poems of wallace stevens

THE EMPREROR OF ICE-CREAM
by Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb,
Let the lamb affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

A POSTCARD FROM THE VOLCANO
by Wallace Stevens

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with out bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds below
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

skully girl

all of these little pen and ink sketches have to become either a big drawing or a painting soon. i love my moleskin, but the art has to start living outside of its box soon.

truman capote: breakfast at tiffany's

Late one afternoon, while waiting for a Fifth Avenue bus, I noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out a girl who ran up the steps of the 42nd Street public library. She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make. I let curiosity guide me between the lions, debating on the way whether I should admit following her or pretend coincidence. In the end I did neither, but concealed myself some tables away from her in the general reading room, where sh sat behind her dark glasses and a fortress of literature she'd gathered at the desk. She sped from one book to the next, intermittently lingering on a page, always with a frown, as if it were printed upside down. She had a pencil poised above paper--nothing seemed to catch her fancy, still now and then, as though for the hell of it, she made laborious scribblings. Watching her, I remembered a girl I'd known in school, agrind, Mildred Grossman. Mildred: with her moist hair and greasy spectacles, her stained fingers that dissected frogs and carried coffee to picket lines, her flat eyes that only turned toward the stars to estimate their chemical tonnage. Earth and air could not be more opposite than Mildred and Holly, yet in my head they acquired a Siamese twinship, and the thread of thought that had sewn them together ran like this: the average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul--desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they'd been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, lead to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic. I imagined them in a restaurant of the future, Mildred still studying the menu for its nutritional values, Holly still gluttonous for everything on it. It would never be different. They would walk through life and out of it with the same determined step that took small notice of those cliffs at the left. Such profound observations made me forget where I was; I cam to, startled to find myself in the gloom of the library, suprised all over again to see Holly there. It was after seven, she was freshening her lipstick and perking up her appearance from what she deemed correct for a library to what, by adding a bit of scarf, some earrings, she considered suitable for the Colony. When she'd left, I wandered over to the table where her books remained: they were what I had wanted to see. South by Thunderbird, Byways of Brazil, the Political Mind of Latin America. And so forth.

--Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

the bordello

The Bordello is one of my official favorite places in Los Angeles now. I went to see Miss C. of the Finches sing. She's such a beautiful songbird, and how can any man not instantly fall into an instant crush with her? They all do, even in Berlin they did.

Like many of my friends here, that's where we met. I was dirty and covered in paint and we were in this filthy but wonderful silkscreen print studio, and it was very cold and gray that year and I didn't even realize she was American and that much younger than me until we started talking. Appearances are deceiving! That was a really weird time, and we were thrown into the mix with lots of freaks from all sorts of countries and earnest Germans running the workshop with the loose happiness of part time kindergarden teachers.

That place is still going, run on good will and cheap rent by generous building owners. The whole street corner where it's at is one of those hot nightspots in Berlin that will stop being interesting in a few years, or maybe not. I'm not a horrible snob about these kinds of things, but there's definitely a sense of energy and accomplishment in many places and in other places there is not. That street corner is still going in Berlin long after much of Mitte has died. And it's still the kind of place where if you stand on a corner at four in the morning long enough with some guests from Brazil, a pack of French girls covered in mud will appear and start talking about falling off their bicycles and charm everyone into falling in love with them. It's not the kind of thing many people are looking for, but for those who want to live their life with a degree of magic, it's the kind of thing you treasure forever.

So lovely miss C, here and now in Los Angeles: There was a slight technical problem, and then she went into the most deadpan, hilarious little story about East Coast frat boys on a yacht diving through the innards of a dead whale.

We were in a booth with a glammed-up girl, and as the Bordello used to be, well, a bordello, the womblike hole encouraged us to talk about very racy and saucy topics. How many people would want to listen in on the things we say?

That place is just so feminine and pretty, although I can say that the corsets the waitresses wore were (for me) decidedly not so sexy. I would rather have women like in the paintings on the wall; heavy saucy women with dark hair and heavy make-up and low-cut white blouses.
I can only take one drink at a time; they had midori sours. Those were the only drinks I got used to, I used to order them all the time in Manhattan, but only one. They don't like cocktails so much in Berlin, although it's growing, especially with young yuppie girls.

K. commented that it was astounding how little light all the red chadeliers gave off. I love seeing people in the dark. As I've said before, people look better in the dark, clothed. On the beach and in clothes too revealing, it's lacking in mystery.

All that on the surface, that's what people catch when they're in Los Angeles. That's why you have hole up in the dark here for a few months until you discover all these little secrets: recording studios with basketball courts and old-fashioned microphones and tucked-away parties where everyone looks like they come from Europe and massive tiki bars in the middle of suburbialand full of flourescent fish tanks. That's when it's David Lynchland.

in those years by adrienne rich

In Those Years
by adrienne rich

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through rages of fog
where we stood, saying I

Seven Years by Aaron Cometbus

the root of the matter

remembering

I spent a good weekend with miss s., as we had not seen each other in many years. It's so strange how so much time outside of the country seems to be as if no time had passed at all; was it all a dream? I still miss my Berlin friends a great deal, and photographs and e-mails are nothing compared to real-life conversations and hand-holding. Miss S. had been a series of e-mails and chats over the years, and it was so gratifying to see her in person again as she stayed at my house.

