Gettysburg

For Crying Out Loud

Sat, 17 May 2008 16:57:40 GMT

Went swimming at the pool down the street, part way I remembered my forgotten bike and thought of the young kids I knew who had biked to the pool, and how I could be like them with towels thrown over their smooth shoulders riding bikes too small. And that is how things are now, I do things, beautiful things, but not as well as I'd like.

Sometimes days stretch out like admonitions against my barren ideas. The things I love to do that never build, lie flat where I set them. When I was in Middle School I taught myself sign language and had no one to talk to. I am learning again how to make hands words, but I become skeptical at it.

Sometimes I come home from work like waking from dreaming, no memories but rather senses, recalling a smile and a hand. Forgetting is worse than boredom, like salt thrown behind your back. I am against loss, with all my hours.

Theorize a lack of friends and then go to them, go to drink, and half way done with that rise up for pen and paper. Into drunk and crowded streets to play tag. It is a natural and easy thing that I am winning at tag. Some one yells: stop running! and I come to sudden halt, ready as anything to behave well.

Yes, and a profusion of hours on the phone trying to chase up what it is exactly that I do with myself, for people who I only see on holiday, the loved and family.

Sometimes I shore up against loss by not wishing for things, by passing a hand over my hair when I wake up and asking myself only "what today?" and sometimes "what tomorrow?"

I have moved to Austin.

Thu, 08 May 2008 20:21:35 GMT

I am still waiting for a box of film for my finicky camera. Across from my back door, across the road, is a stone staircase that goes down to a waterfall and pond with a dinner plate size snapping turtle. Down the road a little bit is a stone creek bed that overlooks an empty waterfall, or empty but for the thinnest rivulet. It is a good place to throw leaves and see how fast they can scoot by, and I have empirically proven that it spontaneously brings to mind Terebithia. Twenty paces gone by and there is a beautiful wooden bridge that ends by honeysuckle and roses. Fig trees and orange trees seem to be everywhere, and the cactus are about to bloom. One person does not mow their yard and the flowers that come up look like a field of stars in the evening. The moss is trying very hard to cover the earth, and tosses down perfectly round sons and daughters that look like Martians and are the ideal size and softness for throwing at people. I know the best place to go to watch turtles lay atop of each other, and I've even grown fond of the poison ivy, if only for it's perverse ability to thrive in every wild spot I want to go. In the front yard a Magnolia tree is blooming- I have spent longer smelling a Magnolia than any dang flower.

Common Dream Element

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:31:03 GMT

So far beyond the casual solitudes.

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:30:39 GMT

"I admire compression, lightness, agility, all rare in this loose world."

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:44:59 GMT

I am moving from one room to the other in a very cold house. A space heater tells the thermostat that all is well and I walk shivering in the hallways. The room I am moving from is all windows, wood floor set out from the rest of the house, hovering off of the foundations. I suit up to go into it, gloves and hat, ready to gather fossil socks and vacuum lint off the futon. That room is being turned into a den, although what loving couple would want to go in and snuggle at 30 degrees is beyond me. Adolescence bumps into me as I go to the bathroom, now that I live in my mother's house. (Did I mention that I have committed the gaffe of moving in with my parent?) My mother has a boarding house and I am one of her tenants.
I recommend with wholehearted abandon the book "A High Wind in Jamaica" and am about to read "Lolly Willowes: or the loving huntsman" and "The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren." Several animal cookie cutters have been strung out like washing along the ceiling, and I regret to say a few were stepped on, making them into invertebrates. In a week and two days I am taking a test that will carry equal weight to my four years of college and today I went and got new contacts for luck. The doctor told me that veins in my eyes were moving closer to my iris and that this could be stopped. On the desk is a procession: the pink & blooming jesus, prehistoric parents carrying a rock and a child, the star that bore the sea, two baby deer, a chipmunk skull, and a day of the dead virgin mary.

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:57:14 GMT

It was maybe today, three years ago, that I walked into a car and made Bobby laugh because I was in love. I think of that moment every time I listen to the Silver Jews song "I remember you".

He almost walked into a wall
Oh man she was a sight to see
At the party down the hall
He said "you are the highest apple in the tree"
Out the window in the harbour he saw a little ship
The moon was worn just slightly on the right
They slowdanced so the needle wouldn't skip
And he held her till the room was filled with light
Hand in hand down a waterslide in Chattanooga
They did not hide from love you see
A winter's plane flight to Aruba
Where he threw a boombox into the sea.
One day they were cutting flowers for something to do
On the bank of the road 'neath the cottonwoods
He turned to her to ask if she'd marry him
When a runaway truck hit him where he stood.

