Some Works and Work Samples
Tour Actions
Written for Lucky Pierre's Actions for Chicago Torture Justice Project
1. The Tour Chair-
Carry a folding chair around to bus stations. Tell people it is a chair on tour- a tour chair. Allow people to sit on it until their bus arrives. Ask them if they are comfortable. If not, offer a pillow you also just happen to have with you.
2. Your Torte-
Turn the word "torture" around to make it "Your Torte." Make or purchase a beautiful and delicious torte. Knock upon a stranger's door. Say, "I believe this is your torte." Give them the torte.
3. Texture, not Torture
Find some items that feel pleasant and interesting to touch ( Flower petals, blades of grass, cotton balls,feathers, or scraps of silk will do.) Place the items in an old shoe box. Write "Texture, Not Torture." on the box. Deliver to your local police or fire station. Say, "I hope you enjoy the feelings of these nice things."
4. Literature, not Tortue
Obtain a copy of "Their Eyes Were Watching God" or "The Sound and the Fury" or "Leaves of Grass" or any other great work of literature. Walk up to individual people in a crowded public place. Ask them if they would like to hear their fortune. Read them the page number corresponding to the day of their birthday in as loving a voice as you can muster. Imagine you can alleviate physical or emotional pain through the sound of your voice and through the words you are reading.
5. Overtures, not Torture
Obtain a recording of a beautiful operatic overture along with a portable device to play it on and headphones. "The marriage of Figaro," "Carmen" or "Orpheus in the Underworld" are all excellent choices. Go to a government office in which people must wait in long lines or deal with unpleasant red tape. Ask people if they would care to listen to an overture while they wait. Offer them the headphones. Be aware of the volume control so as to provide an enjoyable listening experience.
6. Nature, not torture.
Use google or another reliable source of information to find out the times of the sunrise and sunset. Choose two places where both of these events can be seen by large groups of people. Make beautiful invitations to these free events. Mail them to random people you find in the white pages or give some to your friends. If pressed for time use email or Facebook. Arrive early and spread out a large blanket to sit upon while viewing. If you have a red, orange, or yellow blanket use that. If not, any color is fine. Enjoy the ascending and descending light.
Report on the Full Moon
(Written for Joan Dickinson's Owl Sister's project.)
The full moon rose early tonight, in the day, even before the sun had begun to set. It is still setting now. It is orange and appears to be falling into a palm tree forest. I can see it because there is a window in front of me but, just a bit ago, when I saw the moon, I saw it next to an extremely long white cloud in the middle of Amboseli park, in Kenya, while riding as a passenger in an open-air safari vehicle driven by an African man named Alan, who is a member of the Masai tribe. (Oh my, right now there is a lizard on the sill watching me. He is chewing a stick of grass. He is brownish-greenish) .The long cloud next to the moon looked very much like a finger and the cloud appeared to be pointing at the moon.( This lizard looks a bit like a finger too. He is done with the grass but opening his mouth and closing it repeatedly and now the sun is almost all the way down. The sky is pink.) When my grandmother was alive she called a moon that appeared in the daylight, a child's moon because children could gaze upon it before they were put to bed. My own children are driving back with my parents from camping in Tennessee and the moon is nowhere near coming out.(The lizard has turned away from me and is now looking out the window at the last of the light for this day. The sky is becoming darker and darker. There is a thin strip of purple and that is all of the light that is left. The color in the sky reminds me of these socks I had a long time ago when I decided to buy many pairs of the same color socks, so as to always be able to make pairs.) But earlier tonight, when the moon came out I asked it a question. I said, "Hi Moon, are there any new metaphors for you?" The moon did not answer. I think it did not answer because that was probably a stupid question as how could one run out of metaphors for that white, levitating disc in the sky? Just because I have not come up with a great one on the spot doesn't mean they have run out. I suspect moon metaphors are ample in supply. I simply do not know how to access the supply cabinet. I shall work on that eventually. I do think it is interesting that when people say, "moon-shaped" they do not mean round, like the full-moon, but rather crescent-shaped which was the moon situation, some days ago. But the real shape of the moon is the full-shape, so another reminder of how very little makes sense and how the seen and the unseen are always playing some kind of mysterious game together, a game beyond logic and beyond anything involving the brain. Is the moon a brain? It might be. It might be a brain of light. No, that's not right. Wrong cabinet.
Tonight, beneath it, there was a lone hyena, a great number of zebras, and some ostriches. There were also a few cape buffalo whose horns look like fancy mustaches and the cap the horns evolve from looks like avocado skin. Alan says the buffalo are nasty animals and will kill other animals for no reason. They are more or less beautiful assholes. (I said the asshole part, not Alan) There were zebras everywhere and some were rolling around in the dirt, kicking up a flurry of it. There was a nursing baby Zebra too. Night and day are like a zebra? In the distance, we could see Kilimanjaro perfectly. It really is a huge, huge snow-capped mountain and someone in Germany gave it to someone else for a wedding present. I'm not sure if a mountain is an appropriate wedding gift or not. Mostly, I think not. I don't know the full story, just what Alan told us. I don't think the moon would be a good wedding present either. I'm glad no one owns it. What it really is, I suppose is a present of light we receive every night and sometimes earlier. (Ah, a present,another metaphor, Perhaps closer to better,but not great The lizard is now on the right frame of the window, head down. Lizards are lucky in the way they can grip to surfaces. It is pretty special.)
There are no owls in Africa or at least there don't appear to be any owls here. They might not live here at all, but there are these giant blue-grey white birds known as Secretary Birds. I saw some of them earlier too and perhaps they understand moon language beyond what she has communicated to us already regarding light and tides and poetry and such such and perhaps the Secretary birds record what she says and relates it the other birds- The Goliath Herons and Silvery Cheeked Hornbills, and the rest of the birds here too. Ah, perhaps the moon tonight is a silver cheek? I kissed the silver cheek of the moon in Africa tonight. (I'm just trying things out, metaphors that is and Africa.) I'm happy for the gift of both. The sun has gone. The lizard is still here and so is the moon. I think both are very patient kinds of things.
FROM WRITE CLUB
September 2013
Poetry Foundation
Important Aspects of Aristotle's Poetics Played Out in Small Moments of Contemporary 21st Century Life or Shakespeare Was Completely Right about, All the World Being a Stage.
* (Really, all one has to do to make anything a stage is to simply decide it is one, to frame it as one somehow and voila it is one, and becomes more of one simply through the extraordinary vehicle of paying attention.)
So, my cousin and I needed passport pictures, pictures for our new passports because we're going on a cool big trip. We'd gotten some pictures taken earlier at CVS that very day, but we were wearing jackets in those pictures. We hadn't taken our jackets off for the pictures and hadn't been told to remove them by the CVS photographer who'd taken the pictures. I mean the subject of jackets hadn't ever come up at all so when the clerk at the post office saw our jacketed pictures he said, "Oh no, oh no. These won't do. You're wearing jackets. You can't have jackets."
I asked, "Why?" He said, "It's the law. Too much bulk, I think." "Oh," we said, "Bulk, huh?"
