I should be posting more. One person's suggestion was that I write about what I'm reading.
Well...I could. But what I'm reading the most are job posting sites and the news. I could be structuring my time a little better, that's for sure.
Job posting sites aren't very interesting to talk about and the news is depressing.
What made it worse was that I too, saw the Gore(y) movie and I walked out of the air-conditioned nightmare and onto Court St. in such a depression with a thought of: we're all fucked.
Then, to make matters worse, I went home and started reading websites criticizing the movie (and Gore for that matter). He's not a hero of mine, that's for sure, but some of these sites were blatantly attacking him. Sure he got a little bigger around the waist and trotted out the story of his son and sister again. But that wasn't the point of the movie. And since I’m a reader of lefty web sites and blogs, no one on “that side” seems to attack as viciously as “that other side” does.
Anyway… to complete a science requirement at my college way back when, I took a class on global warming. This is back in 1990. Thanks to Mark Lamoureux, he helped me understand the periodic table and all those mumbo-jumbo science words like carbon. I managed to NOT take a science class all throughout high school so I knew zip. I know water is an element of the periodic table and I know that beer isn't.
I went to five high schools. I started two school newspapers and learned how to use a mimeograph machine. If you throw a PowerPoint presentation about carbon dioxide rising at me I will probably understand. My paper on global warming had to do with population growth. I understand that also.
I go for walks in the afternoon when I get a little stir crazy in front of the computer. I didn’t yesterday bc there was a man bellowing on a bullhorn for a good 5 hours. I couldn’t hear what and when I finally ventured out at 7pm; he was still going at it. I found out that if perhaps I accepted jesus christ into my heart I’d be a little perkier.
Books received have been Mike Magee’s Mainstream (who wrote me a nice note on the first page “for xtina, a preemptive apartment-warming present”) which I read off and on in the evening (i.e. when I turn the A/C on – and no comment here yet on what I think, other than I had a long discussion about this book and other things by mi amigo James Cook from Gloucester MA, - it was one of those “touch base” conversations – and I also talked to Amanda Cook – who is due this August, but I don’t mean to define her just by her pregnancy – cognitive of that I am)
And Gary Sullivan’s and Nada Gordon’s Elsewhere 2, which given it’s a comic, was a quicker read and just fantastic. The text and graphics. His encapturement of street signs and visual culture on display is just, actually moving. I even showed it to my mother, (bc I sometimes tell her the poetic details of what’s going on around me), whose reaction was “Wow. He’s really talented. He should get a job doing this.”
Yes mom, most of us are talented. We should be churning out poems, artwork, comics and books and getting paid more than enough to live off of. I guess I’ll call up my senator, but no wait, we all know who she is…
A few weeks ago I also received small chapbooks by Anne Boyer 11. The deep (self-published) and Hazel McClure’s Nothing Moving, done by my next-door neighbor, Gina Myers. They’re the simplest things to read, but I haven’t gotten to them yet. I don’t know why other than I’d feel guilty for reading during the day when I SHOULD BE LOOKING FOR A JOB so…
…but the news and political blogs, I refresh every few minutes. AlterNet gets their feed from the Huffington Post, and something new goes up every few minutes. CrooksandLiars is good bc they have video and sound bites, the NYT for the general news and the Guardian UK bc they’re 5 hours ahead of us. I have to stay away from CommonDreams (too Chicken Little The Sky is Falling! stridency), Democracy Now (great reportage but you know, depressing) and the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (2544 us solders dead, 18,877 wounded and an estimated 38,960 iraq citizens killed and lately I’m much less sympathetic towards dead us soldiers when their comrades rape and kill and torture – nuff said there).
So, I may have to take a hiatus on the news, just and if only for my mental well-being, which is quirky enough to begin with.
So, poetry blogs. I more or less stopped reading them bc as I wrote a way while ago, I would briefly check them out at work, in lull periods, but the lulls and lulls were getting less infrequent (this particular instance my work site was sponsoring a conference so…kinda busy doing that), I was eating at my desk with my head in an excel spreadsheet, so I didn’t have time and thus, fell out of the habit. And initially and still maintain, that if one has some easy going job, one can briefly check out blogs, the news, and take some stupid quiz that is devoid of actual content and thought-process, but if one has a job where they are constantly busy the second they step into the building, one doesn’t have time. If you teach 3 classes back to back, you are not reading blogs in that time frame, if you are commuting an hour each way to work every day you're not reading blogs in that time frame and if you're working retail? Forget it. I sit way too much in front of the computer as it is.
