2002
Thursday, January 3, 2002
⇒ When you’ve lost some degree of connection with, say, your child, you fall
back on forced expressions and dry motions that leave a bad aftertaste of phoniness
⇒ His head hung forward over you in a kindly way that you might mistake at first for a kind of soft criminal goonishness.
⇒ the wheezing of the pipes like faraway fireworks
Friday, January 4, 2002
⇒ Black man sketching a young woman across from him in the subway car. Not very many people, the way was clear between them. He feathered the pencil over the page and landed here and there like a fidgeting bee, filling in the shadowy look she had about the eyes. It was a good likeness, and something a bit more too. Workman’s meaty fingers with opaque dirty nails. A part in his thin gray grizzled hair. Gave her the dog-eared piece of paper. She looked it over, not giving too much away, but subtly smiling. He muttered across, agitatedly that he should sign it. She gave him the paper back and he did, and dated it too, though I saw he dated it tomorrow. She passed two dollars across, which he took with an attitude of maybe disgruntlement, I couldn’t tell. Set to shuffling through his sheaf of other profiles, done earlier evidently for people who either left the train before he finished or wouldn’t pay. He drew the pencil over the line of a chin, refining it.
⇒ People who rehearse while walking down the street how they will talk to someone, inevitably adopt this tone of astonishment that their intentions could have met with so base an interpretation. Their eyebrows go up in innocent crescents in this fictive confrontation in which they always come out ahead.
⇒ He stalked the genius until the day he saw him moving his lips while he read. The discovery filled him with relief and set him quite free.
⇒ The store went bankrupt because the new hire posted a sign which read $40 off, instead of 40% off, so they were forced to hand out money to customers for most of their merchandise which cost less than that amount.
⇒ Short film: EX CATHEDRA – documentary interviewing people talking about subjects beyond their ken.
Tuesday, January 8, 2002
⇒ “Don’t make me stoop to survival.”
⇒ Sevi loves to have her soft mossy green hat atop her head. Pats it constantly saying “haht”. Pointed to baby on the cover of book, said “bahbah”.
⇒ Hollywood – ash grey face and uniformly red eyelids = terminally ill person.
⇒ they took that wonderful CHOW MEIN sign down on 5th ave off 9th street—I was always meaning to photograph that mangled metal relic. Probably was tossed. Never put off…
Wednesday, January 9, 2002
⇒ Sevi said “nose” repeatedly. Wouldn’t let me bounce her to sleep, but bucked and screamed herself hoarse in my arms for a good 10 minutes til mama took over again (who’s back is sorely aching). It’s been a long time since I bounced her to sleep and she simply won’t tolerate it. We’ll have to work on phasing that in again and overcome her tantrums. I’m glad that she fights for what she wants!
⇒ In the subway, big boisterous longlegged guy hunched with unsprung fascination over the polaroid snapshot of his girlfriend. Overexposed and milky in the photo, tiny in the wide angle standing with legs wide before the hood of a car in the glare of a cloudless day, smiling at the photographer. Kept showing the pictures to strangers, to me, saying “isn’t she beautiful?” and “just look at that smile. Could there ever be a bigger smile than that?” Joking with his pal, a quick and jocular guy, most likely gay, who kept stroking a fur thing around his neck, joking goodnaturedly about the girl. Guy kept kissing the polaroid. “She’s the one, I think of her every minute of every day. I just can’t wait to see her, man. She’s everything.” A smile he had which kept renewing and wouldn’t break, wave after wave of love radiating off him. A little droopy woman in blue with a blue knit cap, European, came by, warily. He made a big production of giving her a seat. He showed her the picture, she smiled politely and made demure comments. Asked if he was serious, would consider marriage. He said “I poured her out on a plate and sopped her up like a biscuit. Only thing left is to slip that ring right on her finger.” Went on about how his jokey friend was a compulsive eater of Skittles. Carries around whole sacks of them. Bet you got some Skittles in that pocket right now, yo, am I wrong? Said, “he don’t just eat ‘em one at a time, he gobbles em up” and he made a snuffling snorting exhibit of that. Flush in love, no counterfeit. Total immunity. Delight is omnipresent, to be found in every one, every thing. The little lady seemed to bask in it, felt it was perfectly easy to observe that his jokey friend had “teeth like pearls”. She remarked that they were quite a marvel. The man in love said, “You hear that, she said you got teeth like pearls, you know, like Pearl’s, like Pearl my niece’s teeth” He laughed and laughed. As long as you are heading toward your reunion unstoppable with your life’s love, you get drunk off the air.
Friday, January 11, 2002
⇒ He tried to humor the 2 year old at his birthday party by pretending to gobble up the stuffed animal, then to have the stuffed animal try to gobble up the 2 year old’s hand. But this particular 2 year old was quietly mortified, and said no, the animal didn’t want to eat him. Quite simply. The man colored with shame. A moral was being shown him by this child that he was fully and nakedly vulnerable too. He felt like a corrupt and venal circus tyrant, treating the child like some beast to be broken in. He took himself to task. How could he be so crude and exploitative of another human being? The child had taught him a lesson, and it stung.
⇒ A man in the subway with warts all over his face and neck, all over his body for all I could tell. I mean all over. Even warts rolled over and into the folds of fat in his neck, under the bristles of his crew cut salt and pepper hair. I spotted a few white hairs between two warts. How did this man even begin to shave?
Sunday, January 13, 2002
⇒ He makes an unsuccessful pass. Takes a bite out an apple. The bite has browned, thoroughly, before either of them speaks a word.
⇒ Esty’s simple ownership of certain concepts of sound good sense, such as when he says “Pocopson”, the name of the township in PA they live in, it evokes a generous wellspring of sound familiarity. The quality of draping over concepts and place names, brands, companies, eras of history, this familiarity, as if the subject were a naturalized part of the speaker.
⇒ She poohpoohed the application of “growth experiences” to any interpretation of trying events. She wanted to convey that she knew new age nonsense when she heard it.
Wednesday, January 16, 2002
⇒ Sevi steps on a sticker with a little bit of the adhesive showing, and does the circuit of the room, around the table, with it stuck to her left foot. Does this over and over. The fascination of a new variation. She’s unaware that we’ve observed this at all. It’s an experiment and fascination all her own. Rebecca says goes to show how anything can be a toy—even this old glittery sticker which has sat in her nursery amongst her toys for at least 4 or 5 months.
