Bats
Friday, May 30, 2008

Wednesday night I couldn't sleep. Imaginary bats crawled across my face with their thumb-tacky little flap-hands and licked the sugar from my cheek as I rolled around in bed and thought, for the first time really, of all the ways the reading could go wrong. The Lydia Davis people will show up and pitchfork me; that thought was the tinkerbell song on loop as I finally fluffed my way into unconsciousness at something like five in the morning. And when I woke up at eight, huff! like that, I was thinking of mean things to say to a woman I know, a woman I would wear on my ear like a conch shell. A woman with the heart of a thirteen year old. Which is black, friend, if you're keeping score. Like onyx. Black black black. This was the funk in which I drank my coffee.

The day did not turn out as full of vipers as that. I had work to do, after all. Got the word from Poetry Fred that Philip Nikoleyev would be filling in for Lydia Davis. Very good. I knocked together a review for Kirkus of a life-affirmingly bad book, so that was American money in my pocket. Watched some Dynasty Handbag performances online, which got me thinking about the June 12th performance. Sent along this video to friends. I dressed well and came to the reading. Met Fred and company for plum wine at Hiro, where I kept calling Philip "Nicholas," to the point where I just started calling him "you," and Ange talked about her lost year in Morocco. At Solas, the house was packed, it was our best turnout yet. I think even the Lydia Davis people enjoyed themselves. Philip was fantastic in spite of my mistreatment of him. Lewis Warsh was like good heavy metal, clean and tough. I had a little bed of triumph to sleep on for eight hours last night, thereby fortifying myself for the third-rank horrors of Friday.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 4:01 PM, ,


I guess before I set down the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility I should wait for the tranquility to set in. Some corrections were made to the posts below. They are now possibly readable.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:26 PM, ,


Walk A Thin Line
Wednesday, May 28, 2008


Everyone in your So Cal let's-talk-about-our-feelings band is breaking up. Not the band itself: the band will never break up. It perpetually exists near the pop charts & across continents, swallowing decades as it churns forward, leaving behind a sticky residue of former and non-hits, along with discarded band members gone paranoid, alcoholic, insane (one day before a show former guitarist Jeremy Spencer says he's going out to "get a magazine." He's found days later among the Children of God, a religious cult). No, the members themselves are divorcing, splitting up, yet they continue to serve. A new chemistry is formed within the shapeless amoeba of the band. Songs are written, recorded--these secure multiplatinum success. Add to the chemistry of the amoeba broken love and massive infusions of cash: as any American success story can tell you, cash can kill almost anything. Not in this case. The thing slithers on, larger than ever. Yet the shape of the amoeba changes. It turns a sort of brackish, lively color and starts to move slowly. As the body rolls eventually its weird underbelly gets exposed. That underbelly is called "Walk A Thin Line." There is no pop to the song, no intro, just Lindsey Buckingham next to a thin, chilly drum track, singing, "I've seen so many things that made me wonder/ but sometimes it's hard to tell/ I said "Take your time"/ but no one was listening..." There's a guitar there: it sounds like it's been recorded in another, colder state. The drums pop and crack like glass ground into pavement. The band has eaten together, slept together, ridden first in buses and then in private jets together: now they sing together in formless harmony, the boys and the girls side by side again in the same cold, ideal space in which the guitars reside. The song whirls around and around but never coalesces. Its brittleness extends into the air and piles on top of itself, like some rare supercoolant tipped over in lab, dissolving the aluminum table legs. The result is that the members of Fleetwood Mac are fixed to the amoeba as it finally crawls to a halt; there is no more alienation, no more fighting, just the supreme layering of production technique. Beautiful.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:01 AM, ,


Try, Try
Sunday, May 25, 2008


Thursday was fun. There was a barbeque over at RK's house, with surprise guest the lovely, years-missing D. (the supremely meditational sound you hear is that of water trickling under the bridge). Talking. More hugs.

