HI

It's The Last Day Of My Twenties

2008-06-26T00:54:00.002+08:00

What should I be doing?

I SEE BENJAMINS AND A BILLION OTHER BIG HAIRED PEOPLE

2008-06-17T01:02:00.001+08:00

Young Brandon, OH ON MY MIND

2008-06-13T00:19:00.001+08:00

I Cant Feel My Face - LiL Wayne Ft Julelz Santana

A FOUND POEM

2008-06-05T04:48:00.001+08:00

SUPREMACY

I carry a bag of guts into the space of appearance
where I do things and say them
and the city leaders promise that the city will preserve them
my shoes in puddles of spermy puke
leave footprints as I plod, leave sperm and puke trails
down the subway stairs and into the subway.
Jason Bourne stays up all night writing down his memories.
He works for no agency, and yet is full of it,
strength with no power that goes and dissembles power,
the force of agency. The things I say and do
in the city are true love, and all I ask is for my lovers to acknowledge them
in the space of appearance, with their (her)
bodies (body) and hands (hands). The world is lovable.
My demands? Impossible. Today the bag of guts
is part pain, part profit. P, I'll repeat it
to show you where the pot at.
Red and green G's.
Red and green G's all on my hat.

2008-05-29T00:26:00.000+08:00

I’ve been thinking about Catullus a lot recently, and in particular Ryan Gallagher’s fairly recent The Complete Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus. What might not be apparent at first apprehension of this book is that the publisher, Bootstrap Productions, seems to be partly Gallagher’s press—and while I don’t know Gallagher personally, I am convinced that this project is an intense labor of love. So while I have many criticisms of it, I want to respect that love, that labor, and say first of all what I love about The Complete Poems.

That is, essentially, that I love that it is a book. The translations of the poems take up, as you might imagine, about 160 pages of the book. After the translations, Gallagher devotes about 50 more to a selection of essays on various tropes in the Catulluan oeuvre, and then Eleven Ways Of Looking At Catullus, a Weinbergian catalog, non-exhaustive, of various extant translations that Gallagher consulted, and criticisms of each. Gallagher’s eleven mostly consist of 20^th and some 21^st century translations. This section of the book is followed by the complete poems, in sequence, in Latin.

I love that The Complete Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus reimagines, that is, the very notion of what “The Complete Poems” means, as if such appendices were part of the sign “Complete Poems.”

Gallagher’s debt to Zukofsky is unconcealed and in fact iterated and reiterated, even in various forms. The epigraph to the book is Zukofskys’, examples of their Catullus are given in the various essays, and their book is one of the eleven that is lauded. That said, this is perhaps precisely where my great dissatisfaction with this project lies, that the translator professes admiration for a project in translation that reimagines the possibilities of translation in a more profound way than, to my mind, any other work of translation in English (moreover, actualizes what it imagines), and yet separates this aesthetic attraction from the practice of making “translations.”

Not that Gallagher’s alone in this—this is de rigueur for translators. And it is always the cause of more intense discomfort for me to encounter this retreat to the conventional when these works are made by poets, much less poets with a declaimed interest in Zukofskys’ innovation.

And so this is also a train of thought that goes well beyond Gallagher’s project, which at the end of the day is eminently likeable, and obviously all of this goes well beyond Catullus, who was turned into a sign at the moment of his departure from this world, as is any author. This goes beyond even the sign Catullus, which has its own problems.

For me, and I know I’ve bored you to tears with it already, Zukofskys’ Gaius Valerius Catullus is a watershed moment in the history of translations. Perhaps, Holderlin’s translations of the classics into German hold an analogous place for German literature. Let’s say you agree with me on this. The source of my wonder is simply this: why have innovations in poetics tended toward being interpretable, applicable, etc. Why are they developed, problematized, criticized, reimagined, reused, etc. to the extent that methods and tropes and innovations are iterated and reiterated to their detriment as viable or at least exciting strategies; why is all that true, and Zukofskys’ 1969 book Gaius Valerius Catullus still essentially the weirdest translation ever?

The majority of my work over the last five years has been centered on this problem. Given that, I acknowledge that I am still not able to express it most clearly, sorry ya’ll.

