Commute from Nada Gordon on Vimeo.
In her Segue reading on January 16, Mónica de la Torre wrestled with workday alienation with wit and authority. 
She read a piece based on a work of Martin Kippenberger that I think was called “The Hot Seat” (although a Google search turns up nothing, so maybe I am mistaken). It began with statements about jobs that implied or mentioned hierarchies. There were interview-type questions that began with “have you,’ and then descriptions of physical positions one takes in office situations, as well as what seemed like job application letters or interview responses.
“My position is sssh””
“My English is not very well”
“My English is not good and it is badly to heard.”
essential shtetl of the world stage
uncertainty’s cool relaxing harness
my sklls/ my shit/ the shit
what can’t be said can’t be said, and it can’t be whistled either
the song about desire always wants to disappear
our devious monad ways
having identified the shit, the shit you can’t say shit about
the terror of enjoyment is too damn good
I sail the dark water of the mind by rocket ship
I get preoccupied with the tonal situation
you have to wait for the sound of the theory of sound
Purpurated habitually: this delicate lunge.
Mellowly dramatic sparrows on my fluffed-up heartbeat.
The forge.
Reality went all glib and masturbatory…like difficult money.
The poetry should TEAR UP the space (as a kind of scrounge). Right?
Ampling into a rough and beautiful future, not ignoring plumes.
Let me hold you as a hypnotized tongue.
Torrent of vibrant nos in the decorative blame arcade.
I couldn’t sleep at all last night: like a fabric swan.
And on that weirdness now I lay my weary curls.
Outfit blogging returns at the request of Jill Bohn, beautiful mother of Gary Sullivan and therefore beautiful mother-in-law to me. Today I am wearing black Docs (so often pictured in this series), super-warm lavender glitter tights, sort-of-Lolita schoolgirl skirt in lime plaid with black tulle underlayer, and purple and black warm items on top. The feline presence in the upper photo is Dante, who is lamentably huge but very very sweet.
Quoting myself in a moment of facebook indignation today:
People say "fuck Flarf" for various reasons, I think: 1) a general snottiness regarding 'the contemporary' 2) a resentment of the overall good time we seem to be having and our feel-good kumbaya closed-group identification 3) as an expression of received opinions to try to cement solidarity in united disdains 4) as a way to reify their own "gravity" and "seriousness" and hence "importance" 5) because they genuinely don't like the work, but they have actually read enough of it to earn the right to say so. Of all of these responses, I respect only the last.
encountered many odd people today
the young johnny depp-like guy (long hair, good cheekbones & physique)sitting next to me at the Good Stuff Diner who kept moaning to himself and fidgeting.... I saw him take out a pack of cold pills and down one, in addition to drinking THREE ice coffees in the brief time that I sat there. he kept blowing his nose loudly into a napkin and then tossing the napkin, unfolded, on the table... he was so fidgety from all the stimuli, hardly ate his bagel and lox, although he kept spreading the cream cheese around... and then he was on his cell phone, telling someone he would pay back some money
also a tiny Muslim man in the 14th st. station, as much as six inches shorter than me, which would make him 4'5", in white kameez and wool jacket, with jaunty astrakhan cap on his head
in the same station, possibly homeless? guy in orange jacket who came up to me and asked me if I was an artist because I was holding a giant palette. I said no, I mean yes, I am, but these are tiles... the palette was covered with small glass tiles... showroom samples I found on 15th st. outside the tile store; they must have been discarding old stock... other odd people: a man with an accent that sounded, I don't know, maybe Greek? and a walking stick kept saying "look at all these beautiful tiles, just look at them! look at this blue! just like water!" and another woman, also picking through the tiles eagerly... of course I got in on the act
and in my eagerness got a giant BLOOD BLISTER on my little finger...
well, this evening was Fellini-esque somehow...
