Good Medicine Reading Company

No, it's not the name of the press I want to start someday, so if you're out there, and you want to start a press, take that title. I'm fine with that. It's yours. Just make me chief editor, 'k?

H has come up from Tejas to visit. She came for heart-head clearing fun before settling into the groovy flow of her disseration (once she clears a few points up with her committee about just who owns this project [her] and where she going [not academia]). The details are hers to share/not. Find out at The Wood Report. ANYway, her visit has bonked some stuff loose.

We saw Eddie Izzard's Stripped at the Orpheum, which got the happyhappy endorphins rolling. No spoilers here for those of you still checking to make sure you know where your tics are, that you didn't wake up and forget to go to the show, and similar. Eddie Izzard is good for you and tastes better than tofu. I will that while I laughed hard and my face hurt afterwards, I did not quite get my comedy rocks off, but I am spoiled on that front RE: Eddie in particular. May the rest of the performances go better for Eddie and for you.

So, there was some real, like, JOY. And maybe the planets are dancing more elegantly, or more robustly, but M has cheered up in recent days, and though the You Can't Grasp It complexity of my non-conformist family's material life is really beyond even our ken at this point, I have come to the firm and warm observation that It Is Going To Be Fine.

The poetics book is going to go live a good life. M and I are going to keep on keepin on in the way we do, and with more laughing, for however long we will it so. H is going to rock her badass self into a PhD and then go teach bright-souled underpriviledged high school students and make all manner of Art. Lioness as received actual spiritual grace, in my presence, and came to stay with me in order to get it and start processing it. So, also, there is grace. In this case, it bumped Wonder Twin rings with a tree and a 66 Mustang and took the form of a heart.

H and I wandered STL today -- poking around, eating, marveling, lamenting in the city's jawdropping potential and utter refusal to go for it. Like, M told me that STL, which has no less than FOUR children's hospitals, also has the highest infant mortality rate in, like, practically the US (for urban areas, I think, haven't googled it yet). Which just says that lots of immigrant, poor, young, and otherwise marginalized moms are not going to/getting in/staying at these marvelous warm-fuzzy hospitals. !!! Because that should not be hard to fix. Because there is enough.

Now, this gets me to the Medicinal Reading part: At Left Bank Books, I did what I do. Purchased books. One on serendipity, one on robust democracy based on systems and assumptions of plenty (note: Not the system in which we currently sleepwalk), and Jorie Graham's new book o poems. (eeeeyayayayayay!) Now, if you know me, you can read this map. If you don't, you don't read this blog, but I'll explicate anyhow.

I needed a reminder about serendipity. I used to trust it with my whole entire soul. I could read signs and hear Comos whispering like nobody nowhere ever. I watched Lioness trust it for about a week in person, then some via the Interweb. Underneath grocking it all mentally, I was like, "Th'hell is going on?" It was like I, who once spoke serendipity fluently, had a rail road spike in my head and couldn't understand a word of it. I mean, I could, I knew it was a language -- I just didn't feel it anymore. OH MY SWEET MOTHER OF ALL GODS! Who am I? Well, I'm the gal who jumped a sick life like a sinking firey boat, that's who. And serendipity had a lot to do with that. And yes, it's a Deepak Chopra book, and back off. I need the reminder. I forgot who I am. So, there's some medicine. It's called The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire. Go read it. I mean, with that title, how could you not? (there's science in it, for you materialists have not yet gathered the spiritual implications of recent theoretical physics and some very innerestin' experiments with light and stuff)

Then, I found this book by Frances Moore Lappe, and why in the wide world have I never heard of her, and why didn't any of you Tell Me She Exists???!!! Holy cow. It's called Getting A Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in A World Gone Mad. If you have also been deprived of familiarity with this woman, rectify that situation immediate-ly. It's a users manual, it's a deconstruction, it's a workbook, it's written this amazing tone that assures you that indeed the world and your future are utterly managable and imaginable, and that completely avoids complaint. She's like, "Sure it's nuts, but at the very same moment we have every tool and resource we need to make it (everything) right, and so here we go." The jacket calls it a vibrant, intimate voice. Nah. The voice is bemusedly assured that "making a world we can be proud of" is quite simply on offer. It is confident and encouraging.

Whaaaaah!? No bitchin and moanin? No initerminable Age of Critique!? Really? I'm in.

If I don't get a job a Nifty Lib Arts College, I am calling her up. I am going to work with these people. Serendipity-do. There is an organization on earth that essentially jives with everything I dream and want, but that does not cater/market to deepening the souls of the rich because then we gurus can be rich (a thing that has bugged the living fuck out of me about Ken Wilber and frankly kept me arm's length there -- not that money is bad, just that not making your wisdom Affordable, really, dude, bugs the fuck out of me), and might spare me the soul-killing that kind of ground level work that people like Lioness have the tungsten for an' I don't. I was just talking to H about that today, how I have gifts, but the one I would need for That Work, I don't have. Get too pissed off too fast in there. Would end up eating my own head for lunch, maybe with side of slaw and two fifths of Jameson everyday until liver failure. Really. I've seen me sadly astounded just at students who hamstring themselves by not doing the Learning part of being a student. I can't handle a whole lot of that particular texture of failure/refusal, from either end.

I'm not proud of this. It's just the case, is all. And I know that writing about difficult poets is not going to really change the world, not practically.

She, Lappe, knows what I rattle on about in my poetics book: all (nearly all) previous notions of love/desire/gender/society/economics (and poetry, and ...) have been based in LACK. This is complete and utter unfactual bullshit. It is despicable and poison. (whew, that was a nice sentence. yeep!) Plenty, and wonder, and extra, and here have some of mine are right here and let me show you how reading poetry that way changes the game ha-ha. Hence also the Murdoch project. As we all know from the many less-fun to read posts about said. Have been wandering my corner of the earth saying this for, well, my whole adult life. I don't mean this in that "I thought it first" competitve way. I mean it in the HEY! LOOK! FRIENDS! way.

AND, Jorie has a new book out. Sea Change. I read one poem from it while sitting at Dressel's waiting for yet more rain and KNEW that Never and Overlord and Sea Change are a trilogy. Other critics who have jobs I want will say this, but you saw it here first. In the way that I now, abruptly, see that End of Beauty and Region are a pair, and Materialism, The Errancy, and Swarm are a set as well. And I do mean this in the I said it first way.

Good Medicine, Reading, Company. All of these for you as well.