P.F.S. Politics in Six Minutes

Curious about P.F.S. politics? Take six minutes and find out. 

 

from Something Solid: Aughts Philly: The Studio

The vista which then opened was one I never
could’ve anticipated in the Nineties— the PAFA
campus was set as a series of jeweled buildings
smack in the center of Center City Philadelphia,
a few blocks from City Hall. Mary was then still
in enough good standing to maintain her own
studio on campus. I had to sign in as a guest on
the ground floor every time I visited. The room
was a large rectangle, & the elongated back wall
was one big window, looking out on the western
progression of Cherry Street, towards Broad. Until
Mary & Abby, I had no fixed notions of painting;
now, I dived in with the frisson of one let loose in
a wonderland. Everything about Mary was magical

to me, & the canvases arrayed around the studio,
largely male nudes, recumbent or not, plugged into
Mary’s fascination with classical mythology, & made
a case for Mary as a Don Juana, a seducer of men.
Heady stuff, & often Mary’s tales were about men
who had posed for her. Vertiginous, but I was on
the verge, nonetheless, of a full-on love affair, maybe
marriage, to a women powerful enough to be called
a Creatrix, a female goddess in the world, & I knew
it. Sleeping with Mary meant something it never could
with others; rather than a mere palliative, if you could
get her to put out in the studio, you were plugging into
a mythological web, glistening & intricate, stitching
yourself, possibly, into history, & the come was in color—

LTDM (Letters to Dead Masters): #38

        John,

       On a day to day basis, more and more artists, semi-artists, and pseudo-artists are migrating to the Grind. Sitting not too far away, a group of three intent on being theater impresarios. They’re talking funds and grants. Having never received a grant, I have nothing to contribute to their conversation. I do know this: as the years go by, I get more impatient with the material demands of daily life. It’s enough to make me desire some kind of permanent grant, just for one less thing to worry about. I’m already gnawed at by impatience— the sense (call it the Faust sense) that there’s nothing left to experience. Being monied would at least be different. The gratuitousness of temporality— you use up resources, reserves, but even if it’s done wisely there are still days, weeks, months, years left to fill. Wordsworth spent forty-three years spinning his wheels; the rest of you lot got out early. The problem with the human race is that it derives most of its sustenance from illusions. The great suburban illusion I grew up with is that one should take steps to secure the longest possible life. Don’ t drink, smoke, take drugs, or engage in promiscuous sex, so that you endure to achieve a ripe old age. Quality of time takes a not particularly close second to quantity. I’ve noticed something else— that you can extend a worthless and meaningless existence as long as you want, without altering its essential vacuity. It may be more intelligent, spiritually, to get in and get out. Not that I can’t imagine living to a ripe old age: it’s possible. But I refuse to abandon my pack-a-day habit to an ethos that aligns prudence with emptiness. And, where the female race is concerned, I can be taken by force, stealth, or stratagem. Most human endurance is shallow endurance. I’ve seen married couples discover, in extreme old age, that they don’t know the first thing about each other. 

       Then, there’s the intensity and dedication that can be brought to language. Linguists tell us there are an infinite number of potential sentences. Language, itself, is infinite. But because language is the expression of necessities (i.e. we communicate what we need to communicate), if there’s no need to speak or write, nothing should be spoken or written. As I follow line with line, another silence is covered over. There was no need for poor Wordsworth, after 1807, to lead a bitter life. But because he couldn’t shut up, he did. Fame, also, has sunk to nothingness for me; love hasn’t. Does love involve anything but humiliating intimacy? I’m not convinced it does. Someone like Dana never thinks of death (or love), but of shortcuts to material prosperity. I feel the weight of her emptiness more than she does. She misses, as Trish and others didn’t, what a penis might be worth. 