"Passports are only issued without jacket pictures. It has to be just you, just you, no jackets at all."
"And I don't know why, I mean sometimes things just happen, but I felt this unexpected, all at once, burst of intimacy, so I took advantage of it, of the feeling I mean. (This happened to me once before inside a vestibule too and another time near a fountain in India.)
I noticed the clerks name tag said, "Abraham," so I said, "Abraham, you gotta help us out with this please Abraham." It seemed then that the intimacy feelings increased exponentially through name repetition and it all seemed contagious because my cousin said," Abraham what should we do? Can we please just use these pictures Abraham?" We said Abraham several more times while talking to Abraham because to stand there at the counter with him felt friendly and pleasurable and it felt so nice to be having this coffee klatch situation in the post office of all places and we didn't even have any coffee. The truth was, it felt almost like a miracle. Finally after, shaking his head and laughing a bit, and flipping our pictures over as if hoping to see unjacketed new pictures on the reverse sides and finding none, Abraham said, "Listen, you must go to Walgreens and retake these pictures."
Where's the Walgreens? we asked." Right across the street," he said. "Go," he said," Get new pictures and then come back here."
"Okay!", we said.
Wow, we already had plans to hang out again. It felt good to be alive.
"See you soon," he said.
And then we went to Walgreens. "Remember that camp song," my cousin said, "Abra abra ham, ham, ham. Abra abra, ham, ham, ham?"
"Yeah," I said- one of the three jolly fishermen. Then I sang, "Wal green greens greens'..." Stop," she said. It was hard to stop because Walgreens was just as enjoyable to say as Abraham, and now it had turned to song, but I did stop.
By the way, perhaps you have noticed as I did that very day that there are no green walls at wall greens And there are so many greens they could have gone for: forest green, electric, teal, olive, sea, shamrock, sage, jitterbug jade. The walls at Walgreens are beige, they are, and because of this Walgreens lacks an important level of verisimilitude.
Nevertheless, we went to the photo counter. No one was there. We went to the regular counter and inquired about passport photos and the photo person was paged, but the pager did not say a name. She just said, Customer Photo Assistance. Customer Photo assistance. We returned to the photo counter. The man who finally came did not have a name tag and we were over our name obsession anyway The name obsession was the before/ness, not the now/ness. We were in a different stage now. He did however have slow to focus eyes. We found his eyes rather enchanting due to their roaming quality, but his personality was not enchanting at all. I would call him gruff. I would call him Mr Gruff.
"I miss Abraham," I whispered to my cousin. "Me too," she said. "Why are we whispering? I said." I don't know," she said. Then we stopped whispering.
"Go stand in front of the sandwiches," Mr. Gruff demanded. We did.
Are you aware that in some Walgreens there are sandwiches inside a refrigerated stand-alone shoulder-high, semi- open compartment and this compartment hums and glows with buzz and light? Talk about a stage! Incredible. Who knew? We stood there looking at the chorus of sandwiches. We removed our jackets in preparation for picture taking and hung them on each side of the sandwich stage. They looked like curtains.
'll be right there Mr. Gruff said, Please, he told us, face the other way. He didn't want us facing the sandwiches. Why, we wondered. What was going on here? Why were we not permitted to gaze upon this sandwich theatre? Then, a few minutes later he finally came out from behind the counter with a camera. "Okay," he said,"Here we go."
He reached behind us and pulled down a background screen from the ceiling. We hadn't noticed the background screen. And there it had been, the whole time, installed, right over our heads, waiting. Everything made sense now. The screen went in front of the sandwiches, so we couldn't be facing the sandwiches. We had to be in front of the screen. "Whoa," we both said.
He took our pictures and then he rolled the screen back up and that part of the thing was done. He printed our pictures and then we had new replacement, jacket-free pictures.We went right back to the post-office, but Abraham was't there. Lunch break, my cousin conjectured. "God, I said we should have brought Abraham a sandwich. I mean we were standing near them the whole time.They were glowing. How could we not have put this all together? Whatever, my cousin said. I'm sure he brought a lunch with him. I don't know if we can be sure about that,"I said. I just don't know if that is really done anymore, lunch to work bringing."
A woman named Tina helped us with finalizing our passport applications and then inquired as to whether we wanted to purchase some postage stamps. We did not want to buy any at all because we had nothing to mail. We said, "No thank you."
"As you like it," she said.
And we did.
FROM THE PLAY. "FRUIT TREE BACKPACK"
INTIMACY
ANNA AND CLYDE
She was furious.
He'd lied!
She was under the impression that he'd quit smoking months and months ago.
He hadn't quit smoking.
Not even once.
It was a lie!
He'd wanted her off his back.
That's why he'd said it.
All the time
All the time
Never intending to quit.
They went to Barbados for a vacation
and he told her the truth
Not because the lie was eating him alive, no, but because he knew they'd be spending all their time together and he needed to smoke
or he'd go crazy.
Crazy!
How could he sneak cigarettes?
He could not sneak.
Not in Barbados.
Not with them together constantly.
ANNA
I told the neighbor last month that it wasn't you dropping butts from the balcony onto the roof of the garage. I said it couldn't be you dropping butts from the balcony onto the roof of the garage because you'd quit smoking months and months ago. But it was you. Now I have to go and apologize. I defended you and now I'm going to have to say that you lied. She's going to think I'm an idiot. I'm going to have to tell her that you have a serious problem with smoking. Now I have to think about that and it's going to be on mind constantly and I'll be rehearsing it and wishing I didn't have to have the unpleasant exchange of it and this was supposed to be a vacation. Now I'm going to have to do a lot of work, in my head.
CLYDE
Ah, come on....I'm sorry . I'm sorry. C'mon. I'm really really sorry. I.... I guess I fucked up. I guess I really fucked up. Wow I guess I fucked up bad.
BOTH ANNA AND CLYDE
(singing)
You fucked up bad. You fucked up bad.
Oh
you
fucked
up
bad.
Pause
ANNA
And there's still the problem of you smoking! You know I don't like it. Do you want to die? Do you want to die? You must really have a death wish. Nobody really smokes anymore. What time period do you think we're living in? I just don't get what this is about for you. The whole thing is confounding.
CLYDE
Oh not this again.. Can't we talk about something else? Can't we just have a vacation with smoking?
ANNA
I wanted a vacation without smoking.
CLYDE
Well a vacation with smoking is still a vacation and I'll be the only one smoking and I promise I won't do it around you and I can do that because I have practice at that and so we can move on from the smoking now and talk about other things right? We can segue and digress and talk about other things because there are, as you know, so many things to talk about right? We could go off on tangents! Like we could talk about that thing you're writing...
ANNA
Oh that.
CLYDE
What's going on with that?
ANNA AND CLYDE
What's going on with that writing project?
What's going on with that?
ANNA
Well the whole thing has turned into a. kind of investigation of punctuation. Like commas and ellipses and periods and colons and semi-colons and question marks and exclamation points. Wow, I almost said explanation points. There should be explanation points. There should be all sorts of kinds of points. Points for this and points for that because people, you know, have so many points to make and you know the more points the better anyway; that's how you can get to poignant with point after point after point. I mean what's an exclamation? Ah! So what? You feel strongly about it. Big whoop.