That all said, I finally went on Joel Sloman’s blog - http://idasfoodieleas.blogspot.com/ - bc I had the time, and I thought he’d be the last poet in the Boston area to start one. I ate lunch with him at the end of June (at the Stata center) and he asked if I’d gone to his blog yet and I hadn’t. Bc I couldn’t So I did. This evening. He said he was reading Stendhal (he told me this in person) so now, weeks later, I am sitting in comfy digs in Red Hook and I look up and lo! Stendhal’s The Red and The Black is up there on the shelf. I’m glad Joel is blogging; he has an amazing music and book and broadside and chapbook collection. What I mean to say is that he should keep it up.
Other blogs: I check out Jack Kimball’s the most, I checked out Gina Myers’s blog tonight partially bc of the irony that she lives next door to me and Tim Peterson’s because he said, like a lot of other people do: well, it was on my blog.
Well, I’m inclined to be a little sarcastic here but I’ll hold off, mostly bc I have to close the windows bc it’s pouring outside. If I were a little kid, I’d be disappointed this spring and summer, bc there’s been a helluva lot of rain that just seems a bit off (Is there global warming in your bathroom? Did we just go into hurricane season without having a summer?). And for being as web savvy as I think I am, I don’t know a lot about RSS feeds but then on the other hand, there isn’t a lot to know. And since most blogs are set up with an RSS feed, don’t worry, I’ll think of the easiest way to look at you and yours…
However, employment comes first.
And you're astute in noticing the only blog I provided a link for was Joel. But I've done enough name dropping for one evening. Time to go back to work.
The last of the books on the bookshelf…
The presses (bc if I had to type out all the book titles, I’d be sitting in front of the computer for a while when I should be packing...)
Roof
Edge
UDP
Krupskaya
Granary
Semiotext(e)
Burning Deck
Wesleyan
ND
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Chax
Dalkey Archive
Zoland
Atelos
Subpress
O Books
Diwan
The Figures
Post-Apollo
The Figures
Potes and Poets
Talisman
Tougher Disguises
Black Sparrow
Faux Press
Soft Skull
Sun and Moon
United Artists
Green Integer
Hard Press
Germ
That’s not all of them, but now it’s time to stick them in a box…
Before bookshelf #8,
I forgot to count the other 8 book cases I have in the apt.
In total: I have 16 bookshelves.
There's no way I'm going to be able to squeeze
16 bookshelves in a NY apt.
Like most things, I'll figure that out later...
One low level two-tier bookshelf in the living room is almost empty. I sold a bunch of books and got a pittance for them, and then donated the rest to the library where my mother works. That library will then sell the books to raise money to buy books. Fine with me. That library doesn’t have a great poetry collection but did have a few Robert Duncan books and other surprises. If the library wants to use the $$ to buy more idiotic harry potter books, I’ve lost my say in the matter…
These bookshelves, MY LIBRARY, are now whittling down to fiction I don’t want to get rid of, a bunch of political books and other things that got shelved there for no reason like Houellebecq’s Platform and The Elementary Particles, Leroy Jones’s Blues People, Ulysses, too many books by Jean Baudrillard, an atlas dating back to 1963, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (interesting that’s she is from the boston area and also moved away which does not surprise me), Lightening on the Sun by Robert Bingham, the Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Book of Rock Lists, which is dated at this point but if one wants to know how some 70s has-been rock star died, that’s the book to turn to.
The near to almost empty shelf once housed works from Chekhov and Austen, but I can always read those anywhere…
Three other bookshelves hold zines and paper and are more or less a dumping ground for card stock, staplers, paper cutters, rulers, cds, boxes of cassette tapes, and even more ephemera. I don’t know why I have Live Skull on cassette but obviously bc it’s pre-cd. I should import them…I also found old, as in old, issues of MAXIMUMROCKNROLL (circa 92 which doesn't seem that long ago and I know the mag has been around for a lot longer than that...), another useless but treasured oddity…
That leaves three bookshelves in my bedroom, which house a fair portion of a Kathy Acker collection, some VC Andrews novels, early books by Bernadette Mayer and John Wieners, at least more than one book on the history of prostitution and lots o nick-knacks, jewelry and mementos, but seeing as this is my bedroom, I’d have personal items.