Yet Friday in Chicago was cold and entropic when I got the word Lydia Davis wouldn't make it to the reading next Thursday. All my Chicagoans were deeply immersed in pre-Memorial day work obligations, which, if I remember my desk job etiquette, means sitting in front of a computer coming up with things to do with your hands while listening to your co-workers sigh about their plans for the surplus weekend. No one could come out to play. I just sort of waited around for my own vacation to end. Plus fought through a hacking cough I blame on my recent penchant for appetite suppression by way of smoking. The Lydia Davis news didn't hit too hard, since the Warsh/Mlinko ticket is still a pretty fierce one. Yet Fred over at the Poetry Foundation seemed pretty bummed out about it, as did St. Mark's when I called and told them to take down the fliers. I took naps. I walked around Chicago for a while poking into shops, and then went up north to Links Hall (no one joined me), where I got the pleasure of seeing John Beer channel Brando in an adaptation of Frank O'Hara's "Try, Try." By this time I realized the entropy had taken a physical dimension: I was sick. Then the phone calls. Finally my Chicagoans were collecting--Simone had organized a dance party of one sort or another over at Danny's--but I just wanted to crawl in bed, on a plane, away. Nonetheless, JW met me for a nightcap and we talked about Orwell. We decided the difference between him and his student, Hitchens, is that, whereas Orwell found ideology absurd, Hitchens seems to be searching for an ideology absurd enough to suit him. Then to bed alone, last night as tonight, back in New York.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:05 AM, ,


After the reading
Thursday, May 22, 2008

Unfortunately The Rec Room scheduled my reading at the same time as a Danny's Reading. I read something very quick and not my own (it was a themed reading: the subject, animals, so I read Leigh Hunt's The Man, The Fish and the Spirit, which killed). I left early, but not so early that I missed Simone Muench and Philip Jenk's partnered recitation: not so early that I didn't already have major beers behind my belt. Arrived at Danny's too late to catch the end of the Abraham Smith reading, and so went directly to more drinking. Girls passed by I remembered vaguely. I blinked at them with aquarium eyes. Weak, weak. Never mind. Soon I was drunk to a vomity greenness and everything was fine. Wound up at Joel's, where we listened to records standing up and swaying semi-consciously over his turntable like forest gorillas during an earthquake. I tried to explain the joys of Burning Witch entirely through the language of spasms. Joel played Can's Tago Mago for me, and i got the spins. Then we passed out. Another night made weird and nightmarey. No more. My powers are diminished. I do believe I stink. Time to rebuild what odd fortifications are left to me.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 4:33 PM, ,


Whatchacallits, On A Spit
Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Got a call from my father two weeks ago that convinced me he was dying. He had just come from a monthlong stay in the Veteran's clinic in Battle Creek, MI, where he was being diagnosed with a collapsed lung. Not many details, something about his years in the floor-covering business, breathing in asbestos and fortmaldahyde and whatever else carpets were made of back in the 70's and 80's. His voice was deathly weak over the phone. I had a reading upcoming in Chicago and so booked a train to Kalamazoo to have lunch with him--a very rare occassion, as we're estranged. I do remember visiting him at Migala carpets when I was about knee-high, climbing up those mountains of pumpkin and deep green and honey colored carpets and rolling into the valleys of them, getting nauseous and high from the plasticine fumes. "I feel like one of those, whatchacallits, on a spit, one of those indian spirits who float away through the woods," he said.

Seeing him Tuesday, I was surprised to see him healthier than ever: healthier, that is, discounting the burbling generator feeding oxygen through his nose. He had lost weight, kept away as he had been from his numerous vices for a month. He was on some new medication and quite lucid. On top of that he was quicker, more spry. The softness had come away from his face, the redness and wrinkles now indicated a sharpness I hadn't seen before, life experience, long nights of spartan loneliness lived in full awareness. We talked, as we usually do, about New York: the time he spent in the early sixties stationed at Fort Dix, his leaves to the big city to see fine art, jazz, the Aida. He told the story again of the woman he saw painting in the middle of the street who was suddenly struck by a seizure as my uniformed father watched. "People just stepped over her, stepped on her paints. There was paint all over the sidewalk. Ack." He told the story of how he fell asleep on the 6 train and got his watch stolen by some nimble thief he never laid eyes on. We drank a brandy together and, when there was nothing more to talk about, said that we loved each other. I am now exactly half his age, 35 to his 70.