In the future people will wear clothes.

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:34:33 GMT

I spend time looking at the International Fashion weeks, a festival which has just bounced from New York to London, and is shortly due at Milan and Paris. There be monsters, and fashion which imitates the way flesh is peeled by scalpel, there are proms, big and little, there the future and the past lie, spread flatly upon flat chests. Every morning I read it scrupulously, like an event of pressing importance, as if the clothes that are due to emerge next spring, as objects of economy, bear upon themselves oracular properties.

Faith in worthless knowledge

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:40:55 GMT

I wake up under blankets, all afright. I have been wasting my time? Day warms me up but my nose stays cold and silvery. Maybe I have made mistakes! Maybe I won't know what to do!

With love,

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 03:05:24 GMT

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 04:35:50 GMT

I am, even now after spending a month in Southern Mississippi, resisting the compulsion to don a jacket before going outside at night.

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 04:35:32 GMT

I hate it when I don't have toothpaste, and I hate the icebergs I inherit into my heart, and I hate the constellations persisting through the blind spots.

Tomas of Brasil, who is old at eleven and hates to lose, knows more
about love than I do, at least for today. He has not been speaking to
his beloved, not out of aloofness, so much as the happiness of habit,
and she has left him. He cries constantly, sometimes silently,
sometimes shouting loudly in Portuguese about love and pain. He begs
us to be allowed to go and apologize to her when bedtime comes and
leans against a wall in defeat when we refuse. He wrings his hair and
holds his head.

Lepidoptera

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 01:39:14 GMT

Please, find and figure me out.
Oh, all drunk shoulders I have ever leaned on, my sincerest apologies. I was not intending to beckon, rather all intentions pointed to nights best spent in trees and turning shrubs into rabbit scultures and fine tuning the art of skipping stones.

I found an old piece of heartbreak (my own) and I can't quite swallow it. How did I forget this so completely?
plesiadapiform: i've been drinking and i can hardly think
secretgreendream: oh
secretgreendream: do i still interest you or is this wasteful? i would rather my emotions be neat.
plesiadapiform: i have no clear idea
secretgreendream: i keep expecting to find you in other people but it is never there so i am coldshoulder to good people because they aren't you. i am never certain if you were loving me for anything real
secretgreendream: i am uncertain if i could convince you to want me again or that you ever really wanted me past your loneliness.
secretgreendream: if you don't know then i am probably being wasteful.
Three years ago I had temerity and gracelessness and then I forgot not only that it happened, but what exactly it felt like to say 'I am probably being wasteful.' Perhaps I should say that more often.

All I feel is the weight of my desires.

I want to open a shop at a local farmers market and sell used dresses only and at reasonable prices and work with kids in literacy or art or how to be a wonderful thing and I want to read books from the library and ride my bike and ride the bus and not have a car and not suffer unduly because of it. I want to eat mostly real food that I make myself and I want my grocery list to be as regular as anything can be and I want to find odd grocery stores and supermercados to frequent and to get my star shaped pasta and avacados and olives and grapefruit from. I want to frequent public museums and public lectures and free movies and flower gardens and observatories and learn all of the constellations. I want to have a projector so I can show free silent movies on the side of a building and not have to bend over backwards to make it happen. I want to be alone and I want to be happy about it. I want to eat more eggs. I want to master the art of fixing a bike and how to start a fire with flint and how to use a slingshot well and tennis and jumprope and I want to find fossils and collect cicada skins. I want globes and windchimes and perhaps tasteful christmas lights, and a tent with the sky painted in it to lounge bug free. I want to make friends with spiders and have pet worms and tomato plants that are doing really really well and I want pewter ware and cute coffee mugs and lots of tea hiding in the freezer and plates with maps and destinations on them and I want wildflower gardens with morning glories and snapdragons and I want soap that smells like lavender. I want to have extensive knowledge of motown and of the blues and of old wierd american music and I want to write long letters that I send by mail and that have unselfconscious drawings in the corners and margins. I want to brush up on my sign language and I want to write love letters and collect photographs and take photographs and leave thank you notes for my waiters. I want to know slight of hand magic tricks and I want to know how to read palms. I want to deliver oatmeal cookies to my neighbors. I want to embroider and doodle and perfect my handwriting and switch my name once and for all to Anna Margaret and try to get stories published and write poetry without rereading it. I want to sing old songs and new songs and make up little lovely lullabyes. I want a big bucket of legos that don't collect dust. I want to have a yard I can do stuff with and I want to have a neighborhood I can walk in at night and I want a sidewalk I can absolutely cover with chalk. I want a desk covered with odds and ends I found on long walks and I want tiny bleached animal bones. I want binoculars to watch birds and bats with. I want a bat house! And a hummingbird feeder and a bird feeder and a hammock and maybe a trampoline and a rocking chair. I want to go swimming in a river and become an expert in local flora and especially the edible variety and I want a tasteful inflatable kiddy pool and an inflatable alligator raft. I want prism hanging in the windows and hydrangea hanging off the walls and pots hanging from the ceiling and endearments like pet, darling, flower, and beloved just tripping off my tongue. I want a glass hot air balloon like my dad had, and I want claw foot furniture and I want to have secret ability with origami and cat cradle string games. I want string beans growing in the corners of my yard. I want lightning bugs and possums and raccoons and flashlights for the thunderstorms and I want to actually ever play my banjo and I want to watch old sixties movies and learn how to dance by watching them. I want old dear lamps and I want an absolute minimum of cooking supplies. I want to live exactly according to my tastes and I want not a single person around to witness or comment.

