Joanie on the Pony

Ace of Swords

Liberatrice

We’ve all been burned, waking with the vision and the need to
Hunt the one who must hear, petition at the gate, battle
Inquisitors, don improper garments, shatter the strategy.
“Sire, this is your sign, take it.” And my hand closes on air.
Pulse race slowing, the sword’s weight palpable still on my palm.
Escape equates to heresy. With heralds and hoofbeats we
Rush into engagement, but the voices that guide us don’t shout.


The ones who hang out drumming and hooping on Sundays will get this one. I've always wanted to do something with some of her trial narratives, maybe sometime. A close initial reading might reveal an unexpected gift. After she jumped out of the tower that time, they told her another escape attempt would mean an automatic conviction of heresy. She replied that wanting to escape was perfectly reasonable.

New Moon Co-Opted by Commodified Ersatz Supernatural Beings

New moon, bright sun, and I'm blue as hell.

My daughter broke down crying in the car the other evening when she heard on the radio news that the oil had reached Florida. I don't know what to tell her.

I'm infuriated when I hear people talk about the seafood or the tourist industries. Yes, but what's happening here is on such a larger level than that that it is inconceivable. Global emergency, worse than bombs, and we're all moving dream-slow, like we're wading through, um, oil. Our lives have changed forever, you know.

Writing is going nowhere and feels like it never will, just a colossal waste of time. But what else will I do with myself? I drew a card and waited for voices last night, but after 12 hours of writing for hire and being treated like the maid, there was nothing left.

I was talking to a woman I like yesterday evening and noticed for the first time the scars on her wrists. Of course I'm too polite to ask. But sad.

Tests said I'm still anemic, which means more and worse tests.

I will go pull weeds and stomp on ants now.

My friend is here for the weekend and my daughter is healthy.

Here's astrologer Jeff Jawer's bite-size bit:
The New Moon in Gemini sows seeds of ideas that can excite the intellect and spark a variety of connections and conversations. Mercury, Gemini's ruling planet, forms supportive sextiles to philosophical Jupiter and inventive Uranus, setting off brainstorms of innovation and originality. The Capricorn Full Moon Eclipse, though, insists that we come down from the clouds of possibility and commit to doing the hard work necessary to make real changes here on planet Earth.

The Secret to Endurance Can Be Yours

How can you run for three hours without an iPod, is what people seem to want to know most. I did a trail half-marathon in a leisurely 3:22 yesterday, walking the last mile and a half because of knee pain (might be IT band again, might not; a few days will tell). I still want to attempt the 50k before I'm 50, which gives me a year and a half. (And at my pace, it might take a year and a half to run it.) But if the IT band is back, I might be stuck with 10-milers forever. There are worse things.

I also saw two copperheads.

So I run through pain sometimes, and there is a lot of pain, there's no getting around it. My great discovery arrived by accident, as they do. I found that through my alternating of three basic thought patterns is associated long, sometimes painful runs with pleasure, sometimes great pleasure. First there's the union with the earth and what it gives: In my polymorphous perversity simply putting my right hand down on one of the Grandfather rocks on Bear Island can make my head spin happily. Then there's the association with creative pleasure; writing poems and prose in my head when I run. The third secret--and there must always be three--was recalled to me recently by the wise counsel of a friend who recommended: "Next time you're standing around in line or traffic getting impatient and angry, think about the last orgasm you had."

TMI? Well excuse the fuck out of me. Did you happen to see the sign up top that says "blog"? TMI is intrinsic to the medium.

My ongoing games of "who would you do" on the trail keep me in the moment; when the moment becomes too painful, something similar to my friend's advice gets me out of the time and place that's troubling me. Of course, a man would be the source for that advice and arguably would find it most useful. It's a little more difficult for women. Oh, that's not what I meant. I mean women are more apt to ponder not only the event itself but those precipitating and succeeding it, i.e., "well, that was fun, but I'm still mad at him nonetheless," or, "will that be the last one ever?" or, "why couldn't it have been with this or that person, instead?" or, worst of all, my sisters, and you need to STOP this, "was I too fat/loud/silly/strange/etc." At that point, one needs to cycle back into living in the moment, and touch a rock or something.

Sometimes I also think about landscaping or health care policy.

But never baseball.

Photo: from the NPS website, Bear Island, where the rocks are like none other.

Fan de Psyche

Nine of Pentacles
Pagoda

At the advent of the Third Emperor
My comfort was unmatched:
Even the screech of the pea fowl an
Unbridled proclamation of the security
Of my position. The Second Emperor,
A man of peace, extended
His policy to my person.
Sometimes I smell
The next city burning.

