The last fine day. It dawned today dankly raining, but by midmorning and my coffee pilgrimage there was sunlight, intermittently, and a warming breeze from the south. We won't get many, or any, more afternoons like this (the wire reindeer in the yard across the street, lit now in the dusk, nods at me in agreement), and I'd have felt wrong not honoring it with a long walk. I headed down Lincoln, from Addison to Diversey, then back up Sheffield. Flat, purple-bottomed cumulus passed me, heading north in a gauzily blue atmosphere: now isolated, entangled in the bare treetops; now massed in a great shield over the western third of the sky. I hooked my jacket over my shoulder for no doubt the last time this year, and wondered if I seemed insolently unoccupied to people with jobs. On a yellow signobard hung over a Kabbalah center, the kind that accepts rows of black plastic letters, I read:

POWER OF
KABBALAH CRSE
SEPT 20

which I think was advertising a (sadly outdated) cruise having to do with Kabbalah—strange as that sounds, since the alternative, announcing Sept. 20 as the date when the power of a Kabbalah curse was to have been revealed, seems even more alarming. I was drawn into Powell's by a window display of Green Integer books: I didn't know the imprint, but the small, almost square volumes looked inviting somehow; I thought of the Big Little Books I read as a kid. I hesitated over a couple of the volumes inside—I always hesitate over book purchases, regardless of my financial condition. I wondered whether I didn't instead want a copy of Blackwell's German/English edition of Wittgenstein's Philosophische Untersuchungen: I read a bit, reminded pleasantly (a) that my German is still pretty serviceable, in spite of neglect, (b) that German philosophy reads a lot better in the original than in translation—even read imperfectly, with the aid of a trot. I was also reminded that I've never managed to sustain enough interest to make it through more than about ten pages of Wittgenstein, and that the desire to improve my grounding in the philosophy of language hadn't exactly gotten stronger in the years since I left grad school and teaching.

For five bucks, I picked up a copy of Suicide Circus, a volume of selected poems by the Russian Futurist Alexei Kruchenykh, who I'd heard of (though only as a name mentioned in connection with Mayakovsky) but had never read and knew almost nothing about. I was sold by these lines, from The Lacquered Leotards:

Only the first buzz of blood is scary.
Later we relish it
like a viscous wine
and the hand
of rakes won't tremble pressing against the craggYcheek!
In distraction, like young potatoes,
crumble and launch into separation
on their bottom.

No poet ever reads other poets innocently. I'm always looking for mojo to steal—an exuberant surrealism does the trick better than anything else. (I'm slowly working my way sequentially through Frank O'Hara's collected poems, reading a few every night before bed. What I wouldn't give to have that fluidity and ease in my own writing!) We'll see if Kruchenykh has stuff I can use.

posted by michael  4:52:42 PM  
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