Like jewelry. Like books. And what’s worth something, I’m keeping, and what’s worth nothing, like a penguin imprinted Pride and Prejudice paperback novel, I’m tossing. Or keeping, like a circa 80s lcd quartz Dukes of Hazzard watch.
I collect a lot of ephemera. I collect porn, I collect empty cookie boxes from Japanese supermarkets and I collect controversial books. Tho not Mein Kampt and not the bible. I read 2 pages of the former and it made me ill and the latter book I argue with after the first sentence.
Bookshelves 4,5,6,7
…are a mess (surprise surprise). The thin 4 shelved bookcase has empty beer bottles (Victoria Bitter ale from Australia, Smithwick’s from Ireland, and a bottle of “fisherman’s brew” which is brewed on the north shore methinks and tasted quite good), stickers from every imaginable lefty hot button issue there is, bills, and books.
These are the books that realistically I should have gotten rid of, but I just couldn’t part with a book on the history of cannibalism, two novels by Anna Kavan, a Nancy Drew book, the Civil Disobedience Handbook, and how can I get rid of Leaves of Grass, Our Lady of the Flowers, Babe: Pig in the City, My Turn, by Nancy Reagan, Red Light – Inside the Sex Industry, Understanding Japanese Buddhism, The Wit and Wisdom of George Bush (père not fils), and Richard Viguerie’s The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead (especially with an introduction by Jerry Falwell!). Incidentally, the last book is self-published with a copyright of 1980 and on the immediate front page is stamped: 3/$1.
Obviously I am not naming all my books, bc I am not turning this post into a library catalog.
Bookshelf #5 three shelves:
Top shelf: jewelry findings, a dv cassette tape and a mini tool box of phillip screwdriver heads and whatever else one finds in a tool box
Second shelf: oil paints and turpentine and brushes
Bottom shelf: lots of computer cables and computer add-ons (I used to have a drawing tablet and I used to have Painter – the computer software that is, but I dunno where that is now) and a box of nicorette gum, which didn’t work. I bought the heavy duty smoking gum thinking that since I smoke a lot – and did say I would quit in 2006 (but didn’t say when) I thought this would work. The gum tasted like shit and it made me sick. So I will either have to take half a gum and stick a whole tin of altoids in my mouth at the same time or just throw the box out.
Or just quit.
Bookshelves 5 & 6
prop up what was once a working table but the table top is in such disarray it’s now the corner of the room I avoid, tho this isn’t a very big room, just my working studio/office. On those two shelves are more Portable Press chapbooks, as well as feminist-type books from college (the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and The Death of Nature by Carolyn Merchant), Blue of Noon and The Tears of Eros by George Bataille, a book of erotic photographs of 1920 women posing on automobiles, and Death Scenes: Homicide Detective’s Notebooks. I can’t say I have a favorite picture, the provocative posing female showing her knickers on top of an old Ford, or a decapitated head lying on the side of the road.
There is not A theme to this shelf but there was a theme at one point OVERALL…tho it should be obvious...
The other bookshelf holding up the table has Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, The History of Sexuality by Foucault, Paradise by Herve Guibert and Twenty Years at Hull House. The bottom shelf houses art books I bought in Paris like Paintings at the Musee d'Orsay and The Louvre which I don’t want, but since I bought them there, I will just give them to my mother, who won’t want them either bc neither of us like impressionist paintings, but she can use the color schemes perhaps…
The 8th and final bookcase houses poetry and that will be forthcoming…and by the end of this month it will be packed in a box.
