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

sumarr reading series, part three

(bigger pics on flickr)

this past sunday i gave a reading with the lovely nicholas katzban, scott reding, and emily st. armand-poliakoff. a local band named slumber beast also played. many good poems. lots of 24's were had.

HEATWAVE

i have lived in california for one year to-day

the swoon-worthy jessica hallock flew out to california for a week. lots of gin gimlets, kisses, blunts & gossip.

interview with christine wertheim

early this spring, i asked california writer and editor christine wertheim to answer a few questions via email about herself as a poet, feminist, and editor. read the entire interview on the lemon hound blog.

EH: Have you always considered yourself to be a “feminist?” If so, has your definition of ‘feminism’ shifted over the years?

CW: Yes, I have always been a feminist. My mother had 6 children and no help, and was a founding member of second wave feminism in the 60s/70s in Australia, so I have always been aware that there was a need for a more equitable distribution of access, along gender, race and class lines, to social resources, including discursive space, and validation for one's contributions to life. That has always been my main definition of feminism/s. In the 90's, through my encounters with psychoanalysis I added an extra clause, that access to what the Lacanian's call "symbolic" resources is also crucial, and that if our current symbolic resources by definition exclude certain kinds of articulations, i.e., the perspectives of any specified social group, then those symbolic resources need transforming. This is one of the tasks for feminists, as it is of all social justice movements.

les figues press: not content, pt.2

Painted Over/Under: Part 2

Not Content is a series of text projects curated by Les Figues Press at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Not Content investigates the ways in which language functions within public and private spheres and within the tenuous and transitory space between these real and imagined realms.

MORE PICTURES HERE

Eros
Robert Creeley

Also the headache of
to do right by feeling
it don't matter, etc.

But otherwise it was one, or even two
the space of, felt

and one night I said to her, do you
and she didn't.

I, 3. Lichtenberg says that very few people have ever seen pure white. So do most people use the word wrong, then? And how did he learn the correct use? – He constructed an ideal use from the ordinary one. And that is not to say a better one, but one that has been refined along certain lines and in the process something has been carried to extremes.

I, 26. We would say, perhaps, of a green pane: it colours the things behind it green, above all the white behind it.

I, 72. One thing was irrefutably clear to Goethe: no lightness can come out of darkness – just as more and more shadows do not produce light. – This could be expressed as follows: we may call lilac a reddish-whitish-blue or brown a blackish-reddish-yellow but we cannot call a white a yellowish-reddish-greenish-blue, or the like. And that is something that experiments with the spectrum can neither confirm nor refute. It would, however, also be wrong to say, “Just look at the colours in nature and you will see that it is so.” For looking does not teach us anything about the concepts of colours.

I, 81. Can one describe to a blind person what it’s like for someone to see? –Certainly. The blind learn a great deal about the difference between the blind and the sighted. But the question was badly put; as though seeing were an activity and there were a description of it.

III, 102. When we’re asked “What do ‘red,’ ‘blue,’ ‘black,’ ‘white,’ mean?” we can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colours—but that’s all we can do: our ability to explain their meaning goes no further.

from Remarks on Colour, Wittgenstein

night so thick wade the moonlight. sweat stuck on the second step of the stoop. i do not want to go up, into the apartment with tea in its pantry, a clean litter box nor down to the streets. 4 am’s dry wind. only the garbage men. their trucks wheeze, weave between street sweepers, industrial green dumpsters perched on the edge of the sidewalk. sidewalk, a glut of smashed jacaranda blooms, rotted purple to white to brown. how the first flush of dawn appears as a white crust circling the sky, thinning out into the same weak grey light in which i learned to be alone.

can i lay in bed all day listening to doug sahm don’t turn around, something’s gaining? the cat curled between my legs. i have closed all the windows though it is nearly eighty degrees. to sweat myself out. the unbelievable heat of two pm. on the sidewalk, a man with a long pointed beard, dressed in all blue, picks through the trash for beer bottles and pickle jars to recycle; ten cents a piece. the downstairs neighbor wails into a receiver well, i wasn’t asking the whole world, why did you let me leave? or so it seemed she was speaking into a phone as no one answered her. tell me: what are the purple blooms that grow only in california? pushing up against the window screens, turning the whole room, not like a bruise, but the same strange yellow-purple?

September 18, 1996

"I don’t think Wendy’s coffee has such a good taste. This is not to say I don’t like it. I like it very much. Its poor taste keeps my intentions clear; I drink coffee for the enthusiasm-prod, not for the taste. The taste, then, when it is too pleasant, can distract one from what matters most — the deep writhing jolt. Of course, some taste is necessary so that the jolt seems, at bottom, inadvertent."

from Letters to Wendy's, Joe Wenderoth

you keep telling me where you’ve been
you say that man, he’s just a friend
aww baby, o baby, it just don’t matter