New Look, New Content

It has been ages since I've paid any attention to this blog. My attentiveness reveals a lot about my personality. Maybe I'll use this as my "I need to write something every day, or at least a few times a week" outlet. My practice. And maybe tell people I'm writing in it again. I've mostly used it for links, which I love putting out there.

I'm reading Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, at the suggestion of my friend Kate Simpkins (http://www.katesimpkins.com). I love the way Winterson makes her main character, the lover, of indeterminate gender. And always is this character having an affair with a married woman. The same was true in The Passion, which is another book of hers I adore. Set in a surreal Venice. Characters who deal in human hearts as if they were black market firearms. It's lovely. My favorite part is where the lover steals into her old flame's house to steal her heart back, stuffed into a box and shoved in with all of the other bric-a-brac.

Speaking of hearts, mine has been under pleasant siege. My lovely D.Rae surprises me with each passing day and night. It has almost been a year. Her eyes house the sun. Her heart has a door for mine.

Word Invocation

I am a wordphile who suffers from logorrhea, logomania, and verbal constipation. How can that be? Easy: I love words too much and sometimes am so overwhelmed by my passion for them that I swoon and hit the edge of the coffeetable, am struck linguistically impotent, become a raving idiot.

The innumerable word relationships possible; the infinite combinations of letters; coming face to face with lexicons that creak under the strain of generations of etymylogical maps and guideposts, previously charted territory just waiting to be revisited and explored: It's a little overwhelming. (And that is the opposite of hyperbole--is the word for that simply understatement? It seems there must be a grander word than that for it!)

My vocabulary is abysmal. There are so many nuances of precision that I miss as I lumber inelegantly toward understanding. I urge myself to be more promiscuous with my language and my search for word wisdom, handle language like the well-worn currency of several nations: I'd like a larger safe, I'd like a larger account, I'd like to move up to a vault-load of currencies I can be facile with.

That is my hope, and the above is my condition, so this is my invocation to Athena and Aphrodite together: Do not let my love control me, but help me to glide with it, accept its warm caress, and allow it to (Greek goddesses willing) lead me toward wisdom and ardent engagement in an intercourse whose fruit displays both mind and heart.

(So did I just betray a lesbian love fantasy here or what?)

Sundance Slave & Dancing Outlaw

My friend Erin is working Sundance for the second year in a row. She's keeping a photo-driven, well-written blog of it this year. A gifted raconteur who shares my love of Tom Waits, this Greek lady made a documentary about Graceland Too, the largest collection of Elvis memorabilia anywhere. The guy who runs it reminds me of Jesco White, the Dancing Outlaw. (Oooooh, if you haven't heard of him, have a look-see here, and then do a Google search for more.)

Meet Erin, the Original Broad:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/original_broad/

Subway Graffiti

This is why I got a cell phone with a camera in it.


http://www.geocities.com/sloecat/graffiti/graffiti.html