To bring it back to the sign “Catullus,” is Zukofskys’ translation the last word? And just to clarify, this is not strictly speaking lauding their method as failsafe. I like Men In Aida as much as anyone or anything, but as far as I’m concerned homophonic translation can stay in the 80’s.

This is a vitriolic blog post. Weird. Sorry. I’m going to Kansas City tomorrow, otherwise I would blog for you about R. Kelly and puppies.

2008-05-20T23:17:00.002+08:00

Jon Lester threw a no-hitter against my Royals last night.

I think it was the first no-hitter that I watched pretty much from the first pitch to the last, and I had weird feelings about it as it happened. I mean, the Royals were getting their ass handed to them, 7-0, but in the seventh and eighth I was cheering for them to break it up. In the ninth, though, I started to cheer for Lester, almost instinctively. And when it was over, I sobbed like a baby. And took a picture of myself.

What's the deal with the no-hitter? I thought that at some point the no-hitter took over the pitcher. Pitchers are, you know, supposed to give up hits.

AN APPROPRIATION POEM FOR ROBERT FITTERMAN

2008-05-20T02:43:00.001+08:00

Do You Taste Breakfast?

Great, the robots think we taste like crispy breakfast treats.

There are days when I’ve overslept and have to skip breakfast

We happen to be out of all those things, so I’m snacking on

hummus. Mostly I have toast. Breakfast just isn’t my time of day.

Breakfast is the only time that me, the husband, and the spud

can all reliably eat together. This requires a tank of coffee.

I’m easily bored, so I rotate my breakfasts but on the weekends

anything goes. Goodness, I feel like such a breakfast slacker!

I’m not a morning person, at all. A scrambled egg is good, too,

add to the mix. However, when I was 20 lbs. heavier, it was a hot fudge

sundae and French fries—no joke. The easiest hot breakfast

ever is grape nuts. I figure you get 300 calories, if you eat

dessert for breakfast it saves you the calories later on, right?

We usually have leftovers for breakfast. I’m not typically hungry

for breakfast. yay! someone else who does cheddar cheese

with her oatmeal. Mmm mmm mm! I like breakfast!

2008-05-10T00:37:00.002+08:00

I just want to say good luck to Kells. They're selecting a jury for his trial and, you know, as a citizen I find his crimes reprehensible, but as a fan I wish him the best.

Maybe it's being a poet that helps out. I mean, as soon as you get some training in the Great Modernists, you already have to start with the apologies. "I mean, sure he was a ravenous anti-Semite but..."

I say, if he's guilty, and that's IF, he should do time. But he should do time with an 8 track and a microphone.

Discuss.

2008-05-03T02:37:00.003+08:00

All morning long two songs have been competing for being in my head more: Mariah Carey's Touch My Body and the fucking goddamn Eagles fucking goddamn Desperado.

I don't like the Carey song that much, although I like ANY song that has the lyric "I will hunt you down" on principle, a little bit. and I fucking HATE that fucking Eagles song, OH MY GOD. SMH.

So to distract myself, I'm summoning the spirit of White Male Poet to ask a properly WMP question: which is the greater piece of art, "Sunday Morning" by the Velvet Underground or "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens? Discuss.

2008-04-30T00:13:00.002+08:00

Anybody else see this piece of shit movie Rendition (2007, dir. Gavin Hood)? I mean, it’s not like I had astronomical expectations for it as a film, but I was at least hoping for something in the vein of The Road to 9/11 or United 93. But alas. I guess that it is in keeping with the arc of extraordinary rendition that not one single character in the film has, uh, a character. Corinne Whitman (Meryl Streep) is the cold CIA chief who phones in the authority to render Anwar al-Abrihimi (Omar Metwally), so he is rendered and tortured by Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor), a brooding thug of unidentified nationality (in fact, this half of Rendition, replete with suicide bombings and secret prisons, takes place in simply “North Africa”.), which torture is observed by CIA agent Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal). Freeman watches the torture and then goes home and gets drunk, and is so upset by what he sees that he ~~does something to immediately stop it~~ can’t even fuck his brooding CIA colleague of unidentified (but Arab) nationality. Sometimes Freeman gets drunk at a sort of lounge with belly dancers (?). Meanwhile Isabella Fields Al-Abrihimi, Anwar’s totally white wife (Reese Witherspoon), hangs out in a senator’s office with her totally white pregnant stomach and cries out for justice.