⇒ Mom said she went to see the movie “Ali”, found there to be too much boxing.
⇒ Todd pronounces “always” oh-wees.
⇒ Jay’s framed picture on his desk of him between the Clintons.
⇒ Jay’s endearingly inept attempts at joshing humor with his contacts.
Monday, January 21, 2002
⇒ Is it masochism to want to go beyond the tribe? Can you defend them, these opinions sulking by themselves and shirking off the familial circus mirror take on whether you were wrong in your simplicity (“of course you were, poor dear!”) or whether you withheld from another spirit whose overtures you disdained to recognize.
⇒ “Speed slows progress.” – Martial Arts Proverb
⇒ Practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes permanent. – adage of Bill Ochs
⇒ The vexing predicament of anyone hearing speaking out against anything. The consequences of the lifestyle of nearly all Americans condemns their opinions, however radical, to hypocrisy.
⇒ Eternal Revenue Service
⇒ Yesterday I showed Sevi the first snowfall she’s really seen (if you exclude the one a year ago when she was about 3 months old). I stood her up on the windowsill in the living room and we looked out together on the snow which coated most everything with a modest layer of 3 or so inches. Once down, she kept demanding to be lifted up again to see more. I opened the window a crack, brought scooped up a little fuzzy bit of snow on my fingers. She was very alarmed by the cold of it. (She’s taken to calling both hot and cold things “hot” recently). I let it melt on my fingers and drip to the carpet. She went back to the window and tried to pry it open again, and repeatedly had me fish more bits of snow out to look at. Fascinated, but not very eager to touch it.
⇒ Today I took a pencil and drew a smiling man for Sevi on a piece of scrap paper on the dining table. She was much interested. I thought what a wonderful thing it was to create a smile, some cheeriness and a being looking back at you with just a bit of graphite on a page. She dragged the pencil lightly zigzagging a bit.
⇒ He felt like a protuberance, something which should have been pruned back. His presence overhangs others with an expectancy which burdens them, abrades their good will.
⇒ Someone dies, your life has borders suddenly. And because it these dimensions which you can in some sense now see around, your life becomes this thing you feel no compunctions about “owning” and feeling very guiltlessly selfish about.
⇒ Sevi stomps around in staccato fashion to the music, like a flamenco dancer or a irish step dancer. She already adopts the white girl overbite.
⇒ She gave you the precarious feeling that she was trying out being nice on you, and that it might be for the benefit of someone else watching.
Friday, January 25, 2002
⇒ Argument last night about whether or not anyone had told Sugi the dollar amount (~25K) of the Muste job. Big fight ensued where I insisted that if I had a solid memory of our having debated a definite figure the reasons for my having that memory ought to be explored. Sugi was sure she hadn’t been told a thing about salary by anyone at Muste, told me to consult the emails in case I didn’t believe her. She resented my tone of growing indignation, and I her dismissiveness toward something I felt I wanted to clear up. We agreed that when we have conflicts we should early on recognize them as such. Sugi said that it’s like a path widening in the woods, the ease with which we descend into contentious and unrespectful tones of arguing. It’s gotten so it’s a highway, she said. Resolution: Conflicts should be flagged early and de-escalated.
⇒ Sevi lay down on my lap for a minute or two while we watched this program “NOW” with Bill Moyers (2nd show). It’s probably the first time we’ve let her watch TV, and I got the uncomfortable premonition of what it would be like if she got into the habit. Anyway, the bespectacled editor the Wall Street Journal, a cunning soulless type, got her giggling constantly.
⇒ When on the changing table getting dried off after a bath, Sevi always looks over and requests the monkeys hanging from the broom beside the door, either the long-limbed black and white one, or the funky blue one. (Still calls them “mah-ma”) Once she gets one in her arms, she seems to have very animated conversation with it while I rub oil onto her legs and get her into a diaper. Then usually get her pyjama legs on, and stand her up to get the rest on and leans on me like a rope-a-doping fighter, sometimes hugging.
Saturday, January 26, 2002
⇒ I think Todd in his business is caught between the need to get things down on paper contractually to protect and defend allegations made by clients that Aaron performed poorly, and the need to keep stuff off of paper so that his value to a client can’t be quantified or compared with any alternative, and will freely amplify in their minds in that indeterminate space to the point where Aaron will be considered an indispensable component.
Monday, January 28, 2002
⇒ working in “customer fulfillment”
⇒ mite vs. Might
⇒ Sevi, said “achoo” a few times the other day along with her “Music Together” poem.
⇒ When Sevi is overwhelmed by seeing someone again like mama or Papa or Sylvia, and they pick her up, so often looks away and immediately points to something to take that person’s interest. A way of containing the affection? Deflecting the overwhelming attention? Very cute, seems also very WASP.
Tuesday, January 29, 2002
⇒ Schism between husband and wife when she learns that in his pursuit of having himself frozen cryogenically when he dies he hasn’t included any provisions for her and the kids. He argues sheepishly that he thought she didn’t take any of that stuff seriously. “No, I don’t” she says, “but you do.” It makes her think that he envisions a future without her.
Thursday, January 31, 2002
⇒ More and more, Todd makes pronouncements about his personal life. My comments and thoughts feel like chinking between the logs, trying to slip a little in here, a little there, never enough time to expand or think through for fear of losing his attention. This is a problem, and marks what I recognize as a huge change from our initial friendship. Of course, there’s the employer aspect, but I think I’m pretty generously filtering out that skew of my impression. It’s a loss of openness, maybe the cost of canniness and success. Don’t know, only know it’s another falling off of possibility from where I am. When I reflect back, I’ve mostly gotten myself into these kinds of friendships, where I studiously avoid asking anything of friends, so don’t feel too obligated, but then there’s a rift and a loss of real friendship I think. Of course, the many megalomaniacs I’ve befriended aren’t missing anything. Friendship for such can be the comfort of a fixture that I seem to easily become. Frustrating and disappointing. Start things right from now on…Need real friendships.
⇒ Sevi has been saying “heh-do” and various things like it for “hello”. Marks the beginning of a consistent emergence of the two syllable word!