I walk the garden,
Jewel-green beetles hop and
Dragonflies hover beside me.
My path has become uneven, rocky,
Riddled by tiny holes I now understand
Are made by snakes.
The old palaces may burn, and my birds,
And even my books, but in this empire
I will not be very much alone.

I was looking for my Kenneth Rexroth 100 Poems from the Japanese for some kind of epigram to kick that one off with, but all I could find was 100 Poems from the Chinese. So I started casting around online, and still didn't find anything, but check out these poems that fell into my hands:

2 poems by Yosano Akiko (1879-1942):

Another look like his mixed me up again—
you really do play tricks on me,
don’t you, gods of love.

Yesterday felt like a thousand years ago,
at the same time
I feel your hands still on my shoulders.

Poem by Takai Kito (1741-89):

A tumble, fall, crash,
then silence—
cats in love

And a Rexroth translation of a Geisha song:

When it’s the man I love
he goes by and doesn’t come in
but men I hate —
a hundred times a day.

Carry Wood, Chop Water

Ace of Wands

The Rood and the Road

That thick club
You ease against the earth—
One touch of damp
And it comes alive!
The peasants gasp and scatter,
Spreading rumors of miracles.

And our eyes meet again,
Like every time, in every town
We’ve done this trick.
We work as one. We’re good,
Aren’t we? And then we run,
Fleeing the bishops and burghers.

Contrary to all caution,
The older, the easier.
Between bouts, I’ve wondered,
On long winter travels, why
We keep it up, keep going around,
Keep coming back. For us, now,
The miracle is not in the wood,
Nor in the sprout, and not
In the bread and coins tossed our way,
But in that look, just after,
The dizzying venture into the other’s eyes,
A world ever new.

AWwwwwww writin poetry at work, I'm tellin.

Sparks and Flares

Not to get all Stevie Nicks on you, but a NYT review of the new Robert Hass selected poems throws in the "Randall Jarrell[’s] definition of a poet as someone 'who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.'"

Despite predictions, no lightning struck this weekend; no poetry struck me either, not even a filthy limerick. But I might have opened up a whole new level of reality, which is nothing to sneeze at, especially when your nose is poised over the corner of a credit card on a breezy summer's day. Not that I'd know anything about that.

ATTENTION X-MEN and comics in general fans, a special announcement of a new publication: I once wrote a comic with this guy, about a pharmaceutical factory/prison colony on Mars. Good times. This is what he's up to now--creating a new series of The Futurians.

So, to give thanks this weekend on what appeared to me to be not only the best but the biggest PDF ever, in so many ways, not in any order: the giant popping and unfolding wavy fan thing by Quentin; Sparkle Pony memento mori; Idea Dome for letting us worship the mind and use the LED hoops; Ludo O'Dillo's Pub and Celtic Cinema for providing a bench out front for me to lie down on in an "anemic" crise (some young women passing by asked my friends watching over me: "Is she real?" and crept forward to investigate; I mumbled something about a performance art piece evoking my Irish heritage, but no one ever hears me); the woman in the white bikini under the black light; Dan Van for the birthday cake; the black snake I almost stepped on while out running Saturday morning; the DC Burner Choir for giving me a chance to play; Elvis for the water; and all the people who grow things and understand the ley of the land.

Photo: Luna moth, pre-flame, University of Maryland.

I Like to Drink It with a Little Salt and Lime

Got a shit ton of pay work tonight but my husband wouldn't let me use the laptop unless I wrote something for myself first. He is not my patron, nor does he patronize.

For My Patron

I could create cathedrals
From my breath, my fingers spires,
Ribs a nave before the altar heart.
My patron trusts stone.

I would use clay, scrabble
And mound the firm earth,
Shape it under a layer
Of slip, supple as flesh.
My patron has no faith
In this substance; he specifies
Block stacked on block.

I tried to respond to some of the interesting comments folks have been leaving, but blogger did some weird error thing with the comments recently. Perhaps it will calm down. I do really like to hear the comments. I also need to write about 20 different things, but the bell just rang--back to the pay work!

When Doing It Wrong Is Right

Writing poetry is such a weirdass thing to do. And reading it to other people even more so. I'm always like WTF? Then I go to something like the Cliff Lynn/Rocky Jones production last night [would give a link but it's pretty much wholly facebooked] and I get it. It's everything ELSE other than creative pursuits (and playing and hanging out and food and love and, OK, healing too) that is a weirdass waste of time. Why do we do anything else?