A chapbook came in the mail, just the other day: “Tooth Fairy,” from Brandon Brown. I read it yesterday and today on my miserable little commute: it was just what I needed. I identified. I laughed. I didn’t cry, exactly, except maybe a little, you know, “inside.” Because of the identification-about-workaday-alienation thing, and because there was some leftover crying from the photos in the NY Times of the Haitian immigrant who went to his local representative’s office seeking information about his family in Port-au-Prince. In the first photo he is sitting at a desk, looking rumpled and worried; in the next, he is collapsed on the floor, being given water to drink from a Styrofoam cup, having learned that his wife and three children had died. Oh… unimaginable…
It’s maybe not properly Adorno-ian to say that poetry is a consolation, but isn’t it? What do people who don’t need poetry need instead (I mean, those people who are fortunate enough not to be the victims of disastrous upheavals in poor and crowded cities in developing countries)? How can they not need it?
I have a great need, desperate really, to fall into other people’s rhythmic insights and imaginations. And Bro can WRITE. The poems are robust, snappy, galloping, taking off from O’Hara, sure, but liberally seasoned with wry resentment and amusing obvious Freud-ish equations of feces and money. There is also a lot of corn in this book, literal corn (BB is Midwestern, after all), and also some figurative corn, but it is so hi-quality that it might be better characterized as wit. Other recurring themes: snot, coke, bills, and lack.
There are lots of great lines, but they are better not isolated out of the poems, which, like the posts on BB’s blog, have a wonderful forward-moving energy. If you go to his blog you can order a copy (and for $10 you will get two more chapbooks besides). I recommend that you do.
"And having on one occasion said in her hearing that M. de Charlus has at that moment a warm regard for a certain person, I was astonished to see appear in the Princess’s eyes that momentary change of colour, like the line of a fissure in the pupil, which is due to a thought which our words have unconsciously aroused in the mind of the person to whom we are talking, a secret thought that will not find expression in words but will rise from the depths we have stirred to the surface – altered for an instant – of his gaze."
Faye Dunaway
Albert Schweitzer
Yukio Mishima
Dana Ward
Sue Lyons
Ariane Trelaun
and me (here in purple birthday suit)!
I was making some tuna melts
for my love and I last night
and of course as soon as the can opens,
"your new name is Buttercup Banana
Breath." Beauty has a big butt that jiggles
like two fluffy pillows. Disco's nicknames are:
"Growly Pants", "Disco Duck", "Madman" & "Mr. Fluffy Butt"
I call my boyfriend disco because I have a things for rabbits
and the sound of a cane hitting a young fluffy schoolgirls butt
in a rhythmic way. Even the hackle tips by stroking the hackle fibers
toward the butt of the feather a woman once asked me
to take off my pants I'm a fluffy green kitty.
Is the word “fluffy” modifying “penis” or … “butt poo”
stuck in the fur of a Sassy Witch Fluffy Butt Tutu
in black and purple happy kittens which is a change
from zombie-like ooze-creatures? I would say that Tinky
has a cute little tiny fluffy butt but I've also caught Horatio
trying to bury a poo in a Fluffy Bunny Butt Fuzzy Nutter
Butt Piddle Butt Mayonnaise. Slice and cube pork butt
removing gland. I will miss your funny bark ("BURF").
Then, if the feather is fairly large and the fronds are fairly long,
the first thing you should do is discard all the junky,
fluffy stuff around the butt. Princess Purr-a-lot
loves to ride my shoulder, usually with his fluffy butt
on my ear for stability, and Elvis’ Monkey Butt Cupcakes
start to give screams in the rhythm of the cane.
D = gidget E = crusty F = greasy G = fluffy H = cheeseball
J = honker K = butt L = brain M = tushie N = chunks O = hiney
Floofy means fluffy, as in a very floofy tail;
Số liệu thống kê của Ms. Fluffy Butt.
Found out from my doc today that my thyroid is terribly overactive, has been maybe for months. No wonder I *can't calm down.* Looking forward to adjusted dosage, and remembering how to relax... but also worrying about SLACKING OFF or GAINING WEIGHT. The worry itself, of course, is thyroid-related. At the mercy of the little gland as always.
Apologies to those to whom I may have behaved obnoxiously, overeagerly, irritably, etc.
Should I reformat Ululations so that the post column is wider?
