aboveboard of a thieveries and of a posturings

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:30:22 GMT

In my dream last night I came across an old french horn, the mouth piece was busted, the body was bizarre, but I figured out, over the course of the dream, walking through places with changing people who seemed both bemused and to discourage me (but somehow of a sad distant jealousy) how to play with perfect beauty The Ballad Of A Sad Young Man.

Ballad Of A Sad Young Man:

And so I just kept walking around playing it.

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 03:15:58 GMT

ON THE SEARCH FOR RASPUTIN'S WANG

by Derek Phillips

The legend tells us that it’s eight to ten inches long,
which was unimpressive to the girls before they realized
that’s fully flaccid and soaked in formaldehyde
for eighty-seven years. Yeah, it was found
in a wooden casket by some maid in the palace
at which Rasputin was poisoned, bludgeoned, shot
and drowned, which was a miraculous discovery,
considering there are no reports of his dismemberment.
And after years of being worshipped in France
like a fertility goddess, Rasputin’s wang is home
in the St. Petersburg Museum of Erotica,
where it continues to have magical healing
capabilities. Just being in its presence will cure
your impotence, herpes, urinary tract infections
and any other dong-related ailment you could think
of. And it was at this point in the story where I could
feel the interest in the room building, as the guys
began to look at one another and wonder
to themselves if Rasputin’s wang would have
any effect on size, stamina and confidence, would it
take away the awkwardness of being twenty-one
and naked before a woman who could laugh
at you in another language. And I found myself
thinking Rasputin’s wang could show me how things
would have been different with that Russian girl
if I allowed myself to come instead of shyly
hammering away until the condom broke.
And remembered how lonely one could feel
being inside of another person. So I and a guy
named Miami George asked directions
from every postal employee, homeless veteran
and scummy-looking passerby, though none
could give the whereabouts of Rasputin’s holy penis.
Maybe if they knew, things in Russia would be
different. It would fix a declining birthrate,
for example, maybe change the sexually abusive nature
of its men that makes the women want to fuck Americans,
who likewise prove inadequate, crying as soon
as they’re touched and so forth. Rasputin’s wang,
if you are listening, how can I be honest with myself
and still dole out the good and necessary
punishment. Tell me whose curse this is.

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 03:00:05 GMT

THE SHIPS STILL SAIL

by Bob Mohrbacher

The river is on fire
Yet the ships still sail.

They lumber slowly from the docks
Where they have gorged on grain,
On coal, on every saleable
Commodity.

We sail into fire
But the flames don’t touch us.
They part before us like fog,
Always thickest just that far ahead.

On deck, we coil ropes
Thicker than our arms,
Looking to the weather.

The fire is tomorrow
And our brawny youth
Is still invincible.

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:31:16 GMT

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:02:31 GMT

WHAT SHE WAS WEARING

by Denver Butson

this is my suicide dress
she told him
I only wear it on days
when I’m afraid
I might kill myself
if I don’t wear it

you’ve been wearing it
every day since we met
he said

and these are my arson gloves
so you don’t set fire to something?

he asked

exactly

and this is my terrorism lipstick
my assault and battery eyeliner
my armed robbery boots

I’d like to undress you he said
but would that make me an accomplice?

and today she said I’m wearing
my infidelity underwear
so don’t get any ideas

and she put on her nervous breakdown hat
and walked out the door

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:01:48 GMT

THE DEAD POET

by Lord Alfred Douglas

I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face
All radiant and unshadowed of distress,
And as of old, in music measureless,
I heard his golden voice and marked him trace
Under the common thing the hidden grace,
And conjure wonder out of emptiness,
Till mean things put on beauty like a dress
And all the world was an enchanted place.

And then methought outside a fast-locked gate
I mourned the loss of unrecorded words,
Forgotten tales and mysteries half said,
Wonders that might have been articulate,
And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds.
And so I woke and knew that he was dead.

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:28:49 GMT

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:18:44 GMT

MY LITTLE ONE

by Tennessee Williams

My little one whose tongue is dumb,
whose fingers cannot hold to things,
who is so mercilessly young,
he leaps upon the instant things,

I hold him not. Indeed, who could?
He runs into the burning wood.
Follow, follow if you can!
He will come out grown to a man

and not remember whom he kissed,
who caught him by the slender wrist
and bound him by a tender yoke
which, understanding not, he broke.

