The Applicant--by Sylvia Plath

First, are you our sort of person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit--

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they'll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

Change My Life

Aww, Britt says it's the best Spoon cover he's ever heard.

http://dodge77.com/prequels/04%20Change%20My%20Life%20(Spoon%20Cover).mp3

Reading...

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower.
Get this book.
Just go get it.
Take yourself to the bookstore and physically get this. Get a muffin and coffee at some point too, make it a date you take yourself on.

Spiritual Journey

Spiritual journey. Epic fail.
"This is the first day of my new life," I said standing there on the early morning beach, hung the fuck over.
"I'll wade out and when the right wave comes, I'll dive under and let the water wash over me," I thought.
But knee deep I realized it was too cold for a cleansing. So I decided to walk instead. "Now" I declared to myself in real words, "Now I will find a special shell and will have a keepsake to commemorate the beginning of my new life."
But I walked a long way and couldn't find anything complete. I wanted a whole shell to represent, you know.
After walking a half mile I found a quarter-sized shard that was once the crown of a tiny whelk, only smoothed down. It looked a lot like a woman's breast. "This is something" and I picked that up.
A little further down I found a fragment from what I decided was a turtle egg. "Yeah, an egg shell is symbolic" and I picked that up.
But then I got depressed thinking how I would display these little things. I realized how pitiful they would seem to me laying on the dresser or in a wasabi dish or whatever.
Almost a mile in I threw them down and called it quits.

Lost Colony

By the time John White returned to Roanoke Island in 1590, an outer bank of what is now North Carolina, the colony was completely empty. Everyone gone. He found the word "Croatoan" scratched into a tree trunk.
20 years later, John Smith would form Jamestown. But my people were the Lost Colony.

The Rosebuds Live @ The Hot Freaks! Day Party.

Bath, NC

I've boarded the flight. It will be partly cloudy in New York, as usual. I am in the habit of taking note of when I'm about to physically or metaphorically fly into tumult. Give me only positive thoughts of little Jasmine when the layers of control and safety become friable, as they are surely about to.

In the airport, I saw an advertisement for a lifestyle in Bath, NC. Houses for sale. "Live in BATH!"
Indeed.
What a romantic idea--living in Bath.
Have me bathed in the Atlantic, in the Pamlico, in my childhood, in my real self, in my thinking and too-aware inner child, in my untouched inner self, the one that cannot be bathed. Scrub her, educate her, tame her hair but it's always the same. Huck Finn in Bath, new and modernized Bath, is still Huck Finn.

Nerd Business

In this pile: Motherless Brooklyn, The Bell Jar, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, The Theater and it's Double, Julius Caesar, Tolstoy: Confessions, Truck: A Love Story. Also: Assorted correspondence, four personal journals, rough drafts of some non-fiction and poetry, a rough draft for the new Rosebuds bio. This is what I did all day.

Niagara

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Life Like

Tour Cat

Pre-show bonding with St. Louis dreamboat.
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Pet Visit

Ivan visits with little orphaned dogs at the adoption fair. Somebody abandoned this little guy?!
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Letter to Frank Black

Mr. Frank Black…

Trying that on now—like you’re my mysterious confidante receiving my notes in a top-floor government office, but even though the office is super nice, the cut of your beautiful suit is the main story. Or you’re an agent at the American Embassy and I’m in a foreign prison, sending this to you in hopes that you’ll interpret all my secret meaning, decode all my metaphors and use them to convert all the English majors into revolutionaries, commandeer jet planes and bring hell and fury to my prison in such a terrifying way that I walk right out on my own and all the girls get to go back to school without having acid in their eyes.
You’re Black. You created that name, that idea. I’m late, of course, having been stuck on a dirt road when you decided on it. But I’m so down with it. Simpatico. Spinning new yarns for it. Black Francis, Frank Black, Francis Black Black Furor.
That last one has Black twice on purpose and you say it all together—one name.

