Happy News Day

I feel like I've been in a huge funk for at least the past 2 weeks now, probably more like the past month or more, due to the impending demise of my job and my inability to get along with someone I really do like a lot.

But, ya know, you can only walk around feeling crappy for so long before a day with some nice things hits ya! In chronological order:

(1) 7am. I live in Weehawken, in Jersey just across the Hudson from NYC. When I first moved here a year or so ago in 2008, the "gypsy buses" taking you into the city cost $2.00. After a few months, the price went up to $2.50. A minor hike, but still...enough to bum you out at a time when EVERYTHING seems to be going up... Today, though, as I disembarked in Manhattan: Was handing the driver my usual $2.50, and he gave me back my change: "That's not the price any more." I looked at him, puzzled, thinking, "Jesus! Now it's $3 and I'm going to hold up the line while I fish around for the extra dollar..." Turned out... the price went BACK DOWN TO $2.00! :)

(2) Noon. Watching TV during lunch at work, saw the scroll at the bottom of MSNBC, something like "Sallie Mae to stop outsourcing and re-add 2,000 jobs to US in 18 months..." WHAT?! This doesn't affect me personally, since I have no connection with, or desire to work for, the Sallie Mae student loan corp., but... Philosophically, what a great development! All I've been hearing for the past 5 years or so is the "trend" of US companies to outsource jobs overseas because it's cheaper. (The traitors! I've always been utterly irked by this. I'm not a protectionist, yet the whole unfettered free-trade philosophy of Bush had gone utterly too far, at the extreme expense of US workers. I've witnessed this personally in the publishing field, with many quality-control jobs being farmed out to India, for example. And coming back haphazardly done and having to be re-done by ME, such an oh-so-expensive American worker.) And now to see a headline about US companies bringing their jobs back home to the US?! Some fairness and sanity in policy! It felt good to see a company do the right thing.
Sallie Mae to add 2,000 jobs to US in 18 months

(3) 7pm. Trolling around job boards. The pickins being slim lately, not expecting to see much. But, lo and behold, a job asking for an experienced copy editor with an English degree AND experience writing and editing for the web... I almost physically raised my hand: "Me, ME!" And the job is in CHELSEA! (After 2 years in this area, my 2 absolute favorite parts of Manhattan are Chelsea and Union Square.) Now, they're probably going to get 1,000 applicants. And so I'm not expecting anything. BUT... I'm darn qualified. And I can now DREAM about being back in the city again! AND in Chelsea!

(4) 8pm. Seems like my-girlfriend-Lindsay and Sam Ronson have broken up, allegedly "for good." Locks changed, et al. Boo-hoo! I did enjoy this blurb from USWeekly: "On her Twitter page, Lohan posted to Ronson: PLEASE leave me ALONE. and stop staying in the room below me, you've woken me and my mother up. go to bed. keep cheating u win." Actually, I think they made a cute couple. I'm just jealous of Ronson, is all. Because of my schadenfreude, this does indeed count as part of MY "good day"! :) (Another dream: Walking around in Chelsea during my lunch hour, stumbling upon a solo Lindsay desperately in need of a cigarette... I am THERE!) :)

Death Epidemic USA

I got a lighthearted e-mail last night from an overseas reader of my Joan Crawford website, telling me about a Joan-owned fur coat and outfit that his boyfriend had just given him.

He signed off, though, on a more ominous note: "And be careful out there. The USA is getting a bit dangerous."

I was a bit puzzled at first as to what he meant. When I read the latest news this morning, though, then went on to note other recent mass killings:

4/5: Just in from Washington state. A dad shot his 5 kids to death last night.
4/4: Pittsburgh. Gunman kills 3 police officers responding to domestic dispute.
4/3: Binghamton, NY. Gunman kills 13 at immigration center.
3/29: North Carolina. Gunman kills 8 at senior center.
3/29: Santa Clara, CA. Gunman kills 5 relatives.
3/21: Oakland, CA. Gunman kills 4 police officers.
3/10: Alabama. Gunman kills 10, including mother and 4 relatives.

This has all happened in the last 3-1/2 weeks. As far as I'm aware, the US has never, ever seen anywhere near this number of mass killings in so short a time. Sadly, I'm used to hearing about one or two such occurrences per YEAR, maybe. But... 7 mass shooting sprees in 3-1/2 weeks?? No one in any media outlet seems to have yet attempted to analyze this epidemic.

Of course it all has something to do with the horrible economy, and job losses. (Unemployment just reached 8.5%, the highest rate since 1983, when I was a senior in high school.) Unemployment is an extreme stressor, as I'm just discovering for the first time in my adult life. When my project job ends in May, I'll be eligible for enough unemployment benefits to cover my rent only. I have no family or friends in this area that I can move in with. I have no mate to pay my bills for me. I spend probably 90% of my waking-day thinking, "What am I going to do? No, really -- WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?" (Yes, knowing that my current job is ending in May, I've been applying for other jobs. No one is hiring.) It's a very grim, hopeless feeling. My level of angst, though, is probably only currently on the "headache/canker sore/pulling-on-a-hangnail" level. I have no home or car or family to lose. I've got a dying cat to take care of, but once she's gone, I'll be free to move to a cheaper place. I don't like having a roommate, but I'll get a roommate, if need be. I'm used to not having much. I'll survive (without shooting anybody).

But I'm a weird, solitary case. What about those who actually are losing their homes, cars, and families? As the past 3-1/2 weeks have indicated, there's something disturbing in the air that some people aren't finding ways to personally escape. I've heard this current political/economic climate referred to as a "paradigm change." Yes, definitely. Now I'm old enough to realize the very real, frightening consequences of that.

Weird side-note: I moved to NYC in February 2007. Never had a single problem on the streets. Just last week, though, I had a couple of creepy "Taxi Driver"-type incidents happen to me within a 2-minute span. (1) A homeless guy actually GRABS me: "Read my palm, read my palm, do something, TELL ME!" After I jerked loose from him, I turned the corner, and (2) then another homeless guy walks past me, then turns around and stops and says to me: "I HATE you fucking 'African-Americans.' You African-Americans living in projects. Who the FUCK do you think you're fooling?" Huh? I don't look black. I'm a middle-aged white woman, with blonde hair. Why was he telling me all of this? I stared back at the guy with a "what the hell" look, and he turned and walked on, still muttering.

These two encounters were, of course, pretty harmless, just weird. It's just that... I'm aware of the "weirdness level" having increased a lot lately to varying extents, both personally, and on my streets, and in the nation.

Ciao, Chelsea Styles

I just found out today that my beloved Chelsea Styles hair salon will be closing this June. After 39 years! See the below link to read about my initial impressions of visiting the salon when I first moved to NYC in early 2007.
April 2007 blog entry and photos
A rocky beginning, but I soon became a welcome regular. The salon will always be part of my early memories of moving to NYC. And to think I was a part of such a real piece of Chelsea history!

In the future, whenever I'm thinking I'm overly...

...sensitive and peevish, I shall happily recall the below quote from this week's "New Yorker," which proves that someone is indeed more peevish than me (from the article "A Nervous Splendor: The Wittgenstein family had a genius for misery"):

"Bad temper and extreme nervous tension were endemic in the family. One day, when Paul was practicing at one of the seven grand pianos in their winter home, the Palais Wittgenstein, he leaped up and shouted at his brother Ludwig in the room next door, 'I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!'"

I'm going to have to memorize that line and use it on someone! :)

Get Dressed

IN MIND
by Denise Levertov

There's in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but

fair-featured, and smelling of
apples or grass. She wears

a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she

is kind and very clean without
ostentation --
but she has
no imagination.
And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl

or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers

and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs --

but she is not kind.

