The Loneliest Job in the World

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?,

and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.

-Tony Hoagland

Poem for People That Are Understandably Too Busy to Read Poetry

Relax. This won't last long.
Or if it does, or if the lines
make you sleepy or bored,
give in to sleep, turn on
the T.V., deal the cards.
This poem is built to withstand
such things. Its feelings
cannot be hurt. They exist
somewhere in the poet,
and I am far away.
Pick it up anytime. Start it
in the middle if you wish.
It is as approachable as melodrama,
and can offer you violence
if it is violence you like. Look,
there's a man on a sidewalk;
the way his leg is quivering
he'll never be the same again.
This is your poem
and I know you're busy at the office
or the kids are into your last nerve.
Maybe it's sex you've always wanted.
Well, they lie together
like the party's unbuttoned coats,
slumped on the bed
waiting for drunken arms to move them.
I don't think you want me to go on;
everyone has his expectations, but this
is a poem for the entire family.
Right now, Budweiser
is dripping from a waterfall,
deodorants are hissing into armpits
of people you resemble,
and the two lovers are dressing now,
saying farewell.
I don't know what music this poem
can come up with, but clearly
it's needed. For it's apparent
they will never see each other again
and we need music for this
because there was never music when he or she
left you standing on the corner.
You see, I want this poem to be nicer
than life. I want you to look at it
when anxiety zigzags your stomach
and the last tranquilizer is gone
and you need someone to tell you
I'll be here when you want me
like the sound inside a shell.
The poem is saying that to you now.
But don't give anything for this poem.
It doesn't expect much. It will never say more
than listening can explain.
Just keep it in your attache case
or in your house. And if you're not asleep
by now, or bored beyond sense,
the poem wants you to laugh. Laugh at
yourself, laugh at this poem, at all poetry.
Come on:

Good. Now here's what poetry can do.

Imagine yourself a caterpillar.
There's an awful shrug and, suddenly,
You're beautiful for as long as you live.

-Stephen Dunn

the truth

all bullshit

i'm still in bed

here's a mix of songs i've been listening to or thinking about lately on this path into fall. fall, when all listening sounds new despite the old and decaying scenery:

1. citizen cope - back together
2. white rabbits - percussion gun
3. animal collective - bluish
4. solomon burke - none of us are free
5. sly & the family stone - just like a baby
6. sam cooke - a change is gonna come
7. belle & sebastian - if you're feeling sinister
8. allen ginsburg - a supermarket in california (as i found myself in key foods at midnight on thursday)
9. brightblack morning light - everybody daylight
10. talk talk - the rainbow
11. slint - breadcrumb trail
12. portishead- roads
13. interpol - untitled

http://tinyurl.com/yer8q9r

shit

i'm embarrassed i like this song/video as much as i do, so obviously i have to assuage that here.



the background choreography for this video is so over-sexed, and what's with the guy doing flips off of everything? but whatever, it's still no single ladies.

Sudden nostalgia for 2005 after re-discovering my livejournal. Years and years of triteness and sarcastic melodrama. Even the user name, a dagger to my already bleeding heart (_goodbyelove). Hilarious and so glad it's there for me. Was that before blogging was cool? In effect, was I cooler as my high school self?

Let me take this opportunity to say

that the tightening in my chest only reminds me of those autumn months. The ones coming, the ones you don't quite know in New York. I remember coming home from college for the first time two autumns ago. Caroline and I sat smoking cigarettes on the beach, my orange moccasins, and what we felt was something short of invincible. But maybe this is the way I chose to remember it.

For the first time this week I read an essay of Joan Didion's: "On Keeping a Notebook" in which she admits to the same theory of fallacy to which I have been subscribing for years. I write about the lake house in its oneiric capacities--the sweet wild spearmint, washing in the lake--yet fail to mention that I have been there but twice, that by night I am afraid of the overwhelming hush.

