Monthly Archives: December 2009

-You start to think of your morning ashtanga programme as your “cooling” practice. -You see idiosyncracies in the script—exhortations to lock out the knee so hard it bends backwards, specifications of an upturned palm with “Imagine the hand is full of money, so much money,” grammatical errors such as “pull more harder” and the dropping […]

Went out Saturday night with four junior professors—good looking, well dressed and profusely published. I like Humanities people: they’re well read and spoken, hyper-reflective, pleasantly cynical, and know how to choose books and order wine. Funny – I guess if interpretation is your stock in trade, you’re likely to take your own emotions hyper seriously. […]

Greetings from Middle Earth. Don DeLillo is everywhere. I drove in to Phoenix/Scottsdale, the romantic apocalypse of his Underworld and the site where a rescued couple builds a beautiful life out of the desert. Echoing the “they made salads” that he uses elsewhere to signal halcyon days, in Arizona, “they made bookshelves.” So too my […]

I’m listening to a fast-moving freight train that slices Marfa from the surrounding deserts. The others have gone out drinking; and I am in this spare, modern house trying to calm down since I’ve been awake for 20 hours. Everyone keeps saying it’s cold: temperatures vary from the sixties down to the teens within a […]

Sitting in my old autoshop on Santa Monica Boulevard, while the Honda gets its spine adjusted and lymph cleansed. On the fiberglass chair beside me a pile of exams – final grades signed, sealed and delivered. Yesterday my least woo-woo friend, Greta, hugged me on the Palisades and said Your drive across the country is going […]

Deluge continues. It’s fine. It’s pouring on the pyramidal skylights. A mad crow attacked one of those windows on the new moon last month, so a bit of the deluge is dropping on to the floor. Down at the Masonic Temple, where we’ll meet for dance and I’m worried there will be some departure ritual […]

Separation from god, separation from Los Angeles. Same difference. I’ve been looking at the pithy definitions of depression. Spinoza called it a recognition of the ego’s loss of power. Most of the mystics after him called it alienation from the divine. Your shrink calls it a treatable chemical malfunction. Your teacher says it's an opportunity […]

Explanations change. A long time ago in ashtanga years, a woman on her cycle was dirty. Shamed in to second class status and a sense that her body was profane, she was all out shunned on certain days of the month. Signs were posted. Don’t compromise us with your stink. Don’t profane our rituals – […]