5/28/13
5/13/10
Goodbye, Blog
I've finally accepted that I'm not a blogger! Consider this blog a placeholder until I make a web site with pretty galleries and links. Thank you to Jason Behrends for asking the right questions in his Orange Alert interview with me: here is my response on blogs.
"I can't keep up with it. Promoting yourself is such drudgery. I'd rather spend my time rewriting my stories thirteen times, until they sing. I'm too slow for blogs."
7/18/09
from CARL SITS SHIVA (in progress)
Carl’s a musical genius and a survivor of cancer. He doesn’t walk: he floats. He whistles Mozart operas in the bathtub, with splashes for punctuation. He’s hard of hearing and he’s addicted to nasal spray and once you’ve met him, he’s impossible to forget.
...The last time I took Carl to the hospital, the custodian took one look at his stubby grey ponytail and said, “You groovy, man!” Carl told the staff that I was his girlfriend, and that we were to be married the following week. He smooched the nurse, and she wiped her cheek.
As four beefy men had rolled him into the ambulance, he had pointed to a fat cat, orange as a pumpkin, rolling ecstatically in the dirt, and said, “That’s my Leo! He eats squirrels!”
5/21/09
4/1/09
Staceyann Chin
3/17/09
The Threshold Between Life and Death
3/15/09
An Infant Memory of Tires
I had a flat, and by the time I pulled up to Ortiz Tire I had two – I think they sprinkle screws in the alley to enhance business. More snow fell, innocent and white, each flake a unique possibility, but the pileup around us was so hopelessly soiled with exhaust, who cared. Boo Boo woke with a frown and coughed out a stream of curdled milk. She looked plump and crotchety, and I sat in the back seat with her singing along with the radio, Little Red Corvette! Her frown cracked into an enormous toothless smile. I held her tight to my body in her screaming pink snowsuit with Eskimo trim, and jiggled her in the garage, surrounded by mounds and mounds, coils and coils of tires. She was mystified by the black mountains. When she is 27, she’ll have a dream of infinite, whispering black mountains in twilight, and she’ll interpret it as an ancestral land, when in fact it is an infant memory of tires.
1/24/09
from ETERNAL VIRGINS
1/22/09
WHAT TO WEAR DURING AN ORANGE ALERT
Read Kate Duva's RARE interview with Jason Behrends of the colorful arts and culture site What to Wear During an Orange Alert.
1/14/09
8/13/08
8/12/08
Your Loving Cowfather
"Cowboy" is Dad's legendary father, who partied twice as hard and lived 20 years longer than his son, and died senile in a stinky nursing home. (Grandpa Cowboy, of course, had mild brain damage since his 30s- ever since he won a midget car race upside down.....)
My father ordered seven gray sweatshirts silkscreened with the word "COWBOY" so that the "bruthas and sistahs" who cared for him in the nursing home would remember his nickname every day of the week.
8/11/08
Tornado Alert
The night after the funeral we went to Betsy’s house. Her suburban neighbors had cooked for us: pork and chives, scalloped potatoes, spinach salad with raspberries. The rain raged, and tornado sirens went off for the first time in a generation. It sounded like war.
“Dad’s angry up there,” someone said.
We piled into the basement, which was nothing but beige carpet and possibility. Someone brought down the baby. He popped right into the swing of things, crawling and blabbing, and the girls did yoga-nastics in princess and monkey pajamas. My father’s best friend picked up Ribby the sexy white cat by her armpits and made her dance around, doo-doo-doo, and lifted her up so her legs swung in circles and her hips swirled, ooh la la!
Rain stopped. Distant wails of emergency vehicles. We drove home through the dripping city around fallen trees. My sisters had been sleeping in the bedroom next to my stepmother every night, and tonight was going to be my night – I even had my toothbrush – but it looked too lonely. I wanted to sleep with my man.
At home only Dad’s blue electric globe glowed, and I sat at my desk and looked at his small and spongy bone, and I kissed it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but when you cremate, there are pieces left. I got in the shower with the father of my baby. We knelt and did each other’s legs top to bottom with pink pomegranate shampoo. Rain and thunder raged again, then it stopped, and lightning popped and popped across the silence.
8/8/08
from EULOGY TO TOMMY JOE
7/23/08
4/18/08
4/6/08
Wicked Nursery Rhymes
Now, in one of my previous incarnations I was a nursery schoolmarm. I relied on the enormous power of rhyme to entertain, hypnotize, and manipulate my tots, but I always wondered what these quaint songs passed to us from ye olde
Now I know that “Ring Around the Rosy” is about the Bubonic Plague (“ashes, ashes, we all fall down!”). “Jack and Jill” refers to the decapitation of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. (“Jack broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after…”) Even “Rain, Rain, Go Away” is, in essence, a war song.
So while adults still rely on nursery rhymes today to lull their babes, historically they’ve served another purpose: to satisfy the human preoccupation with scandal and gore.