But let Didion say it. It only appears long and reads like your thoughts.

http://www.ranablog.com/pdfs/didion.pdf

I BELIEVE IN NAKED TIME

it's been too hard living, but i'm afraid to die

i can't stop listening to sam cooke's "a change is gonna come", which he wrote after his son died. i'm leaving for west virginia in the a.m. it's been a while, 2 years and some change, but enough time to really change a lot of things. a second is enough time to really change a lot of things.

i'm laying belly down on the carpet, it smells musky and there's a boy lightly snoring on my bed. it's been a long time coming, but i know a change is gonna come.

***

What Can be Given

The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only in that moment...a story is different.
-Walter Benjamin, Illuminations


Several months ago when my grandfather called to say that at the age of 88 he was leaving Florida, my mother vowed we would visit as soon as possible; so for the Thanksgiving holiday, my family and I, including our Maltese-Poodle Sammy, bundle into our comfortable sudan to make the nine hour drive to West Virginia. As I throw my bag into the trunk and climb into the back seat, I catch my brothers' disdainful glance. We know what we ride towards will not be as much a reunion as it will be a showcase of grandfather's ennui, which has been exponentially increasing since he married his third wife, June, in 2000. We drive. Country unfolds all around and there is no cell phone reception. The car's digital navigating system tells us we have arrived at our destination but it is too dark to see any roads stemming from the route we travel.
Two hours later than anticipated, our arrival is marked by homemade Irish coffees and a tour of the new house, pre-furnished and punctual, which rests on a plot of land that June's family has owned for generations. In the front of the plot, closest to the gnarled road, is her brother's house, theirs in the middle, and her sister's in the rear—a comfortable establishment where each couple can care for and share with each other, be it meals or around-the-house help. For lack of bedrooms, I sleep on a blow-up mattress in the living room.
* * *
Upon moving to New York City, I began a search, an intrusive search, through second-hand bookstores and flea markets for misplaced personal journals or diaries. I wanted these books I sought to act as some form of muse to me as a writer. One winterslick night as I shuffled down a Brooklyn sidewalk, I found a blue notebook half shrouded in dirt; a godsend. The notebook was the school journal of a fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican Brooklynite, or so I have read. Her name is Anabella Torres and she is semi-literate. In the notebook, Anabella wrote about her goals and how she is going to reach them. She plans to do better for herself, she plans to get out of Bed-Sty although her entire family is there with her. The one word Anabella repeatedly misspells is “success.” Although there is a sense of grudging disdain in her words, there is also a sort of palpable neediness. What Anabella wrote to please her teacher, mantras towards prosperity, relays an authentic sense of struggle and desire for betterment. Her name and home address are written on the inside front cover and as often as I consider returning the book, I cannot overcome the feeling that she misplaced it with larger purpose.
* * *
I wake to gunshots—it is hunting season. Mom and I take Sammy for a walk as we explore the land. Sammy veers towards a fallen log and Mom follows. I notice how her red coat stands out against the tired browns and grays of an overcast November morning. Together we climb a cleared path on a hill to the west of the plot. The decaying leaves push into the earth under our feet. At the top of the hill there is a clearing and an oil rig and I find that my phone has reception for the first time in these stagnant days. Sammy runs around like mad, sniffing and exploring. Mom and I watch him scramble through the grass as his nose brings him to a finding. It is a vertebrae bone, considerable in size and misplaced. It begins to snow. Mom and Sam go back down the hill, but I stay, take a seat on the rig and make a call to a friend. She does not answer.
* * *
Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words II works eloquently in understatement as it is quite literally an act without words. The act opens to two men who are folded into their individual sleeping sacks alongside a neatly folded pile of clothes. From stage left, a mechanical goad appears to prod at the closest sack. A haggard man emerges. He stands, swallows a few pills from a bottle in his pocket, dresses in the clothes from the pile, kneels and prays, pulls his sack farther from where the goad appeared, undresses and leaves the clothes in a heap, takes pills, prays, sleeps. Again, the goad appears and prods the now closer, other sack. A clean-shaven man pops his head out and efficiently stands, dresses in the clothes from the heap, brushes his teeth, checks his watch, exercises, reads a pocket map, checks his watch, moves his sack farther from the goad, undresses, checks his watch, brushes his teeth, exercises, checks his watch, sleeps. Again the goad appears and prods the sack closest to it, the haggard man. He wakes and begins his routine and, mid-prayer, the lights cut to blackout. The act is over.
Rosemarie Waldrop's Alarms and Excursions also works with the poetic silence Beckett poses in this act. She writes, “But what do we not altogether say in what we say? Is it what we try to keep silent, what we cannot or will not say or precisely what we do want to say and what all we say hides...? For these unsaid things we are gravely responsible.” What goes without verbalization in this act—the belief in prayer, man's obsession with time, faith in waking—is communicated through motions. Perhaps it is our motions that say the most about our thoughts and our demeanor—how we offer a hand to a grieving friend, smile in sunlight, skate fingertips over a loved one, tilt the head towards a familiar, lost voice.