⇒ After careful consideration, I’d have to say that my very favorite cheese is Gruyère.
Saturday, February 2, 2002
⇒ “He’s a man of his word.”
“What word is that?”
⇒ “Are you the type of person who sometimes throws her head back when she laughs?”
“No, she ALWAYS throws her head back when she laughs.”
⇒ No one can convey with more economy an absolute despair by means of objects. Spoons or blocks flung away with a wail of abandonment and neglect. It’s an art that kids perfect. We lose much of that talent.
⇒ mercurial Muriel
⇒ Bored of the Smorgasbord, how’s that for a title for something – sounds like one of those Erma Bombeck books from the seventies.
Friday, February 8, 2002
⇒ I was very insecure about my losing my sinecure.
⇒ At the wake, the furniture in the room smiled at having outlived its wealthy owner. These things without life have in inexhaustible capacity for absorbing it.
Monday, February 11, 2002
⇒ Sevi found that her cut-out sponge-rubber pink pig would stick to the side of the bathtub when wet. She lifted the three pound rock to the side of the tub to try to get it to stick too.
Monday, February 25, 2002
⇒ Sevi pronounces “monkey” for the first time yesterday. Today “anana” for banana, which has heretofore always been just “nana”
⇒ Sevi ran from window to window in the indoor exhibits at the zoo, begging “up” to be lifted to see what animals were there.
⇒ In the future, when scientific studies reveal that the more one talks, the less intelligent one becomes. Everyone judiciously tightlipped.
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
⇒ For about an hour, between 10pm and 11pm, past her bedtime, Sevi had me hand her the animal puzzle pieces to her and she distributed them back to me one by one, then I returned the lot to her. We did this over the top of the crib several dozen times, then with her sitting, through the ribs of the crib as many more. Tireless and methodical she was about it. Maybe she’ll end up being a dealer in Vegas.
⇒ Sign in the store window read LISTEN TO ANY CD BEFORE BUYING. So a guy duly listens, and is surprised when the clerk rings it up. “But I don’t think I want it,” he protests. The clerk looks at him squarely. “What about that sign?” whines the customer. The clerk speaks slowly, as if to a child “The sign says, listen to any CD BEFORE BUYING, not BEFORE NOT BUYING.”
⇒ today yet another great person died, whose life and contribution I feel horrible of not having recognized while the person was alive.
⇒ He sees the kid in the passing station wagon driving past on the city street saying “Look ma, STRANGERS”. Resolves to take one picture a day of notable strangers in the street, call them “Citizen of the Day”.
⇒ Need to attain that level of accomplishment where the balance really tips and this feels like who I am again…or maybe for the first time.
Thursday, March 7, 2002
⇒ Sevi say “brockee” for broccoli, “moosh” when she wants to dance to the Music Together CD. Says “monkey” quite clearly, and “hug”. Says “up” whether she wants down or up. Interestingly, we’ve finally picked up that her universal word for wanting something is “mommy”—she points to whatever and says “mommy, mommy”. And her universal word when she wants to give you something is “papa”—go figure. Still calls pennywhistles “shooss”
⇒ Lately she’s had a fascination with papa’s bellybutton, calling it “beebee” and is constantly demanding to see it, whereupon she seems mesmerized, and gently slaps my belly too. I jokingly put the tin whistle up to my bellybutton and pretended to play, which she found fascinating and made me repeat over and over again.
⇒ She loves the game when Sugi and I roll the ball when the “Roll that Little Ball Round” song comes up on the CD. We roll it back and forth to eachother. She runs from one to the other of us, sits in our lap and we count to three and launch the ball from her hands into a roll—she got a huge kick out of this tonight.
⇒ The Hispanic (Mexican?) couple—husband on guitar, white starched shirt, wife standing by the door of the subway car singing, both performing somewhat muted, sheepishly, as if they’d just started doing this and it smacked of begging to them. Still the music had great dignity, was warm loving and haunting by turns. They made out well, touched a lot of people.
⇒ GRIN AND BARE IT
Monday, March 11, 2002
⇒ Memorial for Reed Hopkins (Mary Caroline’s son killed in motorcycle accident in CA) in West Orange NJ. At Pal’s Cabin restaurant for lunch.
⇒ Sevi may have gotten Rebecca’s talent for organization and mine for inefficiency.
⇒ Sevi said “kitty” for the first time, just once, instead of “mew”.
Thursday, March 21, 2002
⇒ Sevi says “ahmiss” for hummus, always asking for it with a “kaka”, cracker. For orange she puckers her lips and says “awnge”
Friday, March 22, 2002
⇒ At 4am the other night we got up and played. I took the little lamb, Lambchop, and had her scaling the bookshelves, where she played peekaboo with Sevi and then, cautiously looking down, lowering herself gingerly over the edge and jumped with a “boing” sound, which got Sevi laughing and asking for countless repeats. This afternoon when I picked up Lambchop she placed her up on the shelf and demanded encores.
⇒ UNTIED STATES, next film?
⇒ SURVIVAL OF DEFEATIST
Monday, March 25, 2002
⇒ THE STORY MUST BE FELT AND MUST MEET A REAL NEED, AS ESSENTIAL AS AN UMBILICAL. IF NOT, YOU’RE JUST DOING TRICKS TO IMPRESS WHICH WILL AMOUNT TO NOTHING.
Saturday, March 30, 2002
⇒ Since Sevi doesn’t say “yes” yet, she nods her head for everything in the affirmative, big emphatic nods when she really wants something.
⇒ While eating my “bitek” at a Peruvian restaurant for lunch, my incisors punched a hole in the lining of my cheek, a ragged loop of skin you could run a belt through. I tongued its sour painfulness throughout the day, trying to assess the healing process. Would the body take that rough sagging flap back to itself or encourage severance?
⇒ The healing of a scar on my knee; over the course of weeks the vanishing archipelago of scar.
Tuesday, April 2, 2002
⇒ Sevi often inspects the rings on Sugi and my fingers, saying “off”—she wants to play with them. We explain that they don’t come off.
⇒ Sevi’s fascinated with “Boggle”, emptying the lettered dice out and placing them back in the box.