I think it has something to do with coming to poetry pretty late in the game. I wrote a couple poems in college, but was known as a fiction writer/journalist. Then in 1995, I was home from work for a week taking painkillers and it reminded me of some feelings and I wrote a poem. Then there was a day in July or August, 2006 I think, and I was running on the C&O towpath and a poem came into my mind. It gave me something to think about while running, because I don't wear an iPod. Then that just kept happening. My poems are old-fashioned and I'm probably doing it wrong.

I'm so creepy and dull about poetry, I have no training or academic background, don't know what I'm talking about, as worth listening to as a right-winger saying "I know what I like!" I'm also slavishly, sometimes ickily devoted and promotional to people who run readings and do presses and such, because it can be so fucking hard and I want to just be a Big Fan and say how wonderful they are.

Having said all that, sometimes I'm on target in spite of myself, and I bought a book by Le Hinton last night, and if you don't do it too, you're doing it wrong.

They also let me read a poem in time for me to get back to DC and get the fishnets on in time for the fundraiser. And to dance to some DJs who were also doing it wrong in the best way possible.

Here's the poem, which happened because I was at the beauty shop yesterday and saw a sign that said "your hair can save the earth." They're filling oil booms with hair. And I was reading this at the same time; Oniony but sharp enough to have fooled several major news outlets, and therefore me, until I could get to where I could check it out.

Beauty Shop

Is it a myth that hair and nails
Grow on in the grave? These vain snips,
Dyed buttercup and crimson, may
The multitudinous seas incarnadine.
The engineers are looking for
A way to stop the bleeding. Been there.
Their defenses booms and concrete,
Like fighting fire with counter burns.
The seas, like us, contain multitudes,
We suck up the oil,
The fish suck up the oil,
The soil sucks up the oil,
And so it is that I suck
Up a blot of old Dick Cheney.
When I die, I'd prefer to be burned.

Ant Essence

The Singing Acupuncturist gave me a great gift last night, a whole bottle of Ant Essence. Chinese herb blend--real ants in it.

She asked me to think about what I desire, and I could barely muster up a puff of laughter. I get a glimpse of myself in the mirror and think: "You? Desire? Ludicrous." But that last word is too melodramatic. Let's substitute "inappropriate." Bureaucratic language is what's required to dry me up entirely. Cough and the dust scatters.

I lie awake in bed feeling every joint and tendon adjust in tiny increments to each position I try, like I'm in a 3 a.m. yoga class. This will mean I'll be falling asleep over my computer at work tomorrow. Pay work is like some horrible abusive relative who's had a stroke and now I have to take care of and feed and change if I want a place to live. The minute I have a thought of my own she's up there screaming like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford combined.

The 3 a.m. parade begins: I have said and done and even worn all the wrong things, I have not done anything I'm supposed to do, there is such a pile of things I must do that even if it were not absurd to have desires I would never be allowed to pursue them, I have nothing to give and no one wants it anyway, no one has anything to give me and I wouldn't be able to accept it anyway. "You're supposed to be counting your blessings and thinking about how lucky you are," hisses Joan Crawford, hanger in hand.

The Singing Acupuncturist calls this "self-lacerating." This is Saturn conjunct Sun, with a particularly tricky Mercury retrograde for icing. As usual, my daughter is the one exception. We have been laughing for days over a comic called Johnny Boo that she got at free comic book day. It's a comic about being bored.

I'm able to think of one desire I might be allowed and might fulfill: To go into the woods. Though I might encounter a Beltway's volume of WASP Labrador-walkers and Latino commuters and half the Sidwell Friends cross-country team, every trail in the woods feels mysterious and alluring to me. I am eating ants and stepping on ants and hoping to conjure up ant power.

Photo: The air conditioning went out in our apartment and the guys are here fixing it and here I am with a big old picture of Adam Ant in shiny party pants up on my screen. That freon will make you see some funny things.

Psychic Haul Video

Open the bags and show you what I got this weekend with my daughter in NY:
1. Little red notebook from Kiosk.
2. Physical contact with Hart Crane's bridge, which Davetree turned me on to so long ago. Long ago for me, not for him of course.
3. Physical reassurance that a friend is doing OK--just OK, but OK--when I ran into her by chance outside Carnegie Hall.
4. Great concert by the Whitman kids. Not-so-great Mary Poppins. Almost did a bait-and-switch on my daughter in the tkts window and told her they only had tix left for Fela!, but she's too smart to fall for that shit nowadays.
5. Cupcakes with Hot Friend E.
6. More $5 fake pashminas.
7. A poem about the Marina Abramovic exhibit. Let me inflict the former upon you now.

