The Funeral Trio

First, Stan Getz:

My father always plays your CDs on Sunday mornings

Bringing relentless Brazilian sunshine into the house

The finely wrinkled eyes

Paths of light

Bloodred flecks brown, earthy yellow

A translator from light to sound to emotion

Even the girl from Ipanema might shed a tear or two.

-

Then Dr. Seuss,

Stumbling his way down into the dark subconscious

Mind

Painting it with brightstripes, licking the walls of thought

Happily to tast the simple joy

To give the finger merrily to Freud

And other such somber grown-ups.

-

The slap in the face--

Miles, Time is before time

Too cool, torn-voiced pimp

Silverplay, brasshustle

Grasped by a hand from the sky

His own hand unseeing, dancing

Lungs, throat, and cheeks doing what they do.

Did.

John Brinker

chips 92
p.92. volume 55. blue w/Her Back on cover.

swing

aint worth
if you aint got
- that

titles

you need to whisper
don't accept me - it's more about where i am going - so different without you - come closer - so you're not angry? - i'm not done growing yet - he looks crazy to me - i'd like to be lost with you - i hate everyone, i hate everything, say sandwich, don't look at it, thursday?, that's not mine, mine!, give me that - just when we have become close, you have to leave - to me they are the only real things in the world - i would be lost without you - you have become a ghost - now now now - the only thing i want, i can't have - what is it like out there? - how do i look in your eyes? - just hold me - you couldn't have known - i wish we could talk like we used to - i'm here - i just want to go home -I don't want to forget you -i was lonely for something i forgot about - please forgive me if i take you for granted

for sam brown's drawings

For page after page our characters exchange comments that are insignificant but heavy with desolate unhappiness: 'Are you cold?' 'No, I'm not cold.' 'Would you like some tea?' "No thanks.' 'Are you tired?' "I don't know. Yes, perhaps I'm a bit tired.' This is how our characters talk. They talk like this because they don't know how to talk anymore. Little by little the most important matters, the most terrible confessions, come out: 'You killed him?' 'Yes, I killed him.'

natalia ginzburg 'Silence'

a plea so desperate

-"what do you want me to do? stand on my head!?"
-please. stand on your head.

Lorrie Moore, I think: How to be an other woman.
and a plea so desperate it reads, come get me yesterday from a book I never read by?~Laurie Colwin ~ sleeping arrangements ah Laura Cunningham: on Page 86: "...am driven into the camp. Later that night, I scribble a postcard plea to my uncles, an appeal so desperate it reads: "Come get me yesterday."

at all

one night of love don't make up for six nights alone
but I'd rather have one than none Lord I'm flesh and bone
sometimes it seems that she ain't worth the trouble at all
but she can be worth the world if somehow you can touch her at all

Willie Nelson -
Waylon Jennings

atlantis

bookstore on Santorini
your past life 11/8 pm You were born somewhere in the territory of modern Greece around the year 775.Your profession was that of a sailor or shoemaker.The lesson that your last past life brought to your present incarnation: The world is full of ill and lonely people. Do you remember now? do. you. remember.

love invents

Elizabeth, the book's protagonist and sometime narrator ah so it was not just the manuscript copy I read- It's startling when the book shifts to third person just before the halfway mark. "She was not drippingly miserable, she was not an affront to society," the narrator tells us. "She paid her bills. She didn't smell or piss on other people's lawns. She suffered from the opposite of `phantom limb' syndrome; something essential appeared to be present, but it was not." {she didn't become manager at the used bookstore where she worked and she didn't go to law school and she didn't own any cleaning supplies, which her mother would have said was a bad sign}
Elizabeth exists only when love, or at least the semblance of sex, exists. interesting-review-bostonphoenix
I was looking for this line: "it is a life that makes sense to me. . . . I am happy every morning and I am sad only late at night."

sensibility

all the gifts and all the needs --R.Bespallof

breakdown, call it breakdown, what are you going to do about it? (that's what I'd like to know) --P.Simon
if it were me, I'd pretend the crack wasn't in me. pretend it's in the grand canon. - baby et up all her spinoza? --F.ScottFitzgerald

worn-out shoes --N.Ginzburg

alone, alone, I'm all alone --the bridge of san luis rey

and fall

szymborska 'a note' -as in the beginning, in the newyorker:
life is the only way to tell pain from what it is not,
to go on not knowing something important.
icarus, are you falling?