Mrs. Lee and April Fool's

When my family lived in College Station, Texas, we had a very large, round, quirky next-door-neighbor-woman, about 60, who wore flowered muu-muus, thick black-rimmed glasses, and her nearly-white hair in a blunt page-boy. Mrs. Lee's personality was as large as she was, always a happy "hello" and a chat over the fence whenever we were outside, and the subject of conversation once we were indoors.

On April Fool's Day, oh, about 1972 or so, when I was 7, my mom came into my room and said breathlessly, "You're never going to believe this." "What, what?" "No, I can't tell you." "Mom!" "...Mrs. Lee is lying out in her yard getting a suntan...and she's NAKED!" "NO!"

The humongous Mrs. Lee naked! That I had to see. My eyes popped and I grinned and started to run for the window, but then remembered: It was April Fool's Day. And my mom was gooood at April Fool's jokes. I stopped dead in my tracks and locked eyes with her, completely torn. I soooooo wanted to see our wacky neighbor naked! But my mom was making it up. Or was she?! Do I act cool and say, "Oh, Mom, you can't fool me." Or do I run to the window out of pure wishfulness, knowing still that it wasn't going to be true... My mom and I stood staring at each other, me looking anxious and befuddled, her looking amused at my mental dilemma. I couldn't help it. I bolted for the window, hoping against hope...

"April Fool!" Mom laughed. Darnit! And then we both started wondering and chatting, in awe: "But what if she really HAD been naked? Can you imagine?!"

For some reason, that stands out to me as the best April Fool's trick I ever had played on me. The minor psychological torment at the decision I had to make! The emotional excitement the whole time! :)

JOAN CRAWFORD: BAD REPUTATION

"You Do Something to Me"

Joan art by Michael Richter.

Obama-Fingers!

There's a new chicken product out in Germany -- Obama-Fingers!

No, no sense whatsoever of the possible negative connotations. Reminds me of when Germany was reunited in 1989: What was the first thing the country's legislature did? Oh...sing, en-masse, "Deutschland Uber Alles"! (Ya'd think they'd act just a little humble, at least at the beginning of their renaissance...) :)

(And, what's with the horrid "curry dip" accompanying the chicken fingers? Curry?? They're not "Bobby Jindahl-fingers"!)



Article from Der Spiegel.

NYTimes 3/24/09 on Plath/Nicholas

Why the Plath Legacy Lives

Nicholas Hughes: 1/17/62 - 3/16/09

I just found out from a reader of this blog that Nicholas Hughes, son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, hanged himself last week. He was 47.

London Times announcement
University of Alaska remembrance

LIFE AFTER DEATH
by Ted Hughes (published 1998)

What can I tell you that you do not know
Of the life after death?

Your son's eyes, which had unsettled us
With your Slavic Asiatic
Epicanthic fold, but would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels,
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair.
Great hands of grief were wringing and wringing
His wet cloth of face. They wrung out his tears.
But his mouth betrayed you -- it accepted
The spoon in my disembodied hand
That reached through from the life that had survived you.

Day by day his sister grew
Paler with the wound
She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it
Each day with her blue Breton jacket.

By night I lay awake in my body
The Hanged Man
My neck-nerve uprooted and the tendon
Which fastened the base of my skull
To my left shoulder
Torn from its shoulder-root and cramped into knots --
I fancied the pain could be explained
If I were hanging in the spirit
From a hook under my neck-muscle.

Dropped from life
We three made a deep silence
In our separate cots.

We were comforted by wolves.
Under that February moon and the moon of March
The Zoo had come close.
And in spite of the city
Wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night
For minutes on end
They sang. They had found where we lay.
And the dingos, and the Brazilian-maned wolves --
All lifted their voices together
With the grey Northern pack.

The wolves lifted us in their long voices.
They wound us and enmeshed us
In their wailing for you, their mourning for us,
They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death,
In the fallen snow, under falling snow.

As my body sank into the folk-tale
Where the wolves are singing in the forest
For two babes, who have turned, in their sleep,
Into orphans
Beside the corpse of their mother.

-----------------------------------------------------

NICK AND THE CANDLESTICK
by Sylvia Plath (October 29, 1962)

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish --
Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs --

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

March 23 (Joan Crawford/Assia Wevill)

March 23 is a red-letter day for me, being the creator of the world's largest Joan Crawford website. It's Joan's birthday. So of course I expected a heavier amount of traffic, mainly on the Best of Everything site, but also here, on my blog.

What I didn't expect, though, was a strangely large number of hits to this blog originating from a photo I posted here back in June 2007, of Assia Wevill's daughter Shura. (I have a stat counter installed that allows seeing the web address through which visitors enter the site.)

Then it clicked: Assia Wevill killed herself, and her daughter Shura, on March 23, 1969. So I suppose people are remembering Wevill/Shura, and my blog posts about them from back in 2007 are showing up in their searches.

It's a bizarre thing for me to see the conflicting reasons for people visiting my blog on this March 23: I love and admire Joan, and all she stands for (hard work, talent, gumption, self-sufficiency). I despise Assia Wevill and everything she stands for (laziness, no talent, relying on men for survival/approval, murdering her child).

In short: Look at the two pictures below and think for a second:

One of these little girls sitting on her Mommie's lap got gassed by her mother. (And the mother's somehow regarded as a sensitive martyr.)
The other little girl was forced by her mother to write Christmas cards and lived to write a tell-all. (And the mother's somehow regarded as a pariah.)

The hypocrisy of this makes me sick.

Trial By Fire / Tigers and Hunters

TRIAL BY FIRE

what oaths have been sworn, what
twinning of thought
could have led to such comfort, such
easy grace you now possess--
still, curled and clenched as a fist
a salvaged pearl in each tight palm

listen to me! your sleep
is grief and breathing even
an affront

you sense the descent
as dead anger needles
yellow and fall
to pin fluttery fly-by-nights
in a welter of ether

whir of disturbance
to mar your
blur of dreams and wings

such is capture, such is cure
each motive unpure
for the purpose of
loosing in you
a howl so winter-white, in-
sightful in its need, im-
prisoned by sleep's frost
of thoughts both delicate and untrue

to awaken you?

my fury, like the sky, imparts
a thousand falling stars--
to catch
or watch emblazon
vast expanse

a world wooed by fire
blackens through misuse

until I learn, my darling
we will burn

------------------------------------------------

TIGERS AND HUNTERS

are lovers, at first.
The battle still game.

The rifle may jam.
The Hunter survive
stiletto swipe to face,
tender-Tiger-style.

There is always hope then.
That one may simply
lie still and let the other
lope off.

But what if the aiming
of that rifle, those claws,
is too stirring
to resist.

If the memory of that
gun, and that click,
trigger the sickness
of last week's miss;
the claws--the kiss
once transfigured.

If either Beast will
NOT lie down. And paws
scrape metal, or pavement,
or dirt, and the jaw is
a weapon, the snarl
of a curse, and haunches
tense at each small sound.

And then eyes lock, each
split upswept--
and jungle cries only
with keeper
and kept.

"She's the One" by Tessa Hadley

Reminded me of a hundred things while I was reading. In this week's New Yorker.

One of the best "desire" songs ever

p.s. I did drive all night one time... After midnight in a decrepit car, through some pretty barren Texas landscape, without a map, not knowing exactly where I was going or what hotel or room my lover was in... I found him! :)

The feeling, and the welcome, were exactly like this song. (Except, no, my Texas man didn't, once I showed up, just lie there and kiss me sluggishly like the gay male model in the video!) :)

And I love the "Is that alright?" line... Although I was pumped up while driving, part of the adrenalin was fear...what if he rejected me?

