A Palm memo

For a few years in the early twenty-first century I used a Palm gadget. I began with a Zire and moved up to an m515 before going back to paper, which did a better job of holding a charge.

The ghosts of my Palms are still with me: I just discovered a text file on my Mac with the contents of Palm memos from way back when. Here is a memo consisting of random notes I made during a reading by a visiting poet in 2003:

This guy is nothing like Whitman

Was Vallejo Chilean?

Poem w/grandparents

pigs being castrated by his grandfather & being shot between the eyes

poem to his penis  NARCiSSiST “God flowers in this nerve”

“I was very attached to my dog Lady”

I’ve omitted the poet’s name, which served as the note’s title. The name, if you want it, can be found by means of that godawful line of penile poetry.

I remember leaning over to a couple of extra-credit seekers who had come to this reading, notebooks and pens in hand. “There’s so much more to poetry than this,” I told them. Or “Please don’t think that all poetry is like this.” Or words to that effect. I might have been remembering how I had felt hearing my professor Jim Doyle speak frankly about the work of a visiting poet. It was a revelation to me: institutional acclaim for someone’s writing didn’t mean that it was good or that you had to like it.

Related reading
All OCA poetry posts (Pinboard)

[César Vallejo (1892–1938) wasn’t Chilean. He was a Peruvian poet. Drumming up an audience by offering “points”: one reason among many that I dislike the practice of extra credit.]

xednI drawkcaB ehT

An analog-world tool: Merriam-Webster’s Backward Index, as explained by Peter Sokolowski.

Etiquette

“I like to eat with my hands. It gets me closer to the food.”

So says G-Man Bill Retz (Art Smith) in Ride the Pink Horse (dir. Robert Montgomery, 1947).

#Brooklynite

Earlier this week, a Hillary Clinton spokesman told reporters that Bernie Sanders would campaign “like a Brooklynite,” while Clinton would campaign “like a senator.”

Sanders’s comment on what it might mean to campaign like a “Brooklynite”:

“I haven’t the vaguest idea, to tell you the truth, but I do know I was born in Brooklyn, my wife was born in Brooklyn — we’re very proud of that. And if it means being aggressive, if it means being smart, if it means being tough, I accept that title.”

The Clinton campaign keeps thinking of new ways to lose this Brooklynite’s vote in a general election.

[I’ve repunctuated the Sanders comment to do a better job of it than Fox News did. Clinton campaign headquarters: 1 Pierrepont Plaza, Brooklyn, New York.]

Form and content

Joseph Joubert:

For the first form and idea of a work must be a space, a simple place where the material can be put, arranged, not a material to be put somewhere and arranged.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

John Ashbery, striking a remarkably similar note:

[A] poem first presents itself to me as a somehow blank space which I then proceed to people with objects, events, and characters.

45 Contemporary Poems: The Creative Process , ed. Alberta Turner (New York: Longman, 1985).

In the manifesto “Projective Verse” (1959) Charles Olson famously declared that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT.” Olson attributed this observation to Robert Creeley. (The SHOUTING is Olson.) For other writers, content is an extension of form. See above. Creeley later added that “content is never more than an extension of form.”

Related reading
All OCA John Ashbery posts (Pinboard)
Also from Joseph Joubert: Another world : Resignation and courage : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing

[Robert Creeley: “form is never more than an extension of content,” in a letter to Charles Olson, June 5, 1950. For the last few weeks, I’ve been carrying Joubert’s name in my head as Jourbet . Wrong.]

Los Angeles palimpsest

  
[November 2012; June 2014; March 2016. Click on any image for a larger view.]

From the Webster’s Second entry for palimpsest :

A parchment, tablet, or other portion of writing material, which has been used twice or three times (double palimpsest ), the earlier writing having been erased; a manuscript in which one or or two earlier erased writings are found; a codex rescriptus. This double or triple use in early times of writing material was chiefly due to scarcity of such material.

This unassuming sign was the subject of posts in 2012 and 2014. The stickers visible in 2012 and 2014 are still visible in outline in 2016. Whatever material was behind the sign has been removed: now there’s just fence.

El Coyote neon

[“As seen in Los Angeles.” El Coyote Cafe, 7312 Beverly Boulevard.]

Visiting El Coyote is a thing to do in Los Angeles.

No more chicken and waffles?

East Coast Foods Inc., the parent company of Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles, has filed for bankruptcy. A very strange story. We ate at a Roscoe’s last week while visiting Los Angeles.

Things to do in Los Angeles

[An incomplete list.]

Meet Rachel and Ben at LAX. Hi, Rachel and Ben! Driving back to Rachel and Seth’s place, discover that Rachel’s car has a tire with a leak, the work of what looks like a big plastic spike. Buy a can of Fix-A-Flat. Hope. Hear the sound of rim on street. Pull over by a hydrant — the only available spot — and change tire. Everyone participates: guarding against traffic, reading jack directions, finding the spot for the jack, loosening lug nuts, jacking up the car, changing the tire. Appreciate the benevolent neighborhood elder who watches over us. The only person strong enough to loosen the lug nuts: Rachel. Talk about this point often, with pride. Go to El Coyote, “Serving Los Angeles Since 1931.” Look at pictures of the stars who have eaten here: Shirley Temple Black and Fred Willard mean the most to us. James Hong (from the Seinfeld episode “The Chinese Restaurant”) ate here. Eat. Drink. Chips, guacamole, salsa: excellent. Fajitas, okay. Margaritas: weak. Ambience and neon: extra great. Before going to sleep, have a cup of tea: first caffeine since the early afternoon.

