mouth story

Once upon a time there a crow made entirely of glass that occupied a place on the shelf in the bedroom of a girl named Pamela.  The glass crow had been given her by a wifty old lady when she was very small.  Everyone said that the woman had something odd about her and may have dabbled in magic.  On some nights when Pamela lay awake and looked at the glass crow catching the moonlight through her window, she could swear she saw its crystalline feathers rustling.  One night Pamela awoke unexpectedly very late, and noticed that the glass crow was missing.  She left her bed for the window, and far in the distance under the moon she could see the sparkly thing wheeling in the sky.  But it was approaching the window again, so she quick scurried back under her covers and watched as it lit on the windowsill sniffing around, then glided gently to its place on her shelf and took up its habitual pose.  The next morning Pamela went to the shelf and took the glass crow down.  “I saw you flying last night, won’t you talk to me?” she said.  But the glass crow was immobile in her hands.  Just then her mama came to the door, startling her, and the glass crow slipped from her hands to the floor, shattering into thousands of tiny pieces.  Pamela began to cry.  Her mother had no patience for that, telling her to clean up the pieces right away and get over it, they could always get her another crow.  “But it’s a magic crow,” she wailed.  To which her mother said “Now that’s enough nonsense, you know there’s no such thing.  Now clean up that mess and be careful about it and put it out in the garbage.”  With a broom and dustpan Pamela did clean up the broken glass, but poured all the pieces into a little bag and tied its top with a string.  She then placed the bag back in its place on her shelf.  That night she woke up in the blue of the moonlight to the sound of rustling.  The bag on the shelf was shifting shape and tussling about from within.  Pamela went to the bag and untied the string.  Out of the bag came the crow, but this was no glass crow, but a real live crow with glossy black feathers.  The crow looked up in her eyes and spoke to her: “A witch placed a spell on me long ago for eating from her special grove of pears.  She turned me into glass and told me that I would forever be frozen in place except for furtive flights under the grace of powerful moonlight, and that I would never be real again unless a little girl took pity on me and tried to care for me if I broke.  And you have!  The crow spread her big wings and hugged Pamela.  “My name is Zara,” she said, and I will always remember you.  And with that she flew to the windowsill, nodded farewell and flew off to rejoin her life in the woods with other real crows.  Pamela never forgot her magical friend and had a fondness for all crows and other birds from that day forward.

Mouth Story

Taras Bulba, a donkey who worked at a junkyard carrying garbage to various piles was startled out of his monotony one day when the cart he was pulling began to weep and he noticed a little boy named Quigley piled in amongst the garbage. It seems Quigley had been playing hide and seek with friends and hid in a garbage can at an inopportune time, was collected in a trunk by the sanitation dept, and now was far from home. Tara Bulba offered to take him back, told him to climb up on his back and they began their odyssey through the streets and parks of the city. But the boy only knew that he lived in Bklyn, not which neighborhood. Luckily they spied a passing car being driven by a friend of Quigley's mom and they chased it. Before long they realized they themselves were giving chase to the police, who were alarmed by the spectacle of a donkey galloping down 4th avenue. Quigley finally recognized his neighborhood in Park Slope and was able to navigate home. Quigley's mom was cross at him for being late for supper, but grateful to Taras Bulba when she learned his role in his return. She gave Taras Bulba 10 apples, and he said goodbye and went clipclopping home to the junkyard at dusk.

