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If an apple could finish Adam, they could knock me off with a grape
Yesterday I went to hear a semi-staged reading of a dystopian sci-fi musical satire. It was a great deal of fun. It was also a workshop: there were surveys to fill out and a talkback afterward. I have no idea if anything I said was valuable, but apparently the bit where I confessed to having a thing for "grandiosely geeky second-string villains" was entertaining. Bits of the score are still stuck in my head.
Today I sneezed and broke my life: I sorted a box of papers dating back to 2008 and then I had to cancel my plans for the evening. (Which always makes me feel like a complete fruit loop. Yes, I'm totally around, except for how I'm suddenly not.) I have been self-medicating with Margery Allingham, but Tiny Wittgenstein has parked himself on my shoulder and he is a persistent little neurosis. Also, I don't think we have the same taste in mysteries.
I think I am mostly annoyed. I've been sorting papers for the last few days; I hate it, but it hadn't been so draining or depressing as to render me incapable of human interaction. I can't tell if this one went too far back in time or whether it was a cumulative effect. I'm hoping it's short-lived. The only upside has been finding all the notes I took (and in some cases never did anything with), sharply-pencilled legal pages for the most part, which I have set aside in a stack of their own. Some of them turned into poems. Some of them, I have no idea.
Because for half a second a ghost
spoke out of the consoling, congratulating babble
Or they play still in the underworld
a slight and scholar-haired Orpheus
in a solid-striped sweater
He said, "Not all musicians know the way to the underworld."
is because when the chest is opened, it contains not only the physical heart of Davy Jones, but all the memories of his love for Calypso—letters, trinkets, tokens of affection buried and toxic; it is wonderfully metaphoric on different levels. The way it is impossible to forget a person with reminders of them all around. The way a heart may be carried like a locket. The way some things hurt too much to keep even their echoes close.
The Dybbuk at the Theater
He could never be found for curtain calls
Melitta
(Pythia) 4?
In the midrash not even the three angels of the [amulet] know, Lilith threw and turned Adam from the riverbanks of Eden, not her rib but her fingerprints (to structure him a template) anchor him human
As if you were a golem until we met
As if you were a golem until that day
I kissed your forehead and printed there
the characters of all our kind who return
to clay, red figures on the last black ground.
Semoy
Semanoy
Semangelof
What I love about English as a language to write in—although I miss features of other languages, particularly the juxtapositions and rhythms afforded by inflected languages—is the precision afforded by its wealth of vocabulary. I don't select for academe; I select for exactness.
Ranuccio Farnese
Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, "Head of a Young Man Looking Down to the Left"
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, "A Centaur Carrying off a Fauness"
Giuseppi Varotti, "A Banquet Scene"
palissander
bleu mazarine
Come ghost out of the machine, Christopher,
the last of the boyish icons put to bed
with a glass of milk and an apple,
saintly safe.
and censorious Cato repeating
delenda est
until no one remembers the god
of the children we burned.
A book of water runs between your fingers,
a book of earth shapes page and spine as turned,
a book of fire, closing, falls to embers,
a book of air is the draw of breath:
its covers shut
I am the fire all your hearts burn in.
I'm going back to Dancers in Mourning (1937). At least I had a month.
Today I sneezed and broke my life: I sorted a box of papers dating back to 2008 and then I had to cancel my plans for the evening. (Which always makes me feel like a complete fruit loop. Yes, I'm totally around, except for how I'm suddenly not.) I have been self-medicating with Margery Allingham, but Tiny Wittgenstein has parked himself on my shoulder and he is a persistent little neurosis. Also, I don't think we have the same taste in mysteries.
I think I am mostly annoyed. I've been sorting papers for the last few days; I hate it, but it hadn't been so draining or depressing as to render me incapable of human interaction. I can't tell if this one went too far back in time or whether it was a cumulative effect. I'm hoping it's short-lived. The only upside has been finding all the notes I took (and in some cases never did anything with), sharply-pencilled legal pages for the most part, which I have set aside in a stack of their own. Some of them turned into poems. Some of them, I have no idea.
Because for half a second a ghost
spoke out of the consoling, congratulating babble
Or they play still in the underworld
a slight and scholar-haired Orpheus
in a solid-striped sweater
He said, "Not all musicians know the way to the underworld."
is because when the chest is opened, it contains not only the physical heart of Davy Jones, but all the memories of his love for Calypso—letters, trinkets, tokens of affection buried and toxic; it is wonderfully metaphoric on different levels. The way it is impossible to forget a person with reminders of them all around. The way a heart may be carried like a locket. The way some things hurt too much to keep even their echoes close.
The Dybbuk at the Theater
He could never be found for curtain calls
Melitta
(Pythia) 4?
In the midrash not even the three angels of the [amulet] know, Lilith threw and turned Adam from the riverbanks of Eden, not her rib but her fingerprints (to structure him a template) anchor him human
As if you were a golem until we met
As if you were a golem until that day
I kissed your forehead and printed there
the characters of all our kind who return
to clay, red figures on the last black ground.
Semoy
Semanoy
Semangelof
What I love about English as a language to write in—although I miss features of other languages, particularly the juxtapositions and rhythms afforded by inflected languages—is the precision afforded by its wealth of vocabulary. I don't select for academe; I select for exactness.
Ranuccio Farnese
Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, "Head of a Young Man Looking Down to the Left"
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, "A Centaur Carrying off a Fauness"
Giuseppi Varotti, "A Banquet Scene"
palissander
bleu mazarine
Come ghost out of the machine, Christopher,
the last of the boyish icons put to bed
with a glass of milk and an apple,
saintly safe.
and censorious Cato repeating
delenda est
until no one remembers the god
of the children we burned.
A book of water runs between your fingers,
a book of earth shapes page and spine as turned,
a book of fire, closing, falls to embers,
a book of air is the draw of breath:
its covers shut
I am the fire all your hearts burn in.
I'm going back to Dancers in Mourning (1937). At least I had a month.
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I say so, and I usually win. Unless it's my wife.
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That is an adorable image.
And then there can be another month of non-krep.
Fine by me.
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Well, Tiny Radclyffe Hall is Selkie's.
Besides, maybe it will give them something to do besides pester me.
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(especially the shifty-eyed coffee-bucket).
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Oh, God, yes.
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(love your LJ username)
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. . . I have to come up with a Wittgenstein drink now. I feel as though this will require research.
(There will be maraschino cherries. You can't fit Carmen Miranda's hat into a martini glass, but you can at least nod as it goes by.)
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"I have no taste in women," Tiny Radclyffe Hall replied, tinily. "So I just take 'em where I find 'em, and poor Una gets the worst of it. I am an invert, did you know? Wah."
"My dear lady, I thought you were a duck. Or possibly a rabbit."
"....wafer biscuit?"
"No, thank you. I have not been sufficiently brilliant today, and even if I were to publish today's findings, in the long run they would not stand up to scrutiny. I will take my coffee without a biscuit, and black, like my bruised heart."
"Mine is bruiseder! I am an invert!"
"Oh, so is everybody. I boffed David Hume's great-great-grandson!"
"How did that work out for you?"
"He died in the War."
"Wah!"
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Actually, this actively improves my day.
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I am glad.
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