Joyeux Noël

Rose, and all of us here at slackersville Meander Knot Press wish you a happy Christmas and New Year!

Even if you don’t celebrate them, and we are not sure we do, those gift cards to Powell’s are still really really nice.

If you are here in Portland we will see you there tomorrow! All the “real” writers go to Powell’s on Christmas Day.

A Hobbit House?

I am so not a hobbit but I do love living in the neighborhood with them.

My elf name is Silmarwen Súrion.

Find out your Hobbit (or Elf) name here.

A Common Enemy

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 23

Last night Christian and I went to the Catholic Christmas celebration in a natural wooded Grotto called “The Festival of Lights.”

We got a white candle and lit it together and wished for all the big global things for the New Year, world peace, health and prosperity and good fortune for all, but we wished too that we would each have a better writing year.

I haven’t written a strong poem in months.

In a way I suppose it has to do with not being “in the game” anymore.

This year after my reading at Borders in March I withdrew completely from the local poetry “scene”.

The one thing that the snake pit did seem to do was get me so furious all the time and that fierce frustration and anger fueled my latent competitive nature and I would write to prove my work was better than…

You name it; I would try to prove my work was better than it.

Oh, not to mention the pathetic soap opera nature of a bunch of people, many with mental problems and addictions, pretending that they had something going on, going for them, the group delusion that with enough anger and enough raw unadulterated desire for recognition that one could make talent appear in places it will never go, a kind of calling for Mephistopheles to come to a place too insignificant to bother with or bargain with.

(One of the things we saw in the store full of Catholic “stuff” including fudge made by monks, was a really really bad statuette of Saint Michael smashing the Devil’s head. It is so much more beautifully portrayed here in Guido Reni’s Painting.)

I am not saying that there aren’t individuals in the local poetry scene that aren’t sticky with evil, because of course there are, but in the broad scheme of these things it is a tame backwater, stagnant and getting more foul.

Sometimes, someone young and talented will wade in and get snapped at by the turtles with their ancient wrinkled necks and insatiable libidos and appetites but mostly it is the same old folks caught in the whirlpool, getting sucked deeper and deeper into the muck, down down down the dark ladder.

Anyway, one thing I know is other then for brief and well-armored forays I am not going back. I must find some other form of inspiration.

Falling in love is good-the buzz-but there must be another way. I will ponder this today on my way to yoga class.

Luminous, the Two of Us

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 22

The sun is out. This is highly unusual.

I am having to wander around the ballroom to get the perfect angle so I can get my bare feet in a beam and my screen in shadow so I can see what I am doing.

Of course I am also wrapped in a blanket because it is freezing in here. I can almost see my breath. One of the guys that lives downstairs has hung his soggy doormat over the porch railing and it is steaming like pumpkin leaves on a frosty fall morning.

I saw these totally cool birds this morning. I am a city girl so I don’t know the names of birds but I would swear they were finches. They were small and fluffed up in the cold, had light green heads and these glorious black and white wings on a beige body. There were about 8 of them together at a birdfeeder and they had the sweetest little song.

From the library this week I picked up a CD by Leonard Cohen’s much younger girlfriend Anjani called “Blue Alert”. The words are fragments from his notebooks put together to make songs.

It is strange collaboration as it is hard to tell where Cohen ends and Anjani begins. Not really but sort of, as there is confusion about the gender of the voice speaking and the title song is about schoolgirls and their powerful siren song to older men.

I think maybe at some point Christian thought that I might be his Anjani but then he found out how high strung and weird about food I am and that I wasn’t going to be good at taking care of him.

He needs a combination fashion model, social worker whore maid with excellent even temperament, organizational ability, good taste and driving skills who loves to cook with lots of spices and fill out forms and has the patience of Job.

It ain’t me, babe.

I can barely pick up after myself.

It is weird because we really don’t go to that many movies together, two hours plus is a really long time for Christian to go without a cigarette when he is awake. But two we saw were “Road to Perdition” and of course we made a special pilgrimage downtown to see “Sylvia” on the day it was released.

The thing these movies have in common is Daniel Craig . And he is our new James Bond.

When we were walking home from seeing “Sylvia” Christian and I were horsing around acting out the “kissing” scene at the party where Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath met. Because of course in the back of both of our minds is the secret desire to have someone beautiful fall madly insanely in love with us upon encountering our work.

Someone willing to take care of us, all those nasty little details of everyday living like calling the insurance company and paying the bills.

So we saw the Bond movie yesterday. During the scene at the spectacular hospital/sanitarium on the coast in Montenegro where are hero and heroine are recovering from their evil night of torture and having lots of sex, Christian whispered to me, “You should go there!”

Indeed I should. Think of the poems I could bring home.
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