WE HAVE NOT LONG TO LOVE

We have not long to love.
Light does not stay.
The tender things are those
we fold away.
Coarse fabrics are the ones
for common wear.
In silence I have watched you
comb your hair.
Intimate the silence,
dim and warm.
I could but did not, reach
to touch your arm.
I could, but do not, break
that which is still.
(Almost the faintest whisper
would be shrill.)
So moments pass as though
they wished to stay.
We have not long to love.
A night. A day....

CRIED THE FOX

for D.H.L

I run, cried the fox, in circles
narrower, narrower still,
across the desperate hollow,
skirting the frantic hill

and shall till my brush hangs burning
flame at the hunter's door
continue this fatal returning
to places that failed me before!

Then, with his heart breaking nearly,
the lonely, passionate bark
of the fugitive fox rang out clearly
as bells in the frosty dark,

across the desperate hollow,
skirting the frantic hill,
calling the pack to follow
a prey that escaped them still.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:33:46 GMT

HER LONG ILLNESS

by Donald Hall


     Daybreak until nightfall,
he sat by his wife at the hospital
     while chemotherapy dripped
through the catheter into her heart.
     He drank coffee and read
the Globe. He paced; he worked
     on poems; he rubbed her back
and read aloud. Overcome with dread,
     they wept and affirmed
their love for each other, witlessly,
     over and over again.
When it snowed one morning Jane gazed
     at the darkness blurred 
with flakes. They pushed the IV pump
     which she called Igor
slowly past the nurses' pods, as far
     as the outside door
so that she could smell the snowy air.

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:59:44 GMT

AN IMAGINATIVE STUDY IN DEGRADATION

by Olena Kalytiak Davis

This poem begins in this corner,
where barely awake and naked
I stand at the top of the stairs,
a bas-relief against a book-encased wall,
and watch you leave for the day.

You may ask: how does the nude
fit into the contemporary setting?
And Cézanne thought apples
were the most difficult fruit.

Remember the year I stopped eating apples?
Remember the summer I kept bringing home
abandoned chairs? A lucid Vincent wrote
to his brother: I have tried
to express the terrible passions
of humanity by means of red and green.
His self-portrait now hangs in the Fogg.
Remember the summer I had to walk
to the Lake just to feel anything at all?

When I descend late in the afternoon
there's a blue plate of heart-
shaped cookies, there's an orange
on the kitchen counter. I notice a crack
in the seam of the ceiling, a spider
vein on the inside of my knee.
What a still still life!

The rest of the day is a slanted floorboard.
The rest of the day is the color of absinthe.
Note the personal and detached attitude.
Note the application of arbitrary color.
The tilted perspective.
This poem is all surface.
You may stand where you choose.
This poem has no vanishing point.

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 09:44:34 GMT

LIFE STORY

by Tennessee Williams

After you've been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do

sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.

You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course

there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all along,

and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?

Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:58:25 GMT

THE BLACK HEARSE

by Bill Graeser

would gladly
give its black away
for the yellow of the taxi,
the red of the fire-engine,
the ringing bell of the ice-cream truck.

And would be relieved to take
a load of lumber on its back
like the old Mack flatbed
or diesel of eighteen wheels.

But how then would the dead
get where they’re going—flowers
tender as hearts by their side?

No the hearse must be as it is—black
as the blackest fur of the blackest cat,
a car without a radio,
purposeful as a shovel
in the one thing it knows to do.

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:15:13 GMT

COASTAL PLAIN

by Kathryn Stripling Byer

The only clouds
forming are crow clouds,

the only shade, oaks
bound together in a tangle of oak

limbs that signal the wind
coming, if there is any wind

stroking the flat
fields, the flat

swatch of corn.
Far as anyone’s eye can see, corn’s

dying under the sky
that repeats itself either as sky

or as water
that won’t remain water

for long on the highway: its shimmer
is merely the shimmer

of one more illusion that yields
to our crossing as we ourselves yield

to our lives, to the roots
of our landscape. Pull up the roots

and what do we see but the night
soil of dream, the night

soil of what we call
home. Home that calls

and calls
and calls.

putting these two together only because i wanted

The Beautiful Nabokovs

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:16:12 GMT

Vladimir Nabokov as a young man

Dmitri with his father, an older Vladimir.