⇒ Sevi says “Morning” pretty articulately. Usually brings her “Good Morning” book to be read to.
⇒ Sevi now says “Q” when she gives you things to hold = thank you.
⇒ In her Babybug magazine, she sees two birds in a tree. Points to one, say “burt”, points to the second “burt…sss, burts”
⇒ Most everything, but particularly questions or requests have the singsongy upward inflection “MornING” “SisSULL” (get the whistle). I think she gets the musicality of inflection from Rebecca, whose speech is almost entirely musical.
⇒ At the zoo today (Central Park Zoo while Rebecca took a mandatory discrimination seminar at Fish & Neave), we saw real Polar Bear for the first time. Sevi kept saying “Wow” or “whoa”, or something between the two. Where’d she pick that up from, Sylvia? We always blame Sylvia for introducing things we’re not thrilled about. While it’s cute, I guess it bugged me, because it represented the first “reaction” distinguishable from the object, which seemed to my over-conscious didactic parental self to be a sort of fall—a non-specific reaction good for any occasion, a loss of union with the thing beheld. Admittedly a bunch of hogwash, but what can I say, that’s what I felt!
⇒ Sevi is in the habit of slapping mama’s desk chair with fingers splayed demanding “Ama” (nursing) which signifies bedtime, hopefully, unless she thereby gets her second wind and wants to play. It’s therefore become the practice to let her make the demand pretty stridently before yielding, so as to be sure she’s really ready for sleep. It usually means a whiney unpleasantness, a being a her wit’s end before sleep and crying. Rebecca is still up 3 to 5 times a night with her, and is herself at wit’s end for lack of sleep, and now she’s got what she thinks might be strep throat, white patches visible. She’ll go to the doctor tomorrow.
⇒ I guess we were both too tuckered out to remember to pull an April Fool’s prank yesterday.
⇒ It’s really getting to the point where her learning is outpacing our capacity to describe it—exponential and multiple surprises daily.
Wednesday, April 3, 2002
⇒ While on the changing table, Sevi grabbed the Johnson & Johnson baby care book and pointed to the photo on the front. “Happy” she said, then “baby”.
Thursday, April 4, 2002
⇒ Ask yourself whether the thing you hate in another isn’t to be found in yourself, and often explains why.
⇒ Keep yourself from your habitual recapping what others say with a generalization. You speak redundancies to stall for time, and in consequence appear kinda dumb.
Monday, April 8, 2002
⇒ “You know, you really piss me off. Why don’t you go practice your proto-asshole businessman-in-training routine on someone else.”
⇒ Across from me in the subway, a six year old girl sucked on what looked like a candy paintbrush with blue glossy substance where the bristles should be. She dunked it in a little bucket of held in her palm of lighter blue and which she sucked off. Her mouth was a blue maw. The blueness was threatening and deathly to me the way it defined the edges of her teeth and gums. She threatened to kiss her crew-cut headed brother, aged 11 or so. He kept pushing her off, and her parents yelled at him, “Frank! Leave Grace alone now” He sat at the end of the bench, and she inched closer, threw herself on him until he pushed her off, and both got reprimanded.
⇒ A hunched over ball of a man with a quiet but persistent reak. Wore a red and white thin parka which passed him off in your peripheral vision as nothing out of the ordinary. But sitting next to him, the smell hit me, a rich dark long cultivated smell of natural crud chafing under clothes that hadn’t been changed in weeks or maybe months. Then I noticed the dark elliptical stains on the parka—and why a parka anyway in 60 degree weather? His head was bowed over, whitish hairs wild but ordinary enough ringing a tanned disk of pate. The price of such leisurely observation was that now I was indisputably overtaken by the smell. I rose and walked away down the car. Across the way, two young frizzy headed buttoned-down banker types were heaving with hilarity, trying to meet my eyes. I realized this was a joke building in momentum. I took my place triangulating from where they sat and where I had been beside the man. I felt a flush of guilt to have their mirth start up in me, thought about the circumstances that would have reduced a man, probably in his sixties, to this state. I thought about the waspish curse of hypocrisy as being born of the attempt to resist the first instincts like this fiendish humor and suppress it long enough for moral considerations to pin down the four corners of wildly flapping sheet simply too large for one to really cover all at once. There was something good and tonic about this derision. I saw virtually the whole crowd around me take part in contributing their own riff on this odorous oddity of a man. The woman next to me took to periodic exclamations about how many stops she had left, and sighed whenever the train stalled on the track. A man with a New York Yankees jacket got a running banter going with the bankers. He had apparently sat down next to the man for a good long time before getting wise. One of the bankers was laughing “We were taking bets!” The man said “Yeah, it took me a while.” They laughed out loud. “I tried, but he won out” “You got the record!” the banker snorted.. They all spoke openly, though the man was clearly within hearing only feet away. Whether in reaction or not it was hard to say, but he now and then was raising a shoulder and it looked like scratching himself, viciously, under the parka “You know,” said the annoyed woman “on the one hand I feel sorry for him, but on the other I really don’t.” The upshot of which was the other hand trumped, I suppose, which was made to confer her authority to judge a situation about which she surely knew nothing. This was the rhetorical way to get that license. I got waves of messianic feeling, to go shepherd the man away from these unfeeling people, who had turned him into the needed twist to wring out the sundry miseries of the day. I even got a gust of real hatred that this was just the kind of random cross-section of folks who perished in the trade towers. This led me to think that just as floor after floor of the towers collapsed, so year after year would extinguish the lives of all on this train just as inexorably. In fifty years we’d all more or less be dead (no one very young about). Fifty storeys. The objection to the fetid smell of a man was its effrontery to whatever civility living had to offer, for however short a while. There was a kind of laughing that was convivial and expansive and understanding of the odor, and there was a kind that reared up in horror and wanted the man obliterated. I was surrounded by both kinds, rising and subsiding among the people in this crowd. At my stop, both the annoyed woman and the reeking man got out. The woman couldn’t believe her bad luck and said so loudly. I saw the man’s highly wrinkled apple face, impassive at present but riddled with deep craggy lines. As he shuffled past a phone his finger went absently into the coin slot and came out with nothing as he shuffled on and toward the steps. I last saw a patch of parka mounting the steps as I came up the other side. I thought of the annoyed woman and a scenario where she kept looking back and there he is shuffling after. She gets to her brownstone, and there he is at the door; in her bedroom, cowering in a corner and he advances inexorably, and does what? Unballs himself and protoplasmically envelopes her in his stink.