Sun, 27 May 2007 17:28:41 GMT

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

The Last Painting or The Portrait of God

In loving the extravagant style of Helene Cixous, I find that even as she describes the many things that she cannot give to us, I begin to see them, almost smell and taste them. It is with such audacity that she writes the world, without pause, using words I find so problematic, like “the present absolute” and the third person of the present, and God, and heroes, and what is. She writes what I feel, when I am too hesitant to put into words assumptions that have been educated out of me. When she says, “I’m calling: Mimosa! I’m calling you.” I am in the South, where the light is warm and the mimosas are almost done with blooming, and I have been called.

An analysis of her argument would be beside the point, for me even painful. Cixous calls for fidelity and I want to give her that. I want to write, too. She has given me painting, after all, inadvertently. It is no mistake that “there is no beautiful more beautiful than the ugly. In painting as in writing, there is no other ‘beauty’ than fidelity to what is. Painting renders—but what it renders is justice. Everything that is: the cathedral, the haystack, the sunflowers, the vermin, the peasants the chair, the skinned ox, the flayed man, the cockroach.” It is no mistake that this, the only painting we read in the curriculum, was the only work that made me cry. The courage I have to give her is by writing a painting in response. I don’t know how to reach the third person of the present or the thing’s is in painting. Truly, what I have is the denial of the thing’s is, and I will try to write that.

I will start in reverse. I have been hazy and vine-encrusted and wildly forgetful. I am now in a room filled with sunlight and an onion that decided to come back to life and has thus been given a ration of water, and various items that I brought to school and Chicago after Hurricane Ivan missed us for Florida and I realized how close we were to losing everything. Having my possessions in boxes feels strange, as if this or that box could just be misplaced or destroyed. I haven’t bothered to box a drawing my little sister made, my poster of the constellations from 1972 that lived in our basement, my stuffed animal that I almost left, my five pictures of my family. Those things I save for last, keep from the boxes that seem so risky.

I am reminded of the experiment with the young children. Very young children would be shown that a box was empty, and then the box would be put face down on the floor. If they were told a puppy was in the box, young children excitedly went and looked. If told there was a monster was in the box, they had to be taken out of the room before they would stop crying. Older children scoffed after they were told there was a puppy: they had just seen that it wasn’t there. All the same, they went up to the box once they thought they weren’t being watched, just to check. When they were told there was a monster they again showed their disbelief, but when the researchers left the room the older children backed up to the door and stared at the box with fear.

My sweetheart said, “See you tonight, darling,” at the Chicago airport when he dropped me off to fly down to my childhood home in Mississippi. My task was to get a license renewed from the Department of Motor Vehicles in the space of one afternoon, so that upon my return to Chicago, I could take the job I had been offered. Once I was on the ground, everything looked normal down the long inland stretches of Popps Ferry Road. But then I remembered: The DMV was on a body of water. That meant something. The building I came for was gone, and as I looked out at the bay, I saw the bodies of police cars still stuck in the water. When I finally found the new DMV in D’Iberville, it was a trailer in the middle of a field, with a long line going all the way around it. I was able to get my license, but noted that two out of three people were there to register their guns.

