River oh, oh, oh

Writers, books, musicians, movies and people who have changed my life for the better:

Dream Work by Mary Oliver
Neko Case
Various poems by Rumi
The Weakerthans and Propagandhi
A Testament of Hope by Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Sun magazine
I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning by Bright Eyes
True Love by Thich Nhat Hahn
Poems by Robert Hass
A Language Older Than Words and Listening to the Land by Derrick Jensen
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Utah Phillips
Kimya Dawson (Hidden Vagenda and Remember That I Love You)
Succulent Wild Woman by SARK
Me And You And Everyone We Know (directed by Miranda July)
Hello Cruel World by Kate Bornstein
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Chaim Potok
The Mountain Goats and John Darnielle
Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
Leonard Cohen, Songs of Leonard Cohen
The Smiths
M. Ward
Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Collective
Cunt by Inga Muscio
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Joanna Newsom
Hello To All That by John Falk
Paul Baribeau
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Karen Dalton
Poems by Sandra Cisneros
O, Pioneers! by Willa Cather
Into the Forest by Jean Hegland
The Replacements and Paul Westerberg
Al Green
Poems by Margaret Atwood
Simon and Garfunkel
Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
Feist
This American Life radio program
A Summer Life and Living Up The Street by Gary Soto
Hearing Voices radio program
Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno
John Denver
Living Fully With Shyness and Social Anxiety by Erika B. Hilliard
Cindy Crabb, author of Doris zine
Peggy McIntosh's discussion of white privilege
Prodigal Summer and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Cat Power
Marge Piercy's poem "To Be Of Use"

Really. Fuck chemistry. I hate wasting my time on this stuff.

Latin phrase of the day:


Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem - In the good old days, children like you were left to perish on windswept crags.

This thought has occurred to me several times before but it's never seemed that important. But I think that it's worth remembering or putting down "on paper".

To write and to read is to preserve. When I was a little, little kid my parents read to me before bed. Some books I remember reading with them are parts of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Red Pony by John Steinbeck, White Fang and The Call of the Wild by Jack London, Ferdinand the Bull and some of the Goosebumps books, which terrified me, by the way. We probably read a lot more than that, but those are all the titles I can remember right now. There were a lot of books about horses and cats in there, too.

I began to associate the idea of home with reading. My mom took me out to the closest Barnes and Noble or the public library, where we would both spend time browsing books. Afterward I could usually get her to take me to the cafe and get a chocolate mocha or some other good treat. Even though my parents generally didn't indulge me in really expensive toys and things (for a long time I begged them to buy me a horse.... no dice there) they would always buy me books. Books definitely became a refuge for me and I kept up the habit of reading as I got older. I especially liked really whimsical or silly or fantastical stories about strange characters and parallel lives. I also loved books about living in the wilderness by writers like Gary Paulsen. Those especially resonated with me, for whatever reason.

So at this point one way I can explain my affinity for the written word is that, no matter what text I'm reading, I can take comfort in the unconscious awareness that I have done this very personal and intimate and imaginative thing over and over and over since I was a child. Words preserve memories, and not in a boring way either. They are memories, memory is language. Language is an ancient, publicly shared and modified cache or deposit of collective memories. The words themselves are powerful. Writing is a way to hold life down for a second before it gets all blurred and indeterminate and ambiguous, before it gets junked by people who don't care about whether or not a record is kept of what happened when they were here.

The "Chicken-Fucking" Newscaster (and FYI there's no actual bestiality or animal abuse involved. Watch for the expression on the female newscaster's face... ):

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/tv/ernie-anastos-apologizes-for-on-air-chicken-remark-1.1458191

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdnXYWSa56w

Writers and a musician that I'm excited about --

Peaches
Michelle Tea
Tao Lin

Sea Lion Woman

See Line Woman


That is good music. Both versions. I don't think that it was a Nina Simone original, but I know for sure that Feist is covering it.

Love them both, Nina and Feist.

What is friendship? What does it feel like to you? What do you like the most about your friends? 