Get a new tire. Get three more new tires. They’re needed. Walk many blocks while waiting. It’s counter-cultural to walk in Los Angeles. Visit a used-record store. One curmudgeonly owner, one assistant, many, many LPs. Walk to pick up car. See Jane Lynch having lunch at a restaurant table right on the sidewalk. We love her from Christopher Guest’s movies. Walk on by, in appropriate leave-the-stars-alone fashion. Get car and go to Larchmont Bungalow, a lovely place to have lunch. Have lunch. Bison burger. Salads. Turkey melt. Note to self: “tea” in Los Angeles doesn’t always mean “black.” Go to Salt and Straw. Freckled Woodblock Chocolate? Yes. Notice that the ice cream becomes more enjoyable as one continues to eat it. Go to Landis Gifts and Stationery. Buy paper for writing letters. Look in many other stores. Looking, not buying, is plenty of fun. Return to home base. Sing many songs with guitar and ukulele. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” now with fambly-improvised lyrics on two coasts. Go to Pann’s before dropping Ben at LAX. But it’s Monday: the restaurant’s closed. (Diners close on Monday?) Go to Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles instead. Great chicken, great cornbread, great macaroni and cheese, good waffles. Iced tea, black and unsweetened. See Ben off. Hug. Watch Karen Kingsbury’s “The Bridge Part 2” on DVR. It’s rather dull, and not nearly as bad (that is, good) as “Part 1.” There’s no Bridge (the bookstore) in “The Bridge,”  which takes away most of the fun. Have a glass of wine.

Wake up to horrible news from Belgium. Go to an office-supply store. A kind employee does Rachel’s xeroxing for free. Go to the post office to buy stamps. The post office doesn’t take cash. Go to the Hammer Museum. See the exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957. Look for evidence of our friend Seymour Barab’s sojourn at Black Mountain as a visiting musician. He’s not in the exhibit but he’s quoted in a book in the gift shop, recalling a summer of “esoteric incomprehensible conversations” between Charles Olson and Stefan Wolpe, each trying to out-talk one another. As far as Olson is concerned, that sounds about right. See the exhibition Still Life with Fish: Photography from the Collection. Allen Ruppersberg’s photographs of roadsigns with magazines are terrific. See the exhibition Catherine Opie: Portraits, photographs that look like paintings by Old Masters. One photograph looks like Jonathan Franzen. Yes, it’s Jonathan Franzen. Then discover a Millet and two Van Goghs in the permanent collection. The Hammer is a perfect museum: lots to see and find interesting, but not exhausting. And free, always. Go to Simplethings for lunch. Cobb salad, Cuban sandwich, meatball sandwich. A tie with Roscoe’s for best food. Go to The Grove. Looking, not buying, is plenty of fun. Go to Clifton’s for dinner. Experience vague film-noir feelings in the downtown parking garage. Experience vague film-noir feelings on the downtown sidewalks. Where is everyone? (Aside from the panhandlers.) Experience strong surrealist feelings in Clifton’s. It’s like the Grand Cosmo of Steven Millhauser’s novel Martin Dressler , with meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Look: here, or here. Stuffed animals. A sequoia. A chapel. Four floors of cafeteria, the upper floors now closed. And a basement with a phone booth (minus phone). Wonder about the large blue object on a desk in a Red Bull billboard. (A Bluetooth speaker.) Watch the news. Give up. Watch Fixer Upper . Have a glass of wine.

Walk to LACMA. Learn from a helpful LACMA employee going in to work that the museum is closed for the day. We got our Mondays and Wednesdays crossed. Cross the street to visit the Craft & Folk Art Museum instead. See the exhibition Little Dreams in Glass And Metal: Enameling in America, 1920 to the Present. Learn about enameling. See the exhibition Made in China: New Ceramic Works by Keiko Fukazawa, witty commentary on consumerism and patriotism in the People’s Republic. Like the Hammer, just enough museum. Walk to Farmers Market. Notice a billboard for Mad Old Nut. Notice how few people are walking on any given stretch of sidewalk. Browse in Farmers Market. Buy two apples at Farm Boy Produce. It must not be unusual for people to buy single pieces of fruit: they have napkins. Eat lunch at Lemonade. Ahi tuna, avocado and cherry tomatoes, beef with miso, chicken and kale, chicken with mozzarella and pesto, chili soup. A best-food tie with Roscoe’s and Simplethings. Go to Book Soup. Looking, not buying, is plenty of fun. Go to Magnolia Boulevard, Burbank, a street full of old furnishings and old clothes. Try on hats. Feel the weight of a 1940s(?) men’s coat. Looking, not buying, is plenty of fun. Be impressed by the array of books and supplies in The Writers Store. Screenwriters need brass fasteners, brass washers, and mallets. Go to Genghis Cohen for dinner. Something happened there to inspire the Seinfeld episode with James Hong. The food really does taste like the New York Szechuan of bygone days. Do Facetime with Ben. Watch the news. Give up. Watch Modern Family . Watch Flip or Flop . Have a glass of wine.

Learn about peripheral vision and flexibility. Go back to LAX. Hug.

Thank you, Rachel and Seth, for a wonderful four days in your city. We are fam-b-ly.


[A hydrant in Flattville, as seen in Google Maps. Thank you, hydrant, for giving us a place to stop and fix a flat.]

More things to do in Los Angeles
2014 : 2012

Another Henry report card

[Henry , March 30, 2016.]

Henry last received a report card on January 30. There must have been more frequent report cards Back Then.

If this panel were all that survived of today’s strip, one could still identify the floating object as a report card. The notch in the envelope’s edge is the giveaway. Trust me: I was a schoolkid, not Back Then, but Back Far Enough.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)