Notes from Summer 07

Despite what this blog seems to indicate, I DID nearly make it all the way through the Burke corpus this summer. My notes were taken by hand (insert gasps of surprise, shock, and/or awe here)! However, the notebook is getting more and more battered by Kit (and, I suspect, Bastet), and I've had it since Gerald's Contemp Rhet class, so it's probably time to do the right thing and just recycle it. First, of course, I'll save my notes here, and on that ephemeral "server" thing at Purdue. Just in case.

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First, some random poetry....

No date, no title. No Idea.

It's my job to rip out the bricks and reveal the ones hidden in comfort behind. This is Virginia, untouched white walls, that I scream at to unloose. They stare when I reappear and I apologize for my absence. Which way, I ask, which way away from the dust? Which way across the too small ocean, where I died by saying, "I live!" too often in Latin?

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The man with slightly toned thighs sitting in front of me has a wishbone shaped scar running up his arm, over the carpal arteries. Like someone tried to peel them out of him. He can no longer retract his vow, but he does not feel quite at home in resenting that.

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(After reading Burke on "Perspective by Incongruity" and "Piety")
The gargoyles followed me from high school--that first imitation-marble statue that sat still on my vanity does not have a memorable face. It was not grotesque or strange enough, its eyes too small to be of any real transcendence. She gave it to me (In French now: Elle m'a donne) in praise of skills I did not want (Je ne les ai voules pas) to exploit, not in that oak-ridden town (La ville que m'a tuee), the stately marble and brick sinking slowly into the swamp. I left the gargoyle to watch over my mirror instead: only he could make it mean again, apart from the sea foam tiles swimming in my visions.

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(After seeing Joyce Carole Oates read at Purdue)

It's the kitchen, he realizes sometime after dawn, the kitchen floor he's ended up on this time. It's a fact, he said, a quote, he said, that Betrayal is Damning. The spider plant is hardy--thank god, he thinks, palming the knife from the counter. It wasn't sharp enough anyway, so it lands in the dishwasher, rounded point up.

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Why is it good to leave yourself sop much? TO go so far from your own brain, to be carved out from your own soul? Is it too deep in there, like an old mattress you've sunk your own silhouette in?

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Random phrases in margins to be incorporated (embodied?) at another time
We must agree with a shiver that One did things for dead men.

The uncrowded filth of an ugly God
grounds us to the flowerless fields

The weave we use for fishing of men is perhaps too tight, too scratchy, too barbed.

The East holds in tension
the hand at the forehead
the groin,
right foot raised to toe.

One eye twitching
as he says
"Runs his eye along it"
not in variable foot
my foot squished into a
fat black shoe.

Transfigured by the broken clock
minutes as degrees of persuasion

So, it's another crit class and again
I'm staring down something Victorian,
and decidedly homosexual. Dorian Gray
is poking his sensual head at me,
cooing, "Remember!"