After lunch, we went around to a park bench (his apartment was across the street but he needs very often to sit and catch his breath) and talked briefly of our future plans. Dad plans to build a rig for the motorized L'il Rascal he is obliged to use for any travel of over a block in length. After he's done with it he says it will hold two oxygen tanks instead of just the one. As I walked away I looked back, as one is likely to do to one's possibly dying father, and saw just his legs cradling his oxygen tank from behind a bush. I'll admit the sight was a touch ghostly.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 4:00 PM, ,


Last Night
Friday, May 16, 2008

I spent yesterday making attempts to get an old girlfriend to come into town. We'd talk about old times (I imagine sitting on the couch, leaning into the cushions: remember that time you made us wear personalized Bon Voyage T-Shirts and we got so drunk and happy we ripped them from each other's bodies out on the dance floor at Danny's? etc.) and possibly do wrestling. On my way to the Scharf/Boaz/Downing reading she called to say she couldn't make it. She leaves the country on Sunday, not to return for a good month. Bon Voyage, my little Iron Shiek. Ran into A. on the subway, heading toward a meeting with agents he looked none too ecstatic to attend. Loneliness.

The reading was sparsely populated by people of the best quality. I walked right up to poet Eugene Ostashevsky, mistaking him for poet Aleksandr Skidan ("Aleksandr, good to see you again buddy!" Great ignorant backslapping. Beat. "You're not Aleksandr." Evenly: "No, I'm not.") They're both worthy Russians, to be sure, not to be offended, yet it's possible I was distracted by two potential hostiles (women, yes, one of whom I'd asked out earlier in the week, to moderate ridicule) who came to my reading for a) friendly gossip and b) to see their old friend Greg blossom after so many years in cold storage, publicly and embarrassingly, as he has been threatening to do on a daily basis, possibly bending down on one knee and proposing an open and frankly sexual marriage to the one or the both of them, right there at Solas: which, to hardened gossipers, would be like manna. I love them, hate them, watch them throughout the evening. The reading was fine. Brandon's multimedia take on Tennyson/snakebite prevention/flaming-motorcycle-sport killed.

Then, off to Decibel with my little friends. We drank plum wine for hours and have a night of magical erotic talk. Is this boring? Which size and with whom and what swagger and what technique and what trajectory and where did it land and did it please you? No, I decide, not boring. I wanted to spit the inexpressible: I told them I imagined them imprisoned on the top of a mountain in a bamboo cage with the buzzards surrounding them. I evoked the mule I would ride to the top of the mountain to save them, the bramble whips cutting my face. I want to wear them over my ears like earmuffs. We all became buddies, forged bonds I expect will last a lifetime. Oh lord, it was platonic. Come home with me ladies, I'll tie one to the other, using only your limbs as rope, and climb up to the topmast. No? They assure me sometime soon I'll get my swagger back. Until then, it's hugs, little pats on the back, off they go. Bye, buddy. Bye bye buddy. I take a long walk.

Back home, Gabe showed me his new drawings, the best things he's done since he's come to New York. Here's a guy who looks like John Berryman, pulling a drunk out of a bar, captioned: IT HAPPENED. A man reading a newspaper: IT HAPPENED. A guy who looks like Clement Greenberg, staring at a clock: IT HAPPENED. This is great, I say. I should be doing work of this quality, instead of wallowing in trajectories, topmasts, etc.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:16 PM, ,


“Racing will never change. What matters is whether we allow racing to change us.”
Tuesday, May 13, 2008

I haven't exactly rushed out with my scarf fluttering behind my neck to see the new Wachowski flick. This is not because it dispenses "almost entirely with credible emotion or intelligible narrative," as Elvis Mitchell puts it. That's what I go to a Wachowski brothers flick to see: I've had enough "credible evidence" in this decade to last me through the next three. Besides, I just saw Two-Lane Blacktop, a great movie, about which the same can be said. No, I've passed on their latest because they have so consistently flubbed the themes I feel strongly about. When Chris Claremont sent his characters back and forth on an alternative timeline he gave them specific tasks to accomplish and personal losses to attend. His comic-book creations had a shared responsibility towards destiny, not the autodidact's choice between the red pill and the blue pill. (And again, I'll keep bringing this up: if the machines of the Matrix's future required biomechanical energy to run, why couldn't they just use elephants, or swamp algae, as a power source? Isn't that what our own dystopia implies?) Anyway, this idea that they're going to take a fun romp through a supposed anime classic isn't really blowing my mind. I expect they'll screw that up, too.

