Loose Leaf Notes

1. “They only bomb carpets so it’s cool.”  –  Seen on Facebook after the last Republican presidential debate.

2. I still remember the first time I heard Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter.  It was read out loud by my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Golden.   I can viscerally recall how tense I was and scared for Peter, who couldn’t find the gate out of Mr. McGregor’s farm so that he could get back home.  It’s interesting that I was so affected by the story and that it has been a theme in my life. I have dyscalculia, am terrible with directions and get anxiety about being lost.

3. A few kidnapped words / don’t know where they belong / My body is a room / a poem must escape from.  – Read the rest of More Than a Ransom Note HERE.

4. “There’s so much of “place” in the world. There’s less time because the time has to be spread extra thin over all the places, like butter. So all the persons say “Hurry up! Let’s get going! Pick up the pace! Finish up now!” Ma was in a hurry to go “boing” up to Heaven, but she forgot me. Dumbo Ma! So the aliens threw her back down. CRASH! And broke her.”  – From the movie Room, spoken by 5 year old Jack on the big world and his mother’s break down after escaping a 10 x 10 room that they were held captive in.

5. Stanzas in poetry need to have a good “a-line-meant.”

6. While I was sick, earlier this week, some kind of delirium set in and my brain started to loop around the name of the author David Foster Wallace.  I was half asleep and couldn’t seem to remember all parts of the name or in the right order.  Sometimes I could remember the last name, but not the first, or the middle name and not the last.  It went on for too long.  The following day Joe was telling me about a new meditation passage he was memorizing and about the repetition of a mantra, and I said, “Oh, that reminds me. I have a new mantra too. It’s “David Foster Wallace.”

7. The next night we watched the movie, End of the Tour, about the Rolling Stone interview with Wallace (who was considered a genius) 12 years before he committed suicide.  Here’s a quote of Wallace talking about his depression:  It may be what in the old days was called a spiritual crisis or whatever. It’s just the feeling as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn’t function.

8. It’s funny how I first became aware of David Foster Wallace. It was through an internet analyzer in which you post a piece of your writing and receive a generated response of who you write like. Mine came up as Wallace, so I looked him up, watched some interviews and learned more about him.  Check it out HERE. 

9. After asking in last week Thirteen Thursday whose hairdo was weirdest ‘Trump’s or Warhol’s,’ I spent half an hour reading about Warhol’s wigs, which he used first to blend in and then to stand out, letting the wig sit on top of his head with his own hair sticking out at the bottom.  – Everything you wanted to know about Andy Warhol’s wigs but didn’t know you wanted to know is HERE. 

10. Another artist hoarder? Warhol was an incurable hoarder who filled his five-story brownstone with cheap watches, wigs and 610 ‘time capsules’ of balled up clothes, leaking Campbell’s soup cans and decayed orange-nut bread.  You can see his art, time capsules and more at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, where he grew up.

11. I just saw a PBS American Masters on Loretta Lynn and came to the conclusion that, as a songwriter, she was the Joni Mitchell of Country music, even though throughout the viewing of the show I thought she was June Carter Cash the whole time.

12. I found it fascinating that Lynn toured and recorded with Jack White and wrote feminist songs like “The Pill” that the country music stations wouldn’t play.

13. “In the long run, wolves make deer faster, more graceful, and alert. In the long run, hurricanes make oaks more powerful, and willows more supple. In the long run, it becomes obvious that our problems are our teachers. It’s a long run.”  – Facebook update from my Dharmacratic poet friend Will.

_____Thirteen Thursday