The Butterfly on the Bicycle Seat

Show them what you're made of, girl!
Show them all--what's underneath,
What's inside--they'll always pay for that.
Show them the pile of bloody bones,
The rotting doll--at seven you knew
The meat on your own bones,
That day on the beach, you saw
The end of the piece, every bit cleanly bleached.
And the encircled figure sketched
In dried-blood-color lines,
Its reach not the ideal of man's capacity
But evidence of the master scientist
Performing experiments in endurance.
You know, the one with the pin.
Seven years later, with your own blood,
You wrote: "I began to paint my dreams."

It's a little from things in the exhibit, but the part about the DaVinci is imaginary. I don't much like Salvador Dali, but I'm really fascinated with his bizarre vision of Millet's The Angelus, and it got me thinking of a different perspective on a famous image. It's probably still too awkward for now. Can we blame it on the notebook?

Photo: The artist from the artist, used without permission. If I'd picked up a Mary Poppins image I'd be in jail for sure. I'm racked with guilt as it is. If you look here tomorrow and there's no picture, it's cause guilt won.

The Rest of Us

Five of Pentacles

Showing Respect

Mourning has a hierarchy
No less than any social construct
And it's just; don't upset them
When they've had enough.
It's often to the same preacher
Who proclaims: This is the time
For you to remember and to share
That falls the delicate duty
Of pulling the prodigal aside,
And in the shelter of a brotherly arm,
Whispering: Don't make this about you, now.
I've seen a few whose doors
In life were thrown open,
In death, rest behind a velvet rope.

The circle of kin can be forgiven
A preference for hired mourners--
Who know the dress, the decorum,
The proper pitch for the wails--
To the peculiar, the peripheral,
The ones they never could understand
Why they always kept showing up.

Special Offer Extended--Tell Me to Fuck Off Thru April 14!

The new deadline for finishing my book manuscript is April 14. New moon. So many stupid work interruptions. I'm furious frustrated over not being able to write what I please. I want to write about a very good writer who died but it just doesn't seem right even if I could. I want to write about Massey Energy but that could take years. And I really want to write about Erykah Badu, but the perspicacious Wanda Sykes has pretty much said it all.



PS: Perspicacious is a good thing to call someone. Someone called me it in a letter to the editor once. It was then I discovered that it doesn't mean sweaty.

Hazy, Ask Again Later

I found a playing card, 7 of spades, near the railroad bridge when I was running, so I'm obliged to write about the 7 of swords. Can't ignore a cosmic demand, even if the offering is so rusty it creaks.

Seven of Swords
The Reader at the Fair

The reader may not want
To discourage or dismay;
She may want you back.
She may want you
To tell all your friends,
Share your wonder, even with a few.

So we know strategies,
Cloaks against the gusts.
Ensuring continued patronage
Means creating diversion:
It may be out of balance,
But it's not a lie.

How else to answer the questions,
Does he love, and Will I live,
And the one they're all pealing out
Nowadays, What must I do
To say, to show, to be
My true spirit, my art, my self?
They falter, and tell me
All the ways it's impossible
To reach what they desire.

The card says this:
The wind comes in from the left coast,
The one traditionally given dominion
Over illusion and intuition. This is
Your path, though not always taken
In such elegant boots. Flags signify
A freshening trend.

Two points of upright, practical counsel
Ought to be enough: Get some
Fresh air and exercise.
Do you want to know more?
Of course you do. Take these five points too:

We are all hustlers and barkers.
Not one of us is worth the earth we plod over.
So, if the spirit moves you, dance.
If the spirit moves you, steal.
Steal with joy.

Shout out to one of my favorite poems, by Robert Bly. Image from the superlative serennu website, for all your seriously ephemeral needs.

Man-Size

She looked like a greyhound with a litter of Labradors up there. All the handsome men from her film leapt and waved and hooted, and she stood off to the side, accepting some hugs, in it but not of it.

I loved Near Dark and I don't know that I've seen a better vampire movie since. Insomnia had me up and watching Point Break at 3 a.m. the other night. It's an anti-distaff version of Showgirls, really, that bad, but in the middle of it all there's a ridiculous, overlong bravura chase scene on foot that still leaves me shaking my head. And her usual male ensemble--all charming whenever they're in motion. They parkour, they surf, they even fly, because they can. Even Keanu is less like a robot for a change.