--------------------------

"I Drove All Night"

I had to escape
The city was sticky and cruel
Maybe I should have called you first
But I was dying to get to you
I was dreaming while I drove
The long straight road ahead, uh, huh

Could taste your sweet kisses
Your arms open wide
This fever for you is just burning me up inside

I drove all night to get to you
Is that alright
I drove all night
Crept in your room
Woke you from your sleep
To make love to you
Is that alright
I drove all night

What in this world
Keep us from tearing apart
No matter where I go I hear
The beating of your heart
I think about you
When the night is cold and dark
No one can move me
The way that you do
Nothing erases the feeling between me and you

I drove all night to get to you
Is that alright
I drove all night
Crept in your room
Woke you from your sleep
To make love to you
Is that alright
I drove all night

Could taste your sweet kisses
Your arms open wide
This fever for you is just burning me up inside

I drove all night to get to you
Is that alright
I drove all night
Crept in your room
Woke you from your sleep
To make love to you
I drove all night... to hold you tight

"May you live in interesting times."

I was just thinking back to my initial peevish reaction to hearing that Chinese quote/curse, years and years ago (probably back during the long stretch of Clinton years, when things were relatively calm and prosperous): "I'm bored! I'm bored! I wish things WERE interesting!" (In my defense, though, I also remember a quote from Clinton himself after he left office, saying he wished he had had more challenges to face, since that is the only way of truly testing a president!)

I was too little during the social upheavals of the late 60s and, more importantly to my mind now, the economic crises of the 70s to fully comprehend what such turmoil actually entailed. (My dad was an enlisted Air Force man; his salary remained stable, so our family was unaffected financially.) Then, when there was another economic downturn in the early 90s, I had a safe state job at a university library, plus was gearing up to go to graduate school, so, again, I was completely unaffected. Then, around 2002/2003, when my publishing company in Austin started having a wave of layoffs: the first time, I was a project employee with months to go on my contract, so I was (cheap and) spared. The second round, I was let go, but was only unemployed for about a month before another company snatched me up.

After another 6 months or so of working for this second company, the original company hired me again, with full benefits. Where I remained until I so cavalierly quit to come to NYC...SANS JOB!

What was I thinking? Oh, something like... "It's the publishing capital of the world! How hard can it be to find a publishing job?!" (Famous last words!)

I remember people (mature adults) being somewhat surprised that I was going to a new city, and New York of all places, without a ready source of income. But here's the thing: While my family always had decent houses in decent neighborhoods when I was growing up, as an adult, goofing around in college for years and years and living off of a library-wage, I was used to living in small, rented quarters. I had no house/mortgage, no kids to support. My living expenses were always pretty small. Picking up and moving to NYC wasn't as bizarre-seeming to me as it might have been to , say, an editor in her 50s with a regular large income and a nice house and yard and yearly month-long vacations to Europe.

I, on the other hand, was still a scruffy "Romantic" in my head--I had no financial or emotional ties holding me in Austin, just wanted to dive in to the beauty and history and excitement of New York, just because I'd fallen in love with it during a job interview there circa 2005... And get this, in the "kicking myself in the ass" department: That interview was for a copy-editing supervisor position with the company I was then working for in Austin. They had been unable to fill the NY position after 6 months or so of interviewing New Yorkers, so I, not having any idea of NY, nonchalantly said I'd interview for it. They flew me in; the interview went well. I then told them I'd take the job IF they paid my moving expenses! What, was I living in the affluent early 60s in my head, where companies paid your moving expenses?! And that f'ing job paid over $50,000 a year!! Good lord I was stupid! And childishly "into" letting the Fates decide! Had I that moment in time to do over, I'd beg, borrow, and possibly steal the f'ing "moving expenses"! :)

As it stands now, I'm on the cusp of my third major job search since I arrived here 2 years ago. (I expected to have ONE.) It's extremely draining mentally. I have been pretty lucky, though: In 24 months, I have had 14 months of full-time, well-paying project publishing jobs. (The other 10 months have been either living off of savings or doing tedious part-time scattered things like legal proofing.)

With the recent stress, I've also been questioning my move here. Especially since my current project job is in Jersey and involves a looooong bus ride to and from work. Hardly the "me-bopping-around-the-city" that I'd imagined. While I like Jersey just fine and it's been interesting getting to see the pretty countryside and towns during my trek every day, I don't LOVE Jersey. I do, however, LOVE New York City. I love it. I get to see it every morning when I catch my bus to my job in Jersey, I get to see it on weekends... If it were just Jersey in the equation, I'd move back to Austin in a second, where there is also pleasant scenery and lots of shopping, plus rents at half the price (though not the kind of Northeast weather that I like a lot more)...

But it ain't about Jersey. It's about New York. I get a thrill just walking around looking at the buildings and riding the subway and jostling on the sidewalks or hanging around my favorite areas of Union Square or Chelsea listening to and watching people. I love walking and not driving. I love being able to buy a hat or sunglasses or a hot-dog off the sidewalk vendors. I love the true mixture of people. (Not the fake "diversity" that towns like San Fran claim, where every "minority" group is completely enmeshed in its own neighborhood and political ghetto.) I love not feeling self-conscious or weird here because there's so much going on that there's no time for judging what's "weird" or not. (The judgment seems to be based on your work: Is it good or not?) I can just relax and breathe and be myself.

When I moved here in early 2007, it wasn't quite clear that the recession had yet started. I was still thinking I'd be riding the wave of prosperity and easy jobs.

And I'd had no real concept of "NYC" in 2001, when 9/11 happened (except for notions garnered from literature and pop culture). I felt for the city, but only abstractly.

But a couple of years later, after the black-out, which occurred after my first introduction to the city via my job interview, I cut out pictures from the New York Times of people walking home across the Brooklyn Bridge and stuck them above my desk at work, with the note-to-self: "I should have been there."

Now I AM here. And I'm going to stick it out, job or no. Years from now, I want to be able to say that I was loyal to the city through the hard times. THAT is how you prove that you really love.

Roy Clark, 1969

When I was a kid in Texas, I grew up watching Roy Clark as the co-host (with Buck Owens) of the TV show "Hee-Haw." I always liked Clark better than Owens physically, but I never thought of Clark as a real singer or writer. Just, though, came across this song of his, "Yesterday When I Was Young":



This song reminds me of what I like about some country men. They can be goofy and cut up, but also be the most sensitive and soulful. Thanks, Roy!

Jersey Girl

I was waiting on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge (connecting Manhattan to Jersey) for my bus home after work this evening when a co-worker came up to me. She and I usually nod to each other on the morning company bus and don't usually see each other after work... When she asked me this evening what bus I was waiting for, and I said the 156 to Weehawken, she came alive: "Oh, you're a Jersey girl! I didn't know that!" She'd always been kind of surly mornings, but once she found out I was living in (not quite "from" I couldn't admit) Jersey, she became really friendly and talkative. We exchanged chit-chat about the shortest transportation routes to our job up until her sister pulled up to the curb to pick her up. (! -- Now THAT's a "short transportation route"!) :)

I love the friendliness, but I'm also rather dismayed. When this co-worker thought I lived in Manhattan, she ignored me, but when she found out I lived in Jersey, I was all of a sudden OK?

This reminds me of my creepy experience in grad school in San Francisco: My poems were of the same quality. Pre-telling I was gay, one (gay) professor (thinking I was "just" from Texas) went out of his way to criticize me and make me feel stupid. Post-telling I was gay... the same professor then went out of his way to praise my poems in class and out. Having been through the first dismissal, I couldn't ever trust his second stage of phony praise.

I miss my books!

I probably had close to a thousand books back when I lived in Austin. I sold maybe 50 at a yard sale before I moved to NYC, and the rest now sit in boxes in my mom's garage in San Antone.

After I moved, in '07, I had the Ma ship me what I considered my "must-haves": Every last one of my Joan Crawford-related books (about 35), plus all of my dictionaries and reference books that I use for my copy-editing work (about 10). Then, when I've gone home for Christmas, I've picked up a few that would fit in my suitcase: Plath (2), Hughes (2), Rilke, Eliot poetry, some screenplay books ("Blue Angel" and "Sunset Blvd" and "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"), some NY-themed things like Salinger's work, Frank O'Hara's poems, and gay-themed stuff like "Celluloid Closet" and "Drag Queens of NY."