I’ve already given too much space to this “film.” If you want a heartwarming look at how conservative and moderate America narratize the condition of “terrorism” and the American “response”, watch The Road to 9/11. If you want a film that portrays torture as a human act with emotional and physical consequences that go beyond Jake Gyllenhaal getting drunk, try Death and the Maiden. If you want to just have a good time, by all means check out Trapped In The Closet.

FOUND POEM

2008-04-24T04:31:00.001+08:00

Sorry I talked about carpets and Persia

for so long—like you care about

Xenophon’s choice of words

for sauce. It’s embamma by the way,

and it’s sort of a dip of hyssop in

vinegar. It’s also used in non-food

contexts, like lotion. I wonder would it

be delicious to contemporary palates? I bet

next I start talking about fish sauce, god!

FOUND POEM

2008-04-24T04:30:00.002+08:00

THE HISTORY OF POEMS

There are two kinds of poems:

poems about farming

and poems about carpets and the east.

I write poems about carpets and the east.

2008-04-23T05:07:00.002+08:00

Weekend Highlights / Lowlights

Highlights

The younger Brown and his girlfriend Lana were in town, so there was much of hedonistic eating and drinking, including but not limited to cocktails at Alembic, cold Miller’s gin, cocktails at Nopa, dinner at Nopa (intra-highlight-highlight, the amazing roast chicken, seared duck breast, sopapillas, cardamom rice pudding, fava beans at Nopa), pork knuckle at the Ferry Building, and In n’Out.

Many hands of Hold ‘em that I won.

Eileen Myles and Michael Nicoloff at The New Reading Series at 21 Grand. Nicoloff read from Punks 2: Repeat Offender, a wedding poem, and his Taxt chapbook Punks. Comments were made to the effect that Nicoloff threw down. Eileen Myles is Eileen Myles, heard? She read from Inferno, A Poet’s Novel. It was amazing and hilarious and sad and everything you want and expect from Eileen Myles.

Drinks after the reading.

Going to see the Royals play in Oakland.

Lowlights

Going to see the Royals play in Oakland. The Royals. What happened? They looked like the 2005 Royals. It wasn’t pretty. (Intra-lowlight highlight, they released Hideo Nomo after the game. Phew.)

Monday morning.

2008-04-18T05:52:00.001+08:00

Both Kant and Montaigne, in their works on friendship, refer to words written in ancient Greece, which translate as “O friends, there is no friend”. Montaigne refers to this quote as one which “Aristotle remarks several times,” while Kant attributes it to Socrates. Ya’ll are more likely to have encountered the quote in Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, a book which, despite being the catalyst for all this reading about friendship I’ve been doing, I once again have to admit that I’ve failed to read.

I haven’t yet tried to locate the quote in Aristotle, and am pretty certain that it does not appear in the corpus of Platonic texts, which would be Kant’s mistake. I welcome correction to this claim! But I am more interested in the different way in which Montaigne and Kant appropriate this quote to serve their own pictures of friendship.

A good deal of Montaigne’s essay On Friendship is devoted to proving that there can only be one friend. All of the classical sources on friendship inevitably repeat certain tropes about friendship, and its “rarity” is one of them (frequently paired with the “amount of time” it takes to make a friend, “bushels of salt” metaphors, etc.) But no classical author, as I mentioned below here, went as far as Montaigne in asserting that there could only be one friend. The citation from Aristotle then, to repeat myself, for Montaigne, means that the term “friend” cannot be pluralized.

Kant has a different use. For Kant, friendship is not derived from experience but from the understanding. Therefore, Friendship is an “Idea”. As no real-life friendship will properly correspond to the “Idea” (for an “Idea” as Kant describes it is “a standard employed as a measure of lesser quantities.”), any real-life friendship falls short of being truthfully measuring up to its name. Perhaps the slip of attributing the quote to Socrates was a parapraxis: citing Socrates in the middle of establishing a perfectly Platonic argument. For Kant, then, the term “friend” cannot be deployed to its full extent. This reading preserves the paradoxical quality of the maxim, which Montaigne’s interpretation, to some extent, attempts to resolve.