However, I do find the reviews pretty obnoxious. They seem to imply that the Wachowski Bros. should earn back their credibility by taking it down a notch, maybe write a wholesome flick about a hedge fund manager finding his purpose in the home country and starting a little wine start-up. Embarassing moments of real feeling. Shot in natural light, maybe. Did you come to see a movie, Elvis, or to shop for real estate?

posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:17 PM, ,


Pelfrey on the mound
Sunday, May 11, 2008

I finally bought tickets to see the Mets play, my first game of the season. I had wanted to see them on my birthday, and thus recreate last year's perfect combination of baseball, euchre, cool daylight and moral clarity. But the Mets were on the road, so I put it off for the following Friday. Jay reluctantly went along with the idea. I bought my tickets online well in advance, payed the extortionate fees to process them and print them at home, accepted the mild disappointment of seeing that Pelfry would be on the mound.

Yet the tickets had to be for May 9th, 2008: the day the skies urinated with catheter-like regularity. It was wet and grey all day. We sat high in the mezzanine. Our hot dogs were like doom dogs, our beers did not fizzle, and we looked out over the long tarpaulin on the grass and waited for them to call the game, which they did, around 8:30.

I find consolation in one thing: riding in the front car of the 7 Train on the way there, looking out at the track, listening to the first half of Maurizio Kagel's Acustica from beginning to end, slicing though the rain and believing that within the half-hour it would puff away into a thin line of steam.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:10 AM, ,


Suddenly
Friday, May 09, 2008

Spring has put her spores into me. Suddenly, it's women; women everywhere; co-workers, customers, out on the street, hanging out of windows with their white lily-pad arms exposed. Light fabrics, rippling, dresses, and I see they're looking around; kind of astonished, blinking in all the gaudy daylight savings; they're horny, too! What convergence! And here's one now, in a sort of silky blue dress, swelling beautifully in places, draping in others, honeyish tangerine hair, and what is she reading? The latest Richard Kern. Eew, yes, but it turns me on! She's young, too young. Too young? Maybe. At 35, am I in her demographic? Does it matter? But she puts the book back, traces an unadorned finger along the stack, a real sensualist, this sweller, this draper of ghostly maritime fabrics. She's going away. So much for demographics. Fortune favors the bold, son, etc etc... But wait! She's turning around, she's coming toward me. Get it together, pal; guten tag, madame, willkomen, bonjour, bonsoir. Hi! She'd like to know, could I recommend a good book along the lines of Tom Robbins? Oh be-puke my heart. Tom Robbins? Really? Yet she smiles at me, this one, and who among us is perfect? I recommend the universally applicable Portis without trying to make a big parade out of it. But wait, let me show you. Perhaps I'll usher you towards the "P's" and gently guide you with my hand at the small of your back. Silence! No touching. Just...here...let me just work my way out of seat and...grunt, puff!

Oh fuck, what is this, this stiffness? Huff. And in the front of me, what roundness! Boof! And the elephantine wrestler's stance crowding all my limbs? The bigness everywhere? It's...I do believe I'm fat! Oh, gigantism in springtime! Utterly thwarted! Muffled! Pinned by fat! What can I do but waddle this beauty over to the "p's," puffing, paunchy, unproud. Here is your Portis, lady. But she wants more. Again with the smile, very sweet, sort of pansy-rural. She wants to know, what in my opinion is best of all books? The answer to that might be Don Quixote, madame, but the true answer is immaterial. I cannot give you the hardcore springtime loving you deserve. It would be like playing billiards with one massive ball. Yet I try, such is the indominability of the human soul when faced with years of chocolate and meats, skies full of lonely eating. I think I say Don Quixote. She says she'll definitely be back. And what does she buy? Mircea Cartarescu's sexy Nostalgia. Oh skulls! Death! Sex! My sweet, I would wrap you in velveteen folds like fresh ice cream, if only my arms were not balloonish meatloafs! That will be sixteen dollars and thirty six cents. No we do not offer a student discount. Bye bye, now. Bye Bye.

I have been doing pushups and situps ever since. Little springtime fragrances come through the window, irritating me. I go running.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 5:19 PM, ,