(A little gator)
I seek precedent
To buttress utterance
(to butter the udder)
A prior eminence
Some dude stopping up his
Piehole with a thumb til he
Blows up large
And shields me from doubt,
Recrimination.
Otherwise, I trot on air
And fear imposture.
Seeing so, won’t I can’t I stand
My own words
Or at least behind them?
Even this poem seeks shelter,
Is all elbows, a harrowing
Gaff and shame.
February 16, 2003
⇒ Bedtime story—made one up for Sevi tonight about Deedle the Grasshopper who sat on a cornstalk watching the ant store away kernels of corn. Come winter time he got snowed on and ant gave him shelter and fed him from his larder. Learned his lesson. Ok, hardly original, but some of those that are don’t bear repeating. I look at Sevi listening impassively to my stories and I worry…what kind of boring junk I am having her absorb…what does she make of it? It’s a spur to ratcheting up the level of the material. Just one story tonight, she didn’t insist on another… She grabbed the ribs of her crib and fell asleep that way for a bit before rolling over. I started singing Row your Boat, which she allowed, but I grew tired of it, so started into the old standard Old McDonald for the improvisational component.
Monday, February 17, 2003
⇒ A few nights ago Sugi wanted me to bring back pizza for dinner (once in a lifetime!). Sevi was so thrilled, she ran around saying “I’m so happy!”
⇒ We had nearly two feet of snow today, blizzard conditions. Barely any cars on the streets. Beautiful drifts arcing off marooned cars. Kids clambering over big piles, old guys grunting with shovels. Plows careening by further burying the cars. One guy trying to dig his out said “Oh the joys of car ownership.” At about 3:30 we went out in it, Sugi cross-country skied in the park and Sevi and I tested the drifts. All the while the air was full of turning whipping small snowflakes. Then we wended our way back and stomped snow clumps through the subway grating and shook snow off burdened tree limbs. Sevi seemed really to enjoy the snow, in her thoughtful way. She was able to walk where it had been plowed, and this gave her a sense of power I think. She always gets a bit quiet when out in the elements. She stuck her tongue out and let flakes sizzle.
Monday, February 24, 2003
⇒ Sevi says “mise” for mine; “yours and mise” for yours and mine.
Friday, February 28, 2003
⇒ Stood over Emily Watson on the “C” train tonight, after leaving work. Entered the train at the Chambers Street stop at about 6:15pm, after having failed to stuff a bunch of mail in the mailbox at Chambers and West Broadway for Aaron Consulting. Too paralyzed to say a thing to her. Thought and rejected every attempt at a thought of how. Tried to pretend to read the book I held, “Damascus Gate” which I still haven’t even begun. Got off at Jay Street, still disbelieving. Thought of so much I could have said, was rained on by regret and shame for not having the nerve—what am I, almost 39 yrs old? If not now, when? I just struck me much later, that at no time in the past, ever, have I come so close to someone I so truly admire who is famous. She’s got to be what I consider one of the 4 or 5 greatest living actresses. Saw her at BAM in 12th night a few weeks ago, and actually thought her Viola lackluster compared to her film work. She wore jeans, a dark jacket, her hair was blonde and had a clip at top, kind of short. Around her neck were two or three gold tablets inscribed in what looked like Hebrew letters. [Writing the next day 3/1/03] Well thank god the spell of remorse is broken. I wish I had said something, but no longer feel so harrowed by it. The thing I think which really bugged me is it revealed that I still think of myself as so “inchoate”, so unready to face all this constellation of my ambition. And yet, how much of life left is there? Why aren’t I there yet? And yet, a part of it is saying, can’t I be so prepared, so centered, that I no longer feel abject in front someone I admire. I was struck by what felt like a fucking love crush; absurdly dizzy with paralysis, wondering what to say to break through to her, how to not come across like everybody else, thinking how what she really needs is to be left alone to candidly observe us hoi polloi to enrich her craft. I felt here was this large large phenomenon before me; I was struck dumb. How can I be the Jamesian “one on whom nothing is lost” when my whole identity goes out the window before this avatar of all I desire to join with and prove to the world. Not talking proceeded from the terror of shattering an illusion, of being spoken to and disdained by the object of desire. How could one survive that? And yet the source of it is so phoney—it’s the received mass culture thing I flounder in—can’t yet put an actor in perspective of the greater scheme. It’s because this is my altar, if I have one anywhere, and I’m still failing to live up to expectations.
⇒ Revery on Self-Sufficiency
For William Wegman it was costuming coonhounds.
For Philip Glass a glass a glass a Ralph
Emerson said one need look no further
Than what was to hand and Immanuel
Kant never left Konigsberg while Saul
Bellow boasted “the emotionally alive person
Is at home anywhere.”
