In my driveway, shiny gray and short (about 8 inches), is the body of a snake, dried in a striking pose. Every time I leave my apartment, I step over it -- not treading -- and acknowledge it, respecting an air of suspended attack that slinks round where I live these days.

Because I am now reading Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel, I have decided to begin Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

It's reputed lingering in details and botomless curiosity draws me.

Anyone read it?


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A few days ago, I was thinking about my smoking. What, psychologically, got me started and keeps me going? Of course, there are the chemical-addictive factors, but beyond that, I saw smoking as one of those things that falls into a category for me ( Read more... )

Gustaf Sobin's poetry takes as a central topic the conditional, the potential. Not as an abstract concept, but as that which animates all matter, lends it direction. The way he speaks of it, the conditional is a real-world force -- almost as if it physically shadows and guides every being -- that defines every entity as both body and meaning at ( Read more... )

OK: Despite good intentions, I have been having trouble following through with my mind-goals lately. I know that one prerequisite is getting an office space set up: I need private space to write at the computer, to loll and read, to stare out the window and reflect ( Read more... )

This morning I am shaving my head. I try to hold firmly and glide back in one clean stroke. Burn. A trickle of red forms a few inches directly above my right ear. In plain sight. I imagine pushing blood-stained books at people and so put an unsightly, godawfully-big-seeming bandaid on my head and begin to head out to work ( Read more... )

This Fall I took the tack that I wasn't active enough, that I needed to dive into my own brand of work to enrich myself.  I took on these poetry writing projects.  I had committed myself to Cinema Memphis, more program design and facilitation at the library.  Beyond that, I developed this sense of guilt about what I should be doing: writing poetry ( Read more... )

Recently, Joe and I were talking about our different personal understandings of Beltaine (spring) and Sawhain (fall) holidays, in terms of "spiritual" meaning associated with those who have passed on -- whether literally or less so. After a few drinks, I also gave a pretty high-flown, but sincere, explanation of why I feel it is extremely ( Read more... )

Master Rub looks askance, nods his ears, hears: Others can't invest in changelings or something imperceptibly slow while he just flat out doesn't believe in numbers. Still he carries a fold-up abacus and scales in his sewn-on pocket. Certainty has weight enough to make beads and arms shake, and so does doubt. If he leans back, crosses one barbed ( Read more... )

Odd feeling to get to work and realize, both, that you DID shower AND that your left hand still smells like lube ( Read more... )