I also sold ¾ of my record collection this afternoon. Most of my cds are in case logic cases, I kept all the paper, but I asked the guy if he’d be willing to think about taking cds minus the jewel cases and he said he’d think about it. I don’t feel like spending my evenings putting the cds and paper booklets back into jewel cases but am thinking of doing so…I have a lot of cds and most I don’t listen to anymore bc honestly, indie-rock bores the piss out of me and the heyday is over. Elliot Smith is dead and tho I’m glad I saw him before he came out with the not-so-hot XO album, the cd itself is worth pennies and will deprecate over time. If I wanted to hear an Elliot Smith song I can download it, which is what I’ve been doing for years anyway and he’s an acquired taste, like Jeff Buckley, another member of the dead young rock star hall of fame set (neither are a fav, too melancholy, but I guess I was in a mood then).
Or I can buy another external hard drive, rip all the cds, and decide after that.
Or I can just make them all into drink coasters and sell them on eBay…
But I’m not selling Bitches Brew or Live-Evil, not bc I listen to it anymore, but going back to an earlier post about the Sex Pistols, he had more history and explosiveness than any of those jokers could even hope to achieve…
But this is all segwaying into a music post…
Bookshelf 3 is a bookshelf built by Tim Peterson...
...tho personally I have never seen Tim build anything, but he is probably more adept at using a drill than I am.
Starting from ground up, and on the floor is a drill, an apple keyboard, a zip drive and a yoga mat, all under utilized.
Note that I have not described what is ON TOP OF these book cases and the knickknacks and doodads on the bookcase. That's for another time.
The bottom shelf houses over sized books. I have The Very Best of Playboy Issue Number One, Teaching Economics As If People Mattered, The Anarchist Cookbook, Billy and the Boingers Bootleg (sans record, I don't know where it went), ReSearch publications of Angry Women and Industrial Culture Handbook and Modern Primitives, the World of Zines, Broadway ed by James Schyler and Charles North, Mondo 2000 and Avec. Also on this bookshelf is a bumper sticker which reads **No Discrimination in the Constitution** and an empty bottle of Bushmills.
Correct. Not only do I collect books but I collect liquor bottles and cans. The bottle of Bushmills was bought in Ireland. And is quite empty.
Note that I have the Anarchist Cookbook, but I do not cook. I couldn't make a homemade bomb any more than I can make home made chili. I did make a puttanesca sauce once on my own, which tasted fine but over all, my idea of cooking is making toast.
The shelf above: a mix of anthologies and thick books I don't know where to put. Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent sits next to The Fatal Shore next to d.a.levy and Ranters and Crowd Pleasers, as well as Vow to Poetry, the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry, Koch's The Art of Poetry and Bernstein’s My Way. This also holds The New American Poetry by Donald Allen and We Got the Neutron Bomb, a book about the southern california punk scene.
The shelf above that: It used to be just the journal shelf, The Hat, The Tiny, 6500, Mungo vs Ranger, NO, Fulcrum, Ribot, the Poker, etc etc but now also houses the two volumn set of Poems for the Millennium, Anne Waldman's Iovis, Poet Be Like God, Repression and Recovery and Duberman's Black Mountain book, which incidentally I didn't like, as I didn't like Duberman inserting himself into the book.
Here is where I have another bumper sticker:
YOU'VE GOT NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR JOB
by the Billionaires for Bush team. I have not been active in their organization for almost a few years now, bc I don't find their sense of irony very funny anymore. Anyone with half a brain gets the joke (Four More Wars! that's so funny!) and the other half are the people who need to be throttled. I already argue with enough people who I would consider on **my** side, I don't need or want to argue with the other half of the population of the united states. Much easier to write them off initially...the integration process of me previewing other viewpoints is slow and painful.
Shelf above that: an interesting mix of books people have lent me, library books and books I am currently reading. This category has spilled into the dining room, living room, my purse and my bedroom. The very overdue library books consist of A Border Comedy by Lyn Hejinian, Stacy Doris's Conference, American Women Poets in the 21st Century ed by Rankin and Spahr, Rosemary Waldrop's Reluctant Gravities, Sleeping With the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen, and On the Nameways by Clark Coolidge.
and other more very overdue library books.
SUBURBAN NATION I owe to mike county, a lots o books borrowed or lent by James Cook, and lotso books lent by Gerrit tho I am not sure Gerrit gave me or lent me books, as he is exceptionally generous.
As for the currently reading: is Toscano's Platforms, Notley's Coming After, Steins's Everybody's Autobiography and An Essay is Astrerisks by Jena Osman. Tho I've read most of them and should be on another shelf.