       I’ll admit: I waver, about intimacy. Actually, I recently spent a (not particularly physical) night with a Wiccan lady, and she laid down an intimacy gauntlet I wasn’t expecting her to. She admitted that the following insight was post-Wiccan, too. The basic purport is this: if a man sleeps with a woman, and shoots a load into her, that’s it. That’s Mother Nature’s marriage insignia. They are then man and wife. It’s the apogee of intimacy. It can’t be porn, and it can’t be a prostitute— any level of professionalization, and the spell is broken. But that’s how a real marriage manifests in the world. There can’t be a condom…the mind reels. Refusing to do a Julio Iglesias routine in text here, I nonetheless know who my wives are, if post-Wiccan is taken to be as legitimate as, say, post-modern. Kate! And poor Dana, who must kick the asses she kicks in the world from a dry place, unlike Jena Strayner. The real, raw thing, like raw time. The likes of which is not orgasming now, to be real, as I’m getting bored with all these shenanigans. 

        Hung, 

          Adam

from PICC (A Poet in Center City): #24

for Trish Webber 

It’s early 2004. Elizabeth died a year ago; I’ve cut ties with Joe Miller. Trish rewired my brain. It would be impossible to overstate how many ways my years with her altered my consciousness. Ms. Webber laid down a gauntlet to help me understand that I should be proud of my impulses towards the sublime. Yet, the gauntlets were often laid down while holding court for Tobi and I in her rooms in West Philly, righteously stoned on the kindest varieties of dope. That admixture— a penchant for form, or the sublime, in a lust-for-life kind of gal, and a blonde no less, was heady stuff. She was N, she was Jena, she was Kathy, she was everyone in my earlier life I ever cared about. And we’d spent a few years spending all our nights together— West Philly and Logan Square, back and forth. We broke up at the end of ’03, after two years, because, to make a long story short, her insanity was driving me insane. Also important for me to notice: Trish was a loved and hated kind of gal, as well. She was herself, she was unique, she was incisively about what she was incisively about. I had to see mirrored back to me, through Trish Webber, what I already knew: to be ensconced in a creative discipline, and to do it in a unique, distinctive way, has, of necessity, to make an individual as hated as they are loved. People don’t always like the real ones, the unique ones. Lots of seemingly creative types are faux, and would gladly have everyone stand in a line, subsume themselves. Uniqueness magnetizes, but also repulses. As does real artistic potency. Catapulted back into a present moment: I’m doing a reading in Northern Liberties for an online journal called Lunge. It’s not just me— there’s a bunch of bands playing, short films, and a team of technicians doing “ambient.” The crowd is a hundred-plus; it’s a gorgeous spring day; the mood is festive. The multi-media angle reminds me so much of Swinging London (my imagination of it, at least) that I get, as in ’99, an intense frisson. Philadelphia attracts celestial sunlight. It occurs to me that now might be the time to write the second chapter of This Charming Lab— that the moment might be germane for it. Meanwhile, Bill Rosenblum is producing an album for me. We’re recording at his pad at 11th and Webster— “Webster Street Studios.” The album was supposed to be just spoken-word; but we expanded and expanded until it looked like we would reach an album’s full of tunes. Bill imposes a Steve Albini ethos. Through Bill, I’m introduced to what the Highwire Gallery is, in the Gilbert Building on the PAFA (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) campus. I begin to put pieces together— this is where I could stage the sequel I’ve been considering. The curator is an erstwhile roadie for the Grateful Dead— Jim O’Rourke. He’s older— short, thin, intense, a redhead. The Highwire is a space to die for; several rooms, all with high ceilings, including one which looks like a cleared-out factory space. Still, the man-power is missing; Christopher works, but I need more running-buddies for this new “trip.” Simultaneously, I graduated magna cum laude from U of Penn and geared up for grad school, which would start low res in the Boston ‘burbs. Between Penn and hipster-ism, I was an absolute freak.