This reminds me of my Christmas visit. It was warm then, and I went walking a lot at night until my friend pointed out that there had been some attacks from dogs left behind, gone feral, and that more and more crimes were being committed with stolen and salvaged guns. The reason walking at night had been so attractive—no streetlights or power, so all I could see was the newly revealed stars and nothing else—was exactly what made my late night walks so dangerous. That night I went online to see if I could find any pictures of my mother when she was young, and I found a picture of my godmother preaching in a river. The false winter of saline had come. The water came over the trees and the salt-encrusted leaves had fallen off, and these trees, which bear leaves all year round, we must now lay in wait upon. Perhaps the spring will bring them back. Perhaps the summer will finish them off. I am reminded of Odysseus salting the earth to escape the draft. It seems that the silver and cold world up north has invaded, and now we must imitate our conquerors’ customs and their bare trees. Everything is too dirty; I still can’t walk barefoot.

Christmas time it seems like the whole world has shrunk. I find my town to be several times smaller without the houses and trees and trimmings. When it’s all gone you can see the church doors where once you could only see the steeple rising on height as if from a great distance. But the doors are very close. I walk to them from the shoreline, across the ground where my house once stood, and the next house, and the next and the next, and stand on the church’s grass and look out at the ocean. During the day I can see so far, especially if I am looking from the shoreline.

I can’t tell if I am painting yet. Have I made the world small? Have I shown how excessive we seem when the creations of plants and humans are lifted up, lifted out, and the tiny, tiny foundation is bared? Have I brought you to where you can feel how immediate the wind is, now that everything has changed? The wind rips off the water and nothing stops it from reaching me, all the way to Highway 90 I can feel it and smell it. Even when the wind is still, when I am standing outside I can smell the sea rising up from the ground. This is all I have to paint right now, and I have not been able to give any of it over to the page. “I would like to be in the sea and render it in words.”

My friends, the three who have art fancies and live on nothing and barely speak to their parents, have all come home and have steady jobs ripping out drywall, and when they get off work they go to where their houses were and try to salvage things. One of them finds a teacup and wraps it in a napkin to bring home to his mother. Another friend tries to convince me to go into his house at night. His house was on stilts but the water lifted it out and up, resettling the house at a dangerous angle and creating huge holes in the floor at random. If you go up the concrete steps you can leap onto the front porch, which is still caked with brown mud. The whole house is like that, and it smells of rot and dead water. My friend wants to go in, I know, so that we can show ourselves that this isn’t sad, just another chance for a grand adventure. I am unable to because it is frightening and there is no light, and he sits on the edge of the road, angry with me for being a coward. When I left to come back to the north, a sea of blue tarped roofs fair-welled my plane as I left. The institutional FEMA tarps looked like swimming pools as we rose higher, as if each and every person had chosen to live underwater.

Before, I had not had a chance to see the ground from the sky when I flew in or out over Thanksgiving. When I came in it was dark, and my sister picked me up. The airport I saw had suffered serious damage. It looked as if it had been put together with cardboard, but it had probably been corrugated metal or something like that. Morgan drove straight to my parent’s new house, a small building in one of the tacky new developments, which they had once fought to keep from being built. In the morning I see that our new home has a desert wasteland for a back yard. I open the back door and the wind attacks and the sun blinds and the thin grass and sand extend into a prairie. My sister and I had our own cots to sleep on and a cardboard box that Dad had designated a nightstand. He had a blow-up mattress and two deck chairs he had salvaged from our house, which were slightly bent. He had bought a can of heavy-duty spray paint, which he used to cover up their extensive, recent rusting and the paint smell never left, and my sister hated them so much she refused to sit on them and would sit on the floor. They took me into the garage before they would take me to our old house, to show me the stuff they had saved. Two of my dad’s pewter plates were there (after he and my mom divorced we used the plates regularly on our nights together, despite the terrible screeching sound any silverware made on them) and a box of our family pictures which I didn’t remember ever having seen before, which washed up to the street past ours and also a vase my uncle gave my dad’s wife, which she had hated, and my sister’s guitar, of which the neck was broken off but the hollow body remained somehow, miraculously, undamaged.

My sister takes me to go see the house the next day. Our new house is out of town, really, so when we drive in we come over the Back Bay bridge. Of course, all of the houses within sight are gutted or gone. I can identify a few places where people I knew lived, and as we drive over the bridge, down in the water are refrigerators and cars. Morgan tells me that it is worse in the water than it is above, what with all of the debris in it and it being almost impossible to clean.