⇒ myfanwy, a Welsh mix of caerphilly and cheddar – great cheese from the green market at Grand Army Plaza.
⇒ Sevi says “tar” for guitar in a medieval music book.
⇒ Sleeping on the floor in the living room, so Rebecca, who’s had a fever for the last four days running, can have ample room in the bed with Sevi. Nestling under the artificial fleece blanket in the dark, the static releasing blue sparks all over.
⇒ Walking bowlegged down the hall to avoid the creaking cracks and waking Sevi.
Wednesday, April 10, 2002
⇒ The dried prune he was about to eat glistened black, its end involuted like an anus.
⇒ The connection between Eric Auerbach’s idea in Mimesis about the authoritative, elliptical, psychologically deep mode of the Judeo-Christian literature as opposed to the contemporaneous Greek epic poetry, and Paul Shepard’s idea in Encounters with Nature about the difference between the pre-Judeo-Christian religions based on a world of abundance and the gift of the slain animal (the bear) versus the later idea of sacrifice of the animal as dealmaking relationship with the deity connoting a world of limits and scarcity (also a deity who resembles us in that he is jealous, lusting etc and needs to be appeased by such sacrifices, including the Christian innovation, self-sacrifice, self-immolation to gratify this deal-making god. I guess it’s not a straight correspondence, since these traits were certainly all apparent in the Greek pantheon.) Less compellingly, Shepard says that in the modern world we have just reversed the role and become ourselves the god who will exact tribute from the land, exhausting soils and resources etc. I guess this idea is already there in the bible, subjugating nature. Food for thought…
Friday, April 12, 2002
⇒ Sevi says “happy”
Tuesday, April 16, 2002
⇒ Movie about just an average joe struggling through economic theory who happens to schizophrenic, called A DUTIFUL GRIND .
Friday, April 26, 2002
⇒ His tactic for getting over things emotionally was to rewind past them and re-record. There had never been anyone in his life that he couldn’t rewind past, until he met her.
Saturday, April 28, 2002
⇒ We treasure up such a vast trove of memories that we despair of ever conveying them to new acquaintances and to the young. Unbidden, the memories wither. The act of recall made to seem puny, self-important. What merit do my memories have after all, my vain nostalgia? What’s new in my atrophy? You spend the years following the apogee of your supposed vanity shrinking into these recriminations, shirking off the effort of memory grown a greater and greater chore. Meanwhile a delectating death waits, much approving of your flagellations. Death is so tragic because it is the death of those memories never recounted, now forever made inaccessible. Nothing in the universe has the power to cipher out of a dead person the memories of love received and given.
⇒ From the car as we drove approaching the Holland Tunnel from the NJT the dark outlines of the buildings moved past across the sky, crisp. I remember when love and mystery swelled lit windows whirring by. It’s nothing so detail-crammed, just the one object displacing space against the backdrop of the other. Why go into the baroque mention of colors and textures, stuffing the craw of the reader with a vaunted richesse of detail. Just get the verve of the thing I’m trying to put across, as deftly and sparely as can be.
Sunday, April 28, 2002
⇒ The connection between dad’s self-absorption and my tending to have chosen friends who are equally self-absorbed and whom I ultimately come to feel alienated by for this. Also my feeling of having to mount a competitive egoism to counter theirs, as the thing desirable for friendship. The obvious idiocy of that idea. The trying to unbend a fawning esteem-starved spine, expunge the toxic envy from my system.
Tuesday, May 14, 2002
⇒ In film school I meant my compliments to others to be overtures of friendship, but they were taken more as currency which, once given, told that I was played out. To be truthful, I took the compliments of others in a similar way, a kind of laddersmanship. It was hard to be open and generous when one’s self-esteeem was so craving.
⇒ I long for the day that my glans meets your mons.
Saturday, May 18, 2002
⇒ After a big argument, pictures himself and the other croaking, being hustled into caskets, nails driven in, casket lowered, dirt thrown in. Beating on casket “let me out” Life’s too short, hugging these grievances to yourself, your damned precious opinions. You will have them to yourself for eternity. Reach out, find agreement, put yourself in the other’s shoes. Find grace. Beam the light of compassion from your eyes.
Sunday, May 19, 2002
⇒ Re: Gabriella – You give her the reaction she wants—a smile or a nod of agreement—and she just continues to milk it. She rolls her eyes or makes the point yet again about her sufferings and keeps watching you. So you repeat the reaction, the nod or knowing smile or word of affirmation, and she just keeps going. She’ll only stop when you sort of brush her off in some fashion, giving her every reason to think you’re callous toward her. But what else can you do? Once she looked at me over dinner and said “You think I’m retarded, don’t you?” I smiled and nodded, then caught myself. “What? No, I don’t think you’re retarded.”
⇒ You’re surrounded by ambitious energetic good looking people, you’re all getting rich and having wonderful sex, you’re the envy of the world. Any community that answers to this description, be it hit television writers, silicone valley entrepreneurs, what have you, how could this not be compellingly attractive? So what if the product of your labors isn’t earth shattering (or rather earth-saving), you’re living a rich life full of stimulation, and who’s to say there’s really anything more than that to be had.
⇒ Noah Vail
May 28, 2002
⇒ Yesterday Sevi patted her chest and said “VeeVees” to me, meaning her. It was the first time I’ve heard her say her own name.
⇒ She started saying “yeah” about a month ago, in place of vigorously nodding her head in silence. Now she says it always with an almost offhanded pronunciation “yeeeahh”.
⇒ She curls her rs very efficiently, saying “carrrr”. She also says “rap” instead of “lap”.
⇒ She got a big kick stopping off at Hawthorne Valley and seeing the calves cows and “piggies”. Both going up and returning we stopped by and viewed the teeny newborn piglets and their colossal mama sow. The little piggies, a dozen or so of them, huddling and quivering in sleep. The sow lumbering in, nosing one or two, and settling down gently in a oozy snooze. It’s remarkable how aware the mother is of the little ones she could easily squash.