I did not reveal all that was on the shelf but there is another bumper sticker which reads:
ATTENTION REPUBLICANS: GO FUCK YOURSELVES!
Which if there were or was actual hope, instead of the culturally falsely concocted kind, I would love to be privy to, and would even watch, republicans fuck themselves.
I don't quite know what joy or satisfaction I would get out of it, but certainly some...
On this shelf is also Ted Berrigan's Selected Poems, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal 1915-1936 and Basil Bunting, which I know Gerrit lent me.
On a side note, I don't like to lend books out bc I never see them again. I am honestly possessive and not very generous. Other people, on the other hand, are more generous. James Cook and Gerrit Lansing are more generous. I know James will want his books back but I haven't figured out whether Gerrit wants his books back or not.
The top shelf:
It started off being small books like Stein’s How to Write to Rattray’s How I Became One of the Invisible to Emily Carr’s Hundreds and Thousands to Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces to wershler-henry’s the tapeworm foundary to horror: John Milton. This shelf morphed to having a Pavement Saw issue of Sean Cole’s work, a Book of the Book from Granary, and other irregular sized books like In the American Tree, Pound’s Personae and Lyn Hejinian My Life in the Nineties, A Thousand Devils by K. Silem Mohammad and Random Possessions by Mei-mei Bersenbrugge. There are a lot of Green Integer and other Sun and Moon books also. I can’t quantify what this bookshelf turned into.
But there are lots more bookshelves, and that is now only almost half.
I'm going to write about my bookshelves, which I should be packing but am not.
One bookshelf, three tiers: The top shelf has chapbooks. Lots of them. It mostly consists of Pressed Wafer, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Ugly Duckling, Belladonna, Pom2 and three issues of Badaboom Gramophone (the latter two are actually journals, which should be on the **journal** shelf but is not for no apparent reason). This shelf is overflowing. I also have a chapbook of Corinna Copp, broadsides of readings, chapbooks from Braincase Press, Brendan Lorber's Dash, and a very well designed chapbook from a Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibit from 2000 which includes work by Camden Joy and Nick Piombino. There's a few more works I didn't mention, but I think you get the picture.
The second tier of shelves are the **boston poets** and why I segregated them from the rest of the poetry books I don't know. But on this shelf is more Pressed Wafer, and books by William Corbett, Joe Torra, Joel Sloman, John Wieners, Stephen Jonas, Gerrit Lansing, Michael Franco, Dan Bouchard, Robert Creeley, Charles Olsen, LIFT, edited by Joe Torra and to add a touch off femme to it, Fanny Howe. She is in fact, the only female on this shelf, which is telling in that the Boston poetry scene is predominantly male. Sure some of these men are gay but...nuff said.
The bottom shelf is my **Hartford** section. It consists of the Hog River Journal, a journal, mostly historical, out of Hartford CT, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Huck Finn, and a bunch of books about race, racism, race riots with a smattering of other books re. the interstate highway system, poor and working class families interviewed in the 1970s, union and community organizers and Twilight and Fires in the Mirror by Anna Devere Smith. Obviously there is an agenda to this bookshelf.
Bookshelf #2
The top shelf is computer books bc I'm a big nerd. Dreamweaver, Flash, Final Cut Pro, FileMaker Pro and the manual that came to my DV camera which is as large as a book. Also on the bookshelf is my Rough Guide book to Australia, a botanical illustration book and the disks that came with my now not so new computer.
Second shelf holds old classroom books on how to learn Spanish, French and German, as well as Spanish, French and German dictionaries, books on how to write perfect grammar, and a book on **isms**, as in classism, racism, every kind of ism, three books on The Book of Lists, and finally, the Dictionary of Cliches.
The bottom shelf's theme is sex, tho not well organized. There are books on prostitutes from the turn of the century, marriage manuals from the early 1900s, Kathy Acker's Portrait of an Artist is on there for ?? reasons, and a Dictionary of Saints. I must have had an agenda at some point but it's being overshadowed by the oversized lounge chair blocking the bottom shelf. This chair is so ugly and battered I'd like to get a fire permit and burn it in the middle of my street.
I have only described two bookshelves, there are 6 more to go, and this is only one room in my entire apt.