We drive through my favorite part of town and it isn’t too damaged. The shops have broken windows and all of the businesses are closed but it is clear: this area is coming back. It isn’t until we go past the Children’s Park, three blocks from the water, and see that the big metal swing set still has a tree strung through it, that we begin to see real damage. There are trees down everywhere, far inland as well, but here it seems like every third tree, and then every other tree, and then every tree is down. The houses look solid on the outside at first, though with windows gone and trees down on them, then they are gutted (where the walls are missing but the major structure beams remain, reminding where doors and corners were), and then they are leveled. My house is worse than leveled: it is a hole in the ground. Not even a concrete slab remains. The front yard remains, and amusingly the sidewalk is still there, with scarred dead azaleas lining the way. It drops off, though, where the yard met the house, and about five feet of earth went with the house. There was a concrete bunker, above ground, built underneath the house, which we used as storage. That’s gone too, and you can see where it was. My sister points it out, and points out the huge metal and concrete waterproof safe that I remember from early childhood, I remember my dad showing it to me, explaining that banks had huge safes where they kept people’s money. It is horribly ripped open and I assume that this was the storm’s handiwork but I am mistaken. Morgan explains to me that when dad came back to the house the day after the storm he was unable to drive his car in, so he ran to the house on foot. The only thing left in the plot of land was the safe. He broke into my neighbor’s flooded, partially gutted garage and got a huge, antique sledgehammer and ripped the safe apart, bending back the iron and concrete. I am looking now at the safe and it looks like a crumpled paper bag and it is then that I start crying. How terrifying and wonderful and how awful that we live in a world where this action is required. Am I painting this? It still makes me cry. I turned around then and standing at the butt-end of the sidewalk, looking down at just the yard and the street, it came to me that I was standing in front of where I had always lived and it was gone.

My nightmares came before I saw it. I had dreams where everything I knew had been unrecognizably flattened. My mom sent me a newspaper article with before and after pictures and the dinosaur from the goofy golf course featured heavily in my dreams after that. The worst dream was where I was sitting on a seawall and the water was just ever so slightly grey and choppy and my mother kept telling me it was time to come home but couldn’t quite explain way. The key to the fear in my dreams was that I didn’t recognize my home; what made the actual experience so devastating was how much I did recognize it. A few trees, stripped of leaves and bark, still stood festooned with clothes and paper bags and unrecognizable cords and draping. I could see each plot of land then, each squared-off area as its own house. Sometimes steps went off to nowhere, sometimes a grey concrete slab served to demarcate, sometimes two or three lawn chairs had been found, dusted off, and set upright in a space that once would have been a living room. My parents placed a duck decoy by the sign that said they were alive, that showed their insurance number. The big pink and sea green house that looked like a birthday cake and that I had always not so secretly coveted was gone, another great loss. I couldn’t even tell where it had been, and when someone walked the boundary out for me I couldn’t believe it. It was so small. Everything was so small. We walked down in the hole and out towards the marsh. Morgan pointed out to me that there were no birds left.

“Every thing has an instant in which it is.” I want to show the is which isn’t. I want to show the instant in which it isn’t. But wait, I am not doing this justice. I am painting a big, empty space and that is as wrong as wrong could be. Every inch of ground was covered, every tree and bush was covered. Houses had exploded and the storm had revealed endless miles of shit. I read: “Insects become my heroes. Am I not a little bit right? Human beings are divine insects.” And I think, yes, but the extent to which, we don’t know. And how big we get in our tiny little spaces. We don’t even realize how monstrous our piles of shit are until they are spread out and they touch, kill everything. Heroes, yes, we are—until and because our myths are exploded. We have so much stored up in these spaces, and it lies in wait for when it can come and cover the world. Refuse as far as I can see.

Now there are tent villages and tent houses and people cooking turkeys on grills over questionable lumber. Wal-mart, one of the only stores able to keep normal hours, that Thanksgiving was stripped of almost all of its items, and when we go in to find film there is none and aisles upon aisles of shelves are almost empty. It is eerie, over and over again.