I've always felt deficient without my library with me. But it's interesting to see how the collection has started to grow again. First are things I've bought outright: I have 11 books about New York City that I've bought at the Strand. And then 3 used bios: Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hillary Clinton (also from the Strand). Plus one that my first roommate here gave me, about rocker Carole Pope (roommate Fran was actually a one-time manager of Pope, who was a one-time lover of Dusty Springfield).

The rest I've been picking up for free--from the first 2 apartment buildings that I lived in (there were "free" shelves in the laundry-rooms). And lately, I just discovered that my workplace also has a "free" shelf. So here are the freebies I've picked up, in no particular order:

The Theory of the Modern Stage
Changing, by Liv Ullmann
No One Here Gets Out Alive (Doors bio)
Riders on the Storm (Doors/Densmore)
The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer
Great Expectations
The Jungle
Saint Joan (my favorite Shaw play)
A Room with a View
The Sheltering Sky
The Mill on the Floss
Story of O
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
Jane Eyre
Pierre and Jean (Maupassant)
Siddhartha
Walden
To Kill a Mockingbird
It Takes a Village
Citizen Hearst
Epitome of History (1883)
A Harvard Classics set including volumes on Franklin/Woolman/Penn, Aesop/Grimm/Andersen, Addison/Steele/Swift/Defoe/Johnson, Emerson, Homer, Plutarch, Virgil, Cervantes, American Historical Documents. (Like I'm ever going to crack open one of these!)

(The one book I myself contributed to a free-pile was the autobiography of Maria von Trapp! I thought it would be a rolicking good tale, a la "The Sound of Music," but... the woman writes like a nun!) :)

The only things I really wish I had with me from the garage are my nice, big art and movie books (too big and heavy to ask my mom to mail), plus my dozens of books on/by Plath/Hughes, and the rest of my poetry collection. The other novels and things: Eh, I can always pick up from the library if I'm craving.

514 W. Rebecca

I was just thinking of this house that I lived in in Iowa Park, Texas (a small town near Wichita Falls), when I was in 5th and 6th grade.

I started thinking of it because I was crying just now, and I remembered once at Christmas when my dad was stationed overseas... The house was two-story, my mom's bedroom downstairs, and our kids' bedrooms upstairs. And on Christmas, my father intentionally didn't call my mom, and she was crying, and I could hear her crying through the vents. I never in my life saw her cry, but I heard her that once.

Other memories of that house:

(1) There was only dirt and small rocks all over the yard when we moved in. So my mom set me and my brother on a project to pick out all of the rocks so we could plant grass. While we were out there in the yard, passersby actually stopped and opined that we would never get all of the rocks out, and grass would never grow! (Yeah, yeah: We DID get all of the friggin' rocks picked up. And grass DID grow!)

(2) I used to create themes for my upstairs room. One time, while I was into "Encyclopedia Brown" mysteries, I turned my room into a detective's headquarters. (My mom wouldn't let me hang a business sign on our front door, like Encyclopedia... Why not?? One mystery that I wanted to solve was a dead cat that I'd found lying in an empty lot a few blocks away, with the flesh missing from one leg. I could tell that it had been tortured. Never did figure out who did it.) I was also once into the Old West in that room (which consisted of me, for some reason, turning around my desk like it was the front desk of an inn, and hanging hand-made "Wanted" posters on the walls).

(3) From my room, which was upstairs, I could spy some boys building an underground fort in an empty lot a couple of blocks away. Of course, I had to go over there and mess with it. And tell other people about it. The guilt. Really! It was a neat, secret thing, but because of my "I Spy" bedroom, I could see exactly what they were doing and got involved and messed it up. I just told a couple of people, but the word spread, and pretty soon teenagers were hanging around there, leaving garbage strewn around.

(4) From my room, I could spy the Dairy Queen that I used to visit once a week. My mom would give me the 45 cents or whatever it was to get my usual, a cherry sundae (no nuts). I would go there by myself and eat at a booth by myself, then come on home. One time, there was a man there with his wife and 2 kids sitting across the room. He kept looking at me, then insisted on buying me an ice-cream cone. I was sitting there already eating a sundae, and he was there with his wife and kids, but something compelled him to force the counter person to bring me an ice-cream cone. I nodded a "thank you" over at him, finished my sundae, then left with the cone and dumped it outside on the way home. (Jesus, I was 10 or 11. The precursor to the guy buying you a drink from across the bar!)

Silly Geese

I work in North Jersey, relatively "out in the country" (at least by Northeast standards), at a "campus" that houses thousands of people. It's been cool to watch the Canadian geese hanging around, even during the snows. They're big and sassy, constantly strutting and flying around, not scared of people. And...they poop as big as puppies! Seriously, while walking from my bus one day, I saw a couple of goose-piles on the sidewalk and had to ask a fellow passenger: "Did someone have their dog here? What DID that?"

Being from Texas, I'd never encountered such big beasts of birds before! Aside from their poop, I also had to inquire, when they were hunting around for food in the snow a couple of weeks ago: "I thought geese were supposed to fly SOUTH for the winter! What are they doing hanging around Jersey in this cold?" The person I was talking to said, "They're CANADIAN geese! This IS 'South'!" :) :) Ohhh! :)

One last thought: A few weeks ago, after the "Miracle on the Hudson" emergency plane landing, because the emergency was caused by said Canadian geese flying into the engines of the plane, a bunch of yahoos, both legislative and civilian, started coming up with plans like "Let's shoot all of those geese"; "Let's douse their eggs with gasoline"; etc. etc. Just wondering: Did those kill-happy idiots ever think about perhaps installing lightweight grills over the engines so that no flying beasts could be sucked into them? Hmmmm...

Talk about "No Exit." (Some death poems.)

Monday I was late to work, caught a late bus to work, which was later still because of a huge hour-long hold-up on Jersey's Route 17. As the bus inched closer to what I'd already guessed would be a wreck-scene, you could see yards of tire tracks in the grass on the side of the road, then, finally, a silvery car smashed head-long into a tree. A yellow plastic tarp covered a body next to the car. (That's when one of my fellow-passengers--aged 22 or so, pale as a ghost and glib with youth--piped up to no one in particular: "Whoa! That guy's gotta be dead!" Gee, ya think, Dude?)


LATE

Somebody died in Allendale today.
Near noon, on Route 17. I was late for work.

Was he reaching for his coffee,
or to put out a cigarette?
Was he mad at someone passing
in this rain?
What song was playing?

His yellow plastic tarp
will outlast his remains.

My boss does not complain.

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My poem is pitifully flimsy, of course, but I was reminded of other poems about sudden, surprising death that have literally made my heart ache:


THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER
by Randall Jarrell (1945)

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

....................

"OUT...OUT"
by Robert Frost

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behing the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them "Supper." At the word, the saw,
As if it meant to prove saws know what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap -
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all -
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart -
He saw all was spoiled. "Don't let him cut my hand off -
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!"
So. The hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then - the watcher at his pulse took a fright.
No one believed. They listened to his heart.
Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

..................

And then there's Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," which I just a few weeks ago re-read. The ultimate painful, heart-breaking "death-poem." (Babe, the horse, is what I keep remembering the most for some reason...)

No Exit

Sartre's play "No Exit" I read back in college: If I remember correctly, there was a straight man, a bisexual woman, and a gay woman trapped together in a room. The bi woman wanted the straight man, the gay woman wanted the bi woman, the straight man didn't want the bi woman but did it with her just to piss off the gay woman. (I'll probably have to go back and re-read.)

Back in the late '80s, I had a night of relatively bad sex that reminded me completely of the above.