June 15, 2002
⇒ Can’t you be firm without being vindictive? It’s just like moving a specific muscle and not the whole muscle mass, which is inefficient and tiring.
Wednesday, July 3, 2002
⇒ Sevi says “horses” like “hersess”
⇒ Woke up last night convinced I should remember and write down something to do with the word “coots”—as if that were a word everyone knew…
Thursday, July 4, 2002
⇒ Sevi likes to play the game she calls “9 8 9” in which Sugi holds one of her hands, me another as we walk her down the sidewalk, swinging her up in the air on the count to a certain number.
⇒ FLACCID
flaccid and without love was the woman reading to her child
the woman herself not loved
an agony of effort to dissemble
where she had none to draw on
bonetired conjurer failing to conjure
any thoughts other than
‘what has become of me’
‘of the child I was’
in a place where
pink blind and helpless longing
alone makes for the franchise
and calls her drawn and wasted
otherwise
submitted as Seymour Awalts – [email protected] password y as in the famous rings
Sunday, July 7, 2002
⇒ The difference was, she surrounded herself with friends in order to appear beautiful; she tried to appear beautiful to surround herself with friends.
⇒ Sevi says please “puh-LEEEZE”. She always smiles, because she knows we think it’s a riot. Outside she pronounces “OUT-side”. “OUT-side, puh-LEEEZE” she kept saying until we stopped the car and let her walk around on a narrow strip of median on the Palisades Parkway returning from a visit to Andy Buday and Karen Shafer in Mt. Vision (near Cooperstown NY).
Monday, July 8, 2002
⇒ “I’m the inventor of the C-ulator,” he said, pulling out a gun and popping him at point blank range. “See you later.”
Monday, July 15, 2002
⇒ He didn’t know where he fit in on the greedy-holy continuum.
Wednesday, August 21, 2002
WAIT
Wait
I believe you missed something
Or were you thrown by the title?
You can learn a tune by ear
And reproduce on command
As long as you know what
Note to start on.
Hence the first word
And I never get the last, believe you me
Oh I know when to shut up
We all do
But pulling back is like a misstep
The black appalls
The mistake was oafish
And yet still unknown to this rube
We dream up a palace but are
Lucky to finish with a shack
Said Thoreau to paraphrase
But O…
Picture a man double twisted
And bent over his crabbed phrases
The din of harangue a constant—
Oh by now you’re fed up or
Underfed on the chartreuse and saffron
Oh you poor poetaster you know so little
Nor do you crane in sympathy with him
Who felt so far removed from
The world dimensional
Unreconciled, drowned
And you won’t even get the allusion
Oh stick your neck out
Think you know me?
Let me give your patience a try
Saturday, August 24, 2002
⇒ Dollars bills and birds, where have they been in the course of a lifetime?
Sunday, September 8, 2002
⇒ A sure symptom of despair is the collecting of witticisms
⇒ It keeps coming back to me “Nota: man’s intelligence is his soil” I stand accused of avoidance, of having seriously lost my way.
⇒ Eco-mediaevalists or luddites set upon by mainstream pranksters wanting to disillusion them, pop their bubbles.
⇒ NYC enables one to live with no checks on one’s appetite; hence the variety of life forms.
⇒ Trainee at wine shop fails to mimic blather of successful salesman
⇒ Truth can only be embodied, not stated (to paraphrase Yeats I think)
Monday, September 9, 2002
⇒ He decided to make a determined effort, privately, not to be wretched. He would do this unilaterally, with no need of compliance on her part.
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
⇒ Leslie mentioned culture of people who travel around doing all the war re-enactments as needed throughout the country. A kind of carnival life. An article on it a few years ago in the New Yorker.
⇒ Theme of UNTIED STATES – future, I’m afraid, highly didactic film I nevertheless feel driven to want to create to pierce the bubble of American life and have it stay pierced. Our blanket freedoms include the freedom to tyrannize over and lay waste to the outside world, and to the extent it can be cosmetically justified, our own. Homogenized Man, today’s scion in America has been duped and enlisted in the struggle to keep our “dream” alive. No intrinsic qualities matter other than that he may be relied upon to consume in ever greater and more profitable ways. The American Dream these as cover for an unconscionable stupor induced in our populace by the greed and power-driven class that rules it.
Wednesday, September 12, 2002
⇒ A tumorous bulge stuck out the back of his baseball cap, wedged in the hole above the adjustment strap like a tennis ball in a chain-link fence.
⇒ Sensitive to slights, but powerless to avenge.
Sunday, September 15, 2002
⇒ Guys in the locker room at the Y watching “My Fair Lady” on the TV.
Saturday, September 21, 2002
⇒ Bunch of 40 yr old Manhattanites in a band playing nights to gratify themselves in a way their careers have failed to.
⇒ A wine seller who eschews adjectives; uses only verbs.
Sunday, September 22, 2002
⇒ Decrying the habitual dismay he hears on the voices of the liberals in his life. The knowing after-sigh which conveys some kind of weary acquiescence, or bittersweet knowledge. It was driving him to distraction. He longed for something straight, unapologetic, purged of its inertial hypocrisy. And this led him to reconsider the kind of life worth living.
Monday, September 23, 2002
⇒ Woke up this morning and went with Sevi to living room to bring back her birthday balloons, fallen from ceiling to floor in living room, to mama in bed.
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
⇒ Sevi refers to her friend Christopher as “Krifisser”
Tuesday, October 1, 2002
⇒ Even the bald spot on the back of his head endeared him to her. She thought, “he can’t help that,” and loved him all the more for it.
⇒ She smiled tightly like the wringing of a washcloth.
⇒ Dreams a synecdoche for the ripple in existence we are.
⇒ I feel so incredibly damn wise. Is that for real?
⇒ Both good poetry and good film – the art of extreme condensation
⇒ you talk out your ass all the time trying to impress people with your special analysis. You want so much to impress that most of your analysis is “ex cathedra”. You think by force of a certain originality to avoid scrutiny of your carelessness with facts and assumptions. Others better equipped to judge their own subjects will be unimpressed with your thoughts and write you off as a fool.
⇒ Curtis E. Call
⇒ Matt Finnish
Tuesday, October 8, 2002
⇒ I RO
N Y
⇒ burn monkey burn. Singe.
