The weather is gross. A wintry mix. My flight was cancelled. All of the flights. All of them cancelled. So just as I made my peace with leaving I seem to have one more day in NY.

I set up a job interview at The Nonsense Factory for later today. Apparently Ana used to work there, but the boss was too mean. I think it might be the ideal job for me.


I've been reading the Schuyler to O'Hara letters all week while I've been here. They fill me with so much joy.



I've also been reading Lisa Robertson's Xecologue, which is (along with Cole Swenson & Anne Carson) making me want to write more in the space between the essay & the poem. Robertson brings a vastly greater level of lyric mystery to this space. The declarative, essayistic elements arrive through the play & wrench of metaphor, rather than depending on the metaphor to illustrate the idea. Witness:

These boys are vicious as a burnt lip tongued. The sleek swing of a silk fringe rewrites their project as a failure. One begins to sing: it is an anthem, sprung with a quality of flung bits, withdrawn or chastened as rustling tongues in fluent scandal, reined with the amusing cruelty of Cupid birched, caressed by an accent as rubbed fur murmurs to the sneaking night, sulking as a flicked skirt, cradled in the precise euphoria of a method held in reserves--Dirty per se:


Or this:

How then may we speak of futures? I would prefer to lean and whisper in the throaty privacy of roses but distance brings discipline both anticipatory and fettering. Our anxieties have dissapated into all the varieties of edge a ruffling hand describes. A vocabulary is no longer adequate to the precisions of our desires. We're on the cusp of an umbelliferous and sweet coin. A timorous wordling flushes and buckles into secrecy. Greeness and violence wipe our lips. Fingers fall into the buxom air, the flickering and rhyming flesh. Skin is a rhythm cupped. Skin hinges the light. The buxom air unbraids us. We regret only our costly addiction to the beautiful.


In other news, A.O. Scott is getting all up with Chris Rock's new movie. Weird.