An Evening in the Bronx with Romanian Writers, Poets and Two Americans

On Sunday, Paul Doru Mugur and Adina Dabija invited us over for dinner al fresco. This is their daughter, Ana-Maria, the flower fairy:



Also sharing victuals and libations were Carmen Firan and Adrian Sangeorzan:



Here, Adrian pours wine . . .



. . . and here, poses prettily with Paul:



Here we are in Rembrandt light: David . . .



. . . and Carmen:



And me:

Flarf Is In Bookforum

With thanks to Franklin Bruno, for this.

One Tiny Thing About Michael Jackson

What do I have to add to the Michael Jackson discussions? Nothing, God knows. Well, maybe just one little thing: last Friday evening I was sitting at the kitchen table in the cool half-darkness after finishing the dishes. A beautiful blue light, like the blue of blue glass, was filtering into the kitchen from living room windows which look out onto state game land. (This was at our little “country house” in Pennsylvania, where we’d gone to spend the holiday weekend.) That particular quality of light always brings on the same memory: when I was a kid in the ‘70’s I used to dream of being in a clean, cool blue room, in a house that was — to use a phrase of my dad’s — “way out in the country.” He’d use that phrase when describing the suburbs where his more successful brothers had homes, suburbs that were not really “suburbs” yet, but more like semi-rural areas bordered by prairies. To drive out to visit those relatives was a long haul because my dad didn’t like to drive on expressways: “You gotta have a t’ousand eyes,” he’d say. So, we took local streets, usually Archer Avenue until, after an hour or so, it ceased to be Archer Avenue and became (what looked to me like) a dirt road cutting through forests and farms, like in fairy tales, or in the photos that went with the life stories of famous movie and TV stars who came from humble beginnings. All the way out I’d sit in the back seat behind my dad, staring at the “evening in the country” landscape and listening to a transistor radio pressed to my ear. My sister, who always sat behind our mother, had a radio, too, and it was pressed to her ear because we listened to different stations. She listened to one station, WVON, the soul station, but I switched around constantly from ‘VON to WLS to WCFL.

I was ten when “Never Can Say Goodbye” was a hit by the Jackson 5 in the spring of 1971, and spring was when these long drives out to “the country” would usually begin, bringing with them the promise of summer and longed-for summer vacation. There’s a particular quality of longing — for summer vacation, for friends, for a boyfriend — that one feels at the age of ten. And that song had that particular quality of longing to it: a light 3-note harpsichord riff repeated four times drifts into a sigh, which then floats down into a dreamy, twinkly-sounding cloud of young male harmonizing on a rhythmic “oo-oo.” Then a hypnotic, snake-charming flute brings in the voice of 12-year old Michael Jackson singing the title, and his brothers in the background sighing, “Giiiirl …” “Even though the pain and heartache seem to follow me wherever I go,” sings Michael, “though I try and try to hide my feelings, they always seem to show . . .” I don’t think I ever reflected that this was a 12-year old singing. What he was singing, and how he sang it, rang so true, even to a ten-year old. There was something about that song that matched the deep blue quality of the “country” light – we walked into my aunt and uncle’s house, into their air-conditioned, plush-carpeted living room — in our place, you entered through the rickety, cigarette-stinking kitchen — and all their lights were turned off (ours were always on, and hideously bright) except for the color TV and the lava lamp, which was, of course, blue. And I probably had a crush on Eddie Jozefiak and he was probably ignoring me, and I wanted to be beautiful and wasn’t, and I hated myself and the way I looked and wanted more than anything to be like my cousin, who lived in that clean, cool, blue world. Even more than that, I wanted to be adored, to be a singer on a TV show with a whole studio audience applauding for me, and a big clean, air conditioned house way out in the country to go home to, where maybe I would be interviewed, and fans could come and visit me. That’d show everybody who ever made fun of me, who thought I’d amount to nothing, or thought I was too ugly to love.

And now I do occupy a clean, cool, blue house — at least on the weekends. I know I’m not ugly, but it took a long time to come around to that. But that ugly girl’s still there, feeling sad about something and listening to Michael Jackson. Who was, we now know, feeling sad about something, too.

I Was Columbia College's 2009 Alumna of the Year

Chicago, May 2009

As Alumna of the Year, I got to boss people around. For instance, I demanded that Michelle Passarelli, Director of Alumni Operations, meet me at the airport wearing a mask . . .





I demanded that they put me up at the Four Seasons, in a corner suite with a view of Lake Michigan . . .