from Equations (2011-2023): #15

for Jena Strayner 

With Heather, Wendy, Julie, and the others: mostly hokey contrivance. All roads must lead back to Jena, because she is where this road begins. Picture a nineteen-year-old woman in the first bloom of rich youth. Not material wealth as in money, but in looks and everything else. Jena stands about 5’6, she has cornstalk blonde hair, cut short into a pageboy. Her large, bright blue eyes tend to widen when she is pleased or aroused, and her smile is wide enough to split her face in half. Thick lips, a roundish face, high forehead, skin just pale enough to make her whole contours have a quality of shock about them; large breasts that do not even have the thought of sag in them; flat stomach; long legs that she deliberately displays in such a way that the adjective “coltish” seems appropriate. Jena was born and bred in a small town; it would be inconceivable that she would have sex for any reason but love. We work up to sex over a period of two months. Because we are working in tune with our emotions, because we let ourselves fall in love first (at twenty, I have been in love before, but never like this), when we get down to the business of physical passion we do it with no holds barred, so that nothing, no roles, no equations, no rigid striations, needs to be contrived. At twenty, I don’t quite realize the miraculous nature of what I’m getting; I have no idea how far, how fast, and how bitterly I will have to fall after Jena. I just naively swim into her, her into me, and every squish that happens between our bodies strikes a chord felt by us both.

Worth noting: The plot thickens

This Mary Evelyn Harju portrait of me was painted in late 2006, into 2007. I have now used it as the cover image for PICC. Worth noting: the way I take it, it's not exactly completely an affectionate portrait. The drab coloration, misshapen quality of my head and my hair, were deliberate on Mary's part. As, also, is the sense that my face, as it is painted here, is a little off. If you look closely at it, it is easy to discern that what you are seeing is my face, melded with Abby Heller-Burnham's face. Mary seems to be expressing a certain amount of righteous indignation that Abby and I, by then, had consummated an affair too. Even after I broke up with Mary at the end of '03, I was supposed to know that Abby was off-limits. And, as is generally known, Mary and I did reunite for a big chunk of 2007. So my sense of reuniting with Mary was not thrown off. But important that Mary seemed to see Abby and I together as demonic, or at least menacing. All the elements of the painting which could seem peculiar are no accident.

from Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Undulant

for Heather Mullen

I'd made plans to meet you in Bar Noir
on 18th, you were there; we drank. What
happened after that, in the Logan Square
flat, is that in defrocking you knocked over
an antique lamp bequeathed to me by my
aunt in Mahopac. Serendipity, I thought,
stunned then into silence by your bedroom
elan. Outside, a sultry night simmered; this
night of all nights, scattered green glass littered
my bedroom floor, & I finally got taken, past
liquor, to what eternity was only in your mouth—
as though you'd jumped from a forest scene
(ferns, redwoods), a world of pagan magic,
into a scene still undulant with possibilities—

from PICC (A Poet in Center City): #62

 

