Fashion for Writers

A few weeks ago, during the visual poetry workshop I took with Pamela Moore, we were talking about the sensibility and utility of lists, and how they may not necessarily be the most expansive way to think, and that instead of writing down lists, we might serve our little noggins better if we drew mind maps and mapped out our thoughts on paper so it would look like thoughts branching out from other thoughts and traveling by way of smaller tributaries and streams, and my visual metaphors are all mixed up, and on top of that, I have terrible handwriting and I draw the kind of broccoli trees that have a cartoon V for branches, so I won’t show you my mind-map scrawlings, but maybe I can approximate it in this post.

I found this neat Kodak 35 camera in Artifacts, a lovely store in town, and I’m so charmed by its heaviness and how vintage cameras make today’s cameras seems like shriveled little fries in comparison.

On the subject of fries, last Thursday, I had a mushroom soup and cod-cake sandwich with mint aoli and avocado and Thai spices and handcut french fries at Lincoln Cafe (can you tell how massive that sandwich is? I’m trying to provide my hand as a height reference) in Mount Vernon, and now I’m worried that I’m misrepresenting myself in the gastronomical sense because it seems like all I do is eat sandwiches and fries when really sandwiches are a rare occurrence for me, and food-wise and life-wise all I do is eat rice two or three meals a day (Tony, if you are reading this, I know you’re laughing and wish you wouldn’t!) and noodle soups and things covered in raw garlic and spicy sludge that I doubt would ever look appetizing to anyone else.

We tried to go visit the gazillion antique stores in Mount Vernon, but they were all vastly overpriced, and a lot of them were fancy and had a hush-hush environment that reminded me of going into designer stores in New York where the sales attendants stare at you for having scuffed shoes and not wearing expensive jewelry and then I have bad fantasies of flicking rocks at their tightly wound spirits (I’m sorry, and also not!)

I did like looking at the rows and rows of canned goods, and Michael finding the world’s smallest hammer and also possibly the world’s third or fourth smallest trowel, and a bubblegum pink fifties prom dress that would look nice on a girl with charmingly high-maintenance needs, and of course this creepy DAMMIT doll:

The little paper taped to her chest says (complete with little girl/big girl? [sic] errors):

When you think you want to climb the walls
or stand right up and shout……
Here’s a little dammit doll you cannot
live without
Just grasp it firmly by the legs
and find a place to slam it……
Then as you whack it’s stuffing out…..
DAMMIT,   DAMMIT,   DAMMIT    !!!!!!!!

I really liked the idea of this doll, mostly because antique stores sometimes bore me, and even though I’m very guilty of pining for the past and wanting to think about halcyon days gone by, it really displeases me to think of antique stores as magical places to dig for old treasures full of sweetness and faded beauty. I’d rather think of the past and the old objects we save from the past as having the potential to contain just as much anger and suppressed and expressed rage and sarcasm and skepticism and banality and weirdness and pointlessness and meaningfulness as the present.

More profound thoughts: these Swedish Hasbeens really are super duper comfortable with over the knee socks that don’t fall down because there’s also something magical about these Hansel from Basel socks, and also something magical that is making me have twenty dreams a night that I can remember and probably forty more that I can’t.  Like the dream I had about one of my contact lenses turning into a flattened scorpion that grew to the size of three-dimensional beast who I hacked into pieces with a dull kitchen knife.

This dress from Motel has little bunnies all over it and gave me weird, wobbly, diamond tans on my back last summer and maybe this summer, bunnies used to show up a lot in the poems I wrote in my first year at Iowa, right now I’m reading the poems of Ben Lerner, just like everyone else right now, and Chelsea Minnis, just like everyone else before, and watching the film Charles Burnett submitted for his MFA thesis in the 70′s, and nearly crying at the end but keeping it in, and finally saw When the Levees Broke by Spike Lee, and again kept it in, and listening to this radio show on WFMU, which you should too if you are lucky enough to be under sunny skies and even if you aren’t lucky or lucky enough, for example, a few nights ago Michael and I were unlucky to be trapped in a terrible parking lot because the bar wouldn’t raise (what is that bar called? Googling it only led me to the article, ‘Man found shot at topless bar,’ and ‘Bar Brawl Spills in Parking Lot,’) but then we were lucky enough to have someone fix it after ten minutes of me trying to raise the bar with my puny arms, and also if you want to raise the bar on how good you feel right now, go ahead and listen to this:

I’m heading to NY on Wednesday and Shanghai on Thursday. Out of curiosity, do we have any readers living in Asia?

Love, Jenny