I lived in a small apartment complex managed by a drug-addled gay guy who never cleaned the pool. (No, not "so to speak." The lazy ass never cleaned the damn pool.) He let a lot of his similarly druggy gay guy friends live there for free. At the time I wasn't out, had no idea the manager was gay or doing drugs, etc. One night I looked out my window across the way and saw a naked guy lying in HIS window, curtains wide open, jacking off. Being a naive 22, I immediately reported him to the manager the next day: "Was there a homeless guy in that apartment? I saw someone...PLAYING WITH HIMSELF last night!" My complaint (combined with my complaints about the scuzzy state of the pool) freaked the guy out. He told everyone he knew that I was a "narc" sent by the police, and subsequently quit in his paranoia.

(Funny how wanting a clean pool and not wanting to see guys jacking off was interpreted as being a "narc"!)

Anyhow, that's the back-story to my "Bad Sex" story, which took place at the same apartment building.

Once the building had a new manager, and a clean pool, I met a guy at said pool. Turned out he was, so he said, an "ex-Chippendale's dancer." He was staying there with a gay male friend of his, who was also out by the pool. The three of us chatted for hours, etc. The "friend" eventually went back to his own apartment, and the Chippendale's guy ended up coming up to my apartment. There was some more chatting and then a lengthy bout of making out. I was a virgin at the time and the guy was cool with that, so we just grappled for a while (and I learned how good someone's tongue can feel in your ear---oops! too much information!). He was completely gentlemanly in his naked Chippendale's way, though his "I'm going to drive you crazy" exhortations didn't really.

When it was all over around sunrise, we said 'Bye and I was seeing him out. Only to look down at the pool area and see the gay friend sitting there and glaring up at us...Lord knows how long he'd been sitting there waiting to see when his friend would emerge from my apartment.

I felt terrible. I could have cared less about the Chippendale's guy, yet here was somebody below who obviously cared very deeply, enough to wait up all night for him...

There wasn't any sort of scene. Chippendale silently went down to his friend's apartment, the gay friend followed him in without yelling at me. In the next couple of days, Chip and I went to a mall and held hands awkwardly. He then found another place to live and we never kept in touch.

But to this day I do feel a bit guilty about what I too easily got and didn't want, what the guy by the pool didn't get and would have given anything to have had.

from "Poem for a Boy"

...I find it sweet
the barely nicked pinky you show
and I kiss; the forehead scar, too
the mean uncle my lips erase

And I feel tenderly toward
the panties your first wife didn't wear
one drive-in night, 1959.
What a thrill for your
19-year-old self
What a new, lovely thing
(how softly her hair falls)...

-----------------------

Song for new/lost love: "Last Date" by Floyd Cramer, 1960.

"May you live in interesting times..."

A famous Chinese curse, veiled as a blessing!

When I first decided to move to NYC in 2007, sans job and with very little savings, it was with the blind confidence of a Naif, a fool. At the time, I thought, "La la, it's the publishing capital of the world, I'll have no problem making a living..."

To the saint who watches over fools and children (even 40-something-year-old children)... THANK YOU! In the past two years, I've gotten quite lucky just in time: At two points of near-desperation, I, at-the-last-minute, got hired for projects by publishing companies, just in time to pay my way overdue rent and bills.

My last ex-project ran out in April 2008. I knew ahead of time that it would probably end then, but chose to hang onto hope and rumors: Maybe it won't end, maybe the company will call you back a month or so later. Didn't happen.

What did happen to me mentally after that April is that I laid around on my couch in May and June of 2008, lethargically watching re-runs of bad reality TV, sweltering (because New Jersey really does have hot summers and I couldn't afford to buy an air conditioner), doing absolutely nothing to find a job, waiting passively for a phone-call. In July, with my savings running out, I finally shook myself out of it and started scrambling. For the next 4 months, I did odds-n-ends, scraping together enough to live on, panicking in the meantime. I finally got hired for a 6-month project in November... and just found out that, due to company budget problems, this latest position really IS going to end after 6 months: This May 15.

Today's February 28. I've got 2-and-a-half months until May 15. And I learned my lesson after last April: Do not sit around on your ass thinking that a job is going to magically appear.

Initially upon hearing this latest news, I was scared and depressed, thinking, "Jesus Christ. Not again." Last year's job search was tough and emotionally draining. The constant "sell and sell and sell" of yourself wears you down, as does the overhanging financial fear. My initial panicked thought this second time was, "Well, I can always go back to Texas." Sure. I can do that. It's not that I'm in danger of starving or being homeless or anything. I've got people back home who will take care of me.

The thing is: I don't WANT to go back home to Texas. I like it a lot where I am. I like (nay, love) NYC and I like Jersey. There's the dumb, physical stuff like liking the weather a lot better here (all four seasons). There's the surface stuff like liking the general behavior of the people better here (frat boys/ex-frat boys don't rule here; people are generally down-to-earth, like in Texas, but also way more tolerant and sensible -- there seems to be a lack of underlying sadism in the Northeast, which is a genuine mental relief. I'll always be a Texan, but I cannot stand the shit that people get from being "different" there, even if it's "different" from the liberal PC bullshit in my liberal college hometown of Austin).

Point being: I want to stay here. I learned my lesson about lying around on my ass. I've been applying for jobs tonight in anticipation of May 15. I don't want to get a roommate to halve my bills, but I will do so if need be. It's nerve-wracking watching the latest layoff news on TV: "The highest unemployment rate in 16 years." 16 years ago, I was still in college mode, about to go off to grad school, sure of plentiful student loans, unconcerned about the job market. This go-round, I'm in full adult mode, fully aware for the first time that there are very real consequences.

It's scary, but it's also weirdly exhilarating. A personal test.

Perpetual

My two favorite love poems.

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.

--W.B. Yeats (1893)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAUCER

“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote . . .”
At the top of your voice, where you swayed on the top of a stile,
Your arms raised—somewhat for balance, somewhat
To hold the reins of the straining attention
Of your imagined audience—you declaimed Chaucer
To a field of cows. And the Spring sky had done it
With its flying laundry, and the new emerald
Of the thorns, the hawthorn, the blackthorn,
And one of those bumpers of champagne
You snatched unpredictably from pure spirit.
Your voice went over the fields towards Grantchester.
It must have sounded lost. But the cows
Watched, then approached: they appreciated Chaucer.
You went on and on. Here were reasons
To recite Chaucer. Then came the Wyf of Bath,
Your favorite character in all literature.
You were rapt. And the cows were enthralled.
They shoved and jostled shoulders, making a ring,
To gaze into your face, with occasional snorts
Of exclamation, renewed their astounded attention,
Ears angling to catch every inflection,
Keeping their awed six feet of reverence
Away from you. You just could not believe it.
And you could not stop. What would happen
If you were to stop? Would they attack you,
Scared by the shock of silence, or wanting more—?
So you had to go on. You went on—
And twenty cows stayed with you hypnotized.
How did you stop? I can’t remember
You stopping. I imagine they reeled away—
Rolling eyes, as if driven from their fodder.
I imagine I shooed them away. But
Your sostenuto rendering of Chaucer
Was already perpetual. What followed
Found my attention too full
And had to go back into oblivion.

--Ted Hughes (1998)

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and here's one extra:

BEAUTY MOVES

...the trance of
your dark eyes, now closed
as dance takes hold,
head back to grin in
gold regress.

I love you like this, warm bliss
replacing once and future cold;
for now the mist of your happiness
settles on your skin -- not for
my own dumb tongue to bless --
but for lights
and all eyes to caress
and kiss.

-- Me (circa 1991)

Anne Sexton: "Do you hear how that is like sex?!"