⇒ I used to be able to leap into the identities of people. That was the whole point. Mimicry as a natural joining. I had this gift. And now I have to relearn it. Get back into that trench.
⇒ It’s from now on unacceptable not to get something at least down on paper. You can’t base further thought on nothing. And the thought that of course takes over in that void is your failure. It takes all your effort just to get back to the point at which you began.
Wednesday, October 9, 2002
⇒ Beware the self-defense, “well it’s not ironic enough, it’s not cynical enough for the audience, therefore it doesn’t play. I’m just too sweet and straightforward.” Bottom line is something doesn’t work. I could be because it’s too straightforward, meaning the art is lacking, the point isn’t emotional but bald and didactic, there is a slowness and obviousness that breaks us out of it. The audience ought to be more cynical than the work, always, or there would be no audience. The cynicism of the audience is the task at hand, always.
⇒ This culture treats love as just one more arena—abeit the preeminent one—for success or failure—even competitively so.
⇒ Balzac grabbing his ball sack.
⇒ When Blake says “Eternity is in love with the productions of Time,” to me it means, yes, what of the love of all the nuance and multiplicity in this world? Does the Buddhist view as commonly understood sort of nullify and level this beauty, exposing it as just so much detritus of ego-driven desire?
⇒ What was unexpected for me was the idea that the primary emphasis of a society should be on the individual. I’ve always just assumed that this was to the heart of our problem as a society, but we’re actually far from that. Our rhetoric is all about the individual,, which is promising and perhaps what represents our real departure from history and the hope we represent in the world, but in practice our concern for the individual is in significant ways a sham. It’s almost like the individual is being spotlit only to be sacrificed. Invoking Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” has always been a touchstone moral imperative in my mind, but I see how with the cheapening of the individual, the idea of sacrifice has been coopted to serve malign ends.
The Buddhist idea is that concern for the individual is preamble to the need for the individual to discover the very insubstantiality of the self. It’s funny. 12 years ago (~1990) this idea struck me–in connection with Deb’s escapades with the Sufis in Torreon New Mexico–as just about the most alienating concept imaginable. Self-reliance was the creed I identified with, as little explored as it actually was for me. Since then, when I first seriously studied about Buddhism I guess in the year before Sevi was born (‘99 and early 2000), the idea was no longer threatening and actually seemed to make sense of much that was frustrating me, yet still the Tibetan version of Buddhism, as put across by the Dalai Lama seemed to have some doctrinaire weirdness and intolerance (as I understood it) creeping around the edges, and the Marxist critique of it as a feudal theocracy (therefore handmaiden to capitalist excesses and evils) made sense. So I went on to Zen and other types of Buddhism, found that so preciously esoteric that I dropped it, although Alan Watt’s book “The Book” was memorable and sort of repiqued my interest in the questioning of the self and expanded on the “emptiness” thing.
Now with Thurman (after having watched the video of his lectures at Columbia) I’m caught up in this again. Call it professional failure thus far, too much idleness, whatever you like–it’s really caught my attention this time. For the first time, the godlessness of Buddhism is what really appeals to me. To think of the idea of God as the real stumbling block for so much psychically–an enshrining of authority, and “other” as something forever alienating. If you let this go, you get cozier with the idea of begininglessness and endlessness to the universe (against which, by the way, the whole history and desire for narrative: story: militates), and the idea, perfectly sane, of reincarnation, which after all has its corollary in hard science–we’re all recycled. And then I return to those few epiphanies I’ve had, such as when I saw a squirrel being chased by a cat in the backyard of 121 Prospect Place and had this quick awareneness suddenly that the squirrel and cat were actually one–like two hands of the same being clapping, and by extension understood how I was one too–not just metaphorically, but actually with these creatures and potentially everything else. Well, these flashes of thought incandesced (a word?) more forcefully the more I read Thurman’s book–and the liberation of it dawned on me in a way that was more exciting and which I looked forward to pursuing more than I can remember ever being so excited about a metaphysical or ontological idea. It also connected with that film idea always throbbing in the back of my mind, UNTIED STATES (a riff on the country), with the image of each of us as “selves” just being knots in a rope–while we live–then simply coming undone and rejoining the rope when we pass on. Food for thought. I think I may have found in Buddhism something in which I can essentially believe, even if there is some rarefied and arcane bits to it. It’s a belief (not really a religion) that you could actually have entirely apart from any actual knowledge imparted to you by Buddhists, per se. It’s merely a description—you don’t have to know it to be it. There is no ostracism or persecution–no authority claimed here, and no excellence of compassion that Buddhists wouldn’t recognize in non-Buddhists. It’s the most natural thing in the world. I’m interested in following up more in Thurman’s “Essentials of Tibetan Buddhism”.
Now any lingering apprehensions I have, have more to do with Blake’s observation “Eternity is in love with the productions of Time” which I always took to be a critique of the levelling nullifying aspects of philosophies which sought to expunge the self. Throw out the self and what of all the beauty of mortality, all of multifariousness of reality which is after all the driving force behind any creative impulse I (and I assume just about anyone else on the planet–maybe moreso in the West) has. Do you throw this out? Are you now above all these mere symptoms of “desire” So many of the biographies of people that have fascinated me seem to have been stories of the journey from the inside to the outside in this sense (Malcolm X, John Lennon…) grappling with pain, making beauty of it–heading for a realization of all-inclusiveness. How can you cling to the merry-go-round once you realize what it is? (all of Lennon’s work, culminating finally in songs like “Imagine” and “Watching Wheels Go Round”) Anyway, hardly coherent thoughts, these, but notes for future thought…
⇒ No more grabbing and playful pummeling except at very specific times. Gentleness the default.
