when they stop the drum machine
Friday 21 December 2001 | I like a cookie
and I can think again
maybe I’ll remember what it was
I tried to describe PMS to M. the other night. “It’s like…eighteen babies screaming in your cranium all at the same time and you can’t get them to shush, or it’s like…that feeling you get when you have a fever, or when you’re coming out from under anaesthetic: you can’t think in a straight line, so there’s no point in trying, and you want to stop trying, but you just keep trying to think, and it’s delirious and confused and compulsive….” He nodded but I’m still convinced there’s no real understanding unless you’re the one in the body experiencing estrogen-plummetting.
I’m excited that I’m done with the semester—so excited, you can’t imagine! My brain woke up this morning promptly at 8 am, no dread, just pure relish and the interest of seeing what it will get to think about today. And the first things it’s thinking about, for no particular reason, are IT-related:
1) why don’t the computers on The West Wing ever break down? how come Josh never goes into Leo’s office yelling “I can’t work like this! I need more memory! I want an upgrade!”
2) speaking of upgrade—my parents called yesterday and announced that they are mailing me “a box of used socks.” This is our argot for, a large expensive new present I could never afford to buy for myself. (Remind me to tell you about the $13,500 I owe in student loans sometime—and that’s down from about $37K, mind you.) In this case, I’m hoping hoping hoping (and half-dreading, knowing about my mom’s credit debt—which is pathetic in the literary sense, because she’s moved from software to upper management and makes a healthy six figures) just hoping it’s…a G4 PowerBook. There, I’ve said it. Doesn’t that make me silly and shallow and consumery?! Oh my God.
I used to have a Post-it over my desk with that quotation from Steve Jobs: “True artists ship.”
3) tonight’s the opening ceremony for the new temple at Chez Zen. I still haven’t spoken much here on Zen practice, but that will be added “dire dire” as M. says in Hindi.
4) and finally for now, I can’t stop thinking about the three lyricists Lucinda Williams, Frank Stanford, and CD Wright: one relatively famous and rich, one relatively obscure and dead, and one just cool, quirky, brainy, and awesome. I’d like to write something longer, about them and my loose association with CD, but in lieu of this for now, here’s an interesting interview with Lucinda Williams which is a dreadful ugly page, but I love her familiar blunt way: “If you don’t want my peaches, don’t shake my tree.”
And what I am hoping, in the next two precious weeks of no day job, is to grow a hasty gorgeous bunch of fruit. Mandarines and tangerines in December.
Also, just for now—CD talks about Frank’s poetry in this interview, but with her usual formality and guardedness. You can almost hear her pausing to think before she speaks, reminding herself, “I am talking about poetry; not about a dead man I loved when we were young.” Which is all to the good—which, in fact, is one of the reasons—her gravity, her circumspection, her amused braininess—I adore her every utterance like a schoolgirl with a crush. If more people had behaved this way when Brodsky died, we wouldn’t have had the resultant orgy of poets floundering in elegiac sentimentality like sticky biscuit dough. And here’s the other woman’s, ça veux dire the wife’s, Ginny Stanford’s, perspective. You can find more of what CD thinks about all this in her poems, and in a brief statement in a New Yorker article which doesn’t seem to be online, malheuresment.
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