"The Wrestler": Adrian, and Hope, Have Left the Building

Having seen (and being an admirer of) director Darren Arenofsky's harrowing, jittery tales of obsession "Pi" (1998) and "Requiem for a Dream" (2000), I expected the style of "The Wrestler" to be similarly frenetic. And at first was a bit disappointed that it wasn't. I came out of the theater this afternoon feeling a bit subdued and flat, rather offhandedly chalking the movie up to, "OK, I got another Oscar-nominated film out of the way before tomorrow's ceremony."

Its subtlety fooled me, though; just now I woke up from a nap unable to keep from thinking about various philosophical aspects of the movie...The choices that the two main characters made, for instance, and why they made them. And could their fates have been avoided, and why they weren't. And whether or not the choices were actually spiritually valid ones, despite all evidence to the contrary.

After seeing "The Wrestler," and sleeping on it, a lot of other characters and works keep coming to mind. The Devil in the Bible, for one. Captain Ahab in "Moby-Dick." The main character in Mike Leigh's movie "Naked." Rocky Balboa. Barbara Ehrenreich's nonfiction book "Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage America."

And I keep picturing, also, uber-wrestler-success Hulk Hogan watching this movie; surely the thought crosses his mind: "There but for the grace of god go I." Just as I, when watching Karen Black's character in the tale of the underside of 1930s Hollywood "Day of the Locust" think, "There but for the grace of god goes Joan Crawford."

Randy "The Ram" Robinson in "The Wrestler" is the much more realistic flip-side of Rocky Balboa in "Rocky II." Remember Rocky's humiliations at the hands of the sarcastic TV ad-director? Or his humbleness at going back to work at the meat-packing plant after being told that any further boxing matches could possibly blind him? When Rocky decides to go back in the ring, though, you get a bit giddy, knowing that things are going to turn out OK in the end and you, the viewer, will get a big uplifting emotional payoff and feel good about yourself in the process: "I'm just like that scrappy underdog!" When "The Ram" decides to go back in the wrestling ring, you don't get any such panacea. More a sense of, "Oh shit. What's going to happen to this loser? What would I do? Am I like that?" And who, really, wants to be forced to question themselves like that?

But IS "The Ram" a loser? Well, yeah, of course, on the surface, by society's standards. But you've also got to hand it to him for being true to himself. He may be self-destructive both physically and emotionally, but isn't going out with a bang in your own realm really preferable to being nitpicked to death day-in and day-out by petty customers and managers in a soul-deadening job behind a deli counter? The vast majority of us, of course, pick some variation of the safe deli-counter route. And barely stop to question why that route is the only one available to us.

Which is why fictional and/or real-life characters like the Devil and Charles Manson and Captain Ahab are so fascinating: Things might have come to horrific ends (not necessarily planned to be such but always a possibility), but there's also some shocked sense of awe/admiration that these guys just said "Fuck it" and threw all caution to the wind in their very different quests for self-respect. What was it the Devil said? "I'd rather be the ruler of hell than a servant in heaven." Most of us wouldn't make that egotistical leap, but you've got to acknowledge the courage in doing so in the face of the almost-assured negative consequences.

"The Ram" is certainly no devil or Ahab or Manson; his life is lived on a much smaller, pettier, more realistic scale. But his sense of self is similar. And thus admirable in its own way, however lone or sad. There's no Adrian waiting to comfort him at the end of his trek. She'd already left the building. But there IS, nonetheless, one last "Ram Jam," one last leap of glory.

Hotter than a two-dollar pistol

I dedicated my graduate thesis, deservedly so, to this man (a 2008 Kennedy Center national honoree):



From the Washington Post article at the link above: "I think the whole egg in a nutshell," Jones says, trying one last time to explain his enormous appeal, "is that there's never been anything phony about me. What you see is what you get."

That's also what I love about him. He can sing the most intense, serious love songs, and then cut loose with the goofiest of ditties.

I also like his sign up outside his Tennessee home: "Forget the dog. Beware of the wife."

Kudos from "Films in Review" columnist

Films in Review - David Del Valle blog

In the midst of a shitty week emotionally, I was pleased and proud to get an e-mail saying that the film critic David Del Valle had nominated my Joan Crawford website as one of his favorites online! Below is what he had to say in his "Films in Review" column (though, I must note--"The Best of Everything" is a regular website, not a blog!):


4] THE BEST OF EVERYTHING

The ultimate Joan Crawford blog…even to call it a blog is to deny the full force of what this site does to keep the memory and career of Joan Crawford alive in a positive way. The book MOMMY DEAREST did this great star severe damage when her daughter made public what may or may not be the true picture of Crawford as a mother. However as a star there can be no question, she was one of the greatest and this site proves it over and over again. One of my favorite sites online.

-----------------------------------------------

It was really an honor, and a relief, to get an acknowledgment like that, especially at this difficult personal time. I may be inept at personal relations, but, by golly, I DO know how to convey the Spirit o' Joan to the world. Friends and lovers come and go, but in the grand scheme of things, it is the purity of the WORK that matters, that lasts, what you've given your heart and mind and soul directly to (as opposed to editing with your loved one in mind)...

I really have poured myself into "The Best of Everything" completely for the past 5 years, spending more than 30 hours a week (in addition to my full-time job) working on it. Why? Because a 27-year-old actress in a 1932 film once gave me goosebumps when I was 22... And ever since then, I've wanted the world to know exactly why she was so goosebump-raising. I thank god for the Internet, which gave me the means to channel my love and admiration for her into a forum that her admirers worldwide can share with me.

When national film historians (and Joan fans) like David Del Valle also take notice, it's delicious icing on the cake. Thank you, David!

The Late Arrival

My travel to work every day involves hopping over from Jersey to Manhattan's Port Authority (42nd and 8th) to catch a company bus, which then takes me back into Jersey for my job. This all goes on around 7am every weekday morn.

Despite my usual bleariness at that hour, I almost always get a thrill when I first step onto the streets of NYC: the neon, the steam, the jackhammers, all at full blast...And I'm usually running late, and running to catch the company bus 8 blocks away, and trying to pick up a tabloid or two on the way... It's all very hectic, but exhilarating at the same time. So here's a ditty to my early-morning Manhattan.

---------------------------------------

The Late Arrival
(Port Authority, 7 a.m.)

Jumped a white-knuckle jitney through the tunnel of lerv
Spewed out where neon duels with dawn--the balls, the gall, the nerve!

Gave Ralph Kramden's ass a squeeze, one "To the moon!" before I dashed
Grabbing tabloids, jazzed to see what star, or plane, or market crashed

Slurping down each sluice of sunrise spilling toward me as I ran,
Smeared my greedy mouth with juices from the street's jackhammer jam

(How I'm starving, how I missed you---
Manhattan, here I am!)


----------------------------------------------

Some things in the poem that New Yorkers might know, but others might not:

"jitneys" -- crappy little run-down buses, often driven by cursing, swerving Middle Eastern men, that run between Manhattan and cities in Jersey along the Hudson shore. Since the regular Port Authority buses often are too few and far between during rush hour, if you're late, you catch a jitney bus...at your own risk! :)

"lerv" -- from Woody Allen's "Annie Hall": "I don't LOVE you, I LERV you..."

"Ralph Kramden's ass" -- there's a statue of "The Honeymooner"'s Ralph Kramden outside the Port Authority that I pass every day. (Gleason's occupation on the show was a Port Authority bus driver.)

"sluice of sunrise" -- in the morning on clear days, if you're walking down an avenue and looking east, you see the sun flowing down the building canyons/sluices as you cross each numbered street.

---------------------------------------------------

No More "I Love You"s...Please!

-----------------------------------------------------

I used to be a lunatic from the gracious days
I used to feel woebegone and so restless nights
My aching heart would bleed for you to see

Oh, but now

I don't find myself bouncing home
Whistling buttonhole tunes to make me cry

No more I love you's
The language is leaving me
No more i love you's changes are shifting
Outside the words

No one ever speaks about the monsters

I used to have demons in my room at night
Desire, despair, desire
So many monsters

No more i love you's
The language is leaving me
No more i love you's
The language is leaving me in silence
No more i love you's
Changes are shifting outside the words

And people are being real crazy
And you know what mommy?
Everybody was being real crazy
And the monsters are crazy.
There are monsters outside

Do be do be do do do oh
Outside the words

My Slumdog Valentine!

