cannies and uncannies, etc

Look: a little thing I drew some years ago when I was drawing a lot of Mark Ryden weirdies.

An orchid we had died some time ago. We put the root ball in the compost after it seemed totally hopeless and after the stems turned all crispy and snapped off. Well, the thing started growing. It's got two creepy long albino stems now that are coming out of the dirt. I didn't even know orchids liked dirt.

Author Katha Pollitt recommends some top poetry books; in her list, she includes three collected works. Isn't this a little like putting a Greatest Hits album in your top ten? I don't know. You tell me.

And tonight, I made a pie: bananas, very overripe apricots, and cherries. I adapted the recipe from Sara Kate's Apricot Breakfast Pie concoction over at The Kitchn, but I can't find the recipe now. If you like to cook, it's worth it to sign up for her e-mail. The crust I used was made with olive oil instead of butter; I'm trying to eat well and this was just too interesting not to try. You'll be happy to know that the result was awesomely crumbly and very much non-olive-flavored. It was just as healthy as pie can get and not a drop healthier -- still, I only had a doorstopper-sized slice.

Thanks S. for sending along the link to this project: Matthea Harvey reads along to Philip Glass's "String Quartet No. 5", played by the Miró Quartet. Audio here; text and images here. I put this on when I cleaned off the floury counter today.

understandably, we remained devastated

Maybe I have a formula to only post once a week. During this particular week, when we all watched Iran and the New York senate with more than a little mild curiosity, and suffered two massive pop culture losses, I've been reading, writing, busy, and insane. NY is getting hotter and our apartment with it. I am trying to make plans to go to Florida for my sister's graduation and, later, for a friend's wedding, but it seems as though everything is up in the air pending review. Speaking of review, the week in review, with pluses and minuses appropriately marking places where pluses and minuses should go:

+ Laura Sims was gracious enough to send me her book, Stranger, now out from Fence Books. Gorgeous little book, and the poems are beautiful. I hope everyone checks this book out.

- I lost an entire draft of my Rebecca Wolff review, and must now recreate it. I'm worried the thing will be late to the party once I manage to do so. I read the book four times; you'd think this would be easy.

+ Despite the fact that they haven't updated their website to reflect it, the new Post Road is out, and I have a poem as well as a translation in it. The translation is of Arto Melleri's poem "Sea Winds," and the poem is called "Isotope." If you're at a fine purveyor of literary goodies and other curiosa, and you happen to spot the publication, be sure to surreptitiously read the poems, stash the magazine back into the rack, and slink away into the stacks like a do-bad. Or, y'know, buy the issue and exit like a true citizen.

- I think I actually got negative sleep one night recently. Sleep was actually robbed from me by a feline burglar with a licorice whip.

+ The new At-Large -- the B-side of the Mixtape issue -- is also just around the coroner. (Typo with intent. There's actually a creepy coroner guy here. I don't know who he is but he sure is some grim fucker. Wouldn't even say thanks when I handed him his glass of blueberry soup, just grunted and turned away. Possibly a member of the Swiss thrash metal band. Updates when available.)

one of these days, i'm gonna wriggle up on dry land

Instead of doing the things I should be doing, for money, or for clout, or both, I'll just do this blog post for pleasure. I'm pretty sure there is no recent album that I feel more strongly about than The Sunset Tree by the Mountain Goats. I am just listening to it now, again, after kind of a long time of not listening to it, and I just am taken in by wonder and magic and all those other disturbing emotions.

"Floor two foot high with newspapers / white carpet thick with pet hair. / Half-eaten gallons of ice cream in the freezer / fresh fuel for the sodium flare." The way John Darnielle sings it in his earnest nasally voice in "Broom People" makes the sodium flare sound so normal, so awful, so everyday, so like something you need. But what the hell? Why a sodium flare? Who has that laying around? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's just some ingredients that people put together, right? It's not something you should shop for.

I always thought this album had a brilliant time-arc, starting from the most "current" song, the first track on the album, "You Or Your Memory," and then cycling through various stages in the narrator's life, with different degrees of personal distance. I think the most touching songs - read: songs that touch me on the plane I'm on, not the plane I'd like to be on - are the above-mentioned track and "Pale Green Things." The emotional jerkers of the album like "Dilaudid" with its teenage fuck-angst and its suicidal ending, and the abuse-surviving "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod," are both set in the past, for me, in the arc of the album. I don't know if this is accurate, but it's how the story of the CD reads for me.