Before that, of course, the storm came. I had just arrived at college and, as classes began, the storm came. I am so used to hurricanes. I had really scared myself with Ivan the year before and had been convinced that we were in immediate danger, but later felt that I had been overdramatic. My uncle’s house did have six feet of sand in it after that storm, but I was told that the current of the Mississippi River drove hurricanes away from Biloxi and Ocean Springs to Florida. I didn’t even think that this storm was going to be a big deal. It was supposed to weaken to Category 2, after all. The morning after the storm I read the first news. A young child was crying on the steps where the Biloxi courthouse used to be, and when the rescue crew followed the child back to his house they found his parents and grandparents crushed by walls.
I know what it is to be the painter of the written word. For a while, days, all I had to give was endless words of neighbors’ bodies under concrete slabs, bodies in the streets eaten by rats, thousands of rotting chickens washed up on Front Beach, and the endless, endless list of missing people. Power and internet and phone lines were all down, so it was days until I found out who was alive. It was weeks before I was told my father’s house was gone. The destruction of New Orleans and the endless battering of its (my) people kept me up, night after night, column after column. It became so hard to look people in the face. It became so hard to not see everything leveled, everything underwater, everyone in the trees and holding on for dear life or no longer holding on. The trees saved many lives, it is true. They also found bodies in the trees when the harbor was cleared enough of debris for ships to go out to the islands.

Cixous refers to Percival, whom she speaks of traveling around the world to regain innocence. I take much comfort in this. I am not able to write this without falsely gilding it with sadness and discomfort. I can’t my pleasure weep; I can’t my sorrow laugh. My simplest presentation contains great infidelity but perhaps this is the only way. I am willing to go around the world again. I know how to find one intact scratched plate and carry it home, wash it and use it and keep it from the garage where shrines are made. It is with the other plates. I know how to look at things and see them not there anymore, and I know how to find them again strung up in a tree, on the neighbor’s steps, in pieces on the road. I know how to leave the chairs and find my bed sheets in a pile of rubble. I’m calling! I’m calling you.

Thu, 17 May 2007 04:58:35 GMT

I want explosions and I want to be in another part of the continent.

Fri, 11 May 2007 05:16:59 GMT

This site: http://www.luckymojo.com/blues.html is extremely informative. Especially as I want to use both voodoo and hoodoo in the songs but I don't want to ignore that they're different. The whole you can't break a rule if you don't know it thing, if you must.
Despite having started working on instrumentation it is unclear if it would be better to sample other songs and try to hide that fact (i. e. change the songs but prevent it from sounding modernized if possible) or if I should stick to what I can eek out of my limited technical ability. Ennio Morricone's Revolver soundtrack could form the backbone of the cowgirl interludes. In Milwaukee there is a Golden Chicken Diner where I should be taking some pictures which will relate to this and if I am able to they'll go up here.
Detection in the Spanish tradition means "taking the roof off" due to the story of the devil who occasionally offered one of his favorites the entertainment created by removing the roof of the neighbor's house, and thus a detective is the disciple or son of the devil. That I find helpful, that and and the idea that a detective and criminal are suspect because they are "both deuteragonists in an occult ritual incomprehensible to the law abiding spectator." It may or may not make it into the lyrics, but there does not seem to me to be a great deal of difference between someone who tries to steal the truth from others by lying and someone who tries to steal the truth for themselves at the expense of other people's privacy. This comes up, I hope it is clear, because Sweetheart is a no good cheating lass who's been going from bed to bed and the Detective who isn't really a detective may be true blue but his trying to untangle her lies makes him just as culpable in their bid for power. Ah, again, just something I've been thinking about rather than something necessarily useful.
Also: "If anything was Lost, Whether by Negligence of the Owner, or Vigilance and Dexterity in the Thief, away we went to the Detective." This would serve as a good title to the opening detective's song, all the better for it's wordiness. I may have a narrator announce each song title before the song starts, which would go a long way to the goal of evoking a movie score.
Any ideas about : fidelity, Southern folk magic, detectives that may or may not be in cahoots with the devil, diners in the Wisconsin Illinois Iowa area with names that are remarkably similar to The Golden Rooster?