Kant, by the way, permits us to have “two or three friends.”

Kant’s take on the typical trope of friendship supplying a lack is that human beings fundamentally distrust each other, and therefore there is a need which arises in order to have one or two or three persons to whom we can “communicate our whole self.” Here’s a little more Manny:

“Friendship is not of heaven but of the earth. It is a peculiar association of specific persons; it is man’s [sic] refuge in this world from his distrust of his fellows, in which he can reveal his disposition to another and enter into communion with him.”

And I’m going to promote this quote from Lacan that David Brazil kindly left in a comment box, regarding friendship and the lack.

"Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn't even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack. Being attains a sense of self in relation to being as a function of this lack, in the experience of desire. In the pursuit of this beyond, which is nothing, it harks back to the feeling of a being with self-consciousness, which is nothing but its own reflection in the word of things. For it is the companion of beings there before it, who do not in fact know themselves."

--The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955 [223-224]

2008-04-15T23:32:00.003+08:00

Hey! Do you have the OMG! books? Because they're not going to be around forever, you know.

The box in my room of Stacy S.'s fabulous AUTOPORTRAITS (with texts by Trane Devore, Renee Gladman, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Killian, Anne Tardos, Tim Peterson, or Trace, Elizabeth Robinson, and David Gatten.) is the last of them; Erica Kaufman's terrific CENSORY IMPULSE would make an amazing, uh, Memorial Day gift. And you can still have PARANOIA AGENT, transcribed by David Buuck!

I said it before and I'll say it again. You're really not going to want to wait until they're gone. Because even though I'm a softie, I'll tell you right to your face, No, No, I'm sorry, you can't have one, you fucked up, you waited too long, I'm SORRY. Actually, I'll probably tell you that I'll see what I can do and then avoid you for like a year. Is that what you want?

So I'm asking you to please go visit OMG! and buy these books. And not only will you have the books, you will have my undying love and gratitude.

2008-04-15T01:19:00.003+08:00

Montaigne's essay on friendship proposes, via the conventional demarcation (i.e. that there are two types of friendship, the "ordinary" [mediocri] and the "sovereign", to repeat the vassal/lord metaphor present in the extant texts), a radical revision: there can only be one friend. This is the context in which he cites Aristotle: "O my friends, there is no friend."

The ordinary friendship, properly pursued, consists of anyone treating their friends as if they one day will hate them. And vice versa, treating their enemies as if one day they will love them. This tactic is a trope, and appears in Cicero's text on friendship as a reprehensible mode; Montaigne celebrates it, however, as a way of negotiating the truth of friendship, which is that all friendships correspond to ordinariness (and are thus easily dissembled) except one.

"A single dominant friendship dissolves all other obligations." Montaigne understands this sentence literally, and for him this one friendship, this one friend, surpasses all other relations. The duty to the friend surpasses the duty of a citizen, of a husband or wife, of a believer. Moreover, the duty surpasses duty: "In the friendship I speak of, ours souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them and cannot find it again."

2008-04-11T23:46:00.003+08:00

Kanye West is still my fashion icon. Who's yours? Alli Warren's is Diane Keaton, mostly in the 70's.

2008-04-10T05:15:00.002+08:00

Since becoming seriously interested in cooking and food over the last couple of years, I have been lucky and/or financially reckless enough to eat at some pretty amazing restaurants. So it’s with some hesitation but not really reservation that I say that the best restaurant experience I have ever had was at a restaurant called Solociccia, in Panzano in Chianti last month.