We ran around the city like little children, stuffing our faces at the Thai Temple with m. and feeling like we were in another country, and then lazing around in the Museum of Jurassic Technology to escape the intense summer heat. We were there for hours and hours. It's a place to get lost in, one of the true jewels of Los Angeles, full of renaissance theater dioramas and an exhibit dedicated to the mobile home of America. Yet another example of the L.A. David Lynch world.

We walked the long strip of boardwalk between Santa Monica and Venice Beach. It was at this point that we started talking about a common acquaintance, and she was shocked when I told her that he had passed away. It had been a tragic situation as well. Young men of our generation should not be going so quickly like this; I remember him as a genuinely good person but also very brilliant and moody. He was not so much a friend of mine as he was of hers; in fact, she was intending on mailing him back some movies next week when she got to her parents' house. She didn't believe me at first.

With so many years spent apart from the ones you love, living great distances, you get worried.
You have to hold the people who are important to you close. She was very sad, and we went on the swingsets, surrounded by European tourists and people babbling so many languages at once. It wasn't so much fun... You know, there are so many interesting people on the beach. I could just sit there and watch them until the end of time, but things shut down there at sunset.

Later, our feet blistered and overwhelmed by the sun, we made our way back to the car. "I can't believe it," she said. This is something we will all have to get used to as we get older, friends passing away.

I just can't imagine what it would be like to be left entirely alone, everyone from your past gone from the earth, like those hundred year olds. What is that like? People from your youth are so important, or at least that's what I think lately, and I am fortunate that there are so many of them here in Los Angeles, because they ground me.

jeans & heels

"Wow, everyone here is so conventionally attractive," I blurted out, and my friends laughed, because I know that it can be taken the wrong way, but it wasn't meant in any mean sense. We sat in a happy little circle in my first really West Hollywood goings-on place, and it was nice to just sink into the sofa watching all the pretty butterflies and birds go by.

It's fascinating to sit next to people blatantly on their first date. You overhear so much. The awkwardness is amazing, but some people are smooth hands at it. Sometimes I feel that if it really means anything, it's always going to be awkward. If you're smooth at falling in love and at saying the right thing at the right time all the time, perhaps you've been around the corner too much. Love is this uncontrollable, awful monster that needs to be reined in and controlled, sometimes even purposely destroyed, especially if it occurs at inappropriate times. But the more you try to push it back, the more it fights back, and then you're just left with this mess of an animal, and you just have to close your eyes and wish for it to go away soon!

The woman was so shy but she was so eager, offering herself up at the bat, her bosom overflowing in her dress, but she wasn't tacky. It was the kind of place where girls where heels with their jeans. She had this long straight pretty blonde hair that reminded me of the nice girls I went out with when I was in Hamburg, how they were always very proper and sexy about the way they dressed, they were nice girls going to art school or working at advertising agencies at their first jobs. She kept inching closer and closer to the guy, who seemed attracted but not too eager, and we couldn't help but listen in on their conversation, which was composed of nothing and completely insubtantial because it was all in the body language.

So we were a group of three, two girls and a boy, and the boy was also watching two women sitting at our table with their backs to us. One woman had a very interesting nose, or so he said, and we were trying to figure out a way for him to go up to her and talk to her. We had all had too many martinis (for me just one is enough--I can't handle alcohol and never will), and they had two or three each, but for some reason they maintained a strange calm.

"How are you going to talk to her without it being false or confusing or contrived?" I wondered.

"Just drink a lot and then go up to her," K. said. But that's the kind of thing girls always say to boys who are stepping upt ot he plate.

"That would be scary," I said.

"Oh no, it's not so bad. I'm good at it," he said, but at that moment when they say things like that, you know that they're not really that good at it and even when they don't show it they're prepping themselves up.

It was by far the place with the (conventionally) prettiest people I'd been to so far in Los Angeles. It was actually nice being at a place without boys in skinny jeans, although some of the women were so thin that their clavicles jutted and they looked a few years older than they probably were. Starvation does that to you. The men could get away with exposing less because they were all in dress shirts, but they had different sets of expectations from the women, as in being cute and charming at the same time but not too much, and being somewhat well off and promising, which meant earning a bit of money, but not waving it around too much.

This whole dating ritual mystifies me and continues to do so. My Belgian friend once said that she never does this kind of thing, it's such a weird American ritual. But then she got her impressions of dating from those MTV reality shows they air in Belgium, where women prance around in bikinis trying to get eligible bacehlors, or tv spots on speed dating.

I guess they do dating in europe too, because i knew a bunch of merry girls who worked on an online dating portal. There are many interesting things to say about that, but I wouldn't mention it here or anywhere really, because it's important to be discreet.

When we left the place the two girls were there, one of them miss nose. Our friend was still trying to figure out a way to speak to her. He chalked it up as a missed opportunity as we left, but he didn't seem to be in the mood to get his hopes up, and he didn't like her as much as he thought. I was wondering if I should go talk to miss nose for him.

But then it was also the case where one relationship had ruined his life forever and so on, and it had not so much to do with the girl herself as the particular time and place in which it happened. You can't really blame so much of your tragedy on most other people, not even your parents, but we all have one of those disastrous relationships which sends us into fits of depression for years down the road. I think it's always interesting that these kinds of peoples are the ones you should avoid for a while, but the ones who always try to get in touch with you at bad times.

You're just so horribly curious, and people who knew you when you were young are the ones to keep close to your side, isn't that what they say? Dorothy parker said, "Every love's the older love in a duller dress." She was such a horrible cynic though. She couldn't see the fun in Los Angeles, not like I can, although I think we can sense the darknesses, or she could and I can. It's the dark sides that make it so interesting though!