The Golden Rooster and The Hoodoo Queen

Fri, 04 May 2007 05:42:29 GMT

It should sound like a mix CD in terms of strong stylist changes, but with a coherent story and cast. The story goes: [A detective is put on the case of a girl who took all the love she could steal and ran. He knows that she isn't really a cowgirl but she always rides into the sun and he follows her from Texas to Louisiana, via Sunrise. His sadness taught him to move slowly, to pull his hat down and turn up his collar.] [He finds notes on diner tables in her handwriting: The only thing I could never get behind, she said, is that you wore sunglasses in the dark. She writes: When I met you, you were the only boy around with a three piece suit. She writes: I was the only girl in town who could never hold her whiskey. She writes: I became a cowgirl just to shoot you down. He knows that she isn't really a cowgirl but in every diner he asks after the girl with invisible silver spurs.] [The notes stop in New Orleans and he sits and waits. On his clean white steps is left the head of a golden chicken and a note from the Hoodoo Queen telling him where to go if he wants to get the girl. The note says the girl's name is Sweetheart, a name the detective thinks he may recognize. On the morning that he goes to meet the queen he gets on his steps his first note in weeks from the girl with the invisible silver spurs. The note says, "Baby, watch your step. I'll hex you right back."] [The voodoo queen tells him that when he told Sweetheart "I'm going to keep an eye on you." he lost his name and became a cigarette and a flask of whiskey between a slouch hat and a long coat. She says: the world listens and makes changes accordingly. She says: Alligator feet and chicken teeth won't put her boots back under your bed. She says: It's a little late to be ethical about whom is climbing in and out of whose window. She says: She told you she loved you and all you could ask was Hoo Doo? The Hoodoo queen tells him that the missing piece of the story, the part he forgot, was that he wants his lover back and she reminds him "What is more sensual and earthly than death?" The Hoodoo Queen tells him where to meet the girl with the invisible silver spurs.] [He wore black. She wore white. He asked to see her palm where the voodoo queen said he would read a trace of indecision but all he could find was a trace of disappointment. The voodoo queen told him there was no evil in the gentler sex but he read it there clear as day. He knew then that some early morning he'd been outclassed and outhexed. He said, I came here just so you would fill me full of lead. She said, If I shot you down be sure it would be with a silver bullet. He wasn't shot but if he had been, it would have been by a silver bullet. She said: I'm through with climbing into windows, now I'm going to climb into the sky. Out on the levee the ghosts whispered: I love you and answered: Hoo Doo?]
(The brackets are where songs begin and end.)
Notes on orchestration: The detective sings the New York bar blues a la Nina Simone piano and drums with a lot of cymbal. The Voodoo Queen sings Bo Diddley, Screaming Jay Hoodoo jive with a bit of Motown Northern Soul sass. The cowgirl named Sweetheart sings Soapy Western guitar. When the detective and cowgirl face off it should sound much like a rip-off of Lee Hazelwood's Velvet Morning.

black spider dumplings

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 23:16:49 GMT

"caw! caw!" the downy young ones say,
"How lovely is this peep of day,
Oh, what a glorious sight is this,
There can be nothing here but bliss."
"Caw! Caw!" replies the mother crow,
"There is no joy unmixed with woe."

Go read it: http://www.archive.org/details/cawcaworchronicl00rmrmiala

I went to the museum to look at butterflies and curiosa. The one plant left unnamed is now named Zombi after Marie Laveau's snake god.

It's a Batman Turner Christmas/ Infancy and the Sweetheart Despair

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 23:06:17 GMT

I've been going straight home to read and listen to early DRO and Batman Turner laments and feel my heart mash up like an old moldy avocado. Someone needs to tell Anna to get off of her fanny and make cheesetoast and do anything besides sit all soddenly, and it looks like that person is going to have to be me. Go make Cheesetoast- it's delicious. Does everyone in Milwaukee hate hugs? Seriously. Cause I would make fancy ginger broccoli for anyone willing to make me a huggee. Fuck, I'd make miso, and anyone can tell you I make a mean miso soup.

The Rape of Rome

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:07:11 GMT

I am reading anything about investigation I can get my dirty hands on. If you are licensed to be a Private Investigator in Wisconsin you are licensed also as a bodyguard! It is relatively cheap and easy, too. Reading Harriet the Spy again makes me wish I was more willing to put down in writing every terrible thing.

I was buying a notebook for my notes about the shift between ethics in classic v. hardboiled detective work when the lady cashier stopped me and asked me "Did you use to be a nun?"
I was of course confused and she continued "Oh, I only ask because you seem more serious and innocent, but your skirt is so short I knew you couldn't still be."

Also, the Veteran's society has divine karaoke which is heavy on the Frank Sinatra sung by old men whose only remaining ambition is to smoke and drink and still hit the high notes.

Jerico

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 19:09:43 GMT

Find the soft sounds we left behind amid the seashells and rubbish to rummage in your room. Shouldn't we have cut out images of snowflakes and whales? Some shared plan would have saved us any amount of grief. When the lights come up we're climbing out of the cotton and crying.
or, as I've said before: I am not humble or merciful. That is the worst, that and me never using my powers for good.

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 03:19:51 GMT

My full name (which is way too long) is Anna Irene Margaret Vinsonhaler Weldon. I've always wanted to lop something off that and I feel that Irene is a good candidate. It begs further lopping, though.