* * *
Later in the day, the six of us—mom, dad, brother, grandfather, dog, and I—make the drive from Sod to Nitro to see mom's great aunt. The outside of their house is more pleasant than the surrounding, ramshackle homes. We are greeted at the door and as we proceed through, she hugs and kisses mom, dad, brother, grandfather, pauses and looks at me puzzled, “You're not one of us.” She laughs reluctantly. I shrug. We sit in the living room, which is appropriately covered in family memorabilia and photographs. Mom takes the liberty of pointing me out to everybody in a picture from a family reunion when I could not yet walk. Grandfather takes a seat across the room. He, who is usually an adamant contributor to talk of family history, stays silent. His face lays long and heavy, his focus on something not present. There is talk of relatives whose names I have never heard; bodies who, in passing, I could not discern even on an empty street. We leave within the hour. There is a turkey to be prepared.
Back at the home scents of pumpkin pie, cranberry pilaf, and mashed potatoes stir in the air. We celebrate our Thanksgiving a day late due to school break and travel time, which causes it to fall on a Friday night, the Sabbath. My mother converted to Judaism after she married my father, not because she had to, but because she chose to, and my grandfather has always been respectful of this. He puts Sabbath candles on the table and my family says the prayers as we all join hands. Mom offers that we also say grace, and asks grandfather if he would like to lead. He shakes his head no as his eyes fill with tears.
* * *
On September 11, 2001 in his City apartment, William Basinski, a post-minimalist recording artist, transferred analog tape loops from the 1980's into digital format. Because of their age, Basinksi found that as the loops revolved, the magnetic tape disintegrated. With each revolution, bits of iron oxide fell from the tape, fragmenting the continual drone. Throughout the day, he transferred five different loops, the most compelling of which is DLP 4. The piece is a simple electronic keyboard drone, a few melancholy chords that seem to fold into and over themselves. What is fascinating about DLP 4 is the brevity with which it deteriorates. The piece continues for a mere 20 minutes, insubstantial to the nearly hour-long DLP 5. It is audible decay. What Basinski created that day was not only art, but also a requiem: chilling, prophetic, the ideal soundtrack for tragedy.
* * *
When I wake, everyone is seated around the kitchen table over homemade cinnamon buns and bowls of oatmeal. The talk is polite, but there is a stiffness in the air already. As I sit at the kitchen table and stir butter and sliced bananas into my oatmeal, grandfather breaks his silence and offers me the china that fills the kitchen cabinets. My entire life, he has been giving me things like this—porcelain dolls, plates, embroideries; knick-knacks for him to be remembered by. I accept the plates and then, for the second time, grandfather tells the story about how, one hunting trip, he shot four bucks. He includes every minute detail—how he saw them in the forest beyond the hood of his truck, how he moved in silence in order not to frighten them, how he left the door slightly ajar as to not make noise and also have a light to focus with. It occurs to me that grandfather holds this hunting accomplishment as the most empowering of his life, perhaps even the last time he felt alive. Grandfather has always been a storyteller. Although listening to his same stories repetitiously becomes grating on my brother and me, it illuminates the past we would otherwise never know.
One story which we have both been subjected to several times is one of grandfather's coal mining days. As a young teen, he worked in the coal shafts of Illinois. More sufferable than the threat of miner's lung was the shaft collapse he endured one day, black powder like smoke filling his breaths and fogging his sight as he struggled through a tunnel 50 feet underground. In his essay The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin muses, “The storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today “having counsel” is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing...after all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is unfolding.” What grandfather offers through his stories, especially that of the shaft collapse, is not only an awkward sort of counsel, but also the continuation of a legacy. With each story of his past, I begin to make sense of the man who sends me holiday cards and specially produced coins from the Franklin Mint. It is my task and my brother’s task to interpret his foreign life as we will. While I write essays that attempt to come to terms with the melancholic sense visiting brings me, my brother turns his stories into poetry. Once, he wrote on the shaft collapse not from my grandfather's perspective, but from his mothers' perspective. She, ignorant to the collapse, moves through her day as her son teeters on the margin of death. In this way, we become storytellers in our own right—daunted, uncertain, and naively discriminatory in our selections. Our whole visit is full of stories and grandfather's tiny side remarks about his waning health; how he just cannot do what he used to do. June tells us he thinks he is dying, but I acknowledge that I am dying.
After breakfast, we pack and give our goodbye's. As our car pulls down the dusty lot, grandfather and June wave from the porch. Half-way off of the plot, I look back to see that while June has gone inside, grandfather stands on the porch, his gaunt face shrouded in tears. Dad turns on the radio, snow falls, we drive forward.

