Q: What do you worry about?
A: Lately I am not-things: not staid or needy or acutely bored or solitarily dealing with a cloudy swollen ego, not tired or overworked– something like stepping away from an outline of yourself still feeling the pressure of the chalk around your limbs. M calls, early early morning, and I’m not old enough [...]
Yearly Archives: 2009
Q & A
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Q & A
Q: What do you worry about?
A: Today on the train an older man had made it barely through the doors of my second stop. I don’t know what they call the people that drive the trains. Drove? Conducted? The conductor. The conductor was friendly and reminded us cheerfully to let the elderly and disabled have [...]
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Not to cause any alarm
but there is a contestant on Make Me a Supermodel named Salome although the way the host pronounces her name is something like sal-OH-may or sal-OH-me which veers slightly closer to salami than to the the bearer of John the Baptist’s head.
“Salome,” answers the young man,
“I wanted them to bring me your head.”
He said this [...]
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HOSPITAL WAITING ROOM
-After his stroke Nick’s father used to think he knew Chinese.
-Not the same.
-Right. It’s more offensive.
-Easier managed.
-She’s still alive kid. Still knows who you are. You’ll have to readjust.
-The nurse said that when she accidently spilled her water she told her to fuck off like she’d just answered the phone. The sweetest fuck off she’d [...]
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Revisited
Griel Marcus on Astral Weeks: “You can hear these moments of invention and gasping for air, and you reach your hand and you close your fist and when you open your fist there’s a butterfly in it,” Marcus says. “There really was something there, but you couldn’t have seen it. You couldn’t have known.”
(Bangs’s was [...]
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Dwelling
A million years later I’m off the couch, stealing spotty internet at a new place with two floors and an impossible parking space. I have a view from this deck now of an old hotel which is mainly why I’m here, and in my head moving means playing music too loud and drinking beer and [...]
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Well roared lion, gluey atmosphere
FiveChapters serialized John Cheever’s Of Love: A Testimony. Cheever has been and probably always will be the giant watermark on anything I write. The man knew how to start and end stories and use words everywhere.
He looked up to where she was standing, speaking so rationally. He saw her long limbs in the serge frock [...]
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At Daytrotter Ben Lee instead of singing reads only that small part from “The Balloon” I was talking about. Only!
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Onwards
It’s raining here. It’s good. Today I talked to a landlady, not my landlady, someone else’s– I’m still managing to not live somewhere– and she said when she moved here in the 70s things had gotten real bad and they were setting up fines for using too much water. Whatever apocalyptic language you want to [...]
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