CLYDE
I see your point.
ANNA
I'm so glad.
Pause.
ANNA
Ellipses are the best because they leave so much room. They assume that there is always more to say. They are a little chorus in the service of a gesture of more. They are a back door to a deck and then a winding path after that that leads who knows where? Wow, I could talk about this for for a really long time...
BOTH ANNA AND CLYDE
Let's talk about something else now! Let's talk about something else!
ANNA
I'm still so mad at you about the smoking. I bet you want to light up right now. Don't you? Don't you? You probably want to light up all the time. Whenever we're together you are probably hardly ever listening to me but always just thinking about how you can get away from me so you can light up.
CLYDE
I thought we were just going to let this go for now.
And besides, now that you know...I can just go and smoke when I like and tell you. It's all out in the open now. God, I have to say, I feel so relieved.
ANNA
I'm sure you do.
ANNA AND CLYDE
Let's talk about something else.
Let's talk about something else.
Let's talk about something else.
ANNA
Do you think beaches are obscene?
CLYDE
In what way?
ANNA
Like just by being so big and out there and open and everyone just all laid out upon them and the sun is so like, you know the sun shining and shining like beaches are like...I don't know...like outdoor genitalia.
CLYDE
Outdoor genitalia?
ANNA
Mm Hm.
CLYDE
What makes them obscene? I just don't get it.
ANNA
The outdoor part and the gigantic part. They're like an embarrassing graduate thesis project.
Long pause.
CLYDE
Do ever think that intimacy is a burden?
ANNA
Oh, I do. I do so much.
ANNA AND CLYDE
Intimacy is a burden.
Intimacy is such a burden.
Such a burden
Intimacy is.
CLYDE
So I'm feeling like now is the time for me to go smoke. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to do it in front of you. I'm going to do it away from you. Afterward, I will have a mint. It feels great to tell you all this. I'm...well...I'm grateful.
He Exits.
ANNA
After a long pause and to audience.
A quiet seduction...
Are you aware that the original name for Barbados was Ichirouganaim and that the translation of that strange, long, and lovely tribal word is: Red Land with White Teeth?
My mouth
that I am speaking with
right now
is also
a red land with white teeth.
My mouth could be called Ichirouganaim or red land with white teeth or Barbados even. Yes it could. And that's something to think about.
I'm not going to tell him about it.
I'm not going to tell him.
I'm not going to tell him.
I don't want you to tell him either, so don't!
I'm taking ownership of that fact.
And I'm keeping it for myself.
That's my agenda.
I chose it.
I did.
It feels very powerful.
Beat.
Clyde returns.
CLYDE
I was thinking about intimacy while I was smoking and I was wondering, along with it being a burden do you also find it sweet?
ANNA
I do.
CLYDE
So you find it a sweet burden?
ANNA
I do.
CLYDE
Do you find it claustrophobic?
ANNA
Yes, that's part of its burden.
CLYDE
What about new intimacy like when you drop into a new level with someone
with someone new and there it is suddenly?
ANNA
That just happened to me while you were out smoking.
CLYDE
Wow.
ANNA
It was just a little moment. It felt charged...electricity wise.
CLYDE
Plugged in.
ANNA
Yes.
CLYDE
I like that feeling.
ANNA
The intensity of it though, I have to admit was still a little burdensome because it was so much aliveness to bear like a delicious weight...like a fruit tree backpack.
CLYDE
I get it. I so get it.
Do you mind if I smoke?
ANNA
I do.
CLYDE
How about if I don't light up, but just put the cigarette in my mouth and pretend to smoke it?
ANNA
Why would you do something like that?
CLYDE
Just for the comfort of it.
ANNA
I wouldn't find it comfortable.
CLYDE
Can you just imagine for a moment what it might be like to feel like me and want to have a cigarette right now or an intimation of a cigarette right now?
ANNA
I'd rather not.
CLYDE
You'd rather not
End.
GERTRUDE STEIN ALPHABET PERFORMANCE
A is for Alphabet and Alphabet and Alphabet and Alphabet and that is how Gertrude would say it. She would repeat it. That is how she would be saying it and meaning it and knowing it all the time she was doing so and all of this with Alice her wife. Oh how nice it would be for every writer to have an Alice, a tiny Jewish woman with a slight mustache cleaning and cooking for you and adoring your handsomeness and your pulchritude and especially your genius as it rose up out of you like steam on a wet street and just taking all the writing from you as you wrote it and typing it up perfectly and correcting everything perfectly and fleshing it out perfectly for you and then having a completely different kind of fleshing out at night, one that exposes flesh and the lyricism of stars too and repeating this day after day for most of your life in Paris with Picasso around to boot.
Bathed in her language. Basked in the sun of it. Broiled in the heat of it as it burned through me. Yes. I was 20 or so and I lived with housemates and a lurking feral cat in an old house in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts and I remember being on my bed and reading Each One As She May from Three Lives, a miracle I had purchased from the used bookstore on Centre Street for only 75 cents and I sort of had an, well I did have an ARTgasm. That's really the only way to put it. I'm sure you've had Artgasms too and when you are 20 years old and open in an available way to what comes in, it can be a daily thing. But this one but this was the biggest one I have ever had. It was a Kama-Sutra tantric illuminating..multiple extended ejaculatory heart, head, groin opening ART-gasmic blast all through me. I hyperventilated and I cried and I laughed and I held the open book to my chest like a bird and as i read it was like... whatever this is who I am. Whatever this is, I am and I want to be and will be until I am dead. She made everything possible for me as a writer and as a woman and as a queer person. All the doors flung open one after another after another like in one of those hallway dreams you can have from time to time.
C is for cubism and how she expressed the new idea of it so brilliantly and originally in language, the simultaneity and the overlapping multiplicity of so many thoughts and feelings all at once and how she interpreted what the visual artists were doing with words and how those artists interpreted what she was doing visually. Oh what a party! What a party it must have been.
D is for dissertation. This alphabet will not be one. It will not. It will not be a high school book report of born and died and lived here and there no it will not. Gertrude would have hated that. I am sure of that and so I will not be doing much of that. February. July. And that will be enough of that.
E is for how easily some people write Gertrude Stein off when they should most certainly be writing her on and how complicated they make her, especially the literary critics and really the work must be surrendered to and sometimes what they say about it makes me say don't you get it don't you get it? You are thinking when you should be feeling and in your cerebral analysis you've just missed the ecstasy entirely.
F is the for the fairytale that every experimental writer hopes for and that Gertrude truly lived. In the message from her which is sort of an introduction from her and a thank you and a prologue all at once in her selected works she writes, "There was my first publisher who was commercial but who said he would print and publish even if he did not understand and if he did not make money but it is true. Bennet said, I will print a book of yours a year whatever it is and he has." Wow, what, F for fortune.
G is for Gertrude Stein the subject of this alphabet. She said, "Any letter can be an alphabet and I think that is true."
