Laundry time – didn’t I just do the laundry – that was the linens and the floor mats – oh yes, so it was. Sunday morning go to meeting time – no one wears their Sunday best anymore – there was a time one put on a suit to get on an airplane and probably a time when it was done when one went into town – but not any more – now that is just for the dead and his pallbearers.
My daughter’s kitchen / in winter. I fork the pie in / and tell myself to stay out of it. / She says she loves him. No way / could it be worse – Raymond Carver (All the Rest, 1996 p87)
Whether it is Joyce’s grave
In Zurich or Baudelair’s
In Paris (a Baudelair sandwich
The guard joked)
They might have been
OR
Should have been
OR
Could have been
This close to the crypt
They were our crowd, our set, our friends. We rarely knew their names, or they ours, we called each other pal, chum, captain, darling. We drank our brandies or our ouzos, whatever was the cheapest local poison – John Banville, The Body of Evidence 1989 p10
It’s high tech inside there
You notice that when almost
All of the chips have been consumed
It’s the benefit of the space program
These developments in the packaging industry
Atomized aluminum sprayed onto plastic
Shrink-wrap applied with a hair dryer
Flies and moths, it turns out, are both poetic and antipoetic things par excellence – Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia 2001 p265
Being a man is knowing the lay of this land
And not just its women either
Talking of sports the way
A woman talks of her priest
Oh it’s much more than memorizing
The statistics and hating math
It’s chatting up one’s expertise
She says she did this and then that
And he says the same about the players
On the field of his dreams
Contracts and moving them about the league
It makes no difference if they are dead
She at least is talking about people she knows
Up close and personal
In sports that’s all pretense even if you
Watch them every day religiously
Umberto Eco calls it chatting about chatting
About chatting and claims it’s a substitute
For politics – this democracy called sports
An admission that you’re impotent at least
In the realm of affecting your own life
Perhaps contempt was for us a form of nostalgia, of homesickness, even? … I used to dream of rain – real, daylong, Irish rain – as if it were something I had been told about but never seen – John Banville, The Body of Evidence 1989 p67
She showed me her flower
Irises? A little late in the season
Isn’t it?
I thought they were Irises
The same purple color
No, it’s something that begins with a ‘C’
Carnia or Cadamus but not Carnation
Is that the Ventures on Siris Radio
Either that or Dick Dale
No it’s someone with a nostalgic
Fondness for surf music
That electronic drum beat
Gladiola! Gladiolas, I said
That’s what they’re called
Yes, she replied, that’s what it is
Same driving guitar and steady beat
But with the precision and sharpness
Of electronics
I’d never seen Gladiolas of that
Color before and I was not sure
About this homage to the Ventures
But it was probably better than to have
To actually hear them – Telstar, Pipeline
‘
Syncope is the opposite of symbol and synthesis – Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia 2001 p281
I put up a petition annually for as much snow, hail, frost, or storm, of one kind or other, as the skies can possibly afford us. Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter fireside, candles at four o’clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without – Thomas De Quincy – Confessions of an Opium Eater (1821)
Suddenly I had a void, queasy sense of myself, not the tanned pin-up now, but something else, something pallid and slack and soft. I was aware of my toenails, my anus, my damp constricted crotch. And I was ashamed – John Banville, The Body of Evidence 1989 p46
From the Notebooks (#1 – January 15, 2004 - San Francisco - Royal Ground – California & Fillmore)
A beefy red haired woman in a green raincoat who could propel herself no further along the sidewalk plunks down in a chair along Fillmore in front of the shop. She buried her face in a book - not reading it - literarily burying her face in it. She sat slumped over, tired, exhausted. She was now trying to find a comfortable way to flop her head so that she would rest.
Butts - Taxi’s drivers use there’s a lot. Recent research has shown that driving and obesity are directly related. I am off and running with today’s theme not just sitting on it.
No, she doesn’t appear to have a cell phone at all. My first conjecture proves to be right. I just wanted to believe the best about everybody (Linda would have laughed at this), but then who am I to be commenting on her distress. What would someone else think about me as they watched me scribbling away- who’s to say that someone is not watching now. Here's someone trying to find stories about butts to write about - a little strange you might think. But you wouldn't say it out loud.
“So Michael do you want to be immortalized?” “And with you writing about derrieres all day” he replied. “No thank you”
The raucous parrots of Washington Square could be heard two blocks away. The whole flock sounded like it was in the tree, light green plumage among the dark cypress needles with an occasional patch of red and they are still difficult to spot. It’s their movement that gives them away and they were big birds.-
They are showing “The Station Agent” at the Embarcadero @ 1:30. I shall go.
No comments:
Post a Comment