What's Come In the Mail
The Coffee Table Read: Jacques Brel sale catalogue, Sotheby's Paris, 8 October 2008, [Collection particuliere, Manuscrits de chansons, enregistrements, photographies et objets personnels], a clipping from the Style section of the Financial Times on retro Oxbridge fashion, and the Diary of James Schuyler, the poet, ed. Nathan Kernan, Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1997, 1/250, unsigned.
There are just too many things going on in the world, so I am very fortunate to have friends who help me keep up by sending lovely things in the mail. Who would want to miss the Jacques Brel sale? How many of you knew that Matthew Goode is the face of Hackett London? As my dear friend S puts it so aptly, "One can never have too many articles about chaps who adore poetry (and each other) while elegantly dressed in cricket whites and heirloom jumpers."
As for Jimmy, well, I think poets keep the best diaries. His entries are fleeting glimpses, often out the window of the Long Island RailRoad train: "November 20, 1970. Islip. Not a stop that God forgot -- but I did."
Or intriguing snatches of conversation, insight, evocative fragments from a life:
"Beat the eggwhites --
not the bowl"
"Even her friends call her marzipan turd."
"Some sunny days, it's great to try
to see the world
through Frank O'Hara's eyes"
"Come on the leaves, like cloudy white honey with thin blue places where it stretched and tore."
So much to do this weekend - attend a memorial or a wedding (same time; pick one), make dinner plans with out-of-town visitors (decide where), visit central library downtown (because Wyatt Cooper's Memoir is a non-circulating text, a nuisance), Vedanta Temple Sunday Services, grocery shopping, solve financial crisis -- when D. and I talk it's like we're taping our own version of NPR's "Left Right and Center" (minus the Right and Center).
In West Hollywood yesterday and was struck by the recent changes - marked increase in homeless, with either a sleeping or chattering madman in every single vacant store doorway. Which is more distressing, the increase in vagrants, the downside of crystal use and unemployment, or the surge in vacant commercial real estate?
Lately every time E. and I stop in to Koo Koo Roo after the gym for a light lunch, we meet someone we don't expect to see who says he's "between jobs."
A friend we know in banking said, "The Friday Flights are starting again." We looked askance.
"It's when the Feds get their assignments," he explained. "You know, where are you headed this weekend, what bank will you be going out to seize."
He said an acquaintance was reviewing some paperwork on a Friday and saw an order for a bunch of rental Xerox machines for Monday delivery. "Who ordered these?" he asked his secretary.
"The FDIC," she replied.
That's how they realized it would be a good time to clean our their desks.
And why I'm so grateful for all the good things that come in the mail.
Oh yes, and I am reading Wodehouse again, who you will recall visited America for the first time in 1904. I identify with Bertie Wooster:
"It seemed there was something about me that aroused the baser passions in men who were eight feet tall and six across. I took this up with Jeeves once, and he agreed that it was singular."
From "Aunts Aren't Gentlemen," by P. G. Wodehouse, (1974). Singular indeed. Which reminds me, speaking of aunts, that I really must research Lady Furness.
ok. here's a long long long comment. all about me...
my first husband wooed & won me w/a yeats poem...
HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
then, the man i loved most in the world wooed & won me with
a william carlos williams poem left at the foot of my bed one morining w/a note...
There is a woman in our town
walks rapidly, flat bellied
in worn slacks upon the street
where I saw her.
Neither short nor tall,
nor old nor young
her face would attract no adolescent.
Grey eyes looked straight before her.
Her hair was gathered simply behind the
ears under a shapeless hat.
Her hips were narrow, her
legs thin and straight. She stopped
me in my tracks--until I saw
her disappear in the crowd.
An inconspicuous decoration
made of sombre cloth, meant
I think to be a flower, was
pinned flat to her
right breast--
any woman might have
done the same to
say she was a woman and warn
us of her mood.
Otherwise she was dressed in male attire,
as much as to say to hell with you.
Her expression was serious,
her feet were small.
And she was gone!
if ever I see you again
as I have sought you
daily without success
I’ll speak to you,
alas too late! ask,
What are you doing on the
streets of Paterson? a
thousand questions:
Are you married? Have you any
children? And, most important,
your NAME! which
of course she may not
give me--though
I cannot conceive it
in such a lonely and
intelligent woman
then last but not least, and this where i started w/this
the man i spent years with, a sober man, strange and alone as i, grabbed a book off my shelf and
read this out to me...
To The Harbormaster
I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
Frank O'Hara
i am such a sucker for well read men, men who love words, poems, music.
i'm much better off here w/my father. safer in some way.
thanks for the morning read.
xxx
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