H is for the book, How To Write by Gertrude Stein and it is like no other writing book. It is really just example of permission- permissions again and again. You may. You can. You are allowed. There is freedom all over the place in it. I like how she says, "Successions of words are so agreeable," in the chapter on sentences. Yes, actually they are.
I is for imitation. Gertrude said, "Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting." This alphabet is an homage and an imitation within the homage and i am in it too, strung through it too, I am. I am and actually I feel enthusiastic about all of it.
J is for Jeff Abel who is my friend and also my friend on facebook and is always remarking in his status updates how much he thinks he looks like Gertrude Stein and I have not seen Jeff lately or told him that I do not think he looks that much like Gertrude stein but Jeff thinks that he does but if I really thought he did I might have wanted him to come here and maybe pretend to be Gertrude Stein and that might have been be sort of fun but he does not look like her to me even remotely. I think maybe Jeff and I could compete about loving Gertrude Stein. We both seem to love her a great deal. People looking like people makes me think about reincarnation. When I was 20, about the same time I discovered Stein I was also reading a lot about Indian and Tibetan mysticism and i remember wondering in wonder about Gertrude Stein and wishing and wishing that perhaps I was the one it was. Wouldn't it be great I thought, if in my previous life, I was Gertrude Stein? I knew it was impossible, but I did think it would be wonderful.
K is k-nowing and k-nowledge. How I love that for some reason these words begin with a K and occasionally I like to pronounce the k. I love how my friend Vanessa from Mexico city says, chee(s)e instead of chee(z)e and I like how comb ends with a b that just seems perfect to me and how knife begins with a k too. I don't know why.
L is for Lifting Belly, Steins erotic love poem which is a banquet of a poem, a book length long blessing to decadent lesbian sex. It. is. good.
M is for Melissa R. who really did resemble Alice B. Toklas much more than Jeff Abel resembles Gertrude. Melissa even had the slight mustache. Her father was a Freudian analyst who slept with his patients and Melissa was heavily involved in the Landmark/Est cult. She had a cross dressing boyfriend named Peter from Ireland who ordered size infinity pumps from a catalog. Melissa and I would go to gay bars in Boston and Melissa would try and coach me to ask women to dance and when I was too shy to ask them, she would ask them for me or she would dance with them instead and then they would sneak up on me and trap me in the middle like London bridges and grind against me and I would want to die.
N is for so in my used copy of selected writings of Gertrude stein. I noticed a phone number with a 212 area code which is Manhattan of course and it wasn't in my handwriting and I'm sure I've had this book for fifteen years so I thought it would be interesting to call the number and see who it was and tell them I found their number in the Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein and see what they had to say about that and then I thought I could share the high points of the conversation with you because it would be fun but it turned out to be a carpet cleaning service and the man on the phone did not speak English and did not know what I talking about so I just hung up but if i ever move to Manhattan and have dirty carpeting I'll know who to call and that might make a good story at some point.
O is for objects. In Tender Buttons, Gertrude stein dissects objects food and rooms in the most original ways. It is as if each object is a sculpture. Here is an example.
A Long Dress
"What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current. What is wind what is it. Where is the serene length, it is there, and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it."
P is for portraits of people like Picasso, his of her and hers in words of him and Cezanne too and Matisse too and in them she captures so concretely what it feels like to be an artist working and having ideas and the feelings in working and I do not have time to read them but you might want to read them later. They are short. You might want to read her poems too and her plays too. Someone did a production of Four Saints In Three Acts in Chicago in the early nineties and I was lucky enough to see it. And i remember thinking they sort of got it but they didn't totally get it but i was still mostly pleased that it happened at all because as you know in the realm of Gertrude, I am somewhat of a fan.
Q is for famous Gertrude Stein quotes like, "There is no there there." and "A rose is a rose is a rose." It certainly is yes, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. I agree. Here are some more quotes as some little gifts for you....
I will act as your Gertrude Stein quote emissary. It will be so much more intimate than google.
"To write is to write is to write is to write."
"A masterpiece may be unwelcome but it is never dull."
"An audience is warming but it must never be necessary to your work."
"Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change and that is all there is to say about money."
And here is one of my favorites:
"Literature-creative literarture -unconcerened wityh sex is inconceivable."
R is for repetition and how I always seem to love it and how that is one of the reasons I adore Gertrude but right now I am writing in a cafe and there is some sort of distant beeping that is going and going and I don't know what it is but it will not cease and so I do realize that repetition has its limits especially when it is incessant.
"Sweet sweet sweet sweet tea tea. Susie Asado." Now the Susie Asado poem I could say that all day long. I love how at the end she writes. "What is a nai? A nail is unison. Sweet. sweet. sweet. sweet tea."
There there. Yes, with Gertrude there certainly was a there there and it was so there so grounded and there in it's there and it kept being so and that is why it is here. The there was so very there that it made it all the way here. That's just how there it was. That is very there. Makes me want to make sure my there is there especially when I am driving,
U is for umbrella simply because something so wonderful exists. It is a lovely thing and a lovely word. The brella part is exactly the right suffix to express the opening out of it isn't it?I think so. Yes.
V is for very. I had a teacher once in school who forbid the word very and another who crossed out commas as if no one should be allowed to pause. It made me want to write a pages of verys to show just how very it was..it was very very very very very very very very very very very very very unfair and also use three commas in a row and invent a new kind of ellipses. I think Gertrude would agree!
W is for, "As a wife has a cow." So Gertrude stein's phrase for orgasms in that piece is "having cows" and doesn't that really makes you rethink the slang term, "don't have a cow because if you really cared about the someone you would be wanting her to have one?
X is for Xyz all at once. XYZ as one letter. XYZ... XYZ a new unknown variable like in math but instead of X...X, Y, Z. and yes and yes. X, YZ is for Gertrude. Gertrude should be a verb, so you could just Gertrude something. That is what one could do to all boring things Gertrude them and then they would not be boring so if you saw a boring movie or read a boring book or had a boring time you could think oh if only they had Gertruded that it would have been amazing, I would like to Gertrude everything more and more and more and more and have everything be Gertruded for me more and more too. That is my desire. So be it.
NATURE NATURE NOMENCLATURE (From Write Club)
Nature nature nomenclature.
Nature nature nomenclature.
Nature nature nomenclature.
Nomenclature nature
I just have say that I could pretty much spend my entire 7 minutes up here repeating Nature Nature Nomenclature
nature nature nomenclature
nomenclature nature
Why?
because it is my nature to do so.
I can't help myself
that's just the way i am
Apparantly it is also my nature to confess weird things about myself to strangers in some effort to
I don't know, expand my capacity for intimacy in ways that don't really serve me and it is
also my nature to squander away precious time like I am doing right now and then following the squandering to experience moderate regret, some time-management fantasies, and a little shame.
That is simply how I roll.
How do you roll?
How does you family roll?
Are there assholes in your family?
Of course there are.
Having one or two assholes is part of the nature of families .
And what about the whole myriad of twin studies? Hmmm?
They are always the same. The two kids have the same womb and the same mother and the same father and eat the same cereal from the same box every goddamn day but Fred is Gay and Ted is not.