What behavior will cause you to end a friendship?

What do you and your friends do together?

I'm just curious, this is not important, but if you're interested, leave a comment.

Also, once I finish Hello To All That by John Falk, I'm going right into Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. After that, I'm not sure what to read. I might stray from my list again and try Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. Anyone read these books? Thoughts?

It might be a mistake to read two books in a row that deal with depressing social-historical problems, maybe I should go with Bee Season or a John Irving novel to bring in some levity.

"Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry." -- Mary Oliver, poet

"I've eaten some shit over the course of my life... and tried despite that to see and speak kindly." -- Keith Rosson, artist and author of Avow zine.

"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?" -- Bruce Springsteen, "The River"

I want to tell all the potential bfs out there that I will absolutely NEVER consider seeing you if you listen to industrial music, cheesy German metal bands from the nineties, Interpol or Infected (fucking) Mushroom. For serious. It's not going to happen. I don't want to go out with you if you listen to wanky shred metal, or even if you listen to shred metal that you claim isn't wanky, but esoteric and nuanced. Or, and this is important, if you listen to Frank Zappa. Fuck that! Never again. Why have all the people I've slept with liked music that sucks so much. Can't believe this. If you can't tell or didn't bother to ask, I have an aesthetic when it comes to music, JUST LIKE YOU, you jerk -- please respect it. I don't even care how cool you are, if you listen to music belonging to a genre whose stage presentation involves wearing gobs of poorly applied dark eyeliner or any sort of codpiece, or if you have to go to a dark, disgusting, techno club to enjoy your music you fucking suck. 

You know what your music tells me?

It tells me that you live in a bad place in your head. Not an imaginative or expansive place, but a dark shithole populated by other morons who think that Ann Rice and Robert Jordan are legitimate writers. That you make threats that you'll never carry out because you're too scared. That you internalize every critical thing that anyone has ever told you. That you really have no sense of beauty. That your sense of humor is darker than black and bleaker than No Exit. Really. It's true.

We just wouldn't get along, and I'd probably end up writing a journal entry like this, feeling tempted to elaborate on it and send you a much longer and more colorful email to remind you of all the times I felt like ripping off your balls because you were such a manipulative, dishonest son of a bitch.

Thank you.

The Short Eared Owl

I was walking down Raby Road
this afternoon and saw what looked
from a distance like a dead muskrat
on the lefthand side. As I approached
the animal I noticed that it was covered
in beautiful soft dusty gray and brown
feathers. I stood one foot from the dead
thing and looked closer. Sharp, hooked
talons peeked from tufted feet. The
talons indicated that it was a raptor,
but something still didn't seem right.
Where was the head? Had the car that
hit it taken it clean off? There was no blood
that I could see.
One wing was partially outstretched
on the gravel road.
I looked for the head and finally realized
that what I had thought was the neck
was actually the majestic large ovoid
face of an owl. One black rimmed 
eye was just visible;
the other was facing the gravel. The small,
perfectly formed, hooked beak stuck out.
Such sadness flooded my body then,
when I realized what I was looking at.
I would likely never have seen such
a powerful and predatory bird while
it was alive. In death, all of its physical
details were laid bare for me to inspect
like someone looking at a museum exhibit,
or some anonymous man watching pole
dancers in a dark strip club.
Who are we to kill so wantonly.

Meditation at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you, and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Excuses, and half-truths, and fortified wine.

I want to delete this journal and start a new one. Reading through my old entries, I'm embarrassed. The journal started out fine but after a few months my writing just got sloppy and patchwork. I think the problem is that my entries feel forced, usually; they're not natural (about one in three or four feels good; the rest, not so much).

I think it should be the first priority of someone who wants to write well to write honestly and not force it. Use five dollar words only when necessary and the rest of the time figure out a way for the "size" of your writing to fit the "size" of whatever it is you want to write about.

Well, I'm going to think about it for sure. Maybe I'll copy and paste the important entries and then delete the journal.

I do stupid things sometimes. It has to end. It just does.