news from the house

hello chicks (chix and peps),

sorry it’s been so long...steve, thanks for your nice messages...it was great to hear abt the creeley reading. i don’t have much to report in the thinking area – tony and i flat ran out of money and have been scrambling to recoup. (as jared knows, having received a panicked call from new mexico...

lauren: “i’m in new mexico with only $28 dollars to my name!”
jared: “oh, don’t worry about it, that’s just new mexico. i was once in new mexico with only five dollars.”

i called j. hoping that some such story was in the offing. one is not disappointed.)

jessica came up with the idea that attaching adjectives to one’s dwindling stock of cash would make it healthier (or at least more entertaining), so tony and i have been dandling (at various points) a robust nine dollars, a coquettish fourteen-fifty, and a convalescent twelve.

but we are working, making ends, and payment, and eventual solvency, and eventual gasoline for the devouring engine that transports us (we are slaves to moloch) will come. how could they not?

nicole’s wedding was really wonderful. jessica and i got to spend a whole day with nicole, hiking, eating green chile tamales, watching lightning storms and mountains.

mostly, other than that, not much news. we watched ‘gummo’ last night. i wasn’t sure how i would feel but i really liked it. any opinions on harmony korine? i was looking at reviews, interviews, etc. and came across one by janet maslin calling gummo the worst movie of 1997. it’s strange to me how off-base and irrelevant the times seems to be on books and on movies. something interesting has scurried into the room – please step on it at once!

record highs in houston right now – it was 96 yesterday.

where is everyone located right now? jared, are you getting ready to move? steve, are you staying in the i.c.? catherine, when do you and michael go to chicago for the summer?

what on earth is up with angel season four? the characters are in constant motion like little spinny tops. let them settle down for a sec so i can have an opinion!

xo, lauren

Rowdy Howdy

So, we're off to california very soon, and hopefully moving into a good year of poetry, and sound, and the smell of bay laurels, and crackling dry summers. ah.

i've been reading this denis johnson book (already dead) which is awesome. one of the paragraphs ends thusly:


"*Californian*: that was his epitaph."

heartening.

i haven't written much recently, first b/c we're moving and the household disarray warps the eye's potential. and also, i think, b/c i'm trying to reconcile what really begins to feel like the end of american democracy - that is, all of this frightening and intense smugness on the part of politicians. i'm trying very hard to focus on aesthetics as a way of being, that is, mind 'n' generative wandering, but nihilism is always close at the door. whitman was my nursemaid for too long, and i had really become convinced sometime in my youth that democracy really meant something, and it doesn't, anymore. anyway, it never did, but the new boldness of its unraveling somehow demands a more social reaction.

i have these night sweats about the strength of convictions, and the fear of the same. i had this dream last night in which i stopped paying taxes.

so, so, so,

i want poetry so much.

Thermonuclear Hand

I don't know about you all, but I sometimes wonder what's up with British poetry these days. It always seems like there has to be more going on there than I'm hearing about, if only because I hear absolutely nothing. So while Simon Armitage is hardly the Oxford-exploding, blood-guzzling, Queen-shrieking (the band, I mean) poetical assassin I secretly hope to see emerging from the Isles and their mists, it was still pretty cool to hear him read last night. He mostly stuck to clear and conventional lyrics, but his last poem was something else entirely, written in Cornish dialect and doing some really crazy things musically. I don't know if it's in a book or anything -- I think his first American-pulished collection has just come out, and the poem I'm referring to looked to just be a typewritten page he'd brought along -- but I'm definitely interested in checking out some more of his work. Also, are there any other contemporary British poets you all find vaguely interesting? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? I would've asked Simon myself after the reading but Matt Miller had him in some serious fucking lockdown.

Oh, Lucy Ives also read after that at TalkArt and totally blew my mind. Apparently she said fuck the Workshop, chucked her old poems, and wrote her thesis over last weekend or something. Heartbreaking Surrealism with a capital S. Obviously. I was totally unprepared. My hair dropped at the drop of a hat.