I found it almost by accident. I knew that I wanted to visit Panzano, and the butcher shop owned by Dario Cecchini, made famous by Bill Buford’s book Heat. Buford presents a portrait, or possibly a caricature, of Cecchini as a madman who was possibly the most knowledgeable butcher in the world. The “mad” part, by the way, had a lot to do with Cecchini’s obsession with Dante, and his ability to recite from the Commedia at length. But the description of the shop, and the butcher, and the town, was intriguing. When I was doing research about how to find the shop and Panzano in Chianti, I found that Dario had opened a restaurant, called Solociccia, or “only meat.” The website had one link, called “RULES” in English. The rules:

“This is not a restaurant. It is the home of a butcher. All that you will eat is the fruit of my work and that of my family. You will not choose from a menu, though you will be treated well, and with great respect, if you return the favor. You will eat at a communal table, together in “convivio.” There will be six meat courses, chosen at my discretion, with seasonal vegetables, white beans with olive oil, foccacia bread, wine cake, coffee, and after dinner liquors. All of the above is to be had for 30 euro, with nearly two hours at our table, at the end of which you will turn over your seat to the next guests. We do not serve steak. We are open Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings with seatings at 7:00 and 9:00 pm, on Sunday we sit down for lunch at 1:00 pm. In closing, please be aware that everything: the food, the wine the space and we ourselves are for better or worse…thoroughly Tuscan. P.S. Please feel free to bring your own wine without corkage fee. Welcome. (If you dare!).”

Uh huh.

So I made reservations.

We planned on visiting Panzano and the shop a little before our dinner but as we were driving towards where we were staying I saw a sign for Panzano, 6 kilometers away! And I persuaded Alli to go. The shop was amazing. It was small. Walking in, to the left was the butcher’s case which had several cuts of meat, olives, and a huge bowl full of lardo (Alli’s favorite). On the other side, a long table, with huge serving platters, holding meatballs and spicy jam, tons of lardo and baguette, finocchiona, and huge decanters of wine and glasses. Next to that was a stool with the massive arista pictured here. Dario himself was having his picture taken by some Brits, and when they left he grumbled a little and then went over to slice the arista. I asked him if they were porchetta, and he explained in fair English that porchetta is the whole pig, but this was arista (I would learn how utterly delicious arista is later, at other places). The other person working was a young woman, and I think she noticed that Alli and I were a little hesitant, so she came over and poured us glasses of wine, and said, Eat! So we did. And it was superlative, all of it.

So I had a feeling that Solociccia was not going to be disappointing.

We went the next night, driving on a dirt road (that in the States would have no name, but was called Santa Maria Macerata), and got to Panzano early. We hung out at a bar across the street and had a couple aperitifs, and then went over. One thing the RULES didn’t state is that there are only two tables, in two separate rooms. And also that the meal doesn’t begin until everyone is there. We walked in behind a group of four young Americans, and for one second I wondered if we hadn’t ended up at a fake restaurant, you know, a tourist trap for blithering foodies who thought they had found Disneyland Toscana. It wasn’t to be. We were seated at a table with eight Italians, two couples, a pair of women (aunt, niece or something), and a pair of older men.

On the table already were a couple of courses: pinzimonio di verdure dell’orto, or I guess seasonal vegetables. This was thinly sliced fennel, carrots, ack, I’m forgetting, other things. Also the pane di Panzano, or typically saltless Tuscan bread. We were the only ones who had taken Dario up on the wine-with-no-corkage, so the waiter handed me a corkscrew and two glasses. I opened up a very delicious bottle of Classico. Quickly, once everyone at our table was seated, a bell rang and the waiter walked over to a stainless steel dumbwaiter on the wall. This bell would come to mean only good things: rumblings from the meat basement. He brought us the first course, crostini di sugo all’uso di Natale. I can’t find an adequate translation, but essentially they were fluffy pieces of bread completely covered in a meat sauce. The crostini were served on two large platters, and the waiter handed them to people at the table to take as much as they wanted, and then pass. Everyone did. The crostini were far from subtle, and they were terrific. And maybe that’s the first time I really realized that something we were in for something different at Solociccia. Not only the take-some-and-pass-it-down thing, though I can hardly see that working out to well at the Cracker Barrel or any other all-you-can-and-by-can-we-mean-can-eat hovel. It was the presentation. Or the lack of presentation. It’s bread and meat sauce. That’s it. Eat it.

Our waiter when he brought the courses announced the name of the course and then came over to Alli and I and tried to provide a translation, which was very appreciated if sometimes misleading. The people at the table, who had started by pretty much chatting with their dinner partner, started to all talk to each other. They laughed a lot. One of the couples had a dog with them. Now and then Alli caught them feeding the dog from the table. Luckiest dog, uh, ever.

