Just hanging there in gold stone

Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova, 1968) may be the weirdest film I have ever streamed off Netflix; rushthatspeaks and I watched it tonight and it actually blew our minds. I should be writing that it felt like Orthodox icons or elsewhere Tarot, that it did not abide by the usual perceptions of time or even foreign language, that it is either full of surrealism or full of gorgeous, estranging symbols for which we have no context or both in combination, and that it must share common ancestry with the work of Pasolini, because there is no evidence from either of our reading that Derek Jarman knew of Parajanov and Caravaggio (1986) looks like a direct line of descent. (Peter Greenaway, too. We were reminded also of Ulrike Ottinger's Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1989) and Dr. Seuss' The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953), but we think that last was coincidental. It was mostly the ladders.) Instead we seem to be looking at one another and repeating, "Sheep." You can check out Rush's report if you don't believe me. Kino International catalogue, God bless you.

This had better help with my writing something surprising enough to be worth Max Ernst.

And the subject's no Venus

I keep feeling that I have forgotten how to say anything. I should be used to it by now, but I also keep feeling that doesn't mean I have to like it.

The heat outside is stunning, both in the sense that it is impressive and that it makes you feel poleaxed. I sat on the front steps for a while with Puck of Pook's Hill and so long as I didn't move, I could remain in bare equilibrium with the hundred and one degrees Fahrenheit. When I walked ten feet to meet the postman (I got paid for a poem), I started to overheat.

teenybuffalo found this photo of me from the Rhysling Slan on Saturday. Speaking of stunned, I look like a case of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. My hair is not, in most lights, actually that color. (Naturally, I think everyone else looks fine.)

On Mass. Ave., there is a bus stop near the Arlington-Cambridge line whose name, thanks to the prerecorded quality of the speakers on the 77, always sounds like "Carhouse Yates." It's not, but I have decided this must be a character's name. You should wonder whether the first part is given or a colorful story and no one, including his biographers, should ever be able to find out.

I wish I were in the sea.