Tell it to Proust, forever displaced.
Cormac McCarthy doesn’t get Marcel,
Whose sentences fail to deal death.
He lived behind a shopping mall
Not writing about alcoholics in his midst.
Unlike Carver, who did and had been
And would not be a has-been like
Berryman, who nimbly fought it and.
⇒ Slick (re: the coming war)
Oil is as oil does.
Decay of the dead
Decaying the new
An ever evening gray.
Ash is just the thing
For gouts of expressed blood
Freed brilliantly to the air and now
Without purpose.
A pooling curiosity.
Feather it with ash.
The unheeding few
Slaughterers will end
In lead-lined coffins,
The better to keep them
From decomposing
Into oil.
⇒ Mirror
I got a house and some nice things
And all for very little evil.
In the glass I get real.
I have contributed more than I took.
Chrome fixtures confirm this opinion.
⇒ Standing By
“I have no more to do
With death than you,”
He pled
From his deathbed.
“Or less,” I replied
Without tact.
⇒ Mean-Spirited of Me
Exacting every last caress
From your admiring few
You rose with gall at friends so-called
Who slighted you your due.
You raged and heaved your crowing laugh
Astride the swollen lover,
Your blue face mad for what it was
You never gave another.
Had you ruled the land your way
Your people would have died.
Not likely you would miss a beat
Contriving reasons why.
How lucky music pitied you
And kindly took you in.
How better to tease out the hate
Than play accordion?
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
⇒ Sevi likes taking my whistles away from me while I’m playing and running to the other end of the house to tell mama that’s she’s done so. Lately she’s come back to me saying “I hug you,” and patting my back and hugging me while saying “That’s all right. You’ll feel better,” several times. When I say, no, I want my whistle back, she just repeats the consolations. She’s already expressing an irony on how insufficient that kind of mollification can sometimes be. It’s incredibly cute. I can’t help breaking out into a smile.
⇒ Which is realer, a greater sounding, pain or the absence of pain?
⇒ The seriousness of Sevi’s sleeping—rolls over, working hard at it, knit brow, don’t disturb.
⇒ In film biz, those terrifiers who want to intimidate you about how cutthroat and impossible it all is. And by contrast those with grace who reaffirm the ever-presence of the transcendent—those who really inspire.
⇒ Makeup artists are like morticians. Let people do their own make-up if they’re still able. If the camera perceives wrinkles and flaws, so much the better.
⇒ More and more Tilton’s woes seem to be a variation on the Book of Job.
⇒ Hard to stay focused when contemplation of failure is so “exigeante”.
⇒ Sevi started telling us stories at dinner at few nights ago.
⇒ A few days ago Sevi pretended to give milk to a stuffed animal in bed through her belly button.
March 16, 2003
⇒ The Coming War in Iraq
We hunted the snake
With board and nail.
Where it slithered in
Mud on the bank.
With shivers we hollered
And bore down with the nail
Down on its head.
And it just stopped moving.
No spasms, no rictus of evil
No baleful eyes.
Simply a thing which ceased to move.
We swung it around by that
Head and flung it far
Out into the lake.
The rings of water came ashore.
Relaxing in o’s and oh my’s.
Nothing then left to do
But ponder the thing we did
To staunch up the widening hole in the afternoon.
March 26, 2003
⇒ Sevi uses the word “reasons” to mean “minutes”. She said she’d get up on her high chair, but only for a few reasons.
April 5, 2003
⇒ Threats: You wanna go to college? Eat your peas.
⇒ Last week Sevi and I were at the Children’s Bookstore reading a Richard Scary book about various conveyances, and Sevi pointed to a pencil car and announced “This pencil car is going to Pencil-vania.” I was all over her with laughter at a “good joke” so from that time on we had her repeating it constantly…
April 23, 2003
⇒ Sevi puts “probably” in front of about every third thing she says the last few weeks. “Prolly I’ll go to the Coop. Prolly I’ll go to Granpa and Granina’s re-tend (which means “pretend”)
⇒ When I offer to ‘hudju’ Sevi goodnight, she says, “no, I’m too busy”…
April 28, 2003
⇒ At the zoo today Sevi kept referring to the wallabies as Koala-bees and wobblies.
⇒ In her bedroom after dinner Sevi turned to me, a propos of nothing I could figure, and said “Concentrate Papa!”