My Valentine's Day ended up not sucking after all, thanks to seeing this beautiful, heart/gut-wrenching movie.(IMDB page)

Wow, what a ride!

I spent the whole movie either laughing so hard I was crying, or swallowing hard to keep from crying, or giving up and just crying, or muttering "oh shit!" or "oh my god!" under my breath from the plot tension...All the while marvelling wide-eyed at the thrilling visuals and tapping my foot to the catchy soundtrack (which I'm ordering tonight).

Here're the end credits to the movie, accompanied by its Oscar-nominated song "Jai Ho." I just teared up again while watching the video, just as I did watching it at the end of the movie...so grateful for the experience that I'd just had, and the gift of yet one more thing!

The Bus Long Snake

I'm completely knocked out by this profound poem (with accompanying art by the writer). The creator's a complete shit personally (no Valentine of mine since she's got a "building engineer" to see at a race tomorrow), but her work is, nonetheless, stunningly layered and beautiful and, as yet, ridiculously unacknowledged. I really dislike her personally right now, but...I can't stop reading this poem! :) (Damn...if I weren't such a prideful Leo, I'd love to just lie back and enjoy her. Alas.)


The Bus Long Snake

They found a fossil of a snake as long as a bus.
Don’t you wonder if Eve put her children on him,
to ride around on.
Or maybe she charmed him into her,
telling him it was just for fun,
just for the ride.
Just for the wisdom she gained of the knowledge
of how it could be used,
for the ride of good and evil,
like going to school,
having a teacher,
for the knowledge of good and evil,
for the knowledge that men are not Gods.
Since then she knew the power of love
to heal broken things
since then she knew the power of cutting off the devil’s head
since then she knew the strength of pain
when the bus long snake
came around to make love.

My Funny Valentine

Julie London's last recording, 1981.

Amarillo By Morning

And why I miss Texas.

Manhattan, I missed you!

I started my current full-time job in mid-November. In the 3 months since then, nearly every cent has gone to catching up on bills that got behind while I was only semi-employed the previous 6 months, paying the rent, and buying groceries and bus passes. Aside from a couple of haircuts and a bit of clothes shopping for cheap GAP sweaters over Christmas, I've been unable to purchase anything for myself, really. And in the meantime, my good makeup was running out, my underwear had gone all to hell, etc. etc. There's such a thing as UPKEEP! And I wasn't upkeeping. And felt a bit decrepit as a result.(There's nothing worse than not being able to wear a new sweater because all of your current bras are dilapidated and will therefore make said sweater, and YOU, look a bit, oh...droopy.)

My saggy, draggy days are over, my friends! (Well, until it's UPKEEP-time again...) This Friday's paycheck was the first in 3 months that I didn't have to mainly save, that I could just SPEND, SPEND, SPEND! And I bought BRAS, BRAS, BRAS! OK, only 3... And one was the same cheap Bali-brand that I bought when I first arrived in NYC 2 years ago, the kind that too-quickly went downhill (so to speak)--- but that one's a generic white work-bra (as in "I don't really care if it's cute; no one's gonna see it"). The other two are gorgeous and cost over $60 each... That is, until I got to the register and discovered that, because I had on a red sweater, Macy's was giving me a 20% discount! (It was a weekend-long promotion for the American Heart Association: If you had on red, you got the discount; if not, you could buy a charity pin for $2 and still get the discount.)

Aside from my dilapidated-bra situation, I also had a serious dilapidated-panty situation. Now, lest you think I'm just negligent, let me explain: For the past, oh, probably 10 years, I've worn the same brand of underwear: "Adonna," sold by JCPenney. I swear to god, I've tried other panties in the past 10 years, and there was nothing like Adonna for not showing panty lines. They were cheap as hell, but underwear that cost 3 or 4 times as much just did not do the no-panty-line trick at all. As my current batch started to show signs of fray last year, I started searching for new Adonnas only desultorily online and in both NYC and San Antonio. Back then, the various stores just didn't seem to have any in stock every time I looked. I wasn't too worried; I thought for sure the next time I checked, I could find them... Nope. And this Christmas, after a year of looking, I got the official word: They're discontinued!

In the grand scheme of things, that's minor. In my habitual world, though... catastrophe! "No other panties fit right!" "Whatever shall I do!"

Well, what I discovered today at Macy's... In the past few years, while I was in my secluded little Adonna-world...there have been advances in panty-engineering. It's true. And the saleswomen knew all about said advances and shared their knowledge with me. I walked out of Macy's today with not only expensive/cheap-sale bras, but also expensive/cheap-sale panties...that don't hike up my ass! It was a good day in Manhattan.

And speaking of good days in Manhattan... It was about 40 degrees today, positively balmy after all of the lower-20s weather we've been having for over the past month. And it's been so long since I've been able to spend a whole day there just wandering around. After I got my "official shopping tasks" done (seriously, I woke up at 8am Saturday thinking only: "Bras/panties/makeup---GO!"), I made a beeline for the Union Square area, which I've loved ever since I worked there for 8 months last year... All the street vendors were out in the fine weather. One young woman was selling her small paintings of various classic movie stars (Marilyn, James Dean, Bogie). I stopped at her table to ask if she had any Joan Crawford... "No," she said... "But that's a great idea!" : ) : ) She was a hip-chick, so she wasn't trying to "suck up to the customer" or anything. It made me feel happy for Joan that I might've planted an idea in this artist's head...And it'll make me yet happier the day I walk by street vendors and actually see Joan in her rightful place among Marilyn and James!

Other Union Square delights: Popping in the Virgin record store, in the Strand bookstore, in a little off-the-beaten-path stationery/doo-dad shop that I always liked called "Kate's Paperie"... Window-shopping for shoes... (Today was not a buying-shoe-day. I was already worn out from the lingerie. Like lingerie, shoes warrant a whole day unto themselves.) And just leaning against a railing in the Square, having a smoke, turning my face up to the sun amid all the hustle-and-bustle (but also amid others doing the same thing as me---just sitting and soaking up/in). Enjoying a tiny kid in a stroller whose corduroy cap matched his dad's. Overhearing two 40-something women discuss beauty regimens. (One was bragging that everyone always told her she looked 10 years younger, claiming it was due to all of her own hard work at UPKEEP. Her friend was apologetic that she herself hadn't been trying over the years, and so was now paying the price... I was sunning and my eyes were closed when I first began hearing this, but I had to sneak a peak so I could judge for myself... The two women looked about the same age! The "10-years-younger"-one just had big chipmunk cheeks that OF COURSE made her, upon first glance, look more youthful... But what was her friend gonna say!)

As of this coming Wednesday, February 11, I will have been living in this area for 2 years. The first year in Manhattan, the second in Joisey, in a town just across the Hudson, overlooking the city. When I first moved here, Manhattan gave me goosebumps, as it had when I'd visited 2 or 3 times before. I thought maybe it was just me being dazzled because I was new... Nope. I got goosebumps all day today.

And, when I was on the subway, I actually got teary: A trio of buskers stepped into the car, 60-something-year-old black guys singing a doo-wop song from the '50s... When performers do stuff on the subway, you're supposed to look away, expressionless. ("Don't encourage them!") This time, though, I had to keep stifling a big, happy, goofy grin and keep my eyes from welling up at how pretty they sounded, how lucky I was to be able to hear them for free...

Manhattan's like that: So many neat, magical things for free, snatched off the subway or out of thin air; commonplace there, perhaps, but actually rare.