Trish did a portrait of us together, as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: The Fall. I’d nude modeled for it in ’07, in her then studio in North Philadelphia. When she told me, in the early Aughts, “You’re the jewel in my crown,” she was already planning this. The studio was not far from Temple, with a view of the Walt Whitman Bridge which was re-created through a window in the piece. In the portrait, I appear baffled, but composed. Trish’s limbs wrap awkwardly around themselves, as though she might actually topple over. It was as startlingly confessional as it could possibly be. It took me several years to understand what the issue was. The Fall was shown at PAFA, in an alumni show, in ’08. One of my books was being taught, hand-over-fist, at Loyola in Chicago, and I lectured there behind it. From time to time, Bill Rosenblum would record me reading my poetry and send me the mp3s. Occasionally, a poet passing through from London or Australia would visit me. Sometimes, Larsen and I could get into some Free School-level drug mischief. Mostly, though, I was on my own, writing. The lovers, Julie, Dell, who entered my life at this juncture, didn’t last very long. Julie Hayes was my student at Temple: a coal-eyed, doll-faced brunette with an excellent head for books, and a potential writer. Her volatility and self-destructiveness reminded me extremely of Heather Mullen. The lead-up was several months of courting. I thought it might be another marriage, but the volatile situation, once the semester ended and we got physical, tanked fast. Julie was a monster of inexperience, rather than experience, as Heather had been. She became too confused to go on. Larsen Spurn had been bemused by her, and by the situation. I invited him to join one of my early tete-a-tetes with Julie at the Drop. After Julie left, he looked at me pointedly and said, “I knew this was gonna happen. I knew it! I knew you’d be the kind of professor who…does what you’re doing, Adam.” Julie lived right across the street; I plead innocence. But Larsen, as usual, was right. Meanwhile, what I had to conquer was the feeling that I had to be heading towards something huge. Too many poets in Philly were arrayed against me; if I didn’t find a way to overpower them, I would (inevitably) be overpowered. This is what most of the defectors from my erstwhile camp banked on. Little Foley, the party line went; he’ll keep working and working, but it will never be enough, because it can’t be. Not with us here: Plunkettville. Most of these people were primarily socialites who took for granted that that’s what poetry was; a context for socialization, fags meeting fags, rather than a serious art-form. “You are who you know” was the dictum, and they tap-danced around ever speaking seriously about poetry itself, or poems. I was always on the edge of being counted out. Temple didn’t help; no one there was particularly interested in my poetry efforts, and the poets on campus actively opposed them. I suffered the indignity of having my books taught hand-over-fist at major universities while being treated as a pedestrian graduate student at Temple. But I never gave up hope and I never thought of quitting. If this was “do or die,” I would do. What The Fall was, as a work of art embodying the highest possible formal, representational standard, gave me strength to persevere, and the sense that no one could tell me I wasn’t a loved person, or that I’d led a loveless life. Trish Webber had delivered the goods, and transmuted exquisite anguish into exquisite art. I was standing with a real family that was really there. I stood on level ground.

from Cheltenham (2012-2019): Cheltenham Elegy #420

for N.

I.
The Junior Prom deposited me (and fifteen
others) on the floor of her basement. I could
barely see daylight at the time, and at three in
the morning I began to prowl. I was too scared
to turn on any lights. She emerged like a mermaid
from seaweed. I needed comfort, she enjoyed my
need. We had gone out— she was bitter. The whole
dialogue happened in shadows. No one was hooking
up in the other room, either. You spiteful little princess.

II.
Whether off the bathroom counter
or the back of your hand, darling,
your unusual vehemence that
winter night, cob-webbed by
half-real figures, was animated by an
unfair advantage, which stooges threw
at you to keep you loopy as you
died piece-meal. All I had
was incomprehensible fury and a
broken heart— when I hit the floor
at four, you were getting ready
to play fire-starter, opened
the little snifter, curled your finger
twice in the right direction; darkness—

from Equations (2011-2023): #24

for Mary Evelyn 

To dwell on that siren call: it isn’t really transcendental. It’s meant to lift you up, then plonk you back down again (wet or dry, as the case may be). It serves the siren, not you. Trish knows these rules very well, has studied them. Her approach to playing the role is methodical— you give them this much, and then draw back. Not everyone responds to Trish’s particular wavelength because it presupposes not just intelligence but artistry. You must be a figure worthy of representation for her to take you seriously. Conversations must shoot up around colors, forms, images. The drunken nights I spend at her studio (white and red wine) are an epiphany. I’ve never had my mind and body turned on at the same time. Trish knows this; she is going down the checklist. Her postures and gestures are bold and dramatic; when she takes the pins out of her bun and lets her long hair fall down her back, part of me falls, too. It’s winter; the studio (three of the four walls being mostly windows) is chilly. I’ve grown a slight moustache but, at twenty-five, still look boyish. Trish doesn’t take my songs or poems seriously; they are unproven, not high enough. My thoughts crave her approval as my body aches for her submission. In this way, we dance. Trish is shrewd; she knows that, with my intense urgency, she must give in (at least once) almost instantly. She likes taking the superior position and her long torso contrasts neatly with Lisa’s petite squatness. But (importantly) she hasn’t fallen. She’s played her part well; I’ve fallen alone.