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Thought is a form of grief. Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes, p.9.

Loretta Lux

The Wanderer, 2003

lorettalux.de
digitally altered lifochrome prints: Lux poses her models, the children of friends, most often against a bare wall and then digitally adds the backgrounds from photographs she has taken.

pale as many of these children are
what is doll-like?










Study of a Girl, 2002

isolation

you could write the book on isolation. the book says "you aren't there to read this."

your troll

you find a troll. he's black and sleek and smells like juniper berries so you take him inside.

99 luftbalon

literal translation of "99 Red Balloons" compared to English lyric (table)
ah rw -as I have little cut out papers of English translations undauf Deutsch.


Red the color has left forever (blog-vshort)

enthusiasm

the question is why induced seems like doom when I don't care whether on principle the enthusiasm is "real." the answer may be that from induced you will likely come down into a world that you made that you do not actually care about but now feel you must care for. (act like.) a world that you do not find yourself in but have put yourself in. that now looks like a thing to be sustained, that you do not want to -cannot- sustain. a burden to sustain. as always, Didion on self-respect:
To assign unanswered letters their proper weight [yes], to free us from the expectations of others [yes], to give us back to ourselves [please] -- there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect [integrity, or what you may call my belligerence?]. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw [terror]: one runs away [yes I will - stop.] to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

in Berwyn

slightly off the beaten path for most Chicagoans but right on - for music lovers, FitzGerald's has been showcasing all kinds of roots music for more than 20 years in blue-collar Berwyn. - plays host to zydeco, country, swing, folk, and bluegrass acts - during the club's popular annual American Music Festival, perhaps all in the same night.
family-owned spot - well-mannered crowds of all ages - cozy, wood-framed roadhouse - looks right out of a movie set (Paul Newman, Tom Cruise filmed parts of "The Color of Money" here).
metromix.chicagotribune.com FitzGerald's 6615 W. Roosevelt Rd. Berwyn,IL 60402-1010 708-788-2118 Jimmie Dale Gilmore Nov. 11: 7 p.m. Price: $20

to anything else in a heartbeat

Goldbarth can connect anything to anything else in a heartbeat. Goldbarth's rapid, slightly talky style. -talky- Budget Travel through Space and Time: Poems marks a new publisher Graywolf Press and perhaps a new balance between Goldbarth's recent gravity and his much-appreciated levity ...on... ways one can travel, whether within the body's territory, beyond the body, or even "out of one's mind."

in this collection "Called from Out of the Lines of Your Life." -- vagueness or obscurity-- how it can both positively and negatively influence our lives -- this 8 page tour de force -- story of Eloise and Daniel, two residents of a nursing home. -- the murkiness of memory -- they have forgotten their separate pre-home lives and believe they are married --a fog-fueled delusion that nonetheless gives them an enlivening sense of purpose and well-being -- obscurity of their perception that allows each of them to see the other as a dream-like ideal. "years-long cloudiness" -- either an appalling or pleasant version of our past -- how Goldbarth allows his subject, vagueness, to impact his prosody.

singular

Kate Bush is, with no exaggeration, the most singular songwriter ever to emerge from the UK, a songwriter and performer who has always been utterly immersed in her own unique world - the corporeal, hyper-real and sometimes just plain surreal - and has explored it with no regard for fashion, relevance or commerce. - Mixed reception for Bush's long awaited return

Didion

New York Magazine - October 10, 2005:
Joan Didion on John, Quintana, her devastating memoir, and her persistent critics.

like suspense

(and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence

Didion, Magical Thinking

more than one more day

I love you more than-
Quintana Roo Dunne Michael died on August 26 this year. She was 39.
Saturday October 1, 2005 The Guardian - In another world