I love this album. I've "raised a tower to broadcast all my dark dreams" with this album at least five or eight times. If you do not know this album, please go get it now. I remember when I first listened to it, in my Honda, driving down Northlake in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. All I really remember is that I was having a terrible fucking time, and who knows why? Probably a personal crisis of some sort, some kind of tiff, and I just didn't know where to go so I got in my car and drove. I used to do that kind of thing a lot. I had pirated the album earlier that day, and, being eager to get in good with the hipsters, I gave it a listen on my one desperate drive. It was a very shiny moment, sans residue -- I genuinely believe in that moment, when I listened to the album. And I consider 45 minutes a "moment." I think I might have cried. If I knew for sure that I'd cried, it wouldn't be a genuine "moment."

Anyway, gosh, have a listen to the album if you haven't already. It's worth it.

tryin' to discover my left foot from my right

Today we picked up our first installment of the Bushwick CSA. In the bag: lettuce, kohlrabi, collard greens, spinach, and radishes. If anyone has any advice at all about kohlrabi, or any non-ham-hock ideas on how to cook greens, please let me know. This is my first time being in a farm share; I love to cook, and I love the idea of learning new food, so it's very exciting. Stupid that I don't know about these nice greens, but then again, I have eaten a lot of weird things in my life that I think counterbalance it. (Gator tail, anyone, or perhaps a nice blood pancake?)

Here is a pic from the Martha show the other night, and a link to a little blurb that Rohin put together. This is after she had her divalicious costume change in the middle of the show -- you can't see them too clearly, but her stockings are BeDazzled with gems galore, and match her gloves, similarly rhinestoned. The background changed by song, and was reflective somehow of the subject matter. Once it was petals; once it was people hurrying. I like the look of this aerial map.

And finally, Nick Flynn read tonight at the Mixer series, and it was very severely well attended (elbow to elbow poetry crowd!). Flynn's new book is about torture, Abu Ghraib, and about the birth of his daughter, but not only about those things. Read a long excerpt here at Esquire.

i like short songs

Well, I didn't get eliminated from PV this week. Next week's topic seems like it will prove to be more difficult. Check out the fantastic writers I'm up against, and the gracious comments from the judges. Will they do this every week?

Tonight, I saw Martha Wainwright sing Edith Piaf songs. It was as golden & rambling as you might believe; perhaps more on it later.

Afterward, Garrett took this photo of me as we were waiting for the J at Essex Street. Upon uploadage, we realized there was a bizarre ghosty in the photo (click to enlarge). It's located between the first and second red column, closer to the second, just sitting there on that striped piece of median. It's clearly got hands and feet and a face. What is it? If you can tell me what it is, you will win. The purveyor of the best explanation gets a mystery prize. The winner will be determined by an elite and anonymous panel of judges.

Now, please go here and continue this exquisite corpse with your edifying verbiage.

I heard the one perfect song pouring out of you.

Yesterday's Bushwick Reading -- the final of the season -- went swimmingly. We had a nice turnout (about 40 people!), and assuming technologies don't fail me, there'll be video footage of the panel up on the website soon. You will be able to see what panelists An Xiao, Nathan Schneider, Clara Jo, and Roger Bonair-Agard conveyed about the topic of WILD/LIFE. Sadly, the battery ran out before the readings from Dan Magers and Nicole Steinberg, but you will just have to trust me when I say they were a great pairing. Both readers' work is infused with such a peculiar humor, dark and modern.

The rest of the weekend has been one whirl of events -- Arts in Bushwick organized the big Bushwick Open Studios festival, and the neighborhood is just ridiculous with creativity. It's unbelievable how many artists live here, and how they're willing to open their doors and let any old stranger come flapping in. There's still time to check it out, if you're in the neighborhood.

Now stimulate your brain bones with Garrett Burrell's poems on La Fovea.

And check out Gina's new poetry prompt blog. This girl has ALWAYS got something going on. It's fucking fantastic.

And then, watch this old Mountain Goats video.