I don't get out to too many current movies anymore, but I'd say Hurt Locker was the best I saw last year, that and Anvil. She had the writing (which killed Point Break, which was supposed to be that holy grail of productions, Tapping the Source) on her side for once. The rhythm was astonishing. Whenever someone started losing their cool, it would build, and then you're watching the El Greco St. Jerome military shrink go kapow or something. The image from the film that was used in the promotion, of the circle of IEDs and wires, is more than documentary; it's iconographically chilling somehow, it reminds you of something ancient and horrifying, the dust and the wires and the shapes in a circle emerging from the earth.

Anyhow, the Oscar award to Kathryn Bigelow was accompanied by scattered commentary that she only won because it was a "male" genre, and that a true feminist triumph would only be realized if a woman won for doing a "womanly" genre (romantic comedy. That's ours. Tell it to Wilder and Cukor. We don't get horror, action, war, western, disaster, or even Biblical epics! It's so not fair!).

So Bigelow is not a "real" woman; Johnny Weir is not a "real" man; President Obama is not "really" black, on and on. After a bit of this, I have to wonder why it seems to be so much easier to question the person than it is to question the rules of admission to the club.

Back to my cave to try to finish this thing. No, not that thing, that other thing. And that thing too. Plus I have to go let clients insult me and tell me what an awful, awful writer I am. I have been insufficiently demoralized, and I've got some catching up to do.

Photo: Near Dark. Headline: PJ Harvey, Kleenex.

Catch My Drift

My own peregrinations confined to shuffling between snow canyons splotched ochre by abstract expressionist canines, I'm living vicariously through the DC public library. Because I'm oh oh oh so busy, I've had to renew Will Self's Psycho Too to try to finish it, and then there's the giant brick of the new Patricia Highsmith bio, which is so exhaustively written and oddly structured it takes an act of will to penetrate a page. Doesn't matter; I have to know.

But Self is like listening to my self as I would be if I had a decent education and more talent. Running is my derive, not walking, and I'm deprived of my derive in recent days. So get you a copy of this book, with its fine fine Steadman illustrations, and journey if you will with Mr. Self from JG Ballard's Shepperton digs to Dubai, ending in Ibiza among a party "too old to rave, except against the dying of the light."

Back to work. I'm attempting to work to the music of a French internet radio station that specializes in 70s rock. They just played Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue followed by a bit of French movie dialogue, followed by Creedence's Penthouse Pauper, and then Disco Lady. Civilization's contents.

Hobbitstweedle

I'll blow the cobwebs off while the snowmegeddon soup cooks. Been working on a project that demands two hours a night, plus the working for a living, plus home, plus a fun project I'm writing on. I keep having to say no to potentially fun things to do. But even that's not giving me enough time. So after tonight, no poems, no blogging, and horrors, no facebook (except for official Choir business) til April. I couldn't quit cold turkey. I'm just doing what they call in distance running a "taper."

My two library books this week, E. Ethelbert Miller's The 5th Inning and Mick Wall's When Giants Walked the Earth, a biography of Led Zeppelin, have so few things in common, you don't even need a hand to count them on:

1. They both rock.

2. They each can be consumed in small, convenient, bite-size bits.

There the similarities end. Miller's memoir is a carefully structured series of poetic, detailed meditations on age, writing, love, race, and baseball.

Led Zeppelin had a lead singer who started out in a band called Hobbitstweedle.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, and they don't mind if they do.

I can't get through more than two pages at a time of Giants, and it's not only my packed schedule that's to blame. Wall's crazy overwriting, yeah, I know, pot meet kettle, makes every sentence an adventure, let's say that. One minute you're hearing about Jimmy Page stealing every song, arrangement, and riff that's not nailed down, then you're inside Bonham's bass drum (Page wouldn't let him use a double bass because the resulting rhythmic complexity threw him so far off base), and the next minute you're in the Edgewater Inn, figuratively speaking. I actually was there once, on business, writing about people doing a genomics project. It has been restored to become a lovely place, with a huge lobby full of fireplaces and comfy chairs and board games.