Nature. nature. nature.
You know what I say to the whole tabula rasa argument?
I say shambula shmasa
I do indeed.
We are not blank slates, chalkboards that can just be written upon.
We' are not computers that can be programmed this way and that.
We are not clay that can be shaped and molded and turned into cofee mugs
Come on...
You wanna do a field study in nature
you want a nomenclature...
come to the park in my neighborhood,the park in the hood of my neighbor...
KOZ park....Diversey and Lawndale....
4000 West
2800 North
no
better
argument
exists
The trees and the grass and the evening moon so resplendent and the mango vendors with mangos so sweet and juicy, they are obscene with the energy and pomp of summer
And the families barbecuing whole chickens on the peripehery under the trees and sometimes they bring birds in cages with them on picnics and the birds that live in the park dart here and there and sometimes when a plane flies by overhead there is a stampede of birds and the soccer field lights up and the play sprinkler tumbles out its fancy homemade rain and the kids on the slide and the swings and do you know that if you put your ear on the metal structure of the swingset the same way you would with a seashell you can hear the heartbeat of the swing set? And the astroturfed-former tennis courts turned soccer fields are kicking with color and teeming with kicks and que bonita que bonita que bonita and I swear to you a basketball on the grass alone in the moonlight can be so glossy and arresting and so textured...the pumpkin-like plumpness with the grass relief...oh you feel you could die.
And the picnic tables carved with their novels of love and the two gangs fervently gaurding the rwo brand new drinking fountains on either side of the park and rapping to me as I walk clockwise or counterclockwise depending on my mood, "Hey chiquita if you ain't a cop we got a shop. We got what you need, guaranteed."
And the benches on the baseball field with the home and away teams of slumping drunks in their uniforms of defeat. Once a wife came and tried to grab one of the players and take him home but he wouldn't budge and there was laughter and teasing
their faces looked ruddy and alit and they were all cigarettes getting crushed and their faces were glowing cherries.
Yes.
And once, I saw a man snorting coke by a tree and he saw me seeing and the glint of the foil looked like a Christmas ornament and after he snorted he licked the foil and he saw that i saw and he said i want to ask you something. And i said what?
And he said where is Knox and Fullerton honey
and I did not say, "Well when you stop doing coke in the park where why children play I will tell you." I just said, "Fullerton is the next major street south and Knox is one of the K streets past Pulaski you gotta get to the K streets and its one of those."
"So," he said, "You're saying I gotta get to K land."
"Yes," that's what I'm saying."
And then he said, "How bout this? How bout you let me do you?"
Fullerton and Knox
Fullerton and Knox
And once I saw this big copper dog in the morning in the park after it had rained and he was just this running flag of fur, this flying ground kite and there were mud puddles and he splashed in each one rolling in them completely. It was a mudbath dirty morning and he was just wild for life and the glory and ilk of it of the whole fucking lusterous gush of all of it.
And that is my park
and that is the way it
is
and the way it will remain.
Nothing
you can do about it.
Nature,
Nature,
Nomenclature
My nomenclature nature.
September 2013
Poetry Foundation
Important Aspects of Aristotle's Poetics Played Out in Small Moments of Contemporary 21st Century Life or Shakespeare Was Completely Right about, All the World Being a Stage.
* (Really, all one has to do to make anything a stage is to simply decide it is one, to frame it as one somehow and voila it is one, and becomes more of one simply through the extraordinary vehicle of paying attention.)
So, my cousin and I needed passport pictures, pictures for our new passports because we're going on a cool big trip. We'd gotten some pictures taken earlier at CVS that very day, but we were wearing jackets in those pictures. We hadn't taken our jackets off for the pictures and hadn't been told to remove them by the CVS photographer who'd taken the pictures. I mean the subject of jackets hadn't ever come up at all so when the clerk at the post office saw our jacketed pictures he said, "Oh no, oh no. These won't do. You're wearing jackets. You can't have jackets."
I asked, "Why?" He said, "It's the law. Too much bulk, I think." "Oh," we said, "Bulk, huh?"
"Passports are only issued without jacket pictures. It has to be just you, just you, no jackets at all."
"And I don't know why, I mean sometimes things just happen, but I felt this unexpected, all at once, burst of intimacy, so I took advantage of it, of the feeling I mean. (This happened to me once before inside a vestibule too and another time near a fountain in India.)
I noticed the clerks name tag said, "Abraham," so I said, "Abraham, you gotta help us out with this please Abraham." It seemed then that the intimacy feelings increased exponentially through name repetition and it all seemed contagious because my cousin said," Abraham what should we do? Can we please just use these pictures Abraham?" We said Abraham several more times while talking to Abraham because to stand there at the counter with him felt friendly and pleasurable and it felt so nice to be having this coffee klatch situation in the post office of all places and we didn't even have any coffee. The truth was, it felt almost like a miracle. Finally after, shaking his head and laughing a bit, and flipping our pictures over as if hoping to see unjacketed new pictures on the reverse sides and finding none, Abraham said, "Listen, you must go to Walgreens and retake these pictures."
Where's the Walgreens? we asked." Right across the street," he said. "Go," he said," Get new pictures and then come back here."
"Okay!", we said.
Wow, we already had plans to hang out again. It felt good to be alive.
"See you soon," he said.
And then we went to Walgreens. "Remember that camp song," my cousin said, "Abra abra ham, ham, ham. Abra abra, ham, ham, ham?"
"Yeah," I said- one of the three jolly fishermen. Then I sang, "Wal green greens greens'..." Stop," she said. It was hard to stop because Walgreens was just as enjoyable to say as Abraham, and now it had turned to song, but I did stop.
By the way, perhaps you have noticed as I did that very day that there are no green walls at wall greens And there are so many greens they could have gone for: forest green, electric, teal, olive, sea, shamrock, sage, jitterbug jade. The walls at Walgreens are beige, they are, and because of this Walgreens lacks an important level of verisimilitude.
Nevertheless, we went to the photo counter. No one was there. We went to the regular counter and inquired about passport photos and the photo person was paged, but the pager did not say a name. She just said, Customer Photo Assistance. Customer Photo assistance. We returned to the photo counter. The man who finally came did not have a name tag and we were over our name obsession anyway The name obsession was the before/ness, not the now/ness. We were in a different stage now. He did however have slow to focus eyes. We found his eyes rather enchanting due to their roaming quality, but his personality was not enchanting at all. I would call him gruff. I would call him Mr Gruff.
"I miss Abraham," I whispered to my cousin. "Me too," she said. "Why are we whispering? I said." I don't know," she said. Then we stopped whispering.
"Go stand in front of the sandwiches," Mr. Gruff demanded. We did.
Are you aware that in some Walgreens there are sandwiches inside a refrigerated stand-alone shoulder-high, semi- open compartment and this compartment hums and glows with buzz and light? Talk about a stage! Incredible. Who knew? We stood there looking at the chorus of sandwiches. We removed our jackets in preparation for picture taking and hung them on each side of the sandwich stage. They looked like curtains.