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:18:01 GMT

REGIME DE VIVRE

by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1 April 1647 – 26 July 1680)

I rise at eleven, I dine about two,
I get drunk before seven, and the next thing I do,
I send for my whore, when for fear of a clap,
I spend in her hand, and I spew in her lap;
Then we quarrel and scold, till I fall fast asleep,
When the bitch growing bold, to my pocket does creep.

Then slyly she leaves me, and to revenge the affront,
At once she bereaves me of money and cunt.
If by chance then I wake, hot-headed and drunk,
What a coil do I make for the loss of my punk!
I storm and I roar, and I fall in a rage.
And missing my whore, I bugger my page.
Then crop-sick all morning I rail at my men,
And in bed I lie yawning till eleven again.

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:21:11 GMT

PUBLISHED!

pages 7 and 11 of the new edition of One Imperative.

issue 3

http://www.oneimperative.com/

gorgeous layouts!!!

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:00:39 GMT

THE LOVE COOK

by Ron Padgett

Let me cook you some dinner.
Sit down and take off your shoes
and socks and in fact the rest
of your clothes, have a daquiri,
turn on some music and dance
around the house, inside and out,
it’s night and the neighbors
are sleeping, those dolts, and
the stars are shining bright,
and I’ve got the burners lit
for you, you hungry thing.

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:48:22 GMT

One week ago, on a delicious spring evening, our ship was plowing ahead, I’m not sure how, on a windless day in calm seas. Someone proposed that we dance. So Beaumont went off to fetch his flute and a merry time was had by all, romping on the deck. If you want to know where this occurred, consult a map for the convergence of 42 degrees latitude and 34 degrees longitude! There, or thereabouts, was the dance hall. Man must be an animal heedless of all that may befall him to caper as we did over a bottomless abyss, under the vault of heaven, with death on all sides.

Tocqueville writing from the ship taking him to America when he was 25.
http://hudsonreview.com/new/issues/110/letters-from-america

“This trip was his great escape,” [Mr. Brown, one of Tocqueville's translators/biographers] said. “I think he felt imprisoned by his family and the past. He came from the ancien régime, from a royalist family, and the Revolution of 1830 more or less consigned his father to retirement. Alexis was a young lawyer and very much of two minds about the constitutional monarchy. He wanted to keep his job, and that required pledging loyalty to Louis-Philippe. On the other hand he felt like a traitor to his family. In America he imagined a world without that kind of conflict, without a past.”

Once he got here, Tocqueville was dazzled by the country’s sheer expansiveness, Mr. Brown said, and found in all that physical space a sense of inner space and freedom.

“But what’s remarkable,” he went on, “is how open he was to everything. He wasn’t snobbish at all. All right, so Americans spit — it just didn’t bother him very much.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/books/04alexis.html?_r=1

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:28:30 GMT

Eight-Pound Man Removed From Woman's Vagina
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/eight_pound_man_removed_from?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:39:09 GMT

I haven't been able to find pieces by Kees van Dongen that I'm particularly drawn to other than the above Half-Nude Arab Boy which I LOVE. And, whatever, here's another nude leaning person painted by Schiele (of his sister).

And briefly in other news: I had NO IDEA about this:

In the last 70 days of his life, van Gogh painted 70 paintings, 68 of which are masterworks, arguably the longest run of brilliant painting in the history of art, after which he shot himself.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:56:17 GMT

Vladimir Nabokov, of course, would...become one of the most important writers of the 20th century, earning not only critical acclaim but international fame and financial success as well. Sergei would never be famous -- in fact, his existence has been all but covered up by his family -- but in its own way his life would be just as remarkable. Shy, awkward and foppish, the opposite of his gregarious brother, Sergei had a secret: He was gay.

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/05/17/nabokov/#story_full_c4087b954d318465c3524f8cf34f24e3

Around 1930 Sergei and his lover Hermann spent time at an 11th century castle called Schloss Weissenstein (belonging to Hermann's family) in the tiny Apline village of Matrei im Osttirol near Innsbruck, Austria. This, apparently, is what Schloss Weissenstein looks like today. I love the idea of these two men falling in love here. With the following quote of Sergei as the icon of their affection:

But I think that you will understand, understand that all those who do not accept and do not understand my happiness are strangers to me.