Edge of Texas

Decamp. SxSW starts today and we need their sunshine.
We drove 14 hours yesterday through Mississippi--lush green grasses--so wet, waxy. Redbud trees in bloom.
Playlist:
Justin and Aaron "Big Red Machine"
MGMT "Electric Feel"
M. Ward "Let's Dance" live recording
Nina Simone "Just Like Tom Thumb Blues"
Pixies "Cactus"
Wes Phillips "Drop"
Clinic "Come Into Our Room"
Stanford U on itunes presents: "Her Husband" (the Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes creative partnership).

Youngest Nun

Today, for the first time, I went to Strand Bookstore in New York City. "Over 18 miles of books!" It's a huge bookstore and they have everything, but still, I think they're counting end-to-end.
For the most part, the pilgrimage went about how I thought it would--I shuffled around, peeking at the back covers, flipping through, sometimes teary-eyed, handling everything. I have to touch all the books so it takes a while. An hour in, there was a crazy goon in the back of the store, hunched, lodged into the literary criticism aisle I needed, just looking crazy and coughing on everything, mouth hanging open, arms unnecessarily long. As I picked up the Gonzo he hobbled over and picked up a Gonzo, breathing down my neck and right in the middle of my pilgrimage! Jesus. Could you just... could you stop being a hobo for a minute!? I'm making a nerdy dream come true here and I'm pretty sure you're farting right now.
I was going to call it quits then, but decided to check out the rare books floor first. I cruised around pretty quickly, only handling a Cartier jewelry book and a $900 fashion design book before I headed for the exit. But next to the elevator, in a case, I saw it! This first edition, inscribed copy of Infinite Jest. And I really wanted it, even though it was $400. If he hadn't killed himself, you could have just gone to the college where he taught and talked to him. Now it's all celebrity suicide situation and his stock is way up because now there's a finite number of these artifacts out there.
People getting more famous after death...
I thought about how Kafka, who had only published a little in his lifetime, left his friend Max Brod strict instructions to burn all his papers upon his death. But when Kafka died, the dude published everything instead--including The Trial and The Castle and all the parables. Or... John Kennedy Toole who never published anything before he killed himself. And then, years later, his mom submitted his manuscript for Confederacy of Dunces, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Wallace was different. He understood his success, even if it couldn't make him happy or fulfilled. He knew he would be considered a great man.

Bashfully, like the youngest nun on the team, I snapped this pic and slipped out.

SPIN Magazine featured our video!

Check our our new man trophy. When you get in SPIN, pretty much everybody gets one.

http://www.spin.com/articles/exclusive-rosebuds-go-huntin-humans

Reading Update

I've been taking several mini-breaks from Infinite Jest. Some because of travel and some because of exhaustion. Reading other material, even scholarly stuff, is a breeze compared to it. Let's see... Here's a recent list of books:
The Good Earth (my favorite this time of year)
Great Gatsby
Fathers and Sons
Lolita
Kafka on the Shore
a collection of Nabokov's papers/lectures
and this Georges Bataille work called Erotism: Death and Sensuality.

Erotism--about the history of eroticism. It's a translation of the 1957 edition and it's out on City Lights. I picked it up in San Francisco when we were there for Noise Pop last year because I've been toying with the idea of a scholarly paper on erotic literature. And maybe teaching it as a class, at some point.
I have lots of weird ideas.
Anyway, on the back cover, Foucault calls Bataille "one of the most important writers of the century." So, you know.
If you're gonna get into it, be warned. It's an all-star cast including old Sade.

Some brainstorming on Erotic Literature--the basic syllabus:
Anais Nin (diary + some fiction)
Henry Miller (slight eye roll)
Nabokov
Lawrence

What else? hmmmm. Any suggestions? These are for sure. I'm flexible after these I guess. But no romance novels or anything like that. Bleck.
No schmaltz.
I've cruised the collections on Amazon and what-not, which are mostly garbage.
We need real literature.

And out of this darkness we'll rush...

To the following songs: Cemetery Lawns, Get Up Get Out, Silence by the Lakeside, When the Lights Went Dim, Bow to the Middle...
You can be dance songs now. Just dance songs with a dark past instead of scary songs in an awful nightmare.

Love,
Kelly and Ivan