Equations, and Mary Evelyn Harju

Now that the work of prose fiction entitled Equations is available in its entirety on PennSound, in two parts: The Thesis Episodes and The Jade Episodes: some elucidation might be helpful, if the book is to be widely heard and read. One obvious question worth answering: is the book literal, or meant to be taken literally, i.e. was it written out of genuine, authentic relationship experiences? Yes, most of it was. The dialectic structure of the book, and other things about it, necessitates its designation as prose fiction; yet many of the characters who enliven the book were real people in my life. The most literal character in the book, by a considerable margin, is Trish Webber. Those who know me, know that Trish Webber is closely modeled on painter Mary Evelyn Harju, who could also be called simply Mary Harju or Mary H. in the Aughts. Mary's presence as Trish in the book lays down a gauntlet of how many representational perspectives I can employ to attempt to portray a very complex reality: who we were, together as a couple, and who we were individually as well. If Trish Webber emerges as the star presence in Equations, it is because I really did spend the most time with her, and because she was the occasion of my most profound experience both of falling in love, and of staying in love. I loved her. That having been said, some of the perspectives which develop around Trish are negative ones, too. For a relationship as intense as ours was, and we were very intensely involved indeed, this would seem to be inevitable. It is also worth saying that discerning readers of Equations will notice this; Trish, Mary, winds up looming over the text as something or someone ineluctable at the center. But it may be new data that the standing at the center quality Trish has in Equations was something real, authentic in my life. When I've done Mary in poetry, as in Otoliths 69, the instinct to compress, cut to the core is given more leg room. In both prose fiction and dialectics, the expansiveness of the text creates an effect of circumlocution which is difficult to avoid. Yet fiction, when done with skill, can represent a wider reality than poetry as well. Equations is not meant to be one long paean to Mary, but the composition of the book, as though it were a painting, brings her to life at the center by surrounding her with energy similar to hers, but not the same. She stands with, and against, others in the book. And to be noted that the center placement for her in Equations is deliberate, from my end, and earned as well. 

from Cheltenham (2012): Cheltenham Elegy #261

for Chris DeLuca

Never one to cut corners about cutting
corners, you spun the Subaru into a rough
U-turn right in the middle of Old York Road
at midnight, scaring the shit out of this self-
declared “artist.” The issue, as ever, was
nothing particular to celebrate. We could
only connect nothing with nothing in our
private suburban waste land. Here’s where
the fun starts— I got out, motherfucker.
I made it. I say “I,” and it works. But Old
York Road at midnight is still what it is.
I still have to live there the same way you do.

LTDM (Letters to Dead Masters): #26

              Percy,

            The Grind has a strange policy with bums. For some reason, they are not only tolerated but encouraged to hang around outside. Today has been particularly gruesome— a white, middle -aged bum with shit-stained pants has been hounding girls for an hour. It’s useless to ask the DJs to flush these guys out— they’re too spineless. As the outside tables are not cordoned off, a bum like this can get right in anyone’s face or even sit down. Sure enough, the guy sits down at the next table. He moans and groans, calls the girls beautiful, scratches his ass, and generally ups the tension knob a few notches. It’s Labor Day, coincidentally, and semi-crowded (I was expecting desolation). I just ran into a friend of Bennie Holmes, one of the street poets. The conversation petered out after an awkward minute. What this guy can’t stand is that I’ve changed— I don’t give off cozy mediocrity vibes anymore. This guy resembles the landlord in Big Lebowski, but I don’t know if he does dance routines. Suddenly, here comes Dana, and I’ll end this off with ellipses until she leaves…that’s the longest conversation I’ve ever had with her. Now that we’re a semi-item, she appears to be opening up. Dana has a lot of pent-up rages, for the simple reason, I believe, that she never gets laid. She spent several weeks in New Hampshire this summer, farming, and she tells me all about the thrills and spills of the organic life. She sees herself eventually living on a farm, in some sort of communal context. Funny: I spent some communal time in New Hampshire, too, on a poetry farm, and, as I’m not ashamed to admit, on a proverbial sex farm, with Wendy Smith. Dana is so scared of such things that I might say something about my own life that there are surprisingly few pauses in her rambling monologue. I nod, laugh when I’m expected to laugh, express the requisite affection. But the conversation is tainted by the evident rider that I’m not allowed to speak. Dana reminds me of N, too: the absolute despotism of the orgasmic ecstasy of the mind-fuck.               

