DEWCLAW COVER
Stephanie has been working on the cover for the next issue of Dewclaw. It’s going to be a great issue, you’ll see.
AYN RAND MADE AYN RAND
Ayn Rand loved a golden bath where she signed her name
Her name was made of reinforced concrete
When she thought of her life, her mind moved to each level of the plan
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Ayn Rand had her own way of wanting
It was the American industrial model partly owned by Henry Ford
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Why are we so attracted to money as if it were a bright room?
Ayn Rand’s dead body was displayed beneath a 6-foot dollar sign made of flowers–
$$$gloom$$$
Ayn Rand knew that the word “money” does not come from the Latin term for “empty” until you are alone with money in an empty room. She knew money is a metonym for money, and by this mechanism, really screws with your face
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Yet Ayn Rand was totally objective
When Ayn Rand saw Ayn Rand, she was an orthogonal street grid with park-like green spaces
Ayn Rand included many levels, at the top of which Ayn Rand waited beneath soaring, cantilevered roof lines
for the man version of Ayn Rand, a sixty-story cruciform skyscraper
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When some others looked at Ayn Rand, they saw a frigid megalomaniacally-scaled negation of Ayn Rand
And for this, Ayn Rand deserves our deepest sympathies
Ayn Rand made her name every day. It was all that she could do about the tensions of democratic life
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(Another poem in the Poems for Capitalists series I’m working on. Also added to MONEY.)
BILL BLASS GAVE MONEY A BREEZY LOOK
Light trapped in money gives off a sentimental feeling. A yacht, a Saturday, a fluffy omelet. A diamond rock on a thin hand guiding a rudder tells us nothing about the other hand.
Light trapped in money gives off a scientific feeling. It is light raised to the power of light. This is basic economics.
Bill Blass saw the light coming from inside money. Back then he was in the American ghost army.
When he got famous, Bill Blass believed in every day. He designed a suit for the ways a woman could behave. A woman could walk quickly. A woman could sit sexy on her bare legs and still have some legs left over to run a business. When the gel in her hair caught the light it gave off a quick sheen and Bill Blass understood how this was American.
I gave Bill Blass the Ford Motor Company. He sewed little anchors to the upholstery. The anchors held everything the same.
Fashion mixes interiors and exteriors. When Bill Blass had an idea he watched her hurry into an office building in the revolving manner of ideas.
Money knows how to mimic anything. Trapped inside money, light acts like a copy machine. This effect of light is known in Hollywood as atmosphere. Atmosphere makes the dummies in the distance seem more realistic.
The scream that seems to be coming from the distance really is coming from you. This is called sonic deception. Bill Blass knew this after he got famous. The ghost army got busy making fashion. The economy meant he already was where he was going.
Light trapped inside money becomes anything. It is the deer that laughs at the bullet, then acts like nothing has ever happened.
(from WE WERE ETERNAL AND GIGANTIC, which will be published by Magic Helicopter Press in April.)
“I CAN NO LONGER DEFINE THE BOUNDARIES OF MY BODY”
I’ve been thinking about being small, weak–what this means when you’re in a mall. One night I realized that my favorite writers might all be small, I mean physically. The store for “petites” was crowded. I don’t know why I went in–I’m average. My body was tangling in the cord of my iPod, and then the battery died. When I got back to work, the cord looked like a map of where I’d been.
Matter in another universe has a kink that keeps it from going crazy.
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It is as if the more passive, noncommittal, and self-absorbed the figure, the more “dominion” it exerts over the space around it. [.]
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“I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can’t define where I begin and where I end, becuase the atoms and molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall, and all i could detect was this energy, energy”
“because I could no longer define the boundaries of my body I felt enormous and expansive”
“this was perhaps my moment of transition”
“I remember thinking there was no way I’d be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body”
(Jill Bolte Taylor in a talk she gave about having a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain.)
NIL DESPERANDUM
An example of white space.
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I like Mike Young’s answer to the question “What creates likable, memorable characters?” (2nd question to the end)
You can think of light as a particle and you can think of it as a wave. I don’t know what reality is, so it’s difficult for me to talk about mimesis. (Though I do sometimes.)
I’ve been thinking about something I heard a Buddhist call “feeling tone”.
Like, …”How do we know when a person is present?” (Allen Grossman via Kate Greenstreet’s blog.)
I’ve been looking at pictures of details someone else has sewn. I’ve also begun to cross-stitch a space ship from Captain Forever.
The Bellamy quilt. See if you can recognize the bit of sheet music. Nobody knows what it is.
WE WERE ETERNAL AND GIGANTIC
That’s the name of my chapbook, and it will be published by Magic Helicopter Press in April.
I actually had a dream about a magic helicopter a few weeks ago–I used it to get to dinner, which was in a cloud.
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Later this year Mud Luscious will publish my story, The Lost Body Projected, in the form of a short, stapled book, and they’re having a sale right now. Each chapbook is $2. This sale will go on all week.