head throb. heatwave. temperature peaking at 113 degrees. i lay on the living room floor, beneath the white overhead fan with all the lights off, blinds snapped shut. tongue still stuck to my teeth: my migraine slows all reactions. like a pant—take two, three little blue pills; pain clears. the rest of the day is mine. spend six hours sitting in the wooden folding chair, typing up three months worth of “notes” for the clitoris project: the female spotted hyena’s six inch clit; henry miller’s “fucked out cunts”; gershon legman’s first brush with erotica: sitting on the floor of his mother’s closet, among a forest of dresses and panties, he reads through volumes of havelock ellis, which his mother kept hidden with all the other “forbidden” texts in the back of her closet.

when i am too tired to read or take walk or fall asleep, i do what i always do, stare out the window. bank tellers in subdued colors swish past, fan themselves with the palms of their hands. beneath the stucco awning to the left, on the 8x10 stucco platform, business men adjust their cuffs, wait for the metro. they wait and wait. the neighbor’s white window with little white shutters, white paint on the glass, even white curtains insofar as transparent gauze can be “white.” sometimes the white window is open, and other times, a small white hand tugs it shut.

first flush of evening traffic then steady accumulation. cars moving in a single mass up del mar, down arryo blvd. beyond this street, another: stiff palm fronds, clumps of green offset by 20ft streetlamps , the occasional weed spidering across the concrete. stink bug on the sill, its mad patience, trying to fly with half its body crushed by a black ashtray.

there are thirty-six single unit apartments in my building. three floors with long long brightly lit halls, like a hotel, with light red carpet, clung close to the floorboards. the number on each door is fake gold. #206. the walls: paper thin, white interrupted by more white or the occasional picture, poster, tattered tapestry. already the cacophony: four different tvs, two phone conversations, a lone dog scratching at the door of his apartment, howling every six, ten minutes. delivery men clutching plastic bags filled with every kind of food; they pound on the door or buzz the call box, punching whatever number into the ten digit key pad lit by a red motion sensor. more often than not, the wrong apartment is called. instead of eating my usual rice and beans, i fantasize about eating my neighbor’s curry or “southern style” wet bbq; my whole face smeared with its gaudy red sauce.

west hollywood bookfair

les figues press & co. at the west hollywood bookfair. readings by harold abramowitz, allison carter, and mathew timmons. love letters by jen hofer.

yesterday was so hot. hard to do anything but sit and stare with yr mouth open. when i got home from the bookfair, my pink dress was still sweat-stuck.

SOMETHING BRIGHT, THEN HOLES
Maggie Nelson

I used to do this, the self I was
used to do this

the selves I no longer am
nor understand.

Something bright, then holes
is how a girl, newly-sighted, once

described a hand. I reread
your letters, and remember

correctly: you wanted to eat
through me. Then fall asleep

with your tongue against
an organ, quiet enough

to hear it kick. Learn everything
there is to know

about loving someone
then walk away, coolly

I’m not ashamed
Love is large and monstrous

Never again will I be so blind, so ungenerous
O bright snatches of flesh, blue

and pink, then four dark furrows, four
funnels, leading into a infinite ditch

The heart, too, is porous;
I lost the water you poured into it

"What are the preconditions for the recognition for an obstacle? And the first assertion is: one can recognize an obstacle--which can mean construct something as an obstacle--only when it can be tolerated. Only through knowing what we think of as an obstacle can we understand our fantasies of continuity."

--Adam Phillips, Looking at Obstacles

from The Sexual Life of Catherine M.

“I was carried away by the conviction that I rejoiced in extraordinary freedom. To fuck above and beyond any sense of disgust was not just a way of lowering yourself, it was, in a diametrically opposite move, to raise yourself above all prejudice.”

***

“People also think that darkness protects them. But for some people, me included, it simultaneously opens the space around them up to infinity by making it limitless…In fact, you hardly ever find complete darkness, and people actually usually prefer the vagueness of half-light. I myself would like total blackout because I could then experience the pleasure of sinking into a sea of undifferentiated flesh. On the other hand, I know how to make the most of harsh light, too, because the initial blindness and inability to identity its source dissolve and blur the frontiers of the body. In other words, I am not afraid of being glimpsed unaware because my body is but a mingling part of the air around it and the continuum of other bodies connected to it. I therefore can’t even consider that anyone is looking in from the outside. "

***

“To establish a mercenary relationship, you have to navigate an exchange of words or at least signals, the sort of complicity that forms the basis for all conversations and which would have seemed, to me, closely related to the preliminaries of seduction that I avoided. In both cases, in order to keep your side of the deal, you have to take into account your partner’s attitudes and responses. Now, even at the first contact, I knew how to focus on the body. It is just when I have found my bearings with the body, as it were, when the grain of skin and its particularly pigmentation have become familiar to me, or I have learned to adjust my own body to it, that my attention could focus on the person himself, often to form a sincere and lasting friendship.

sumarr reading series, part four

Performances by Marco Di Domineco, Sam Cohen, Chrysanthe Tan, Henry Perkins, Jon Rutzmoser, Emily St. Amand-Poliakoff, and David Erich Elsenbroich.

i wake too early in the morning. so much sun, already. wide cuts of light on the kitchen tiles. light through the blinds where the cat has snapped off six panels with her little grey paws. a cup of tea. weak weak darjeeling, bought in bulk, two heaping sacks, from the bearded man in the corner store. its windows awash with overripe mangos perched on green plastic tiers next to flowers that look, no matter the color or variety, as if gathered from a wedding reception after all the guests have left. i place the flowers on top of the only bookcase in the apartment and watch the cat sniff at the stems.
fall semester has started. three classes: nonfiction (“travel writing” tho i don't travel), and pop criticism. school signals the end of personal quiet, of solitude. to steep: read, daydream all afternoon my face pressed to the window screen staring down at the street below which is lined with equal parts trash and still-ripe leaves. although, i know: this summer contained no solitude. RS tacks a note to my windshield: 2010 the year i fell in love with all caps and elizabeth hall. his backyard cleared off save two plastic lawn chairs and one weepy palm tree. we sit legs sticking to the plastic. i say no no no.

at night, in bed with M., i watch lee marvin play a hard-nosed chicago detective cruising the streets in his immaculate black ford. movies: the big heat. marvin as “vince” a high-ranking gangster. when he suspects ‘his girl’ of messing round on him he corners her by the fireplace, sets his drink down on the mantle, twists the girl’s arm behind her back. chest-puffed up he shouts oh yeah? does not believe her when she says she saw no one, twists her arms harder and harder oh yeah? in the next room, vince's lackeys sit around a small wooden table, just sitting, listening to the girl’s scream, as if waiting for the final scream, and when it comes, as it must come, it is somehow still a shock: vince throws a pot of boiling coffee on her face, disfiguring her forever. i cannot get enough of these gangster films. the stupid blunt brutality. none of this headache of trying to do right by feeling.

“If there is one thing I’ve learned in analysis, it is to appreciate the infinite diversity of human life and to remove oneself from that diversity or to avoid experience with it is tantamount to amputating an arm or leg.”

--Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are facts