the opposite of bullshit

got janis joplin's "summertime" in my head, shrill voice but the liquid/silk dance we did last summer... wish i could remember all of the steps, a stag here and there. why is it that at 4:37 am i miss dancing like that this much? i'm stuck on the motion/thrill.

it's been raining and grey for too many days, and i'm getting sick.

another semester down. i'm cracking my knuckles in the dark while vanessa tries to sleep.

like i've said, i've become less discriminatory about what i post here.

like i've said, i used to have valuable things to say.

real talk

i'm going to get myself in trouble

new and shamed love for myspace playlist feature (yes myspace, i know) but it's getting to be summertime. windows down and this kind of music. current choices include:

my girls - animal collective: obligatory and deserved nod to this perfect pop song. i just wanna pinch its cheeks.
ain't no grave - crooked still: mississippi shit, like midnight baptism. or maybe super walmart.
there she goes my beautiful world - nick cave & the bad seeds: made me realize i revolve my pleasure in songs around how much i enjoy driving to them.
ascension day - talk talk: sexy, this song is just sexy.
ivo - cocteau twins: due respect, dreamy fem voices. i want to eat mushrooms.
fast train - solomon burke: this song reminds me of the dance studio by summer; solitude, wood floor buckling with heat, windows open and lace white curtains.
lost in the paradise - caetano veloso: firefly eve, toes in neonite blue pool light. or maybe driving through queens at 101 degrees fahrenheit.

more & then more & then more of it.

He had more books than I've ever seen in all my life--...He played Vendi operas and pantomimed them in his pajamas with a great rip down the back. He didn't give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York Waterfront with original 17th century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. He lisped, he writher, he flopped, he moaned, he howled, he fell back in despair. He could barely get a word out, he was so excited with life.
-Jack Kerouac

Someone told me memories are now scientifically eraseable. What terror.

holy shit

and it's very hard to get a punchers (with tags!)

every girl's got one

i've become less discriminatory about what i say here

i miss summer glow, late nights spent with the windows open and the sometimes rain or 4 am sprinklers. it's raining now in new york but nothing feels new because of it. i don't know what to say; i've made it a long way on uncertainty. so much for tongues; i'm tired to the point of want & impossible things.

my window is open and what blows in smells like weed. oh, new york where a walk down the block smells sweet like that. oh, new york that i denigrate despite majesty.