April 29, 2003
⇒ Went with Sevi to Coney Island today and the Aquarium. Long before we got near the walrus exhibit she was vocal about not wanting to go there. We did go anyway, and I held her. The walrus seems to be taking up the role in her psyche as the first real menace—it is very imposing when you’re there just on the other side of the glass as it rubs and squeaks powerfully against it underwater, and it’s not a stretch to imagine the window crashing and the water and tons of walrus rushing over you, crushing and drowning you—must be a genetic fear. Anyway, it does coincide with her beginning to repeat more and more the last few days “The monster’s coming to get you.” No idea where that came from—I’ve never introduced the image or the phrase. Must be from her books. We went down to the water on the beach and she was very shy of the tide. Training our attention on an orangeish oblong ladybug on a drifttwig that didn’t seem to mind the saltwater, we were surprised by a little rush of cold water around our feet. Sevi was shocked and extremely unsettled—reddened into huge crying and sobs and insisted I hudju her above the water. Even when I tried to interest her in packing cold wet sand into her blue bucket, she couldn’t be distracted, kept her eyes on the water and kept saying “the water is coming” and scrambling up on me again. She kept repeating. “Papa likes to get his feet wet, but I don’t like to get my feet wet.” Oh well, too brusque an experience this time—I should have been more attentive. We walked the middle of the beach a bit and looked out at the Wonder Wheel in the amusement park, and I explained that sometimes when people get very high on it they get a little afraid, like sometimes the water makes people afraid and sometimes the walrus. She returned to this idea talking about it over dinner.
May 7, 2003
⇒ VERBOTEN FOREVER and NEVER FORGET IT – SELF-PITY, ENVY
May 13, 2003
⇒ Sevi says “melon” and “lemon” interchangeably.
⇒ A few days ago Sevi looked at the chicken wire mesh (hexagonal) stapled across the logs of the bridge spanning the Ausable River, and said “looks like honey”
May 27, 2003
⇒ I finally figured out something that had been puzzling me with Sevi—she’d kept referring to going to the “Crunchy” and I just went with it, having no idea what she meant. Then, I think it was two nights ago as we drove back from the winery reception for Julia and Brian’s wedding in the Finger Lakes, in the red half-light in the bus, she said “are you a City Mouse or a Crunchy Mouse?” I hope that Crunchy is a keeper in our lexicon.
May 29, 2003
⇒ Sevi cups her hands and presents me with an imaginary substance called “Play”. She gives and takes it back. “I’ll take your play away,” she says, running away, giving chase.
⇒ Sevi often sings, on the way to the playground “Oh where, oh where can my silly chalks be, oh where, oh where could them be?”
June 9, 2003
⇒ Two days ago was Sevi’s day for the word “realize” She put it before everything, usually appropriately. “I just realized that I had to go to the toll-it” (toilet)
⇒ A restaurant meal appeals to those craving recognition. To be waited on, served, does a world of good to prop of the status one wishes to enjoy.
⇒ the United Status of Quo
⇒ Reading Ferdinand the Bull to Sevi tonight in the crib, she pointed to a picture of his mother the cow, and said, “those are the teats”. “Yes, that’s right, or the udder,” I said. “No,” she said, “the whole ting is called the udder.” She was right—and taught me something!
June 10, 2003
⇒ Flies sketch the air
⇒ Walking home from the “Tanic Gardens” Sevi insisted we stop and have a picnic, which we did not far from the spot of the newly restored Binnenwater project in Prospect Park. She spread out the picnic blanket (attend—meaning pretend), but when I asked if we brought any food she just shrugged amiably, arching her eyebrows and smiling as she gamely does. “What about attend food?” I asked. “No, no pretend food,” she corrected me—she’s very quick to correct herself when she feels she’s being mimicked. Then she changed her mind and decided indeed there was a pretend bowl with rice in it for me—she had to get an “atensil” for it though, and then, what do you know, some “sticky soup” to eat, and even some “Octopus jelly”, enough for everyone, and even enough to take home to Mama, which we did.
June 13, 2003
⇒ His bulk shuddered as he walked, and he walked quickly behind that dome of a belly as if struggling to keep up with it.
⇒ Sugi’s zen routine movements—mine reckless, like they’ll be my last—grace out the window.
June 14, 2003
⇒ What’s really mortifying about the fear, especially of spectating, at a roller coaster, isn’t the danger itself, but the thought of how irredeemably awful harm or death in the clutches of such a needless experiment would be.
⇒ Of diaper cream—one mother saying to another, you’re spreading it on like mayonnaise!
⇒ Her muscled thighs shook following her every surly step, saying “so there”.
June 15, 2003
⇒ War rages on like a fire until it profits too little to keep on burning. In this way of thinking, war is an equalizer, a tirer-out of aggression.
June 18, 2003
⇒ Some folks getting on in years and harrowed by the thought of life not adding up to anything suddenly realizing family is all they have, so come clambering back needily and trying to put over the idea that they’ve been out there cheerleading all along. Not so.