Hermann and Sergei traveled about the capitals of Europe returning every time to the castle Weissenstein, where they walked and played tennis and bridge with Herman’s relatives. In a letter that Sergei wrote to his mother, he said: “It's all such a strange story, sometimes even I don't understand how it happened ... I'm just suffocating with happiness... There are people, who would not understand this, to whom such things would be completely incomprehensible. They would rather see me in Paris, barely surviving by giving lessons, and in the end a deeply unhappy creature. There is talk about my 'reputation' and so on. But I think that you will understand, understand that all those who do not accept and do not understand my happiness are strangers to me”.
http://www.geocities.com/larisabee/homoerotic_nab.doc

This happiness it seems had been until that point particularly rare for Sergei, who--in addition to being a stuttering effeminate boy unhappy in all childhood affairs--lived to grow up in the shadow of his older brother.

Meanwhile, the facts of Sergei's life are still obscure -- forgotten or concealed behind euphemisms or confined to the dusty realm of footnotes and archives.
It's a question worthy of a Nabokov novel: How could the lives of two brothers, both brilliant and talented, both rich and handsome, have led to two such different places: one to literary immortality, the other to the hell of a Nazi concentration camp?
--The Salon article [which is the most amazing article I've read in I-don't-know-how-long!]

It's interesting to read various accounts of who Sergei was. I like the letter written by Lucie Lion Nohl, a Russian imigri who knew the brothers at Oxford, quoted in the salon article:

Serge was the dandy, an aesthete and balletomane ... [He] was tall and very thin. He was very blond and his tow-colored hair usually fell in a lock over his left eye. He suffered from a serious speech impediment, a terrible stutter. Help would only confuse him, so one had to wait until he could say what was on his mind, and it was usually worth hearing ... He attended all the Diaghilev premieres wearing a flowing black theater cape and carrying a pommeled cane.

And I LOVE that Sergei, Diaghilev and Nijinsky were, presumably, all in the same room at once, perhaps all enjoying the same thing for moments in a way that's easy to imagine being particularly unique.

My favorite detail YET!!!!!

Sergei was "the nicest of all the Nabokovs ... a sweet, funny man ... much nicer, much more dependable and much funnier than all the rest of them."
According to Ledkovsky, Sergei was deeply kind, "always a gentleman," devoted to music but also steeped in Russian, French and English poetry -- all languages that, along with German, he spoke fluently. "He could recite anything by heart, and when he recited poetry, he would not stutter at all."

-----------

POSTscript

Lev Grossman, author of the Salon article, found great fucking shit everywhere! Okay, here's what I'm talking about. Vladimir had a hell of a time reconciling himself to Sergei, generally, it seems, failingly. Okay, so Wood, presumably a biographer of Vladimir, we're told, has this to say about the homophobic brother of Sergei

"I think that Nabokov often tries to be inhumanly secure, and confident, and happy, and unregretful....If he pulled that off, he would be a monster. It's a fine thing to try -- and an even finer thing to fail."

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:36:50 GMT

My paternal grandmother would give this poem to my father a lot.

The other day, my father gave it to me.

INVICTUS

by
William Ernest Henley

OUT of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:55:49 GMT

SHOULDERS

by
Naomi Shihab Nye

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south:
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo
but he's not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy's dream
deep inside him.

We're not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.

The road will only ever be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

SO MUCH HAPPINESS

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

WANDERING AROUND AN ALBUQUERQUE AIRPORT TERMINAL

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.

Well -- one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?

The minute she heard any words she knew -- however poorly used -
She stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we're fine, you'll get there, just late,

Who is picking you up? Let's call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her -- southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies -- little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts -- out of her bag --
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo -- we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers --
Non-alcoholic -- and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American -- ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend -- by now we were holding hands --
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Not a single person in this gate -- once the crying of confusion stopped
-- has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

FAMOUS

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Me and my friend

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:03:26 GMT

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:53:13 GMT

DRIFTWOOD HORSES

by Heather Jansch

http://www.zuzafun.com/driftwood-horses-by-heather-jansch