Vinsonhaler Weldon are the last names of my mother and father, respectively. Vinsonhaler is my mother's mother's mother's maiden name and my father's last name does the normal paternal line stuff. Both names are clearly important to family continuity; while I feel more kinship with Vinsonhaler I know that if I remove Weldon and keep my mom's name that dad will feel reverse disowned. (But wouldn't Anna Margaret Vinsonhaler be cool? That'd be cool.) The truth is that I am not crazy about Weldon period. I've thought about making up a name to avoid choosing between Vinsonhaler and Weldon (such as Anna Margaret Gettysburg, or Anna Gettysburg) but I have trouble getting behind the made up name thing.

Tentative solution: Anna Margaret It has the benefit of being entirely neutral in the maternal vs. paternal name thing and it absolutely wouldn't change with marriage-divorce-remarriage. Middle names as last names is kind of fun, and I think it has a nice ring. Also, having a totally female sounding set of names makes me feel like less of a wuss for not adopting the matriarchal Vinsonhaler.

So, Anna Margaret? Not that your vote counts, but let me know anyway.

Something is on my mind.

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 20:30:53 GMT

Yesterday I explained the summer I spent on my knees with a rosary in the hot dust in the attic of a house that was being torn down, and again I am struck by how forgetfully I reduce to magic all of my hours and days. I do not pay these visions much heed but I never truly misplace them. If you do not know this, you should know that I have twelve toenails, whereas my kin possess a bonny ten.

Or you should know that I've never understood anyone who saw a place as lacking. Ocean Springs was seasonally overtaken by weeks of wind that undid ships and shrimping families, it was possessed by red tides that found every fish in the ocean to beach as an offering, it was alive with fiddler crabs that crossed dark streets and polluted ditches and frogs that found their ways into swimming pools to sleep and die. Waukegan was a somnolent and violent town of frozen Latin families and their pink and baby blue grocery stores that held stuffed roosters and pinatas and pasta formed in the shape of stars and religious figures. Shimer found itself in a neighborhood of haunted houses in varying stages of destruction, where classrooms had chandeliers and fireplaces, and the dorm bore the fantastical name Evwill and the echoing building's past identity as tuberculosis hospitals left a formaldehyde touch to readings of the Angelic Doctor. Milwaukee asks us to refuse to forget it as the wind and snow create ice castles on the screens of the windows, it presents us with a million bars and bowling alleys to hold us until violets and daffodils throw us violently out into a world populated with more than just service industry kids who have developed a frightening addiction to icebergs and novellas.

Is it true that physical, genetic mutation is also a parable that tells us that what we saw out of the corners of our eyes and read with our fingertips tells us more about what is hiding in our bones and under our skin?

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:17:49 GMT

At my job I often finish a transaction with "Enjoy!" and always flash to Zizek's view of the injunction to enjoy and how prohibitive it is of actual enjoyment. This is a good example of one of the many secret ways I am a monster.
My mind is eaten by termites and I largely blame my sister for this. When we were tiny babes she would vigorously insist "You aren't Anna, I'm Anna. You're Morgan." Naturally, this terrified me. At that young age she was the only other being I saw as fully human and it was plausible that as we were the only two beings alive we could in fact be each other. That came out a little confused because it was confusing. Anyhow, it also serves to illustrate how Confused I've always been about whether the truth was true.

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:13:09 GMT

When the shit hit the fan when I was a kid I always knew I had a fairy godmother who was magic and did magic tricks and had sparkly face paint and was a wild woman and even if she couldn't fix whatever happened she could come to our house and put up a tent in the front yard and give me piggyback rides everywhere I wanted and didn't want to go. When I was older and going through my awkward adolescence she was my only refuge and every summer I slept on her hammock and ate her grape tomatoes and learned about bats and drumming and how to make wontons.
Things have happened that are terrible enough that my mother tells me that she is tired of me being brave all the time and everyone in my family tells me to call Louise, my godmother. And I won't. Because I'm an adult now and I don't want to go running to her for every terrible thing and because I don't believe in fairies or fairy godmothers anymore. And of all the terrible things isn't that just the worst?

Allelu allukelele

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 02:53:14 GMT

It must be admitted that most of my secrets are physical, that I am uncomfortable with religion and make others also uncomfortable with my collection of Jesus's, that I have very little interest in doing anything useful with my life (that has only recently become true), and that I have increasing doubts that summer is ever going to arrive. Also: I admit that I am frightfully fond of Milwaukee's blue collar shtick.