Red Admirable

Yesterday I Was Fascinated By Somebody Else

I wasn’t, really, or maybe I really was, but in this case I couldn’t decide which title I liked better so I am using two, echoing the misogynist modernists. Tom Eliot stacked his writing on top and on top of itself, leaving room for wonder and none for story; once a professor asked my class what the real first line of The Waste Land–making “wasteland” one word implicates Pynchon, all of a sudden–is.

Leonard Cohen_Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye.mp3

Is it the epigraph from Petronius? Is it the dedication to Pound? The Burial Of The Dead? Is it any one of the many lines from the two sections that originally preceded our published April is the cruellest month, breeding?

Leonard Cohen_Tonight Will Be Fine [live].mp3

I like stacking things, too; it’s an easy way to steal someone else’s gravity.

Leonard Cohen_Is This What You Wanted.mp3

Eliot piled words upon each other, never once adverbing his way into romance. There is a structural parsimony there that my time at Brown had probably prohibited me from ever reaching.

When the children asked, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she would answer: “I want to die.”

I’m at the end of a long moving process; when Chris and I were driving down Grand Street last week he saw a store that I think was called The Art Mart Cente(a)r(t) or something. I said yeah, that’s what we’re calling East East East Williamsburg these days.

It is taking me some time to unpack, so I’m left only with the most recent Economist and The Waste Land And Other Poems, so I just keep reading it. The Journey Of The Magi is a very convenient thing to have committed to memory; it’s unfortunate that I don’t date women, I think they’d really like it. Marina, too.

What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger–
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye

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