Saturday, October 12, 2002
⇒ I took Sevi to PowerPlays on 3rd Ave and 8th Street (Bklyn) on this rainy day. My first time there. Her favorite thing to do was go into the miniature house and bring back the plastic bowl filled with imaginary food for me—broccoli, cauliflower, rice (with boiling water) etc. She must have gone in and out 70 times. I think in new environments the compulsive/repetitive ritual is a comfort to her. Also, she was just thrilled with the novelty of having a sink and kitchen her own size. She’s a little out of sorts today, runny nose. She slept from 3-4pm and woke up really at the end of her rope missing mommy (who went to work at 10:15am at Fish & Neave). It’s like a marathon for her on these days when she knows mama goes away—she tries to pace herself as best she can, but being sick and waking up disoriented were just too much. She was pretty moany for mama all the way in the subway to 47th St. Rockefeller Center. When she saw Rebecca in the lobby they ran to eachother arms outstretched. These reunions are without a doubt the most beautiful moments I’ve had in my life—there’s nothing better than to see the perfect fulfillment of such love and care. These moments mock analysis and put existential concerns to rout as quite beside the point.
Sunday, October 13, 2002
⇒ Featherweight
After years of patient study
And much deliberation
I can’t make a fist for snickering.
I don’t have the facts at my disposal
And never will.
Just a flag mouthing off to the breeze.
My thumb can wet every last page
Of the ultimate book.
And it doesn’t bulk me up.
I’m just some sumless
Somewhere else
Down toward which
Rocking in the air
I alight.
⇒ A culture obsessed with youth not only has no time for its elders, but also has none for its own children, whom it uses, abuses and wastes. Magnolia made this point with all the force of elegance and passion. Maybe a little overstyled at times and archetypal with its characters, it nevertheless really moved me at the time. Saw it twice within a week of its opening.
⇒ “The poem must resist the intelligence/Almost successfully” -Wallace Stevens
⇒ A greed a pawn time.
Should you read this closely?
I wrote it very far away.
October 15, 2002
⇒ We call a thing bullshit as much for the substance as the force behind it—explosive and regardless.
October 16, 2002
⇒ the filament of emotion must not be broken from scene to scene
October 20, 2002
⇒ Sevi says not tofu, and not tufo, but something in between.
November 18, 2002
⇒ The pistachio rule: Do they taste so great? No. It’s the fact of the shell, and the work you’ve got to go through to get to the meat, that somehow enhances the experience. Eat a bunch of shelled pistachios and you’ll know what I’m talking about. People crave these bland things?
November 22, 2002
⇒ Sevi calls pronounces oatmeal “N-P-L”
⇒ parents at Poly Prep
⇒ pregnant lady fainting at Brooklyn Heights Montessori
November 26, 2002
⇒ WANTS UPON A TIME
⇒ The red-tailed hawk and squirrel at the playground, Tgiving
⇒ Death of Franny a month and a half ago, Goldberg Variations
December 2, 2002
⇒ Sevi – I wanna stay at Merryl’s party
⇒ Stone soup theory of religious upbringing – principle of opposition or identity with something
⇒ mama get it mom?
⇒ Want something t’eat? Did you say teat?
⇒ Succumbing to the passion for lists and numbers
⇒ Sevi said “get off of pumkinputer Papa”
⇒ Playing with blocks, making a path like Sevi’s, is this a path, No papa. Can you help me. Have to do it yourself papa.
⇒ puppetworks – airplane!
⇒ He was peeved by people’s use of the philobytes—little philosophical namedroppings sprinkled seemingly through his colleague’s every remark. e.g. – Occam’s Razor, Sword of Damocles, Procrustean Bed, Hobson’s Choice, Pascal’s Wager
⇒ Sevi’s current favorite book, for the last 3 or 4 weeks: SHEILA RAE, THE BRAVE by Kevin Henkes
⇒ Sevi so excited on her trips in the yellow trolley to the Children’s Museum. We’re in the trolley, she keeps turning to me, a hand on my arm and says “Chiln’s museum papa? Goin’ chiln’s museum?” on a chirpy rising note. I assure he we are and she says it in the affirmative.
December 17, 2002
⇒ The leveling of Buddhism, the erasure of identity. Seeing the Western exultation of self as ultimately about celebration of difference and peculiarity. The novelist as the high avatar of the refinement of self into such particularity that we have no choice but to worship before it. And yet the absolute greatest portrayers of selves, the highest artists are somehow ciphers and erasures themselves. They’ve entered into consciousnesses so deftly that no one knows who they are, other than this potent force. You cannot worship attributes without coming to worship all of life, or feeling heightened perception. Somewhere hereabouts the aim of Buddhism and the aim of Western art commingle, and this is the place I’ve always dreamed of—naïve, ill-equipped, deluded and lazy about it though I continue to be.
December 19, 2002
⇒ Bait a Dog
So now I hear it’s the hippocampus that shrinks,
Fizzled away by the acid cortisol of humiliations.
The reflexive jerk of calculating how best to fawn.
The mental clangor and deference that attends
The panicky search for the right words
Chosen to flatter and not presume,
To put things just so and be thought an ally
Not a yes man.
I won’t be a beta dog, though the tendency
Has run undeniably in that direction.
I snap back and resist that appalling assessment.
The nature I’ve kept so assiduously
Frantically
Hidden is mortified.
⇒ “What was he speaking, swa-fucking-hili?” – overheard 30ish blonde telling her friends as she headed down 8th ave near 42nd street.
December 20, 2002
⇒ EX CATHEDRA – short film (or long film) about a bunch of people, experts in their respective fields, who allow themselves to think they’re equipped to deal in some area that’s truly alien to their knowledge.
December 21, 2002
⇒ His morality was so basic it was never on display
⇒ At the circus, the device of sudden blackouts of the lights—an afterimage of blue on the retina.
⇒ The “grandma clown” at Big Apple Circus reminded me of Jack Lemmon in his later doddering parts.
December 23, 2002
⇒ Trying to get Sevi to take a bath, I cornered her in the kitchen, and she said “I never will,” and wriggled away and ran off down the hall. She’d gotten that from a nursery rhyme in the Mother Goose book she just got a few days ago, including the rhyme:
I’m Dusty Bill from Vinegar Hill
I never had a bath
And I never will.
⇒ Sevi tried to feed me pretend soap in the tub. I asked if she meant soup, and she said no soap. People don’t eat soap, I replied. “Some people eat soup,” she said. “Girls drink water.”
December 24, 2002
⇒ Sugi talking in her sleep said “wooden blocks” Filled me with love for her perpetual care and love for Sevi, even while she sleeps.
⇒ He felt pressure, almost as a courtesy, to be whatever a person thought him to be.