'll be right there Mr. Gruff said, Please, he told us, face the other way. He didn't want us facing the sandwiches. Why, we wondered. What was going on here? Why were we not permitted to gaze upon this sandwich theatre? Then, a few minutes later he finally came out from behind the counter with a camera. "Okay," he said,"Here we go."
He reached behind us and pulled down a background screen from the ceiling. We hadn't noticed the background screen. And there it had been, the whole time, installed, right over our heads, waiting. Everything made sense now. The screen went in front of the sandwiches, so we couldn't be facing the sandwiches. We had to be in front of the screen. "Whoa," we both said.
He took our pictures and then he rolled the screen back up and that part of the thing was done. He printed our pictures and then we had new replacement, jacket-free pictures.We went right back to the post-office, but Abraham was't there. Lunch break, my cousin conjectured. "God, I said we should have brought Abraham a sandwich. I mean we were standing near them the whole time.They were glowing. How could we not have put this all together? Whatever, my cousin said. I'm sure he brought a lunch with him. I don't know if we can be sure about that,"I said. I just don't know if that is really done anymore, lunch to work bringing."
A woman named Tina helped us with finalizing our passport applications and then inquired as to whether we wanted to purchase some postage stamps. We did not want to buy any at all because we had nothing to mail. We said, "No thank you."
"As you like it," she said.
And we did.
FROM THE PLAY. "FRUIT TREE BACKPACK"
INTIMACY
ANNA AND CLYDE
She was furious.
He'd lied!
She was under the impression that he'd quit smoking months and months ago.
He hadn't quit smoking.
Not even once.
It was a lie!
He'd wanted her off his back.
That's why he'd said it.
All the time
All the time
Never intending to quit.
They went to Barbados for a vacation
and he told her the truth
Not because the lie was eating him alive, no, but because he knew they'd be spending all their time together and he needed to smoke
or he'd go crazy.
Crazy!
How could he sneak cigarettes?
He could not sneak.
Not in Barbados.
Not with them together constantly.
ANNA
I told the neighbor last month that it wasn't you dropping butts from the balcony onto the roof of the garage. I said it couldn't be you dropping butts from the balcony onto the roof of the garage because you'd quit smoking months and months ago. But it was you. Now I have to go and apologize. I defended you and now I'm going to have to say that you lied. She's going to think I'm an idiot. I'm going to have to tell her that you have a serious problem with smoking. Now I have to think about that and it's going to be on mind constantly and I'll be rehearsing it and wishing I didn't have to have the unpleasant exchange of it and this was supposed to be a vacation. Now I'm going to have to do a lot of work, in my head.
CLYDE
Ah, come on....I'm sorry . I'm sorry. C'mon. I'm really really sorry. I.... I guess I fucked up. I guess I really fucked up. Wow I guess I fucked up bad.
BOTH ANNA AND CLYDE
(singing)
You fucked up bad. You fucked up bad.
Oh
you
fucked
up
bad.
Pause
ANNA
And there's still the problem of you smoking! You know I don't like it. Do you want to die? Do you want to die? You must really have a death wish. Nobody really smokes anymore. What time period do you think we're living in? I just don't get what this is about for you. The whole thing is confounding.
CLYDE
Oh not this again.. Can't we talk about something else? Can't we just have a vacation with smoking?
ANNA
I wanted a vacation without smoking.
CLYDE
Well a vacation with smoking is still a vacation and I'll be the only one smoking and I promise I won't do it around you and I can do that because I have practice at that and so we can move on from the smoking now and talk about other things right? We can segue and digress and talk about other things because there are, as you know, so many things to talk about right? We could go off on tangents! Like we could talk about that thing you're writing...
ANNA
Oh that.
CLYDE
What's going on with that?
ANNA AND CLYDE
What's going on with that writing project?
What's going on with that?
ANNA
Well the whole thing has turned into a. kind of investigation of punctuation. Like commas and ellipses and periods and colons and semi-colons and question marks and exclamation points. Wow, I almost said explanation points. There should be explanation points. There should be all sorts of kinds of points. Points for this and points for that because people, you know, have so many points to make and you know the more points the better anyway; that's how you can get to poignant with point after point after point. I mean what's an exclamation? Ah! So what? You feel strongly about it. Big whoop.
CLYDE
I see your point.
ANNA
I'm so glad.
Pause.
ANNA
Ellipses are the best because they leave so much room. They assume that there is always more to say. They are a little chorus in the service of a gesture of more. They are a back door to a deck and then a winding path after that that leads who knows where? Wow, I could talk about this for for a really long time...
BOTH ANNA AND CLYDE
Let's talk about something else now! Let's talk about something else!
ANNA
I'm still so mad at you about the smoking. I bet you want to light up right now. Don't you? Don't you? You probably want to light up all the time. Whenever we're together you are probably hardly ever listening to me but always just thinking about how you can get away from me so you can light up.
CLYDE
I thought we were just going to let this go for now.
And besides, now that you know...I can just go and smoke when I like and tell you. It's all out in the open now. God, I have to say, I feel so relieved.
ANNA
I'm sure you do.
ANNA AND CLYDE
Let's talk about something else.
Let's talk about something else.
Let's talk about something else.
ANNA
Do you think beaches are obscene?
CLYDE
In what way?
ANNA
Like just by being so big and out there and open and everyone just all laid out upon them and the sun is so like, you know the sun shining and shining like beaches are like...I don't know...like outdoor genitalia.
CLYDE
Outdoor genitalia?
ANNA
Mm Hm.
CLYDE
What makes them obscene? I just don't get it.
ANNA
The outdoor part and the gigantic part. They're like an embarrassing graduate thesis project.
Long pause.
CLYDE
Do ever think that intimacy is a burden?
ANNA
Oh, I do. I do so much.
ANNA AND CLYDE
Intimacy is a burden.
Intimacy is such a burden.
Such a burden
Intimacy is.
CLYDE
So I'm feeling like now is the time for me to go smoke. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to do it in front of you. I'm going to do it away from you. Afterward, I will have a mint. It feels great to tell you all this. I'm...well...I'm grateful.
He Exits.
ANNA
After a long pause and to audience.
A quiet seduction...
Are you aware that the original name for Barbados was Ichirouganaim and that the translation of that strange, long, and lovely tribal word is: Red Land with White Teeth?
My mouth
that I am speaking with
right now
is also
a red land with white teeth.
My mouth could be called Ichirouganaim or red land with white teeth or Barbados even. Yes it could. And that's something to think about.
I'm not going to tell him about it.
I'm not going to tell him.
I'm not going to tell him.
I don't want you to tell him either, so don't!
I'm taking ownership of that fact.
And I'm keeping it for myself.
That's my agenda.
I chose it.
I did.
It feels very powerful.
Beat.
Clyde returns.
CLYDE
I was thinking about intimacy while I was smoking and I was wondering, along with it being a burden do you also find it sweet?
ANNA
I do.
CLYDE
So you find it a sweet burden?
ANNA
I do.
CLYDE
Do you find it claustrophobic?
ANNA
Yes, that's part of its burden.
