here's a gift from Daniil Kharms

reminder #1

don't haunt yourself

When you live in North Carolina, it's not infrequent that zealots of one denomination or another call you to your door to try to dump on your belief system and coerce you into adopting theirs through some wacky argument. These people are, undoubtedly, low motherfuckers, but I've always felt too uncomfortable and polite to not give them the what-for that they really deserve for such an intrusion. But today, reading Daniil Kharms, I found the ideal response and suggest that everyone memorize it in order to have it handy or else print it on a little card that you can keep by the door:

"There exist impolite actions. It is impolite to ask a man to loan you fifty rubles if you saw that he just put two-hundred in his pocket. It's his business whether to give you the money or to decline and the most convenient and pleasant way to decline is to lie that you have none. You've seen that this man has the money and thereby you have stripped him of the opportunity to simply and pleasantly decline. You have stripped him of his right to choose, and that's rotten. It is an impolite and tactless act. And to ask a person 'Do you believe in God?' is also an impolite and tactless act."

catching and drinking and typing

last night iris and i caught a wren and then i fell in love with kate's olivetti:

best sentence i've heard from anyone in a while:

"i tried to know more than i knew."

new epitaph idea (quoting Duchamp)

from Obedience

This is a particular set of vowels and consonants

And this is a particular set of vowels and consonants

Gilgamesh was two-thirds god and one-third man

This countermands this

The Greeks used “logos” to mean both “ratio” and “word”

I can use as many words and letters as I like and I deplete no storehouse or resource

One thing is different from each other

the sades

she is just so beautiful always, really, always this, this

dreamed that i went to a doctor in a warehouse. the warehouse was filthy and abandoned and ceiling holes had dripping water through them but the doctor had set up a shiny white clean examining area in the middle of the open warehouse space. he sat me on the table, on that white butcher paper, and started looking in my mouth. somehow either he was very small, or my mouth was very large, because he could get his upper body entirely in there, head and both shoulders, like an auto mechanic under a car on a lift. i could feel him probing at the roof of my mouth, which hurt, like he was prodding at my palette with a putty knife or something. he was talking the whole time about his family's holiday plans, they were heading north where it gets cold but he was worried about snow and ice and the roads, complaining about having to get out of the car on the highway shoulder to put chains on his tires. then he made some sound of discovery and reached up, i could somehow see him inside my hot humid mouth cavity reaching up, to peel back a layer of plasticky skin like a sheet of packaging tape from across the entire roof of my mouth. the red flesh underneath sagged like a water balloon. with a gloved hand he reached up into the flesh and started pulling stuff out. chunks of rusty bent metal and junk and splintered scrap wood. he pulled out the end of an extension cord that you plug into things but he couldn't use it because he needed a 3-to-2 converter. it was the cord that he seemed to have been looking for. then suddenly i was scrubbing up at a sink with nurses attending. i was about to do surgery on the inside of my own mouth to painstakingly reshape it. i was telling the nurses that the challenge behind this surgery was getting the shape right so my voice wouldnt change, i'd have to carve or build the palette and talk a bit to listen to the voice, and then carve or build more until it was just acoustically right, i expected the surgery to take 3 or 4 hours.

that's all.

At the grocery store they were playing Blondie's Heart of Glass and as I came around into the cookie aisle two shoppers were dancing to it there. They were into it. I got a pack of super-discount fudge-covered shortbread cookies for Iris' lunch.

Iris everyday for school has to do a half hour of independent reading. I always make her read aloud to me. But today her teacher forgot to send home the books folder in every student's backpack. We got the French poetry anthology that Paul Auster edited and Iris read Paul Eluard's "Liberty," then Raymond Queneau's "Sines" and "If You Imagine," and then she picked out a page from Anne-Marie Albiach's "Enigma." Then we typed this together:

I had been blogging under the title of the delay, but I needed to change tracks. So that's archived and now I'm working beneath a different title.

I thought of the title of this blog while watching a flight of pigeons this morning. They gather on some telephone wires near where I live. At intervals, something will cause them to alight all at once. It's not always evident what causes this. But then they fly around in a flock, figure8s or elongated ovals, passing back over their roost several times before finally taking up the same post again. Watching a flock of birds fly and wheel together is a deeply satisfying experience. I wonder how I would possibly know whether or not, or how, decisions are being made there.

It's hard to say what, if anything, will be different here. I'll leave comments enabled, is one thing.