Anyway, I took to opening it at random before falling into a coma at night, and here's the kinds of things you open up to on any given page:

"Thirty-four-year-old Johnny Bindon was a nasty piece of work...a London 'face' who counted among his friends the Kray twins and Princess Margaret, and who would serve several prison sentences before being accused in 1979 of murdering another underworld enforcer named John Darke in a club brawl. Both menacingly intimidating and apparently hilariously funny depending on his mood, Bindon's favourite party trick was to balance as many as six half-pint mugs on his erect penis. Bankrupt at the time of being hired by [manager] Grant, the only thing that assuaged his violent temper was the vast amounts of marijuana he smoked. With both Page and Plant now receiving death threats before the tour had even begun, G had decided he needed someone like Bindon along for if and when things got rough. The trouble was, with someone like Bindon, things were likely to get rough sooner rather than later. As Alan Callan would observe, 'He certainly wasn't hired for his dinner conversation.'"

Interesting sentence structure and comma placement aside, how deliciously weird is that? And there are like 450 pages of it, on and on. Of course, as DH says, it would be more remarkable if it were pints. And with all his writing, Wall never answers the really important questions, like how the hell did they come up with Kashmir, and were those half-pints arranged vertically or horizontally?

Maybe I need to read it backwards.

Photo: Miss Pamela Des Barres, formerly of the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company.

Why Jonathan Can't Write a Sex Scene

The best part Katie Roipe's complaint about the wimpy way new (white male straight American) novelists write about sex nowadays was the letters published Sunday. No, the best part was the charticle, definitely the charticle.

I have my quibbles too, though I didn't articulate them in time to make any letters columns or anything. OK, first thing, the reason the woman threw the new Roth in the subway trashcan was I bet less because the sex scene sucked than because Roth does the biggest dumbass move ever: He takes a character who is a lesbian and has her suddenly want to have a threeway with a geriatric MAN. MAN. SHE IS A LESBIAN. SHE WILL NOT WANT TO FUCK A MAN. That is what being a lesbian usually means. Lesbians are not all waiting to fulfill a man's fantasy, as most of us learned in like the 70s? Toss that beat into the garbage can, Zuckerman! Not even The Situation of Jersey Shore fame would commit such a rookie error, you demented old fiend!

Quibble two: Who cares if Dave Eggers or Jonathan Franzen can't write sex scenes? Or don't seem to know how to deal with sexuality at all, have no sense for its pulse through life and art? There are any number of women and gay male writers and men and woman from other countries and cultures who are very good at it. Read you some Mary Gaitskill or Kate Braverman or Kathryn Harrison (one of the funniest and most interesting and most extended I've ever read is in Envy, which I'm otherwise not so crazy about) and that's just the obvious opposition. One could go on all night. Heh-heh.

Quibble three: It's not the feminists' fault that the Wonder Boys can't do sex. It's a culture that wants to keep (mostly white) men in cargo-short diapers and bottles of beer for as long as possible, that celebrates the eternal boy, because they buy more toys and that shit pays off. Of course, should any man decide to kick over the traces and truly pursue his freedom (perhaps by exploring sexuality), that's a no-no. America, Inc. depends on manufacturing a mommy in the background tsk tsking to keep boys in line (for tickets to arena shows), but she ain't me, so stop saying she is. Even our biggest risk-taking artists can fall victim to that system.

Quibble four: I think maybe it's the glimmering of the beginning of white men critiquing their own privilege and position and how that is just barely beginning to shake and reshape just a little bit. So stay with it, guys, and if it means you can't do sex right for a couple of generations, we'll understand. You do a lot of other things really, really well, Mr. Angel David Foster Wallace et al.

Just speaking for myself? You know, I loved Motherless Brooklyn because it was a detective book, y'all! Genre! I'm a simple woman, and I like genre. I've barely made it through any entire books by one of those other Jonathan's or Seth's or whatever dudes with three names because they're not genre, probably. Their books are too hard! Or maybe not, I'm confused. I'm not smart enough for books without sex scenes.

But I have all kinds of patience with all kinds of women's writing. Wonder why? Cause I'm a sexist.

Here's the latest from the library: The Altman oral history, Joni Mitchell bio/critical essay Will You Take Me As I Am?, [books and subjects: flawed and fascinating]; The Beats graphic novel, Dr. Andrew Weil on what needs to change about our medical system, Becoming Jane Eyre, and a couple of Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vines. See? Duh.

This is a chant by Sallie Ann Glassman of New Orleans, to Ogou Balendjo, a lwa variant of Ogoun. He is a sort of battle medic who can heal in environments of staggering destruction and from damage caused by toxins and poisons. He is also a healer of children, and is syncretized with Saint George. He brought me great healing once when I needed it, and I thank him and the Pomba-Giras for that healing and ask for him to go where he's needed. The chant calls on him to go into battle against disease and give us the victory of health.