CLYDE
What about new intimacy like when you drop into a new level with someone
with someone new and there it is suddenly?
ANNA
That just happened to me while you were out smoking.
CLYDE
Wow.
ANNA
It was just a little moment. It felt charged...electricity wise.
CLYDE
Plugged in.
ANNA
Yes.
CLYDE
I like that feeling.
ANNA
The intensity of it though, I have to admit was still a little burdensome because it was so much aliveness to bear like a delicious weight...like a fruit tree backpack.
CLYDE
I get it. I so get it.
Do you mind if I smoke?
ANNA
I do.
CLYDE
How about if I don't light up, but just put the cigarette in my mouth and pretend to smoke it?
ANNA
Why would you do something like that?
CLYDE
Just for the comfort of it.
ANNA
I wouldn't find it comfortable.
CLYDE
Can you just imagine for a moment what it might be like to feel like me and want to have a cigarette right now or an intimation of a cigarette right now?
ANNA
I'd rather not.
CLYDE
You'd rather not
End.
GERTRUDE STEIN ALPHABET PERFORMANCE
A is for Alphabet and Alphabet and Alphabet and Alphabet and that is how Gertrude would say it. She would repeat it. That is how she would be saying it and meaning it and knowing it all the time she was doing so and all of this with Alice her wife. Oh how nice it would be for every writer to have an Alice, a tiny Jewish woman with a slight mustache cleaning and cooking for you and adoring your handsomeness and your pulchritude and especially your genius as it rose up out of you like steam on a wet street and just taking all the writing from you as you wrote it and typing it up perfectly and correcting everything perfectly and fleshing it out perfectly for you and then having a completely different kind of fleshing out at night, one that exposes flesh and the lyricism of stars too and repeating this day after day for most of your life in Paris with Picasso around to boot.
Bathed in her language. Basked in the sun of it. Broiled in the heat of it as it burned through me. Yes. I was 20 or so and I lived with housemates and a lurking feral cat in an old house in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts and I remember being on my bed and reading Each One As She May from Three Lives, a miracle I had purchased from the used bookstore on Centre Street for only 75 cents and I sort of had an, well I did have an ARTgasm. That's really the only way to put it. I'm sure you've had Artgasms too and when you are 20 years old and open in an available way to what comes in, it can be a daily thing. But this one but this was the biggest one I have ever had. It was a Kama-Sutra tantric illuminating..multiple extended ejaculatory heart, head, groin opening ART-gasmic blast all through me. I hyperventilated and I cried and I laughed and I held the open book to my chest like a bird and as i read it was like... whatever this is who I am. Whatever this is, I am and I want to be and will be until I am dead. She made everything possible for me as a writer and as a woman and as a queer person. All the doors flung open one after another after another like in one of those hallway dreams you can have from time to time.
C is for cubism and how she expressed the new idea of it so brilliantly and originally in language, the simultaneity and the overlapping multiplicity of so many thoughts and feelings all at once and how she interpreted what the visual artists were doing with words and how those artists interpreted what she was doing visually. Oh what a party! What a party it must have been.
D is for dissertation. This alphabet will not be one. It will not. It will not be a high school book report of born and died and lived here and there no it will not. Gertrude would have hated that. I am sure of that and so I will not be doing much of that. February. July. And that will be enough of that.
E is for how easily some people write Gertrude Stein off when they should most certainly be writing her on and how complicated they make her, especially the literary critics and really the work must be surrendered to and sometimes what they say about it makes me say don't you get it don't you get it? You are thinking when you should be feeling and in your cerebral analysis you've just missed the ecstasy entirely.
F is the for the fairytale that every experimental writer hopes for and that Gertrude truly lived. In the message from her which is sort of an introduction from her and a thank you and a prologue all at once in her selected works she writes, "There was my first publisher who was commercial but who said he would print and publish even if he did not understand and if he did not make money but it is true. Bennet said, I will print a book of yours a year whatever it is and he has." Wow, what, F for fortune.
G is for Gertrude Stein the subject of this alphabet. She said, "Any letter can be an alphabet and I think that is true."
H is for the book, How To Write by Gertrude Stein and it is like no other writing book. It is really just example of permission- permissions again and again. You may. You can. You are allowed. There is freedom all over the place in it. I like how she says, "Successions of words are so agreeable," in the chapter on sentences. Yes, actually they are.
I is for imitation. Gertrude said, "Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting." This alphabet is an homage and an imitation within the homage and i am in it too, strung through it too, I am. I am and actually I feel enthusiastic about all of it.
J is for Jeff Abel who is my friend and also my friend on facebook and is always remarking in his status updates how much he thinks he looks like Gertrude Stein and I have not seen Jeff lately or told him that I do not think he looks that much like Gertrude stein but Jeff thinks that he does but if I really thought he did I might have wanted him to come here and maybe pretend to be Gertrude Stein and that might have been be sort of fun but he does not look like her to me even remotely. I think maybe Jeff and I could compete about loving Gertrude Stein. We both seem to love her a great deal. People looking like people makes me think about reincarnation. When I was 20, about the same time I discovered Stein I was also reading a lot about Indian and Tibetan mysticism and i remember wondering in wonder about Gertrude Stein and wishing and wishing that perhaps I was the one it was. Wouldn't it be great I thought, if in my previous life, I was Gertrude Stein? I knew it was impossible, but I did think it would be wonderful.
K is k-nowing and k-nowledge. How I love that for some reason these words begin with a K and occasionally I like to pronounce the k. I love how my friend Vanessa from Mexico city says, chee(s)e instead of chee(z)e and I like how comb ends with a b that just seems perfect to me and how knife begins with a k too. I don't know why.
L is for Lifting Belly, Steins erotic love poem which is a banquet of a poem, a book length long blessing to decadent lesbian sex. It. is. good.
M is for Melissa R. who really did resemble Alice B. Toklas much more than Jeff Abel resembles Gertrude. Melissa even had the slight mustache. Her father was a Freudian analyst who slept with his patients and Melissa was heavily involved in the Landmark/Est cult. She had a cross dressing boyfriend named Peter from Ireland who ordered size infinity pumps from a catalog. Melissa and I would go to gay bars in Boston and Melissa would try and coach me to ask women to dance and when I was too shy to ask them, she would ask them for me or she would dance with them instead and then they would sneak up on me and trap me in the middle like London bridges and grind against me and I would want to die.
N is for so in my used copy of selected writings of Gertrude stein. I noticed a phone number with a 212 area code which is Manhattan of course and it wasn't in my handwriting and I'm sure I've had this book for fifteen years so I thought it would be interesting to call the number and see who it was and tell them I found their number in the Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein and see what they had to say about that and then I thought I could share the high points of the conversation with you because it would be fun but it turned out to be a carpet cleaning service and the man on the phone did not speak English and did not know what I talking about so I just hung up but if i ever move to Manhattan and have dirty carpeting I'll know who to call and that might make a good story at some point.
O is for objects. In Tender Buttons, Gertrude stein dissects objects food and rooms in the most original ways. It is as if each object is a sculpture. Here is an example.