             It’s taken me, actually, thirty-four years to fully realize what a charnel ground the arts are. The charnel ground is established and held in place by millions of folks whose major talent is for self-deception— their guiding premise being that they can do this, where the arts are concerned. Layer after layer of self-deception develops, if these people stay in the arts over a long term. Because the success ratio in the arts is astronomically low, these “pseuds” contrive any number of reasons to place themselves right on the proverbial mountain. Dana is a perfect synecdoche— it’s useless to try and dissuade her from believing that her little pictures are as good as anyone else’s. And what density! All these levels and layers of self-deception are so tightly packed (perhaps because the self is packaged as a commodity) that to talk to these people is to spit into the wind. Being young is no guarantee of malleability— girls like Dana learn all sorts of self-preservation methods (whether it’s theory, mistrust of theory, ignorance or knowledge) that ensure maximum density by age twenty-five. The guy that was just here, Bennie’s friend, is a typical example— his platform is an exaggerated American egalitarianism, an ethos that dictates “nothing’s better than anything else;” which means, of course, that his own putrid pieces are safe, fine. It also means there’s no reason to respect me as his superior. No taste means no waste, as far as he’s concerned; if everyone’s equal, everyone can serve (and, if they’re unctuous enough, be served by) him. Some of his gossip has gotten back to me, too. 

          One of the hokey contrivances around modern poetry involves age; specifically, that poets under the age of forty cannot be taken particularly seriously. This is a gambit on the part of older, conventionally established (i.e. impotent) poets to protect their glass-housed positions. This guy, Benny’s friend, turned forty two years back. Since then, it’s been his delight to deign every move I make the foolish (albeit cutely foolish) misstep of a “younger poet.” If you spend enough years publishing garbage, if you’re still in the game at forty, you too can gloat and treasure easy superiority over anyone younger than you. Taste makes waste, except I’ve won enough leverage to cut him off if I want, and I do. Kill or be killed, schmuck, as Bill would say. The smarmy stance before the world of the book parasite. That the good guy has to win some of the time: why the rake and ho routine had to happen between Wendy and I. 

         The sex difference between Dana and I makes these issues trickier; genuine sexual tension makes it difficult to be disinterested, and vicious. Where there is an edge of wanting, razors become butter knives, especially with a man like myself, who aspires to kindness. But, from old writers right through to Dana, the angle of the would-be (or could-be or should-be) holds true. Do I desire vengeance? In this context, vengeance and truth are identical. Philly, this Philly really is such a putrid mess that a claim for vengeance (or truth) would be an overstatement— all I covet is a few moments rest— Larsen’s dope. Which was a hit down on the farm in New Hampshire, I might add.

