the pith and gist

Come on now: dent de lion, red dress, May sixth, more ska.

Mon, 06 May 2013 17:36:00 -0400

Come on now: dent de lion, red dress, May sixth, more ska.

The snipers are harder to see, my friends.

Fri, 03 May 2013 16:18:00 -0400

The snipers are harder to see, my friends.

that’s right it’s springtime baby grass is green and...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:31:16 -0400

that’s right it’s springtime baby grass is green and shit the whip the whip the whip

wavepoetry: Joe Wenderoth

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 13:22:54 -0400

wavepoetry:

Joe Wenderoth

I have to make a fairly big decision and I’m very bad at doing that and fairly to very bad at...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 02:08:00 -0400

I have to make a fairly big decision and I’m very bad at doing that and fairly to very bad at making mostly all the small ones.

There are yeses and noes to be had or said that look foolish in plurals and don’t even exist yet but seem immanent and dense in what I don’t know to call my neck or my back and I am wide awake.

I’m going to New Orleans and I’m going in the spirit...

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 18:55:00 -0500

I’m going to New Orleans and I’m going in the spirit of the patron saint of pearls of girls and girls in fake pearls and of the Gulf Coast and the wrong train, of whiskey from glass bottles sweated out on sequins, of put your hand on your hip. Of big plastic glasses bad skin full tilt real ruin: cry cry baby, feather boa, pretty whistles, inked wristlet, a long strand of little gold bells.

Can you feel it? ...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:31:27 -0500

Can you feel it?

Photo

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 12:39:05 -0500

“Howdi ther Rins said Maybell blushed like a flouar while we were all sitting there in that...

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:05:12 -0500

“Howdi ther Rins said Maybell blushed like a flouar while we were all sitting there in that rainy trailer, pounding at the gates of American literature.”

from 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 by Richard Brautigan

It’s my birthday!

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 22:01:56 -0500

It’s my birthday!

Photo

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:15:25 -0400

This heat has reduced my wardrobe to a handful of cotton dresses with high hemlines and wide skirts...

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 17:36:09 -0400

This heat has reduced my wardrobe to a handful of cotton dresses with high hemlines and wide skirts that make me look both eight months pregnant and nine years old. To summertime!

So it’s hot outside! Caveat: this caliber of heat drops a lassitude and a resignedness on me, pulls...

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 11:19:29 -0400

So it’s hot outside! Caveat: this caliber of heat drops a lassitude and a resignedness on me, pulls an apocalyptic caul over the shape of things here and things to come. There’s a heat advisory today and the Illinois EPA issued an air quality alert. It’s an ozone action day today and it’s never going to rain again and we’re all going to die melting and screaming!

A riddle: stay calm, and without sweating it, in a tiny way daily save the world itself. How to ride your bike to work without exerting yourself. How to get to an air conditioned area and turn off all the air conditioners. Do a thing and its opposite pops out of it, you can’t help that. But I’ve got old and best-loved friends on their way to this city for my best friend in the tall wide world’s party and we’ll act as if this murderous heat isn’t happening because shake your head and wipe your brow and live it up and dance it off, I mean, what to do when we’ve driven the world into a tight hot corner but do our tiny best and dance in that corner together.

It's my way to the highway.

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 14:31:18 -0400

Last night I sat with a woman who sang songs loudly, out of nowhere, with the wrong words. To sit is to sit and stop a woman from biting her forearms or banging her head into her bedframe or scratching open again her suicide-attempt-soon-to-be-scars or asphyxiating herself with a pillowcase, to sit and watch the woman sleep while she sleeps, to not fall asleep while she sleeps, to sit and read, to sit and stare out the window as she did not want to talk but did not want me to read until she fell asleep.

She sang “Janie’s Got a Gun.” She sang, “Janie’s got a gun/She’s gonna knock/You in the head with that gun.”

In the place where anyone else who says that sort of thing would say “It’s my way or the highway,” she said “It’s my way to the highway.” I like that, no ultimatum and no option but a hand up, a help out, one way to get somewhere else together without question.

I guess the closest word to what he is is neighbor, this old man with nine teeth who lives in his...

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 15:46:46 -0400

I guess the closest word to what he is is neighbor, this old man with nine teeth who lives in his car outside my proper neighbor’s house all day long, listening to blown-out car speaker salsa and reading the newspaper, then sits on their front steps with them all evening. Every morning while I’m putting dogshit in a bag he says to me, “Hey Mommy.” He’s Puerto Rican but the inflection isn’t “Mamí” like he speaks Spanish and thinks I’m sexy, it’s “Mommy” like we’re both English-only and he’s an adult-sized infant with a mustache and the ability to speak and wants to breastfeed, every morning and what is that, it is awful.

Photo

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:41:20 -0400

Video

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:03:55 -0400

These two strangely have the look of...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:05:43 -0500

These two strangely have the look of lovers.

fotojournalismus:

Riot police detain a student during a protest against the government to demand changes in the public state education system in Valparaiso city, about 121 km (75 miles) northwest of Santiago, February 2, 2012.

[Credit : Eliseo Fernandez/Reuters]

My alarm clock is set to RADIO. The first four words I heard...

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:26:00 -0500

My alarm clock is set to RADIO. The first four words I heard yesterday were “urinating on dead bodies.” I thought about this all day: the phrase, the act, it is that bad, the world talks about it, the world’s on the radio, the world and urine and videos and bodies in videos and words on the radio. I heard, selling like hotcakes. And, it’s really coming down out there. And it did all evening while I worked. I watched it. Chicago looks like a winter Bruegel from the top floors of the hospital. A woman pressed her forehead to the back of my hand, her one hand in both of mine and blood really came down from a knot on the crown of her head, from her boyfriend, from their bodies at their worst and the world is, what is it. There was a massacre at My Lai but our army called it Pinkville and it took a year and a half to call My Lai a massacre rather than a good job. See the photographs of what happened and believe they play the dumbshow for a travesty of human decency and evidence an aberration, or, don’t kid yourself, another fact entirely: that our idea of decency is largely travesty itself, a happy puppet’s dance, a child’s fiction. The White House acts now to call this “deplorable, reprehensible, and unacceptable.” The department of defense says “this is egregious, disgusting behaviour. It’s hideous.” It is. But pointing at a thing and calling it by name is a big step for a baby, not an adequate response to a war crime, and by the time the unacceptable is called as much it’s been accepted.

Last night I set my alarm clock, again, and in the time it took to turn the dial to RADIO I heard, a precise snippet, the four words “urinating on the corpses.” In advertising I think they call that symmetry a donut but that’s not right. Donut means sweet and a hole in the middle. Point at it. You can call those dead bodies dead bodies or corpses or failures, say what you want on the radio, they were down and bloodied on the desert ground. In advertising, in irony or hindsight, we can use the whole of language to point out and at and name just what we want to say we see. Bruegel painted town scenes and the tower of Babel. Act now and build your bloodless own with words and art as a toddler at its blocks. High enough the world will look only dun and and dark and white.

If I ever get that chance to travel through time, I’m...

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:43:23 -0500

If I ever get that chance to travel through time, I’m bound without a second’s thought for the Harlem Square Club, January 12, 1963 to dance to Sam Cooke singing live. I’d kept my New Year’s resolutions down to two, and a secret, but they were as follows: one, to put my hand on my hip, and two, to let my backbone slip. That sounds flippant, but I meant it, the best of life happens in a state of deep play, of high song, in a dance, in the brain of the body that’s dancing. Listen to this album and even two resolutions seem superfluous and I have just one, this: Don’t fight the feeling.