GIOVANNI AND LOCKWOOD PERFORMING KARAOKE

Dear Senior Burns,

My brain pan is full. Total bottle-necked. Words and tunes and even the color palettes from Archie comic books. Jack White said his brain was "pancake batter". Mine feels like something that needs a good wringing. And that's what I'm doing here: wringing for the spending. You might hear more from me in the weeks to come. I'm working on a thing -- or half a dozen things -- but I'm too mentally impacted to whittle down the particular notions. Thanks for the space, Burns. 

NIKKI AND ALICE

Imagine my shame yesterday upon realizing I am reading Alice Walker and Nikki Giovanni in the month of February. Not planned! No calendar agenda! After reading three of Giovanni's poetry collections last year, Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet (1971) -- an actual prose anthology -- hit the top of my 2021 list. And then, to celebrate Alice Walker's birthday on February 9, I went to my shelf to choose a title of hers I had not read. The Color Purple (1982) won. Black History Month proved only a coincidence. If we determine ourselves to read good writers and big thinkers and wild voices we will -- effortlessly -- consume more consistently from the wheel of human experience. That's been my goal in all my literacy, and my curiosity naturally whips me out into unexpected spaces, riding shot-gun with long-winded storytellers I need frequent pit-stops to ask contextualizing questions, to situate my own gravity into what they're laying on me. It's easy to get stuck into singular narrative grooves, but it's just as easy to suit up the pugs, walk to the creek, and ask personal resources which questions have failed to find responsive satisfaction. You do that a few times and eventually a name / an image / a time surfaces. And that's where you'll spend the next week or two. 

This made me genuinely giddy today:

"It's difficult to define a honkie. We all remember zombie movies, the big, black, dead things under the bidding of the evil scientist moving around in the jungles of Haiti or some island (it is always an island) hating themselves for what they are but powerless to put their bodies down to rest. Generally an ugly honkie women, which of course is redundant, comes along who is taken to the zombie hideout and Wild Bill Hickok in safari hat and bush jacket follows her, finds the secret of how to kill the zombie (how can you kill something already dead?) and runs back to civilization. Now, the zombie is drink. You order it when you really want to tie one on. Wouldn't it be marvelous if we could run to the neighborhood bar and say, 'Give me a double honkie on the rocks, Sam,' and have the bartender pour something into a mixer and shake it up? Something needs to shake up the honkie."   -- Nikki Giovanni, from Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on my First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet (1971), pgs. 122-123

Giovanni possesses two voices I now know: her modern voice of celebration -- love and family and friendship and food -- and her younger revolutionary voices. She's the writer who's lived a full life across reams of years. Celebrations of music and art abide alongside her fisted revolutionary call, while anger towards violence, towards silence, towards apathy bubbles alongside her gladness for unexpected "old age". We live in the age of algorithms where people are too easily defined, labeled, made completely expository to themselves. And the true sadness is that, in such, we have become people who are far less curious than merely distracted, so much so that we believe at any moment we know what is right and who we are how we do (would) and do not (would not) fit into moments we possibly will never encounter. Giovanni contains the evidence of evolution -- latter years foreshadowed in youth while youth swirls still in latter years. 

God forbid I feel even once arrived.

CONSUMPTION
Latonya decided recently to watch her way through the Marvel Cinematic Universe via Disney+. Dadgum you, Disney+! Three films elude the full list. Today we determined to find those three films without the use of online shipping and handling options. 

We started at Half-Price Books. She found The Incredible Hulk (2008). I found the walking journals of John Muir, a handsome $3 copy of Freud's The Ego and the Id, and Patricia Lockwood's second poetry collection Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals. 

Next at a Game X-change, we found a double-DVD set of two Spider-Man movies (titles irrelevant) and a stash of old Archie comics from the '70s. I nabbed a Reggie's Joke Book for $2 because the cover art looked like classic Dan Decarlo -- and no one can have too many Dan Decarlo drawn Archie titles.

Afterwards, I rented a table at Barnes and also purchased Patricia Lockwood's newest novel No One Is Talking About This, published February 16. 

Count me a happy man if these were the only titles I read until and through and even a bit past Spring Break. Glory, glory!

PATRICIA LOCKWOOD

Patricia Lockwood writes like a woman who has never endured the indignity of her feet touching terra firma. What her sentences lack in logic they pad deep with humor. What her eyes see on mere surfaces is the oily sheen of many reasons people microdose hallucinogens. She strikes me as the bird-watcher who never looks up, who searches the ground instead for peckable delicacies and talon-proofs and back-door splatters rather than the majesty of wing-span and mating ritual. I can dig it. I read her to infuse my own eyes with the lack of gravity.

IN CLOSING
My friend Myles does a (much better) thing like this in which he ends with a triptych of ingestion methods (via various orifices) for art and ideas:

READING -- Walker's The Color Purple (troubling), Giovanni's Bicycles: Love Poems (charming), and Charlotte Bronte's Wuthering Heights (WTFing)

WATCHING -- This week I saw the live action Mulan for the first time. I grew verklempt more than Disney intended or predicted.

LISTENING -- I just ordered the new reissue of PJ Harvey's influences-on-her-sleeve-LP Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, which I woke this morning hankering to pour directly into my ears. So I did. Hers may not be the first voice I want to feast upon in the morning, but it worked as magically as marshmallow chunked ed cereal for breakfast. While typing here I previewed the new Harikari For The Sky record, Maere, which sounds like shoegaze after Jagermeister-spiked-espresso shots. Sad and angry, chunky but fluid -- the sonic attitude of Nikki Giovanni and Patricia Lockwood performing karaoke together. 

PS. Today I am 27 months sober from booze. Perhaps I should have led with that. Being here in the first place is my leading with that.