I demanded that a selection of masks be provided (Chicago *is* my hometown, after all, and there had been some, uh, "incidents" ...):



Of course, my friends Jessica, Pablo (I heard he won a Pulitzer or something) and David had to travel with me in the limo:







Poor Josh Culley-Foster -- he's the National Director of Alumni Relations for Columbia. I really put him through a lot. Look at him not enjoying himself:





And poor Michelle! Having to keep up with my demands for certain "favors" ...



Here, Debbie Pintonelli, my one friend left in the world, is saying, "Don't you ever shut the hell up?"



Randy Albers, my beloved teacher: "Why did I think this was a good idea?"



Yeah, well, they didn't exactly put the fizz in my Fuzzy Navel, either. Thank the Holy Mother of Monkey Poo that I had these babies. . .



Here's their reaction when I said, "Kiss my MacArthur, bitches":



Here's me giving the president of the school, Warrick Carter, an earful:



This is Laurel Carter, the only nice person I met the whole time I was there:



No, wait ... Marcia Lazar, of the Board of Trustees, was nice, too:



Okay, Dean Eliza Nichols, too ...



But then meeting all those nice people just started getting to be too ... nice. I needed a drink. I demanded Josh take us all out for drinks. If you could see his whole face in this photo, you'd see how pissed off he was. Thank God you can only see half!



Now, don't even get me STARTED about Commencement! Everyone wanted to get their photo taken with me!











I TOLD them I didn't want to put that stupid hat on. It totally ruined my hairdo!



Take a look at this -- Dean Deborah Holdstein is making devil horns behind the photographer! What the hell kinda school is this?



Oh, and check this out: we marched in to "Walk This Way" by Aerosmith:



Aerosmith??? What, they didn't KNOW I have a poem called "Retarded Aerosmith World?"


Retarded Aerosmith World

Where dirt bikes meet hips
there's a smell of wood smoke and pussy
there's a windswept junkyard dog
there's nothing for a long time and then there's sex
where the twelve-point centaur rests:
little blue trailer
far end of the parking lot
behind the Walgreens
where there's starlight through dimity curtains
and someone bent over a bathtub
and three people in another room
smoking on the soul cakes.
Later there's a lily bath
and a new hairdo for a funeral
and a great love torn asunder
but another love renewed.


People ... research????

Oh -- check this out:



They told me, "Go ahead -- invite twenty people." Twenty people? Twenty people is what it takes just to get my eyes open in the morning!

Well, finally, it was all over but the drinkin' (and -- quelle coincidence! -- that's when Margaret Sullivan and Debbie show up!):



Yes, Debbie, there is a Santa Claus . . .



Good freakin' riddance, Chicago. Here's what I think of you:

Vote for Me for Brooklyn Poet Laureate!

The article, from yesterday's Brooklyn Paper: "New Poet Laureate Has Big Muse To Fill"

VOTE HERE

Flarf Is In POETRY (And So Am I)

Flarf is in Poetry, and I’m in flarf, so I’m in Poetry too. Oh, Harriet Monroe. Oh, Ruth Lilly, whose family’s liquid vitamin B — Homicibrin, or some such name — I took as a child for underweightedness. I can still taste it.

In this, the July/August issue, with a summery watermelon smiley on the cover, flarf falls under the same watermelon smiley as Philip Levine, Tony Hoagland and Jane Hirschfield, whose poem (“Perishable, It Said”) ends with the line . . .

inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings.

For comparison, here’s Philip Levine’s poem, “An Extraordinary Morning” . . .

Two young men — you might call them boys —
waiting for the Woodward streetcar to get
them downtown. Yes, they’re tired, they’re also
dirty, and happy. Happy because they’ve
finished a short work week and if they’re not rich
they’re as close to rich as they’ll ever be
in this town. Are they truly brothers?

. . . and here's fellow flarfista Nada Gordon’s “Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas”:

I was sort of doodling Hitler at my friend’s
house and we couldn’t stop watching
unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cards
containing scenes in which the baby angora unicorn
and Hitler stay warm on a cold night.

Here’s a taste of Tony Hoagland’s poem, “At the Galleria Shopping Mall” . . .

And here is my niece Lucinda,

who is nine and a true daughter of Texas,
who has developed the flounce of a pedigreed blonde

and declares that her favorite sport is shopping.


. . . contrasted with Drew Gardner’s interstitial “Why do I hate Flarf so much?”:

She came from the mountains, killing zombies at will. Some people cried, “But that was cool!” and I could only whisper “we should NOT be killing zombies!” . . . Hate and love — if those are the options I just want to hate and love lobsters.

Finally, here's the watermelon smiley cover . . .



. . . and here is flarfisto K. Silem Mohammad's cover:

"Can Flarf Ever Be Taken Seriously?"

By Shell Fischer, in this month's Poets & Writers