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
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
posted by Lauren | 10:02 AM
2 Comments:
i like a cool dispassionate eye and i like things that are burning up and stumbling around. but making the passions into blankets (morally uplifting art / or sanctimonious politics) makes both passion and dispassion seem corrupt. if that makes any sense. probably not.
hi l,
oh, i know full well those worries about the sanctimonious in art. it's what i find so disconcerting about r. silliman (b/c he's like a che guevara t-shirt - rigidity in praise of freedom - a starched che shirt). i don't think that's what's wanted or needed, or that that mode does anything but destroy poets anyway. you know, think of auden's change to monumental, anachronistic cleverness.
i think my problem is not a problem of art, or of art as subject. it's more a problem of waywardness, of how to handle (with the eye) a world baring its teeth in the friendliest manner. i think of oppen, and his renunciations of poetry (or, in a much more eccentric and personal way, riding) - was that renunciation an astringent, barren, rite of worldliness? it's an act, an act of saying no, of leaving the place (a place that, from his later poems, mattered to him) of denouncing the beloved out of love.
i want an irony gravid with hope
now i think of petrach's stupid chaste ass - that he could conjure this whole world of pain from an ephemeral glimpse.
anyway, what i mean to say was, i can't write at this time, because i can't write about this particular pain that i'm feeling cause it would force me to become an ideologue - i can't help but take this supremely rational world that abuses the irrational for it's own arbitrary competition personally.
can i join the
school of quiet nihilismitude?
anyway, i know things will be much better when i can feel myself among the californians - it's all homesickness really.
A misreading of the end of your message, Lauren: after discussing the searing temperatures, I thought you'd typed "What on earth is up with angel season?" which made me wonder for a second if broiling angels plummeting into Houston were somehow responsible for those record highs.
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