The Morning After

Thanks all: it was a fun night out with old friends, drinking and dining. Among the gifts: a shot glass from Utah (hehehe), a green shirt, a miniature Edwardian solarium, and a copy of the new Stanley Kunitz poetry/garden memoir The Wild Braid. In thanks, I recited a Frank O'Hara poem by heart. And now it's back to work . . . ah, Monday.

Officially Middle-aged

Well, today is the big "46." I guess I am now offically middle-aged. It's been a quiet day so far: while Dean was at work, I puttered in the yard, helped typeset some of the next issue of Pontoon with Ted, then watched some of the gay Pride Parade on Broadway. Tonight we are going out to dinner with several friends at Bistro 1200, one of my favorite restaurants. Yum yum! I can hardly wait!

Concordance

I got the link to the Concordance program from Steven. Amazon still hasn't posted it for Saying the World (I sent them the forms almost two months ago). So I was happy to be able to do this myself. Here is what I got (after eliminating all the common articles and conjunctions and prepositions, unless they seemed unusual.) It'll be interesting to try this on my next book (which is still in the works).

What do I find interesting? The top words in Saying the World are: first, life, father, mother; which I guess makes sense in a book that has a lot of family and medical stuff in it. The top three colors: blue, white, red (my, how patriotic). The top three body parts: face, eyes, hand & hair (tie). Most frequent time of day: morning. Why does "car" appear so often! jeez. I thought there would be more "blood" and "baby."

Saying the World
Unique words = 3144 Total words = 9541
rank word freq
43 First 25
52 life 19
60 say 17
68 father 14
69 mother 14
70 open 14
72 room 14
77 face 13
78 light 13
79 long 13
80 remember 13
81 time 13
82 up 13
84 years 13
86 blue 12
87 Car 12
88 eyes 12
89 morning 12
90 perhaps 12
91 red 12
93 white 12
94 door 11
95 dead 11
98 hand 11
99 hair 11
100 last 11
101 Next 11
105 three 11
106 way 11
107 wonder 11
108 Yet 11
109 amid 10
110 blood 10
111 baby 10

These "Conundrums" are really fascinating (and a bit disturbing). I'd love to find a way to make a poem from them. 

When Is a Hen on the Fence Like a Penny?

Saw these antique cigarette cards on Aimee Nez's blog. Check 'em out here. They're very cool.


When is a Hen on the Fence Like a Penny?

I Wanted to be The Fool . . .

. . . but I like the idea of "milking pleasure."


You are the Sun card. The light of the Sun reveals
all. The Sun is joyful and bright, without fear
or reservation. The childish nature of the Sun
allows you to play and feel free. Exploration
can truly take place in the light of day when
nothing is hidden. The Sun's rays fill you with
energy so that you may live life to its
fullest, milking pleasure out of each day. Such
joy and energy can bring wealth and physical
pleasure. To shine in the light of day is to
have confidence, to soak up its rays is to feel
the freedom of a child. Image from: Stevee
Postman. http://www.stevee.com/


Which Tarot Card Are You?
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Let's Try It On the Dog

These are the dog days of summer
and like a dog in a manger I am living a dog's
portion of a dog's life in this dog-eat-dog
town, dogging it in a doggery, a salty
dog in my hand, drinking the hair
of the dog that bit me.

Dog-tired, dog-faced, the dog ends
of my dog days in a dogged heap;
dog-cheap in my dog collared shirt,
my dog Latin would make a damn dog laugh,
or at least a blue dog blush.

Dressed like a dog's dinner, walking
like a dog in shoes while you top dogs
put on the dog, my dog feelings tell me
the smell of the dog is upon me —
I've been given the dog to hold.

An easy thing to find a stick
to beat a dog. But dog on it! This dog's
body is hanging on till the last dog is hung.
And I'll walk the black dog on
till you blow your dogs off.

These are the dog days of summer.
Sirius, the dog star, rises over
this dog's breakfast as if to ask:
Whose dog is dead? Next time,
let's let sleeping dog's lie.


*

What Verse Form Are You?

I'm terza rima, and I talk and smile. Where others lock their rhymes and thoughts away I let mine out, and chatter all the while. I'm rarely on my own - a wasted day Is any day that's spent without a friend, With nothing much to do or hear or say. I like to be with people, and depend On company for being entertained; Which seems a good solution, in the end. What Poetry Form Are You?

