Picaresque Musings, Punctuated By Sex


I am a wild-haired academic publisher and poet who spends most of my spare time making art or writing or playing music or walking by the sea. I am thoroughly impatient, sometimes arrogant, mostly kind, and occasionally insecure. I worship ACC basketball, glimpses of the divine, and poetry. I don�t sleep nearly enough. I pray for clarity; insight; a local restaurant that serves sweet tea just like my mother�s; the patience required to write a decent sonnet sequence; a lover who gives amazing back rubs; flashes of brilliance that punctuate the mundane; salary enough to reduce my debt, take a decent vacation, help my friends and family when they really need it, and still allow me to sleep nights without worrying too much about money; brilliant friends who thrive on conversation; a lover who understands my need for my own freakin� space; the courage to stand by my convictions even when I can lose a lot by standing by them; and lobster. LINES I LIVE BY: I trust the sanity of my vessel�Frank O�Hara � I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity�Gilda Radner � I live my life today, as I did then, in the hope of finding real transcendence ... though I understand the danger of such hope�Lewis Nordan � In what we cannot say to anyone, in our most secret conflicts, lie curled our inescapable poems�Jane Cooper � Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal truth�Ralph Waldo Emerson � So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; & whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say�Virginia Woolf � There is no object on earth which cannot be looked at from a cosmic point of view�Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky � Probably all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed. There is grandeur in this view of life that ... from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been & are being created�Charles Darwin � Resolve you for more amazement�Shakespeare � There couldn�t be a society of people who didn�t dream. They�d be dead in two weeks�William Burroughs � The proper function of [humans] is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time�Jack London � What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?�Mary Oliver � I am not the kind of man who can not eat gravy�my father � He�s just a man like the rest of us, James, who wants to fuck away the pain and redeem his body�Larry Heinemann � Exit, pursued by a bear�Shakespeare

My favorite diaries:

oed profile - diary
comments: Buzzcut
healinghands profile - diary
comments: Cybrarian
rev-elation profile - diary
comments: 10 out of 10 lesbians prefer....
refusal profile - diary
comments: "I'm really disappointed that www.hedgehogs.gov.uk isn't the website of a secret cabal of hedgehogs running a shadow government that rules us via a series of international conspiracies and targeted assassinations."
lv2write00 profile - diary
comments: hmmm
laylagoddess profile - diary
comments: interesting
connie-cobb profile - diary
comments: Somebody, anybody�I need a job. I fear that through some sort of grammatical karma, I will not get a job until I stop using the hyphen all the time.
hissandtell profile - diary
comments: What the world needs is more geniuses with humility and stupendous bosoms; there are so few of us left. OH PLEASE COME BACK HISSANDTELL!
lizzyfer profile - diary
comments: Because she sees every shade of color in her landscape and can articulate its beauty.
head-unbowed profile - diary
comments: familiar....
ornerypest profile - diary
comments: pissing off the Christofascists....

My favorite music:

BIG PICTURE
comments: Dolly � Julian Bream � ani � Lucinda � Gillian � Schubert � Magnetic Fields � Fatha Hines � country songs so bad they're good, such as George Jones' little yellow sticky notes stuck up ever'where
Rutter's Requiem
comments: If I die before my mother and the universe is just, then instead of a Southern Baptist funeral, she will simply play this requiem.
Ferron
comments: My best pal and I play Ferron on our guitars, esp. the early stuff�what MTV would call "Ferron, Unplugged." I gain new insights from her lyrics every time I sing them and am still hopeful enough to believe that the artists will be there.
Bobby McFerrin's "Sweet in the Morning"
comments: McFerrin wrote this piece to accompany a slideshow about African-American girls with AIDS and sings all the parts. Like Van Gogh's Blue Irises, this song never fails to stop me in my tracks.
I'll Fly Away
comments: Fell in love with it when I heard my grandmother play it. If I'm ever lost, all I have to do is close my eyes and remember her sitting at the piano, singing this song.

My favorite movies:

To Kill A Mockingbird
comments: Impossible to watch too many times. Also ELIZABETH (Beautiful film plus, if the lead actor and Glenn Close had a love child, she would look like my ex Margaret).
Bastard Out of Carolina
comments: Watching it nearly made me hyperventilate but jesuslawd is it good. Anjelica Houston got the violence right but sometimes got the southern wrong. Also BABETTE'S FEAST (And I know in my heart that I would have told her how much I enjoyed that meal).
Housekeeping
comments: It works on so many levels, but I return to it because I grew up with a suicidal mother too and relate to narrator/her rlsp with her sister. Aunt Christine Lahti's young dimples are also a sight to behold.
High Tide
comments: My dearest, dearest fishfeet, what a wonderfully quirky Elvis-impersonating film you have made.
THE SHIPPING NEWS
comments: beautiful book, beautiful film, beautiful story, beautiful cinematography. Beautiful.

My favorite authors:

Marilyn Hacker & Debra Bruce
comments: Fantasy: they fall in love, are conflicted, send poems to me, buy last-minute tickets to Paris, kiss so passionately they bleed, and I go too�and sit in word heaven eating their poetry and forgetting to brush my teeth or have dinner.
Jeanette Winterson
comments: Pure poetry...and those nekkid photos are something to behold. Art & Lies is brilliant, my favorite book, and I may well have fallen in love with a red-headed woman because I was reading "Written On The Body" the first time she flirted with me.
Carter Heyward's Our Passion for Justice
comments: Sensible, passionate theology. Also Carole Maso's Aureole is brilliant and sexy, sexy, sexy.
Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony
comments: Because, deep in my soul, I know we're all connected.
Others:
comments: Frank O'Hara � Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Red Dirt) � Muriel Rukeyser (The Life of Poetry) � JM Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians) � Carolyn Forch� (Against Forgetting)

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last updated: 2010-12-30 01:58:07
this user's total entries: 277
user since: 2005-02-28

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