=>Sex in people over 40 - decadent, as in, to what purpose? As if the purpose of sex in one's reproductive years were reproduction!
=>The bean in the nose myth - growing roots into the baby's brain...
=>The magazines shout from every street corner "Look how well I survive!"
=>What little technical thing that irks common folk could I recognize and lampoon in delicious irony?
=>Gods
We want them to be something total.
Celebrated for their modesty
Rewarded for it with $$$
And Adulation
For their humility
And their knowing how
Frivolous all this is,
To be lauded for that and
Revered and
Remunerated,
To be quite circumspect
About their scorched earth,
To be wise about it,
And maybe even tearful.
=> What the word "garish" does to the word "love" is either irreparable or delicious
=> Young nubile Turkish woman at the Coop said Sevi meant "lover" in Turkish. With legs astride a chair she received massage from an angular fair curly-headed adulator.
=> Sevi: "Do you want to know how to whistle Bunnies? You blow from the end of their tails!"
=> A few weeks ago Sevi bounded up the three flights of stairs ahead of me, by herself for the first time, thrilled to get to the top ahead of me.
=> A few weeks ago, after a day of computer hell, out to the park with Sevi to fly a kite. String tangled horribly due to the interlopings of the little French boys last (and first) time we flew it. Sevi made up many games during the hour or so I worked to untangle the string. Mostly one in which she was trying to hide her kitties from the Gruffalo. Finally I cut the Gordian knot and tied the string together, by which time we had to head back for dinner.
=> The more you undertake things at half measures, the further you will be from art and fulfillment.
=> Ben Kingsley's remarks about taking away the prerogative of the audience by, for instance, a character crying when he is sad. Always being ahead. Also, two actors admiring and respecting eachother so as to divest of ego and tell the story as storytellers. Otherwise, if for instance you cast two actors as enemies simply because the are enemies, then you're just filming a neurosis, again depriving an audience of its prerogative. Of the death of his son in "House of Sand and Fog", it was all the child actor giving it to him. Kingsley told him always to keep his eyes on him--nothing of Kingsley's personal life came into the role, he insisted. It was all a response to the other actor.
=> Sevi, of taking down her pants in public "I like it, it's my way."
=> Highlight of day: dispatching of all the mail as junk.
=> Sevi, while we were in the bathroom doing ablutions: "Papa, don't close the door. I said it two times. I should only have to say it once."
=> Directing: The profession most conducive to self-love--having your decisions confirmed, your intuitions amplified by the fawning attentions of those who rely on you for their livelihood.
=> Dream-- SARS test, long ride to other locations...dripping into auditorium--cutting up lungs, awaiting answer.
=> never liked to face up to inabilities.
=> A. B. Gill - like character out of Henry James - bright ambitious attractive canny American girl destined to be prey or be preyed on, to turn malevolent or attract malevolence. Not a chance of any middle ground being found--an ineluctably dramatic destiny.
=> the noet or gnoet -- gnoetall
=> Sometimes some people just feel the need to flex their "asshole" muscles as a means to assert themselves and win respect.
=> When we look at water
We can't get over the fact
We don't know what we're looking at.
=>"Metamorphosis are called when they're going through a big change." Sevi, 5/9/04
=> bald as an old dandelion
=> widowsmilk.com
=> blowing dandelions with Sevi, finding whole patches of them and hunkering down grabbing fistfuls - sending of drift streams of fuzz.
=> Nabokov, for all of his vigor and polish and impishness: fine constructions, but not, for me, perceptions.

mouth story

Once upon a time there was a bean named Renata who lived in a bowl of rice and other beans and was cooked up fat and soft for a boy, Horito, who, playing with his food, picked her out and flicked her with his finger out the window.  She fell through the air landing on the stomach of a baby in a stroller, who also failed to eat her but perched her on his nose.  His mama knelt down to remove Renata, but the bean remonstrated loudly that no one was eating her, just playing with her, and that she wanted to be eaten to make someone’s tummy feel really good.  The mama was astounded that this bean was talking to her, let alone mounting a complaint, so she sold Renata to the circus, where Renata spent much time to great acclaim doing tricks for audiences, walking tightropes, riding bikes etc, but was ultimately very unhappy, because all she really wanted was to be eaten.  So she ran away from the circus, found her way to the subway, rode beside an old man’s sleeping shoe all the way back home to Horito’s house.  In the kitchen she made her way back up to the shelf and was re-cooked with some other beans and rice and ended up once again on Horito’s plate.  This time when he raised her up on his fork she sternly told shouted to him, insisting that he eat her to make his tummy feel really good.  He smiled a wide smile and did.  Down in his stomach Renata was so happy she started to dance, and that made Horito dance too. And when he went to school his dancing got all the other kids dancing, and they all lived happily ever after.