Pou Ogou Balendjo, Lwa kap geri avek fe. Konbat maladi. Ede nou nan batay kont maladi. Geri nou. Ban nou la sante. Aksepte ofren'n nou. Antre non ke nou, nan bra nou, nan jam'm nou. Antre vin'n danse avek nou.

You Will, Oscar, You Will: Special Death, Drugs, and Marriage Edition

The latest I Wish I'd Said That awards, brought to you by the Kiss My Happy Heiney Foundation: Giving Imaginary Powerball Winnings to Folks Maria Thinks Are Cool.

Of all the great cosmic questions, WTF still strikes me as one of the most pressing, relevant, and ultimately humane. --Christopher Hitchens on the death of the man who survived bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If it's one thing I trust Rush Limbaugh to do, it's doctor shop. -- Commenter Mt. Skullcrush on a TPM item about Dopey's declaration that he was glad he didn't have health insurance, because this let him comparison shop and pay less when he had "heart pains."

Our key phrase back then was, 'I don't turn down nothin' but my collar,' " recalled Steve Charles, a singer with the Clovers, who sometimes appeared on show bills with Mask Man and the Agents. Washington Post's Terence McArdle (whom I once accidentally called McAdoo in print), in an obit for Harmon Bethea, aka Mask Man, a do-wop singer and subject of one of the best written obits I can recall, and there is nothing in the least snarky about that statement. A real life on the page.

One generally doesn’t indulge another person’s emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex. --Ariel Levy's New Yorker review of Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed. I've been feeling guilty about snarking on a lot of women's self-helpy memoiry enlightenmenty shiny happy minty fresh how-tos, because am I devaluing what's important to women, women's work, women's emotional lives? But then I'm all like, sheeeeeee-it, I know and respect women who are doing really complex, multifaceted projects and/or who are just plain funnier, more fun, more daring, more interesting than most I read in the most popular online magazines, which are all starting to sound like they've been written by the same three women in New York or London who are all really really worried about Botox and nannies. At least Gilbert's not all up in that.

MAN does my arm hurt. HELL. It really hurts to write. This is the true proof that nothing will shut me up.

UPDATE: Forgot one: A gentleman wiser than myself did say that on some such days, thou exits, pursued by a bear, and on others, the bear exits, pursued by you. From Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, fantastic fanfic by Alan Bertocci. Really great fucking writing, I mean like the Walter soliloquies? It was sent to me and I'm thinking I'm going to read three lines and oh, ha ha, and then I sat and read the whole thing so fast!

Waiting For You to Justify My Love

Some birthdays in early Capricorn have flashed across the facebook early warning system in recent days, but you're not the only ones who might want to sit up and take notice of the new moon/solar eclipse icumin in. By popular demand (of one kind poet), I will explain: On the 15th, there's a new moon and eclipse at 25 degrees Capricorn. A few hours later, Mercury goes direct--meaning it's not retrograde anymore. An eclipse is like a super new moon; it gives any new, fresh action a boost. Mercury going direct has a similar effect, so if you're in the habit of making resolutions, revisit them on the 16th and you'll be in better rhythm. The traditionally ominous view of eclipses is lessened here both by modern interpretation and by nice aspects to Venus and the Sun. A little while later, Jupiter pops into Pisces, which is a sweet, relaxed place for it to be--it used to rule there and still likes a visit. Around the same time, Saturn and Pluto have been engaged in a slow-grind of a square (Libra-Capricorn) that will stick around, because Saturn's going retrograde. Squares wear at you. The changes won't be easy, but they'll be real, unlike what most people think of astrology.

For all its appeal to me, it's hard for me to do, because I have a sort of hole in my head when it comes to dates, years, birthdays, anniversaries. I know they're important, and I know time matters, but commemorating it or marking it just seems superfluous to me. For some time, I forgot how old I was. Now I just think of myself as 50, to make it easier.

The point here is that the last time there was a new moon and eclipse on this degree was January 15, 1991. When I can connect a date with the movies and music of the time, it helps me pin down what was going down, and what was going down was Madonna. And the Gulf War.

I never got that lyric--"justify"? The last thing I'm going to do in a relationship is ask someone else to supply a rationalization; making excuses is an under-recognized solo pleasure. I think the gang that wrote it just liked the sound of the word, not that there's anything wrong with that. And I can't really watch the video without cracking up laughing, thinking: position ridiculous, expense damnable, but maybe that's just me. There are far more ridiculous positions and expenses, such as the Gulf War.