A Long Dress
"What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current. What is wind what is it. Where is the serene length, it is there, and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it."
P is for portraits of people like Picasso, his of her and hers in words of him and Cezanne too and Matisse too and in them she captures so concretely what it feels like to be an artist working and having ideas and the feelings in working and I do not have time to read them but you might want to read them later. They are short. You might want to read her poems too and her plays too. Someone did a production of Four Saints In Three Acts in Chicago in the early nineties and I was lucky enough to see it. And i remember thinking they sort of got it but they didn't totally get it but i was still mostly pleased that it happened at all because as you know in the realm of Gertrude, I am somewhat of a fan.
Q is for famous Gertrude Stein quotes like, "There is no there there." and "A rose is a rose is a rose." It certainly is yes, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. I agree. Here are some more quotes as some little gifts for you....
I will act as your Gertrude Stein quote emissary. It will be so much more intimate than google.
"To write is to write is to write is to write."
"A masterpiece may be unwelcome but it is never dull."
"An audience is warming but it must never be necessary to your work."
"Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change and that is all there is to say about money."
And here is one of my favorites:
"Literature-creative literarture -unconcerened wityh sex is inconceivable."
R is for repetition and how I always seem to love it and how that is one of the reasons I adore Gertrude but right now I am writing in a cafe and there is some sort of distant beeping that is going and going and I don't know what it is but it will not cease and so I do realize that repetition has its limits especially when it is incessant.
"Sweet sweet sweet sweet tea tea. Susie Asado." Now the Susie Asado poem I could say that all day long. I love how at the end she writes. "What is a nai? A nail is unison. Sweet. sweet. sweet. sweet tea."
There there. Yes, with Gertrude there certainly was a there there and it was so there so grounded and there in it's there and it kept being so and that is why it is here. The there was so very there that it made it all the way here. That's just how there it was. That is very there. Makes me want to make sure my there is there especially when I am driving,
U is for umbrella simply because something so wonderful exists. It is a lovely thing and a lovely word. The brella part is exactly the right suffix to express the opening out of it isn't it?I think so. Yes.
V is for very. I had a teacher once in school who forbid the word very and another who crossed out commas as if no one should be allowed to pause. It made me want to write a pages of verys to show just how very it was..it was very very very very very very very very very very very very very unfair and also use three commas in a row and invent a new kind of ellipses. I think Gertrude would agree!
W is for, "As a wife has a cow." So Gertrude stein's phrase for orgasms in that piece is "having cows" and doesn't that really makes you rethink the slang term, "don't have a cow because if you really cared about the someone you would be wanting her to have one?
X is for Xyz all at once. XYZ as one letter. XYZ... XYZ a new unknown variable like in math but instead of X...X, Y, Z. and yes and yes. X, YZ is for Gertrude. Gertrude should be a verb, so you could just Gertrude something. That is what one could do to all boring things Gertrude them and then they would not be boring so if you saw a boring movie or read a boring book or had a boring time you could think oh if only they had Gertruded that it would have been amazing, I would like to Gertrude everything more and more and more and more and have everything be Gertruded for me more and more too. That is my desire. So be it.
NATURE NATURE NOMENCLATURE (From Write Club)
Nature nature nomenclature.
Nature nature nomenclature.
Nature nature nomenclature.
Nomenclature nature
I just have say that I could pretty much spend my entire 7 minutes up here repeating Nature Nature Nomenclature
nature nature nomenclature
nomenclature nature
Why?
because it is my nature to do so.
I can't help myself
that's just the way i am
Apparantly it is also my nature to confess weird things about myself to strangers in some effort to
I don't know, expand my capacity for intimacy in ways that don't really serve me and it is
also my nature to squander away precious time like I am doing right now and then following the squandering to experience moderate regret, some time-management fantasies, and a little shame.
That is simply how I roll.
How do you roll?
How does you family roll?
Are there assholes in your family?
Of course there are.
Having one or two assholes is part of the nature of families .
And what about the whole myriad of twin studies? Hmmm?
They are always the same. The two kids have the same womb and the same mother and the same father and eat the same cereal from the same box every goddamn day but Fred is Gay and Ted is not.
Nature. nature. nature.
You know what I say to the whole tabula rasa argument?
I say shambula shmasa
I do indeed.
We are not blank slates, chalkboards that can just be written upon.
We' are not computers that can be programmed this way and that.
We are not clay that can be shaped and molded and turned into cofee mugs
Come on...
You wanna do a field study in nature
you want a nomenclature...
come to the park in my neighborhood,the park in the hood of my neighbor...
KOZ park....Diversey and Lawndale....
4000 West
2800 North
no
better
argument
exists
The trees and the grass and the evening moon so resplendent and the mango vendors with mangos so sweet and juicy, they are obscene with the energy and pomp of summer
And the families barbecuing whole chickens on the peripehery under the trees and sometimes they bring birds in cages with them on picnics and the birds that live in the park dart here and there and sometimes when a plane flies by overhead there is a stampede of birds and the soccer field lights up and the play sprinkler tumbles out its fancy homemade rain and the kids on the slide and the swings and do you know that if you put your ear on the metal structure of the swingset the same way you would with a seashell you can hear the heartbeat of the swing set? And the astroturfed-former tennis courts turned soccer fields are kicking with color and teeming with kicks and que bonita que bonita que bonita and I swear to you a basketball on the grass alone in the moonlight can be so glossy and arresting and so textured...the pumpkin-like plumpness with the grass relief...oh you feel you could die.
And the picnic tables carved with their novels of love and the two gangs fervently gaurding the rwo brand new drinking fountains on either side of the park and rapping to me as I walk clockwise or counterclockwise depending on my mood, "Hey chiquita if you ain't a cop we got a shop. We got what you need, guaranteed."
And the benches on the baseball field with the home and away teams of slumping drunks in their uniforms of defeat. Once a wife came and tried to grab one of the players and take him home but he wouldn't budge and there was laughter and teasing
their faces looked ruddy and alit and they were all cigarettes getting crushed and their faces were glowing cherries.
Yes.
And once, I saw a man snorting coke by a tree and he saw me seeing and the glint of the foil looked like a Christmas ornament and after he snorted he licked the foil and he saw that i saw and he said i want to ask you something. And i said what?
And he said where is Knox and Fullerton honey
and I did not say, "Well when you stop doing coke in the park where why children play I will tell you." I just said, "Fullerton is the next major street south and Knox is one of the K streets past Pulaski you gotta get to the K streets and its one of those."
"So," he said, "You're saying I gotta get to K land."
"Yes," that's what I'm saying."
And then he said, "How bout this? How bout you let me do you?"
Fullerton and Knox
Fullerton and Knox
And once I saw this big copper dog in the morning in the park after it had rained and he was just this running flag of fur, this flying ground kite and there were mud puddles and he splashed in each one rolling in them completely. It was a mudbath dirty morning and he was just wild for life and the glory and ilk of it of the whole fucking lusterous gush of all of it.
And that is my park
and that is the way it
is
and the way it will remain.
Nothing
you can do about it.
Nature,
Nature,
Nomenclature
My nomenclature nature.