Occasionally
Age barks at youth
Snarls out corrections
Hoards its bone
Of piety by scolds
Losing face
Ignominiously

The greatest insult that can be levelled at an artist: you have taken more than you have given.

Note - March '04

Jasper Johns’ laugh, loud and fugitive like the warning call of a forest creature before retreating to its hole

Aaron Sorkin’s comment about it being pathetic of writers to think and treat their characters as if they actually live (meaning I suppose that they ever achieve something like a motive autonomy).  For him characters are the means to push buttons.  As a result, his characters don’t live.  They evanesce, and you’d be confused to equate this irrelevancy with the higher wisdom of the fleeting nature of things.  That, a cover for mediocrity.

SyrupTissues
If you can surmount
The wretched surmise
Of your surroundings
You may do surprisingly
Good work some day sir.

Don’t even pose rhetorical questions out loud.  It’s salesmanshtick, patronizing, manipulolings...

Martian Landscape
The rustblown rocks
Who could believe no eyes had ever seen them
Or seen the frost crawl upon the day and melt from the day
Or believe such modern things were going on
Even while baboons groomed
And Jesus spoke
And suffragettes marched.
The most forward-thinking ancient
Dropped onto this unconversant plain
Would paralyze with incongruity
Would be an ant on this tablecloth.
Ruins so like our own
Yet never peopled.

mouth story

Tonight:

Recycled the actual story about the man who wanted to find water by enlisting the aid of a baboon. Placed a trail of salt leading to a hole in a tree, in which he placed a chunk. But the hole was too small for the baboon to retrieve the chunk in its fist. He knew this was an insoluble problem for the baboon and would keep it busy trying unsuccessfully to yank its hand from the tree for some time. He seized the occasion to net and capture the baboon, which thrashed about in wild anger, then fed it lots of rock salt. Of course it was soon dying of thirst. He left it tethered there for a day in the African heat, then let it go, and when it made a bee-line for the hidden location of the water hole he had accomplished his aim.

mouth story

Last night:

Horace the Hoarse Horse. The eponymous horse (female) took to singing in the meadow during naptime, infuriating all the other animals. One Koala bear named Giddly climbed down from his eucalyptus tree and put pepper in the water of her watering hole, which upon drinking caused Horace to lose her voice. She was so sad about not being able to sing any more she began to cry. Giddly took pity and told her the antidote was to go to the magic melon patch, find the most golden melon during the day, wait til nightfall and under the moon eat that melon while lying on her back and let the golden juice run down her throat along with the moonlight. Which she did and was cured. But Giddly had made her promise to never sing in the afternoon again, during the animal's naptime. The next day she was about to belt it out but remembered her promise, and from that day on sang at all other times but that one, and often sang with the other animals too.

mouth story

Two nights ago:

About a young mink that took to midnight swims in the lake, while all her brothers and sisters had to sleep, not being old enough yet to be nocturnal. They tricked her, had her dive into a bag, which she thought was a bubble under the water. They hung her from a tree, then let her go back in the water...she learned her lesson. The lamest story to date, and that's saying alot!

novelist, poets

The problem with novelists: that they ask for so much of your time; with poets: that they ask so much of your attention, and perhaps belief.

notes

- Get evening. a greeting for those getting even.
- If we must inevitably tailor our thinking to justify the choices we have chosen, is it not possible to step outside the process and make the life we have chosen worth justifying at the outset...
- If you are not prepared to see all people as pearls, you will miss the pearls that do come.

The rub

"I have a stomach ache that says 'feed me avocado and yoghurt" Sevi, 5/21/04