Are you sick of purple?
Any other design crits or suggestions?
What would you like to see more of or less of on this blog?
Any requests?
Quite wonderful readings yesterday from Judith Goldman and Adam Pendleton. 
Judith Goldman
Believe it or not, I had never seen Judith read before. As a reader she was precise and performative inside the work without seeming in the slightest bit stagey or rehearsed, so really "inside" the work. She did many voices: extreme tentativeness, girlish upspeak, artauldian drama queen, pidgin pimp. She didn't waste time with a preamble, thank goddesses, why can't more poets figure that out? Bits of speech: "as a matter of fact, I don't feel so well." Her tour de force was a piece that adopted the prosody of Jay Z and applied it to the name of Pamela Anderson Lee. Poe found its way in: "bells bells bells bells/ taco bells." Judith's actual voice has a very sweet quality that contrasted nicely with the broad parodies and borrowings of the poem. Just great, really. She also read from the "The Dispossessions." It was earthy/strange/angry-lyrical and sort of misandrous (look it up!) and it kept mutating:
[in pidgin voice] "very good for fuck"
"giving your soft globs/ what you shove down to be"
"every other second horse"
"scrambling into soft globs"
"every man fuel for a flare of fucking people over"
"it won't take long""queening into his eggs tighter, tighter"
"my erogenous zones used as a kind of formal language."
Adam Pendleton
Adam Pendleton, a mutli-media artist for whom Thom Donovan gave a very useful introduction, posted here, read a piece that addressed and critiqued the avant-garde literary practices of the last century. It was elaborately structured, maybe even Fibbonaci'd (which seems likely since Ron Silliman was featured in the work as both source text and "character" of sorts). Adam described the structure as a kind of "Chinese box." Source authors included Silliman (recognizably "Ketjak" & "Sunset Debris"), Scalapino, the 1916 dada manifesto, Baraka's black dada manifesto, what seemed to be a contract for a performance piece, and I think some others. Afterward, Cole Heinowitz asked him why he had used those texts, and he mentioned that he had composed the piece on vacation in Paris and that those were the books he happened to have with him. That struck me as a very lovely sort of extemporaneous constraint. He used the texts as base material that he then torqued into other perspectives, some of which may actually be "his." Some lines:
"the performance must be done on location"
"I want a very beautiful man"
"irradiates the day with a milky glow"
"she was a unit in a bum space" [sound familiar?]
"architecture is bound to situation"
"I need a prick in my mouth/ I need an explanation"
"white dada remains in the framework of Euroopan wekaness"
"I want a man with long eyelashes/ white wings of a magpie"
"In part, we grew by looking back at you."
This last was very interesting especially given that Adam is gay and black, and while there were plenty of gay listeners in the audience, the only other recognizably black person in the room was the be-dreadlocked man who took the money at the door. Who is "we"? Indeed.
Glory from Nada Gordon on Vimeo.
Gary nixed this as our New Year's song, but please sing it to yourself for your entertainment:
Blue Moon, you saw me rhythmically nasal,
Without a dream in my metagalactic ballet skirt,
Without a rubberlike grass-form,
Blue moon, windowed gender and nephews,
You heard me thrumming the squid for for,
Someone I really could frustrate,
And then there suddenly appeared before me,
Someone my tepid gurgles could curl,
I heard you whisper "yieldable mole-heads,"
And when I looked the vintage gynarchy had turned to gold,
Blue moon, now I'm no longer Hebraic mackerel,
Without a honk in my cuddle bunny,
Without a whimmy misgrowth of silence of my own.
And then a moisturized schmuck suddenly appeared before me
The only one my trembling thingammy will ever hold
heard somebody whisper please bifork noctiflorous chickadees
And when I looked the moon had turned to fistuliform instabilities
Blue moon
Now I'm no longer an uncombed inhaler of impersonation
Without a monoglot bullfinch in my heart
Without an imaginary Koran of my own
Blue moon
Now I'm no longer pluralistically squamulose
Without a hair powder in my heart
Without a minified horse drawing of my own
