soon, slowly, moving

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evelyn
on October 31, 2008
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I’m moving this site to lispservice.com soon, and after I do that (this weekend?) I will post the interviews with Stacey Levine and Lily Hoang, which are good, they both have things to say.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in a suburb where I’ll be working on election day, training for the work I’ll be doing, and where I walk around quite a bit between the election place and bus stops, and I have noticed this creepy decorative trend: statues of animals that probably once lived in this place before urban sprawl pushed em out. There are statues of black bears stranded between used car lots, in front of McDonald’s, their paws raised, claws and teeth bared. Maybe this is supposed to be ironic, these dark iron-looking statues, maybe this is suburban irony. These bears will be even creepier after the election if the election doesn’t go well and I pass them in the dark on the way to the bus back into the city.

Walking downtown to/from the library

Published
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on October 12, 2008
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A man who is coming erratically toward me carries a cane in each hand. The canes are a gold one and an aluminum one; a large bandage obscures his right eye. I am on his right side. He wears a coat with a high, spattered collar that covers his speech so I can’t understand it. The belt of his coat drags the ground behind him, accumulations of small things and their wrappers. He looks annoyed when I obviously try to avoid passing closely by him.

Later, I am again out walking and a car nearly strikes me. The car is two-toned, the color of the doors mismatching the color of the body. Also, its headlight on the side nearest me is missing, the metal a gash where the light had been, and its muffler drags on the ground, coiling exhaust.

I avoid my body being hit, and then I am struck realizing that I turned a man into a car.

The situation of my unemployment

Published
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evelyn
on October 8, 2008
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Reduced to temping, by Matthew Rohrer, text copied from Jobless Bitch.

Some people are offensively timid.
When I stand near them, and if I
haven’t seen any other people for weeks,
I feel like a star’s bodyguard
and the timid person is an egg or worm.
Alone, I rush across
rainy sidewalks with no umbrella,
with my shoulders drawn in. My ribcage locked.
Something moves overhead at all times:
I am sometimes more, sometimes less, aware
of this looming constant. Lean your head back
and think about that for a few seconds:
you’re very tiny, you’re in outer space.
You see I’m right.

++

I finally understand what I’ve been writing for the last week, the intelligence of the narrator has logic now that causes things to happen, my thoughts feel clearer, I see tasks around me now that need completion, and I feel that I can complete them though it may take some time.

Pirated Poetry Anthology

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on October 3, 2008
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A poem by me, which I didn’t write, is included in the 3785 pages of pirated poetry anthology:

Scrutinizing Admiration

Withdrawn
At a simple Roman
Scrutinizing
Of admiration

I like ’scrutinizing of admiration.’ Good job, compiler or person who wrote this.

Insignificant admissions

Published
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evelyn
on October 1, 2008
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In the last few months I have tried to make this blog less personal, posting less frequently and changing the aesthetic so that white space dominates text. I like it better this way.

But now I’m going to say something personal. I like to smell like medicine. Which I realize is an impersonal odor, institutional, masking my body’s real odor, which I don’t think I can smell, it’s a kind of sensory blindness.

I would like to know the people around me well, to smell their apartments and to see how they store their silver ware. To know what they think about the way they perform banal tasks like adjusting broken mini-blinds. My silver ware, which is not silver, is all thrown into one drawer and I reach in and sometimes can’t locate a spoon. How else do people live, and how did they learn to live that way. What nervous ways do they move their feet during a job interview. I want to know people, anything about them.

Now

Published
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evelyn
on September 28, 2008
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Now my favorite shoes are really worn, the soles thin and uncomfortable, though I didn’t wear them much until the end of our trip, when we had finished biking and were walking around Athens.

Now I’m back in Seattle, sitting in my apartment, which seems different now after a month of travel and so not the apartment I left but the one I returned to, yet familiar still with greenish northern light and the side of the building next door to look to.

Now I will be continuing what I began before I left, finishing the interview questions for Stacey Levine and Lily Hoang, with new shoes eventually placed where I place them to the right of the door to my apartment, and my boots for rain there too, and rain outside the window.

At Barbara’s Food Company, a restaurant in Athens (63-65 Emmanouil Benaki Street, Exarhia) where I felt like I wasn’t in any particular place but a feeling of comfort, we sat on chairs that were just then being re-seated by a man cutting long strips of grass for weaving seats on the sidewalk. Some of the chairs’ seats were still green and they smelled like dry grass. We ate turkey stew, lentils and feta, and artichoke, broccoli, zucchini and green olive salad, bread with a crumb Adam described as “sharp”, and organic Greek beer.

And then when we were full, we were offered a dessert by the waiter. Afterward I felt pleasant discomfort, pleasant because familiar and temporary.

My story titled “Discomfort” will be published in Harp & Altar in late October or in November.

The photograph below is of work by Wendy Kawabata titled ‘The Dunces.’

the dunces by wendy kawabata

Some books on my list for reading this fall:

American Genius, A Comedy, by Lynne Tillman
Fog & Car, by Eugene Lim
Hunger, by Knut Hamson
Poolsaid, by Shya Scanlon

CAPTCHA

Published
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evelyn
on August 24, 2008
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A CAPTCHA painting, more of which are here.

Also interesting: typing CAPTCHA phrases helps to decipher old texts.

Decision

Published
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evelyn
on August 22, 2008
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I’m trying to decide which books to bring on the bike trip. I’ll have four panniers for four weeks of travel, and space obviously limited by things I’ll need like clothing, food, a change of shoes, a notebook, an address book, etc., and other things I find along the way. I think I’ll have room for two books, maybe, maybe three, one I’ll leave on the plane after I finish. So far the books I’m considering are these:

Hunger, by Knut Hamsun

Pan, by Knut Hamsun

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, by Basho

Haunted Houses, by Lynne Tillman

Ghost Dance, by Carole Masso

I’d like to find American Genius by Tillman and bring that, but, unless I find it in France, on Corsica, in Italy or in Greece, it will probably have to wait until I’m back in America and order it on the internet. I’d also like to bring No One’s Land by Paige Ackerson-Kiely, but I’m also not finding that in used book stores, so it will have to wait, I will have to wait patiently.

And, after almost ruining two library books by keeping them in my panniers on rainy trips, I will bring large plastic bags to seal my books and notebook in.

News

Published
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evelyn
on August 19, 2008
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Interviews with Stacey Levine & Lily Hoang, published sometime in October, will be here or linked from here.

I will be biking with Adam from Geneva to Athens during September. (excited!)

from Barbara Guest

Published
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evelyn
on July 20, 2008
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There was a dream within a dream and inside
the outer dream lay a rounded piece of white
marble of perfect circular dimension.
The dreamer called this marble that resembled
a grain of Grecian marble, “Eva Knachte,”
who was blown into the dream by the considerate
rage of night.

Her name evoking night became a marble pebble,
the land on which she rested was the shore
of the sea that washed over her and changed
her lineaments into classic marble, a miniature
being, yet perfect in this dream, her size
determined by the summer storm with which
I struggled and seized the marble.

from The Screen of Distance

I just read this and am posting it here for affection–the way a kid who finds something runs to show it to others for the affection it might bring to her inner body, the one made of sweets and their gatherers.