What's typical after three hours and forty minutes of late French new wave is to smoke a lot of cigarettes, but that option's no longer open to me. So instead, I let myself get picked up. Which, as the story unfolds, is as much like continuing along in a cafe scene as the smoking would have been. I'm not easy to pick up; or, I am, if I'm in exactly the right mood and you do exactly what this guy did. He was bold. He wasn't even fully in his seat before he was chatting me up, and after the film, although I turned my back to him, didn't make eye contact when he said goodbye, and took a very long time fixing up in the toilet, etc, he was waiting for me when I headed for the street, and straight asked me for a drink. I had an hour to kill before going to Brandon and Alli's for dinner. I suggested the House of Shields but he said the Pied Piper.

At the bar I ordered a beer and he had a Coke. Who drinks Coke outside of the French movies? He continued to be bold: He said he thought Veronika and Marie loved Alexandre in the same way, and for the same thing: Alexandre fucked them really well; then he said he himself had noticed this very problem: when he fucks a girl really well, and he means really well, he said, then the girl falls inordinately in love with him. This had the immediate intended effect of distracting me from the subject of the conversation to private considerations of whether or not he could fuck me really well, and he knew I was distracted, he knew what I was thinking about, and he asked me, what are you thinking about? Then he named Alexandre's primary charm with women as his smooth conviction about what he wanted with them. Except my Coke-drinking companion kept saying that Alexandre was "convicted". Really he was describing himself and his own bold manner. He talked about the knee socks I was wearing and this gave him the opportunity---which he made, and took---to put his hand on my calf, feel my leg and talk about it! Bold! More than bold! Offensive! I let him! We hadn't been in the bar 15 minutes. Isn't this amusing? But I know someone just like him, thank god; I am on to this game. And he had lots more to play before the hour was up. He analyzed and correctly conjectured my Meyers-Briggs. I asked a question and he told me I was going to have to earn that information. He made me laugh. He insulted me and he flattered me. As it always turns out in a city as small as a French new wave film where everyone shows up at the same cafe at the same time all the time, he's the ex-lover of someone I know by proxy.

At 8 o'clock I said it was time to go. When he told me he didn't have a job I told him he had to pay the tab. I let him walk me part-way to my dinner party. Very beautifully, however, just as in the best after-dark rain-and-Gauloise Paris street scene, the real narrative begins when I leave the street for the party, kiss my friends and tell them the story of the last hour. They know I'll never have another date with this man and they know why---something he could never guess, is aside from anything he did or said or didn't say or didn't do, and which information is the most basic first exchange you make with a new person: his name. If you know me well, you know what it was.

Oh, the film? The Mother and the Whore. It's playing next month at the PFA, definitely don't miss it.

"The vast tower transcends traditional notions of architectural programming. Disposed diagonally as well as horizontally and vertically, it is more like a city than a typical office building. Conceptually, it comprises three visually discrete structural forms that merge in a single, nonhierarchical high-rise. The building’s relentlessly sensual, undulating mass blurs visual and spatial boundaries between surface articulation, decoration, structure, and enclosure, epitomizing Díaz Alonso’s original, distinctly figurative architectural vocabulary."

m.o.

“The operating principle that seems to work best is to go to the landscape that frightens you the most and take pictures until you’re not scared anymore.”

TMI?

I have been enjoying the worst bout of PMS of all my womanhood, which began at age 11, if bleeding is to be the marker. 10 days of being out of sorts with my body, everything's swollen to pitch, to say nothing of 'irritable bitch'. This morning I grew nauseous and almost fainted in Target (but WTF! was I doing in Target?!). I did manage to get myself home, but only in time to lie down for three hours of migraine-grade headache. There was an afternoon poet-xmas-birthday thing to go to; I was an hour late, and weak, and sweaty, but happy to see my fellows! Poet A is having a work crisis; Poet B saw Poet C in the hospital yesterday. Poet D didn't introduce me to famous writer (obviously, not a poet) E, but it wasn't on purpose. I support Poet F 's dislike of his terrible neighbors, he has real reason to. Poet G gently reminds his partner to check her calendar every month when she's feeling blue, but not, he was sure to say, when they are having a fight. Poet H says take calcium and magnesium, it really helps. There was one baby, at least one grandma. My stomach hurt, I couldn't eat the food or cakes. I didn't drink, which, given the season and the poor tires on my car, is a real blessing. Music being played by several humans in the front room of what truly is a railroad operation/house. I'd never been to that part of Albany before. Actually, maybe I'd never been to Albany before! I was reading Under Albany before going to target/almost-fainting/getting the migraine /going to Albany Can I blame all this on Silliman? That just wouldn't be fair. Or it would be; my physical misery aside, it was a sweet afternoon and a lovely party. It's nice to say Merry Xmas and Happy Birthday Nick Robinson.

----midwinter day----

i want the toaster AND the hotplate AND the hairdryer AND the microwave oven AND the mercedes behind door 7 AND the beefsteak AND the custard AND the chocolate AND i deserve it

in general, people deal with cognitive dissonance — the clashing of conflicting thoughts — by eliminating one of the thoughts. The notion that the toaster is desirable conflicts with the knowledge that you just passed it up, so you banish the notion.

the little battering ram that could

first off, gossip is the laziest locomotion.

Is poetry a sustainable resource?

Has anyone seen Zabriskie Point lately? I can't stop thinking about it, or rather, I can't stop thinking about the last 15 minutes of it, I wake up in the middle of the night and lie awake plotting a four-thousand-point-radiating-star course of action and watching the Zabriskie Point end-game replay in my "mind's eye" over and over again. My mind has no use for eye! what it needs now are four (thousand) hands.

This mental-viewing-slash-cheap-metaphor Zabriskie Point thing happened to me once before, I suddenly recall. At the very moment the Space Shuttle Columbia was burning up over Texas, someone I'd never met before was in an airplane bound for San Francisco and when that plane landed my whole life did a Zabriskie Point. Equidistant from this thought is the one about running into an old friend AT THE MALL last weekend. Jesus, was that just last weekend? I was buying stockings. That was four thousand lifetimes ago, at least.

what is it alice notley said? i never tried to be anything other than a poet

At the Latin American Club---of all the spots in all the spots of all the world's watering holes/spots----just earlier than now---Max Heller, Contact Zone Coordinator for the CPT (Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Poetics Theater, in residence this Friday at CCA/SPT) said the most amusing of all things, considering we'd only known each other 8 (albeit 8 long, intimate) hours: "That is so Suzanne of you Suzanne!"

What this means is that I finally am, in fact, Suzanne. Put a penny in the slot and etc

track 11 of the gramaphone best of 2006 on repeat play, which is what kind of distorted telos? it's the pretty but inaccurate bridge that seems so inadequate to a new body trying to rest after such a long, long bridge of rest-less agency, which took me so far from there to this strange new unordinary here---put a penny in the slot and make an artificial light shine?---

somewhere nearby i have a picture i took on a grassy lawn in san diego a lot of years ago: atop a decorative garden-stake glass-and-wire sculpturette of a grasshopper, is a real grasshopper, shiny, glossy, wet, with papery translucent newly discarded skin just about to drop--do i feel like that? not really. but it's in my mind to share it with you. i feel something even better than that. you can get from there to here in nothing flat.