And there's nothing ridiculous about Charlotte Rampling, above, good golly.

Eclipses come along all the time, but this is a strong one, rated on the astrologers' scale as 5 on a a scale of, um, 1 to 5. The effect of an eclipse is said to last six months. I hope all your resolutions are fine ones, and I wish you the best in achieving them.

As a pagan, I make a few goals on Samhain (Halloween) and then, on Candlemas (Feb. 2, you call it Groundhog Day, we call it maze), I make the traditional three vows: One for myself, one for my community, whatever it is and I still haven't figured that out yet, and one for our world.

Photos: Madonna, of course, and Charlotte Rampling by Helmut Newton, used entirely without permission, but used because Madonna was influenced by The Night Porter in the creation of the video, but I can't bring myself to put the iconic image from the movie up here. It's interesting how those images have been appropriated in the name of women's oppression and women's freedom alike; at this stage of my life, I'm bewildered by and, well, might as well say so, opposed to the application of Holocaust-related imagery of any kind to any other purpose than to continue to speak the truth about that historical event and what it could mean to us today. Unless you're talking about Mel Brooks, who has carte blanche. Perhaps it's any whiff of glamour around the era that repulses me. I think the movie was sincere in trying to get at some truths about the aftermath, but the images then took on a life of their own. I also suspect Madonna didn't quite realize what she was doing and just considered it a sort of Caberet-80s Berlin-edgy sexytime costume, but maybe I'm underestimating her, a dangerous practice! Ow!

I was supposed to have a big editing job coming in tonight, but they haven't finished it yet, but didn't tell me that until it was too late to make any other plans. So I had dinner and a movie at home with my girl. We saw Hairspray, and she danced the whole time.

Top Ten from the Bottom

Started 2000 fevered and ending the decade fainting. In deference to my iron-depleted attention span, the ten words--well, occasionally two-word phrases--that sum up the decade, to me. Not really in priority order, except for Number 1.

10. Roll. As in the heroic-turned-jingoistic "Let's roll" and a thousand other uses. We do not lope, nor do we glide. America will always be on wheels, until it crashes.

9. Bottle service. Big silly demanding babies paying too much for everything, aren't we.

8. Known unknowns. Two words scarier than any Saw marathon could ever be.

7. Derivative. They couldn't even think of an original way to rip our asses off.

6. Abs. Tossup between this and yellow teeth. Doesn't matter which type of marketing, media, social networking or information-type-service you subscribed to--unless your face was buried in a library book, if you want to find anything out, you'll have to face down someone telling you that you must change the color of your teeth or the appearance of your external abdominal area and they, they alone, have The Secret. Everything we bought and sold in the past decade comes down to this: There's something wrong with you that you need to pay to fix.

5. Baby blues. Rush's alleged name for his alleged favorite poison. The various forms of hillbilly heroin edge out meth for me this decade, because I suspect they'll have a longer character arc. Hey, I like vic as much as any other gal, but things are getting a little out of hand for those who can least handle it. I think they'll be killing a lot more people for a long time. Unlike meth, they're killing a lot of people who had no intention of dying, and being prescribed by people who had no intention of killing people. There are other ways of dealing with pain, one of which being not chaining people to computers for hours and hours and making them work more for less money. Code Monkey like Tab.

4. Robust. Well, the second syllable in nearly all cases applies. The whole word, hardly ever.

3. Slider. Encapulates the sad and fruitless, literally, quest for authenticity we're trapped in around here. Evidence of how foodie snobism and every other elitist fancy, from roots music to trucker caps, fetishizes something basically OK in moderation and occasionally spectacular and puts it thru the hipster machine. Little hamburgers started out real and reviled, from the Little Tavern yet, then got super expensive and gussied up, and now the menu at Applebees (which I just researched) actually has an entire category for sliders. Beat out Asiago, chipotle, panko...it's all good, until it's all too much. Plus: It's what happening now!

2. Subprime. And it's where it's at now!

1. Cocksucker. I'll never forgive the gods for not granting me a last season of Deadwood. But it also applies in so many other wonderful ways.

PS: This is not a good time to make New Year's resolutions. Mercury retrograde and between two eclipses. Wait til after Jan. 15--the new moon is like a super new start.

PPS: Oh and please god please don't bring up that "decade REALLY starts in blah blah" shit, you're boring and living in an Idiocracy, what do you expect.