Bill and Hillary

Here's a clip from Hillary's recent swearing in as Secretary of State: "...to my husband...I am so grateful to him for a lifetime of, uh...all kinds of experiences..."! :) These two are cute.

I remember arguing with my mom back during Clinton's impeachment trial---she predicted that the two would be divorced as soon as he was out of office, that they were just together for political reasons. I thought, "No way. He gives her the warmth that her cold father didn't (while still having the same intelligence); she gives him the structure and discipline that his wild mother didn't (while still having humor and intensity). No one's leaving anybody!" :)

"A penny, not a dime! Ha-ha-ha-ha!"

Speaking of the polite job conversations mentioned earlier...

Today my lunch cost something-and-33 cents. Instead of handing the lunch-lady a quarter and a dime for change, I accidentally handed her a quarter and a penny. Oooops! Much forced hilarity ensued, which tired me out tremendously.

I had a discussion once with a co-worker back at my corporation in Austin. Did we like the polite elevator conversations, or did we not? Sometimes, such simple things can be pleasant, making you feel "connected to humanity" for a second... My co-worker fell mostly on this side of the line, whereas such conversations tended, maybe 75% of the time, to make me feel a bit existentially ill at the utter blank triteness of it all... And I'm not being snotty when I say that. I don't feel "nausea" because Sartre told me 45 years ago that I should---that kind of thing actually does usually wear me out mentally.

On the same topic: Today at work I was talking with a co-worker about how much I miss working in Manhattan. She's from Long Island, lives with her mother, has worked both in the city and in the suburbs. To her, driving to the suburbs and taking a train to Manhattan is about the same, and she wondered what I liked so much about working in Manhattan...

Oh, I dunno. Not having to eat in a company cafeteria every day. Being able to step outside during your lunch-hour to go to the post office, or to buy a pair of shoes, or a candle, or a book, or a Christmas gift. Being able to grab a hot-dog from a street-vendor and sit on a bench in Union Square for lunch, watching passers-by. Hopping on the speedy, to-the-point subway instead of trolling along on the bus for an extra hour. Looking at the beautiful buildings. Spotting Elvis Costello walking by. Talking with co-workers about their encounters with Marilyn Monroe back in the day as opposed to talking about what your mom made for dinner last night. You know, little things...

Across the Universe

Great opening lines:

Words are flowing out like
endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass
They slip away across the universe...

--------------------------------------
And then there's:

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---

--------------------------------------

And oh, OK, Old-Timers, I'll grant you:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and sorry I could not travel both...

Universal, Remote

I have an hour-45-minute commute to and from work every day. Initially, I somewhat enjoyed staring out the window, learning the New Jersey country/town-side. That "excitement" got expended after a couple of weeks.

Then I bought a little notebook to carry with me, thinking, "Hey! I'm a writer! I'll make notes!" Yeah. No.

I ain't gonna write about the utterly stilted polite conversation we bus-mates have daily on our company-sponsored bus that takes us to the suburbs of Jersey. The trek and the conversations are killin' me, but... I AM GRATEFUL FOR WORK SO I SHALL NOT COMPLAIN. There.

I will say, however, that a title and first line of a poem came to me last week while on the bus (thinking about a present that I was going to buy Miss Sandra and about our distance, both physically and mentally, from each other):

UNIVERSAL, REMOTE
We were flippant through channels

-----------------------------------------

I started mentally going on from there, but was coming up with trite cable stuff related to the "Discovery" channel et al., so I quit.

Did, though, think of something I jotted down years ago, after reading that the static that we now see on our TVs in between channels is actually left over from THE Big Bang that created THE universe...

Here was a blank thing, black thing, blanker
than the static remnants of the Big Bang
hovering in TV fuzz---ancient radiation
caught between our stations

-------------------------------
It KILLS me that I can't sustain the above thoughts... The fact that the Big Bang remnants are now static on our television stations... That is extremely profound...

How do you sleep?

Somebody help me. I'm going crazy here.

How?

Just wondering...

Hera hurling Zeus-borrowed bolts

Death dodging in Weehawken this week.

The "Miracle on the Hudson"... !!! What a beautiful thing...

The plane landed around Midtown Manhattan, in the Hudson across from Weehawken, where I live. The plane's pilot, "Sully," grew up in Denison, Texas, where I was born...

------------------------

In other death-averted news:

My cat Gracie has been sick all week. All of a sudden unable to walk straight. Not eating. She's only 10.

When she was a kid, she used to hunt birds and lizards for me, eating every bit of them except for their hearts, which she would leave on my balcony for me to admire.

When I moved to a small house from the apartment with the balcony, she was a real porch kitty. Sitting there, and then...able to leap from the porch rail up onto the roof in a single bound... That was at least 6 fucking feet! I can't think of any little beast that could ever even dream about doing that!

And then there was the time that I was taking some boxes out to the dumpster that sat catty-cornered across the street from my house... I dumped the boxes off, then started back home... Only to have a maniac-cat leap out at me from a drainage-ditch! SURPRISE! (There was a drain off the street... Gracie had, for some reason, jumped right down into it---hopefully she saw the platform below-ground before she jumped... And she waited on that subterranean platform for me to walk back... When she saw me, she SPRANG!)

Before I moved to NYC, I used to talk to her: "Are you a New York Kitty? You ARE a New York Kitty, I know you are..." In Austin, she'd always been an indoor/outdoor cat, always had her freedom. In moving to New York, there was the scary plane ride, then the first apartment with 6 other cats, several of them vicious; then the second apartment, with the basset hound; then the third apartment, with the manic roommate always trying to grab under my bed for her... She put up with all of it.

It's been peacefully just me and her in this current apartment since last February... I thought she was OK, I thought I had her with me until she was at least 16 or 17... I'd always promised her a ground-floor apartment, where I could let her outside when she wanted...I'd always promised her a little brother for company...

If she dies now... Not Gracie. Not at only 10... She's always been a wild, healthy cat... I keep nuzzling her, saying, "You have got to get to at least 17, honey; please be with me until I'm 50, when I'm old and you're old..."

Solitary Man

Courage (i.e., "the art of losing")

For years now, I've made a living copy-editing literature textbooks for grades 6 through 12. While I've sometimes gotten annoyed with and been dismissive of the pedagogy I have to look at, here are three poems that I came across over the past week at work that made my heart happy, even while making me cry.

I was an English major, and I hardly ever read any more. (Kind of like Mrs. Robinson, the former art major, who tells Benjamin she's not interested in art.) Seeing these poems reminded me of how stunning and heartbreaking poetry can be, how it can strengthen your spirit and give you hope even in (especially in) the face of the utter waste and sadness that life can sometimes be.

I'm so glad someone (some wise and tender spirit) chose these for the kids to be able to read! For all the little "fatties" and "crybabies" and queers out there, the kids who feel "crazy"...


COURAGE
by Anne Sexton

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

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ONE ART
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MAKING A FIST
by Naomi Shihab Nye

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

Dusty Springfield: How she moves!

I love watching her!

Move Over Darling

When I first heard this song back in Austin, I sat in my living room and played it over and over and over... And made a Doris tape... and then played the song constantly in my car (until I once got stuck at a stoplight with frat boys next to me while Doris warbled "Make love to me" over and over and over...)

A Very Good Year

My Leo horoscope from astrocenter.com:

Your horoscope - Week of January 5, 2009
This is going to be an excellent year for partnership and romantic issues. Jupiter moves into Aquarius and your partnership zone on Monday, where it will stay until 2010. Despite the issues and problems you've had to deal with in past relationships, you may decide to get married, engaged, or perhaps commit to your lover on a long-term basis this year. You're also going to be doing a lot of socializing and this is going to bring many new friends into your life. You're going to have a lot of fun.

Oh, all this as of Monday, huh? OK, astrocenter! Bring on my ENTIRE YEAR o' bliss! ;0