SLUTTIN IT UP, a cordial invitation

Guys, I'm making my radio premiere tomorrow night which means you should attend. Beyond the fact that this is an occasion as historic as my summer barbeque's, it's a good and interesting interview. I don't know how to make this post not-awkward.

Anyway, listen to Citywide on 89.1 FM New York, or stream live from www.wnyu.org WEDNESDAY APRIL 1ST AT 7:30. do it. you won't regret it. and if you do, bitch me out on the Citywide blog.

hey hottay

REMEMBER YOUR ROOTS

"everyone's babbling and crying out about the sunshine downtown and taking long naps in it."

Lyyyyfe

Last night Vanessa and I talked about optimism and cynicism. Through 4 am haze she held a hand to herself and summed our conversation with, "I think I'm too optimistic to know bad. And, well, you're a cynic." Never before have I been called a cynic. It was a bit of a blow to my self-morale and I can only hope that she, who uses words loosely, did not really mean it. But in the event that she did, what can I do to assuage this? I think seeking a method to turn my potentially newfound cynicism into a joke is, in itself, optimistic. For example: I acknowledge that sitting on my ass with a jar of peanut butter while thinking about exercising is not an effective weight-loss tactic. I've thought before, and think again of writing a book, potentially pathetic and certainly trashy, much in the style of Bridget Jones' Diary but with a higher sort of intelligence, maybe, grieving all of this. How many times has Candace Bushnell done that before?

It's shitty outside. I left the apartment once today, walked down the block to Dag's and paid a hospital bills worth for two bananas, coffee, OJ, and seltzer. To elevate the pathos, my back seized up while waiting in line so then I shuffled back here, where all day I have been alternating between napping, coffee, and shuffling through papers to simulate work-doing. So this is life a la today. I'm waiting for the spring and El Sombrero's margaritas on-the-go, believing life will start again when it's warmer. With a sigh, I can say that I don't have to purposefully look for ways to liken myself to the nursing home outpatients that live in the building next door.

top chef

yo, it's dat love thang. LOVE CARLA

college pt. 2

sitting on the couch eating freeze dried banana chips. i don't know why i do this late thing, no benefits but my own time when everyone else is asleep. but i think i'm getting too old for this. i used to have valuable things to say.

in other news, my aerogarden rules.

tonight's serious debate

s old man d (not george clooney old, but walter matthau old)
or
s baby d (not baby as in small, but "newborn baby unit hospital" d)


go.



also,
pb and salsa apparently costs 10.15.

also,
i want a treehouse.

also,
stopped into the most swanckenist hotel with dann out of pure curiosity. there, the library out of beauty and the beast is a reality.

also,
last night i dreamt of a wind storm and a giant digital clock tied to the tree outside my window. all purple light and no poetry.


this is going nowhere.

i hereby claim this a word

PHONESIA (n.)- a partial or total loss of memory of information relayed over the telephone, often due to participation in simultaneous actions.

things that go unsaid

all i want is tea, orange, and comfort. ask me what i love, i love comfortable things. white beds, lavender, the sound rain makes over pavement. dancing not for the art of it but for the feeling. after-dinner coffee, the security of memory.


Self-Portrait With Red Eyes

Throughout our affair of eleven years,
disappearing into the pleasure-unto-death
acts I recall now as love and, afterward,
orbiting through the long, deep sleeps
in which memory, motor of everything,
reconstituted itself, I cared nothing about
life outside the walls of our bedroom.

The hand erasing writes the real thing,
and I am trying. I loved life and see now
this was weakness. I loved the little
births and deaths occurring in us daily.
Even the white spit on your sharp teeth
was the foam of love, saying to me: It is not true,
after all, that you were never loved.

-Henri Cole

JAGR: the power of influence