June 21, 2003
⇒ Mortal – latrom
June 23, 2003
⇒ Even Proust sweetened (although maybe that’s not surprising)—the Madeleine was based in reality on an incident he had with a Zwieback cracker—like melba toast. According to this guy who’s been reading Encyclopedia Brittanica in its entirety and is currently mired in the letter P, interviewed on NPR.
August 30, 2003
⇒ AMERICAN WAKE – held before Irish emigrated to America
⇒ The finger – digitus imputicus (the indecent finger) – flipping the bird dates back to Roman times, when it meant the same thing.
⇒ Wallower, wallflower
September 11, 2003
⇒ William Moses joining up with Rev. Billy and going to Burning Man. Had had enough of himself—had to lose himself somewhere. Back to the days of prancing around at night with Grotowski—finally admitting that destiny.
September 16, 2003
⇒ The mallet vs. the wallet – mallet meaning gavel I suppose
⇒ Amygdala, seat of fear in the brain – Prefrontal lobe (on left side?) seat of serenity, compassion. What is the role of cortisol? Why are Americans so fearful and quick to lash out in violence…
September 22, 2003
⇒ Prerequisite of doing
Believing you can find the pulse
And make it beat for others.
O brother how the clichés clutch.
⇒ Server not Found – Fervor not Sound
October 3, 2003
⇒ Intransigent, unrepentant
Burger-eating
Virtuous American.
October 6, 2003
⇒ The mouth sat on its own way down low in the face, ever about to smirk and saying, what am I doing here with these bozos, nose and eyes.
⇒ The slinky somewhat pancaked singer in silk had that quiet jackhammer laugh. The shoulders jittering crazily up and down with no sound whatsoever. Gabriella’s laugh. She sat by the jazz pianist finding her way into the groove, for the benefit of onlookers. Once in, her jaw unhinged, rocking, as if to say, “yes I am so intent now as to let myself be ugly. That’s the kind of artistry I dwell in…”
October 9, 2003
⇒ Whatever you find words for
Is dead in the heart.
Don’t preach.
Embody.
October 21, 2003
⇒ She touched my butt
Said the DP
I love having my butt touched.
Downy features
Yield in time to shine
And glare
Acquisition
And a neck strung like a piano
There is an aim to sex you know.
November 8, 2003
⇒ King Raw Horse – rockinghorse
⇒ From the moment we’re cast
We start to cool
Lace your fingers through my jaws
And in your morbid corner unperceived
Work them clackers.
It’s all right, I’ve imagined it all:
My lifelessness is invested with these lines.
Life can seize the last word.
And does.
November 10, 2003
⇒ Sevi’s taken lately to calling me “pop” instead of “papa”. Makes her sound like a streetwise little city kid.
December 8, 2003
⇒ Yesterday walking back from sledding in the park, Sevi started to get upset by the length of the difficult slog through the snow, whimpering “I want my mama!” over and over. So I knelt down and asked her the trouble. She said she wanted me to carry her, which I did. Then, face to face with her, I began whimpering as a joke “I want my mama!” She said “Sorry, but your mama is in Colorado.”
Late December
⇒ The One Complaint I Have
There are days when the blind person affronts me,
Her tapping stick of suffering an annoyance
Or even more irksome
Her not suffering
And orphaning the homely pity
I may or may not have contrived.
⇒ Taxidermic
My hair feels brittle and marooned
As if the least scratching would
Vandalize it, like the muzzle of an old mount
Rubbed to the upholstery
Never to regrow.
⇒ A society in which economic profit for the individual is enshrined even, for instance in the phrase “American Dream”, is a society unraveling from itself, as the ties between human beings must inexorably be severed—UNTIED STATES.
⇒ Like Gideon Brower trying to make a cute schtick of being upfront about his ambition.
⇒ “You’re a poet. So, what, you don’t apologize, say goodbye, things like that? Niceties?”
⇒ What offends Sugi is the principle of waste and inefficiency, pointedly in defiance of any consideration of scale or consequences.
⇒ EX CATHEDRA – interview someone on a topic they know nothing about. Show that interview on a monitor to someone who is expert in that field, then ask them a question entirely out of their area of expertise, show that on a monitor to the relevant expert, and so on, until ultimately you have the original person back again to view someone speaking ex cathedra and have him or her comment on it to close the loop—this would be an extended meditation on specialization and the fragmentation or unity of culture and information.
⇒ Thymos deficiency, bigtime
⇒ As when you twist a rubber band to the point where it starts jumping into knots.
⇒ Human meaning as a product of limited understanding ceding to emotional well-being. Greater intelligences may founder on the question of meaning and find life difficult to sustain as a result—madness, suicide.
⇒ It told on his face. –William Told, as opposed to Tell.