Ring ring went the dumbwaiter and the next course was brought out, fritto del macellaio, which I think I can translate as “Fried stuff a butcher makes.” Amazing, totally not greasy but altogether fried onion, whole sage leaves (a revelation), chicken fried pork cutlets, and small breaded meatballs that burst with lemon when you bit into them. When the waiter came with the third course and announced the name, ramerino in culo, everyone laughed. We laughed too but didn’t know why. The waiter told us, “it means, uh, um, rosemary…rosemary in the behind.” So the third dish, Rosemary In The Ass, was a small ball of ground beef, with a rosemary sprig stuck in one end, and the other end seared, for what was obviously a very brief amount of time; enough to make one side slightly gray. The ass end, with the rosemary sprig, was raw. And awesome.

Another thing to point out, we weren’t too full already, like we would be in an American restaurant. The genius of take-what-you-want-pass-it-down is that you really can just take what you want. I only needed a few bites of fried things a butcher makes, and I really only needed one raw beef ball. Don’t get me wrong—they were perfect, but it was also perfect to have a little bite (I’m reminded by way of a negative example of a really nice lunch place I went to one time in Healdsburg at which I ordered chicken livers, because, you know, I’m all about them. The owner himself brought them to me and said, “And here’s the best thing on the menu” and I’m all about them except it was a gigantic plate full of chicken livers in a thick balsamic sauce which, again, were awesome, but I could eat about ¼ of it.)

It did already feel, though, like a bit of a marathon by the time muscolini alla salvia came out, a braised pork butt (Alli pointed out that it reminded her of carnitas) with tons of sage. And then possibly my favorite course, tenerumi in insalata, which the waiter said was “Boiled beef with salsa,” but deserves a better explanation. Tenerumi are tendons, and the beef parts were cartilaginous but not squishy, and seasoned lightly, so the flavor of the tendons came out and provided a foil to the salsa verde-ish insalata of fennel, celery, carrots, and onions. Finally, we were served braciole rifatte, which unlike the American braciole (braJOL), consisted of thin slices of breaded beef in a spicy tomato sauce full of capers.

Okay.

So we ate all the courses and they were all terrific, and all the plates were still on the table in case anybody wanted to revisit anything, which people did as they pleased. When everything was done, a basket of olive oil cake was brought over and everyone had a slice. The hostess asked us if wanted caffe. Half of us did. Then she brought three liters of liquor and put them on the table and gave everybody a clean glass.

All right. Imagine this happening, uh, anywhere in the United States. Having trouble? Right. The bottles were three different kinds of liqueur, one was grappa, another slightly sweet but unidentifiable, another totally unidentifiable but our favorite. Everybody tried all three, and while I definitely sensed at the end of this round of drinks that everybody was a little bit tipsy, nobody, like, had a chugging contest or asked their friend to turn them upside down for a keg stand. It was moderately consumed. It was consumed in the way it was meant to be consumed: take what you want, pass it down. You didn’t pay for it, necessarily, so there wasn’t an anxiety to finish. It was the perfect ending.

I think the best way to illustrate how profoundly unique this was, though, is to say that when I walked out of the little room with our table in it, I was completely shocked to find that we had to pay for our meal. I don’t mean that I didn’t know beforehand that the meal cost 30 euro, after all, that was in the rules. But at some point in the almost two hours we spent at the butcher’s table, Alli and I both forgot that we were even at a restaurant.

At some point, Dario charged into our room to ask everyone tutti bene? Bene bene bene, that was the chorus. He smiled tipsily, acknowledged that all was indeed good, and left. And it was good, all of it.

2008-04-10T01:57:00.002+08:00

The accounts of friendship are very different, ultimately, in Lysis and Nicomachean Ethics. One aspect of friendship upon which Plato and Aristotle agree however, is that one befriends another in order to fundamentally fulfill a lack in oneself.

Aristotle: "We aim at whatever we find we lack, and give something else in return." (1159 b). For Aristotle, the pleasure of "finding what we lack" is then itself reciprocated by the pleasure of producing fulfillment for the other, who obviously if the other is our friend is also aiming at whatever they find they lack. After all, one loves what one produces.