     Yours, 

        The Eternal One

from Apparition Poems (2010): #1488

for Julia Brodsky

liquor store, linoleum
    floor, wine she chose
was always deep red,
    dark, bitter aftertaste,
unlike her bare torso,
which has in it
all that ever was
      of drunkenness—
to miss someone terribly,
to both still be in love, as
she severs things because
she thinks she must—
    exquisite torture, it’s
  a different bare torso,
(my own) that’s incarnadine—

LTDM (Letters to Dead Masters): #31

         John, 

       Being in this place on an almost daily basis, my moods come up and down with the music they play. Today seems to be 90s nostalgia day: we’re sitting through Bleach. Listening to Kurt’s voice, I travel inwardly to the place I inhabited when I first heard these songs. The teenage landscape: how much I wanted to be an artist, how many privileges I claimed for myself because I was already writing songs, and all the stuff that happened on the periphery of my consciousness (though perhaps at the forefront of everyone else’s): parties, driving around Cheltenham with friends, pot, girls. One thing I’ve lost is a sense of expectancy— as of today, I have nothing to look forward to. It’s not just that experience destroys innocence; the road of excess I’ve been joyriding down has created a space around me that cannot be filled. But I catch backwards glimpses sometimes, and music, more than anything else, opens up long-closed channels that allow me to re-receive impressions. Right around the time Kurt died, probably late spring ’94, I was hanging out with Chris and Fran at Fran’s house, high. It was trippy weed and, sitting on Fran’s back porch, I hallucinated that his backyard was an African jungle. I was self-conscious because I had to piss and thought I couldn’t find the bathroom. So, this being the 90s, I just walked into the jungle and pissed there. My last memory of that night is of banging out one of my songs on Fran’s piano, specifically for Chris to hear. I realized in the middle that I have a unique talent— though I often couldn’t find my feet when stoned, I could bash out my songs and get through them.                                                                                                        Funny: Chris DeLuca and Ted Gissman didn’t take to each other like I hoped they would. Chris took one look, as of fall ’91, at Ted’s homeboy posturing, and decided to fling some arrows in his direction. Ted became impassive, stone-like. And it went downhill from there. Chris wanted to see some whirling dervish showmanship from Ted, to prove that all that posturing wasn’t hot air, and Ted wanted respect for the loftier position he held at CHS. And other things he was holding. I stood in the middle, attempting to mediate, drained of machismo from long exposure to the CHS theater department and its Harvey Fierstein vibes. Ouch. The contemporary sting kicks in— here I am, at the Grind, 2010, having both gained and lost more than I ever thought I could. All because, bleached or not, when I say “art” I still mean it. Kurt, Fran, Chris and Ted are still with me somewhere. 

           There’s a man sitting in one of the corner seats who appears to do (outlandish as it seems) cartoons for the New Yorker. In the early aughts, I was quite smitten with the New Yorker, down to being a perpetual subscriber. It took me several years to realize how “culture-lite” it is. It doesn’t aid their lightweight image that the most likely place to find the new New Yorker is in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room. I loved Updike in those days, and I still like bits of the Rabbit books, but the poetry is so putrid I really only pick up the New Yorker for laughs. Why a New Yorker cartoonist would plant himself at the Grind in Philly is beyond me. Maybe he likes the European feel of the place— black coffered ceiling, semi-artsy photographs, hipster sheen. There he is, rubbing one off. Nicer than Bleecker, eh? 

             One trail I go down on days like this is opening my eyes to visuals, as ends in themselves. Sometimes I get a weird visionary sense just from looking at murals, row houses, cars, sunlight hitting certain kinds of bricks. For instance, the way the sun just now is striking the façade of Frank’s puts my head in a painterly space. I’ve always admired the expansiveness of certain painters’ lives— Picasso, Monet, Renoir. The real painters, it seems to me, have a way of taking it easy while maintaining intensity. There is a terrible narrowness to language in any one writer’s hands; images have a pliability that makes them seem to me, on some level, more blessed. Not that poor old Monet going blind isn’t tragic; but the length of his life, the broad vista of his painterly consciousness, is something that can be picked up, even if Frank’s is hardly a realm of pointillist precision and water lilies. Or maybe there is a hint of desperation in Philly these days, and I’m channeling it. 

       Yours, 

           Adam