Mysterious Skin

Dean and I went to see Mysterious Skin last night. It was directed by Gregg Araki and won the Golden Space Needle Award at the recent Seattle International Film Festival. What a lovely disturbing film this is! Joseph Gorden-Levitt (of Third Rock From the Sun fame) stars as a young man who was abused as an eight-year old by his Little League coach, and grows up to become a male hustler. His parallel character, who was also abused by the same coach, but suppresses it, becomes an asexual nerd, obsessed about dreams of being abducted by aliens. The final scene is a tour de force, where the two of them meet again, as 19 year-olds, and come to terms with their shared past. Some scenes of the movie are violent and difficult, but it is always graced with a sublime and honest sense of the absurd, and is definitely worth seeing.

for Father's Day

Angel to Love, Man to World: My Father’s Great Books


He swore he would read them all — 54 hefty volumes, plus
a yearly update, each with its own gold-embossed author.
They’re better than encyclopedias, he would say. It’s like
having all the world’s geniuses at your fingertips.
He was going to follow the Ten-Year Plan, begin with
Hamlet, for instance, or St. Augustine’s Confessions, before
diving into The Decline and Fall — finally get the good
liberal education he never had. Sunday afternoons
he’d pick one color-coded volume: pale yellow for Literature,
dark green for Science, red or blue for History or Philosophy,
and promptly fall asleep in his recliner, the dog-eared first page
folded upon his chest. During the week, my brothers
and I would pile Descartes, Spinoza, Cervantes, Darwin,
to bank the tracks of our electric racecars; my sisters
would practice balancing Herodotus, Thucydides, or Galen
upon head-banded heads, see how solemnly they could posture
around the house, return the prized volumes to their case
before father came home to check for any mischief. Before long
he had collected glossy paperbacks to learn himself
Contracts & Finance, Home Remodeling, Do-It-Yourself
Haircuts. His Great Books moved to a spot in the hall,
holding up a vase of plastic geraniums. The pair of Indexes,
with their intriguing titles: Angel to Love,
Man to World, stacked with the only update my father
ever bought: 1961 — as if time and history had stopped
with Kennedy’s Election, Seventeen New Nations in Africa,
Mass Culture, and The Youth Explosion.



*

Houston, we have a problem: The inverted house.

The Old Woman and the Physician

One of the more unusual Aesop's Fables, but one of my favorites:


AN OLD WOMAN having lost the use of her eyes, called in a
Physician to heal them, and made this bargain with him in the
presence of witnesses: that if he should cure her blindness, he
should receive from her a sum of money; but if her infirmity
remained, she should give him nothing. This agreement being
made, the Physician, time after time, applied his salve to her
eyes, and on every visit took something away, stealing all her
property little by little. And when he had got all she had, he
healed her and demanded the promised payment. The Old Woman,
when she recovered her sight and saw none of her goods in her
house, would give him nothing. The Physician insisted on his
claim, and, as she still refused, summoned her before the Judge.
The Old Woman, standing up in the Court, argued: "This man here
speaks the truth in what he says; for I did promise to give him a
sum of money if I should recover my sight: but if I continued
blind, I was to give him nothing. Now he declares that I am
healed. I on the contrary affirm that I am still blind; for when
I lost the use of my eyes, I saw in my house various chattels and
valuable goods: but now, though he swears I am cured of my
blindness, I am not able to see a single thing in it."

Dominant? Me?

Or is it "dominate me . . . ?"


You have a dominant kiss- you take charge and make
sure your partner can feel it! Done artfully,
it can be very satisfactory if he/she is into
you playing the dominant role MEORW!


What kind of kiss are you?
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One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

Dean and I are going to see queer novelist D. Travers Scott, a local writer and friend of ours, read from his new novel, One of These Things is Not Like the Other, tonight at 7pm at Bailey-Coy Books on Capitol Hill. He is on the bill to read with Chilean-Canadian writer Francisco Ibanez-Carrasco.

Here is an excerpt from a review in the Miami Weekly News:

"No one should ever accuse Seattle-based writer D. Travers Scott of playing it safe. His latest novel, “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other” (Suspect Thoughts Press, paperback, $16.95), is one seriously fucked-up piece of storytelling. (Please note, that’s said with admiration.) I defy anyone to find the familiar in his tale of quadruplet brothers – all named Jake Barnes.

The identical brothers were raised in isolation by their father (also Jake Barnes), and operate under the family mythology that their mother died when they were born. Their individuality was muzzled until they collectively made a break from their dad and settled into vastly different lives.

When dear ol’ dad commits suicide, he leaves behind the message that one of them is an outsider born to a different woman; and the four boys began unraveling every shred of information about their lives to solve the puzzle. Scott shifts the perspective among the brothers, focusing on each of their differences as he drags them toward a collision with the truth.

Brutal, twisted and sometimes completely frustrating, “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other” is a meditation on identity that requires a healthy suspension of disbelief. While its parts might be greater than the sum, it’s rare to come across a writer this fearless and original."

*

Ten Things

This meme has been making the rounds. "Ten things you probably don't know about me:"

I can't swim.
I can't whistle.
I can't dance.
I was the badminton champion of my high school PE class.
I waited tables to put myself through college.
I also recorded textbooks for the blind.
I had two older brothers and two older sisters, two younger brothers and two younger sisters: a true middle child.
I used to write fiction and have published a few short stories.
I prefer Chekov over WCW.
I'd love to write a play.