"What is pleasant is actualization in the present, expectation for the future, and memory of the past; but what is pleasantest is the action we do in so far as we are actualized." (1168a) But what happens when these productive forces that find reciprocity in the relationship known as "friendship" are directed towards not one (because "When two go together, one discerneth before the other how profit may be had; whereas if one alone perceive aught, yet is his wit the shorter, and but slender his device." --Homer and "Two hearts are better than one" --the Boss) but many. And what about different readings of "many", that is, a generic many, "the many", or towards a milieu or coterie ("the poetry community")?

And but which is not exactly quite "friendship" in this particular, classical sense, since classical friendship demands not only isometric reciprocity but consciousness by both parties of this isometric, reciprocated relationship. That is almost practically inconceivable when productive goodwill is done on behalf of ones who are not "ones."

2008-04-08T06:33:00.003+08:00

It occured to me while travelling in Italy that I needed to try and cook a LOT of the things that we were eating, and as a way of making it a little easier to pay attention to, I also thought that I could institute in my life the SUNDAY SUPPER phenomenon.

It's working out pretty well so far. I've made three now, and they are all huge and excessive, but then if there's a guest or two, it's better, and then we have lunch for a day or two, and it's good.

Last week when Kasey stayed with us I made house-cured anchovies (awesome! I squeezed their little heads off!) with celery and parmesan (a la Zuni Cafe), spicy broccoli rabe, gnocchi alla Romana (that didn't quite work, and it was just mush, but v. tasty mush) and arista al forno (roast pork), and a hazelnut chocolate cheesecake. This week I made a pizza sort of like the one you see above. We had that our first night in Rome, and it had bresaola (dry-aged beef) and arugula and was tremendous. Instead of arugula I used fava leaf, the actual leaves that sprout from fava beans! It was awesome, too. And also I made mustard greens and fagiole alla Toscana (white beans) and Marin Sun Farms goat shoulder and finally a Meyer lemon tart.

It came out good. And I get to say "Supper" like 100% more than I did before. Supper.

this post is dedicated to Erika Staiti

2008-04-08T06:27:00.004+08:00

There is a curious gesture made in both Plato’s Lysis, and the long section of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle that deal with friendship. While the Lysis in its strange meanderings attempts to analyze (a pun, the lysis in analysis) what friendship is by way of shooting down all the dominant and apparently minor arguments concerning friendship, and the Ethics is a far more systematic and broadly drawn definition, both texts consider friendship using a variety of approaches. That is, to use inadequate categories, “experiential,” “anthropological,” etc. One of these approaches in both texts is the meteorological, or what we would determine as the realm of hard science. That is, an existential question of physics is raised vis a vis friendship. That is, is friendship the sort of thing in which like is attracted to like, or is it one of those cases in which opposites attract. What makes this trope even more interesting is that both Plato and Aristotle, when they present the question, cite poets as the providers of evidence for each stance. The dominant source for the idea that strong friendships are composed of dissimilar entities is in fact Hesiod, whom both Plato and Aristotle quote, when in Works and Days he writes,

Strife stirs up even the shiftless to toil;
for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbor, a
rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in
good order; and neighbor vies with is neighbor as he hurries
after wealth.  This Strife is wholesome for men.  And potter is
angry with potter, and craftsman with craftsman, and beggar is
jealous of beggar, and minstrel of minstrel.

The quarreling potters are amusing.  But is it not also amusing or terrific to think that poets are
the source for existential questions of meteorological
phenomena?

2008-04-08T03:33:00.000+08:00

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

2008-04-02T00:23:00.001+08:00

THE ROYALS ARE IN FIRST PLACE!!!

ALEX GORDON FOR PRESIDENT!!

2008-03-25T00:09:00.002+08:00

Hey, did you all have a good weekend? Mine was terrific.

Saturday night was the return of the Artifact series in Oakland, where I heard and met C.S. Perez, and David Buuck walked into a bar, and Leslie Scalapino read her poems! And then cocktails were had.

Sunday I made Easter supper: spring pea crostini, pici with lamb sugo, roast chicken, cabbage with speck and horseradish, and semolina pudding.

how are all of you? okay?

2008-03-07T01:53:00.003+08:00

CIAO