Next Steps

by Joanna Penn Cooper and Todd Colby

"We Bought a Zoo" is a kid's movie. Please enjoy the awkward

nature of being alive in this century at all. Enjoy it the same way
 you enjoy being helped across the street by a manic fellow
with a gold grille on Valentine's Day. You will take what you can
from the thousands of dogs making their yellow urine canyons
while we breathe in our rattles of phlegm because that is called being grateful.
Your better angels are standing at your shoulder in Burberry coats
making notations on what you think, feel, and see. "3:00 Bedford Avenue,
gangly 12 year-old boy in sweatpants lifts arms like a dancer and steps
over his dog's leash with a Fosse-like hop." Your angels approaching
job burnout just want you to quit your yammering. Wow... I would like
to to get acquainted with you. If you don't press against
certainly? I hope we are similar? Tell, if it is not difficult, what's your real name?
and by the way what are you doing now? Forgive me I have forgot to tell you
my last name. My surname Lyudmila. Mainly
I am search my soulmate here, I want to have genuine relations. You agree
with me? If you have thoughts for the same it will be Perfectly!
I expect to hearing from you soon..
Your answer, is important for me. Lyudmila.

Paul Auster on winter

from The Invention of Solitude:

There is no light to sink his teeth into, no sense of time unfolding.  Rather, a feeling of doors being shut, of locks being turned.  It is a hermetic season, a long moment of inwardness.  The outer world, the tangible world of materials and bodies, has come to seem no more than an emanation of his mind.  He feels himself sliding through events, hovering like a ghost around his own presence, as if he were living somewhere to the side of himself-- not really here, but not anywhere else either.  A feeling of having been locked up, and at the same time of being able to walk through walls.  He notes somewhere in the margins of a thought:  a darkness in the bones; make a note of this.

Make Your Own Luck

by Joanna Penn Cooper and Todd Colby
 

Signs abound and puddles of slush, so you leave the house

like some latter-day Candide exclaiming "Nice hat!" to Orthodox ladies

but really we're all just skulls beneath the moisturizer, making the calcium
function as a shell over all that electric gooey mess. One time
I told a class that desire speaks of mortality.  Cradling the body
of the beloved is like to trying to stave off death by owning lots of shoes.
And that cute thing of lying with your face close to the other's face
and sharing breath immediately becomes the memory of lying there sharing
breath.  Therefore sex is death, everyone.  Let’s start an improv group called
Memento Mori Everywhere. The class just looked at me.  When you’re twenty
sex is just sex. February, on the other hand, but I digress. Let me introduce
you to the second law of thermodynamics: if you light a match
and extinguish it by pressing it against your forehead, it will not only hurt,
but you'll get burnt. The resulting mark is called the Mark of Cain and it helps
distinguish the well-intentioned from those who live above the law, to wit,
artists.  Or am I thinking of Ash Wednesday?  Death and resurrection
are constant themes.  Small talk and pleasantries until one day
you just throw in the towel & float to some ascension magnified not by doubt
but the realization that we are all so fucking alone.  Throwing in the towel

is what we're here to learn how to do.  Using that same towel to pin to a pole
and wave around like a flag is a form of personalism so broad & crisp
it makes my teeth hurt.  Groucho Marx said that.

(More of our collaborations can be found here.) 

Open Letters Monthly

My poem "Crown" appears in a great new issue of Open Letters Monthly.  Thank you to the editor, Maureen Thorson!

Book!

I'm pleased to announce that my first full-length book, The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis, is now available for pre-order on the Brooklyn Arts Press website, with a publication date of February 25th.

Balancing outward and inward looking, playfulness and vulnerability, strange intimacy and gauzy disconnection, Joanna Penn Cooper’s The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis builds a moody and tender ladder. These lyric shorts recall the New York School with their arrays of noticings and exultancies and knobbly, vivid particulars, yet they also feel wholly fresh and surprising, and of Cooper’s own nimble and provocative making. This is a wonderful collection.

 --Paula McLain (author of The Paris Wife; Stumble, Gorgeous; Like Family)

 

There will be a book party/reading this spring.  More details forthcoming.

 

November 26th

Today we went to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. 

I saw this Italian Futurist dog.

I ate a cup of vegetable bisque, half a brie panini, and some chocolate lava cake in the cafe. 

The baby fretted for a bit, and then he fell asleep in his carrier and I draped a napkin over the carrier while I ate my food.  Then he woke up and we went to look at the Anselm Kiefer exhibit.  He liked it pretty well.  A couple of the large pieces we bent over and looked at upside down, which he seemed to especially like. 

November 25th

1.  Sometimes a person may say they are doing a blog post for each day in November, but what they are really doing is a blog post for many of the days in November.

2.  The synchronicity thing:  My mom and I often reported to each other from my childhood on that we had read and heard a word at the same time.  Or wrote and heard.  We each do this separately and fairly often.  These synchronicities come in clumps for me.  Mid-November contained a clump of synchronicities.  I used to write the words down in a notebook [with brackets around them] but I have since ceased this practice.

3.  Did I ever tell you that I sometimes explain things to Ben Franklin in my head?  The other day, I was telling him what sushi was.

4.  The Indian buffet I had for lunch was ok/pretty good, but the dessert was especially good.  The baby tried some small bites of my samosa and then he got antsy and we had to go look at the statue of Ganesh while Clif finished eating.  Then we switched off, and I had some awesome rice pudding and chai.  I mean, it was sustaining. 

5.  "If your toothbrush is giving you vertigo, you may have bigger fish to fry," is what I thought to myself when my new toothbrush gave me vertigo.  It has, like, rubber whitening cups that threw me off balance.

6.  There's nothing wrong with taking your own life and work seriously and also finding joy in it.  Your own life and work can stand on their own four feet in front of a berry bush on an old wooden sign and delight everyone for miles. 

7.  Someone who used to sell suits for a living may enjoy putting on your coat at the end of the evening and then patting you on the shoulders.  This will be cheering, with a touch of pathos.

8.  "Life is short.  People die.  It's not cool."  I am trying to know this and just be here.  Be grateful.

9.  A flock of starlings doing their geometric swooping thing, but very close to the ground and as they are landing in a field near the highway-- it's a wondrous and terrible sight.

10.  When I was a child, I thought as a child, and when people drove me around town, I read signs out loud in a sing-songy voice.  When I became a (wo)man, I put away childish things.  Now I just do it in my head.  ("Suburban Veterinary Hospital . . .  Ideal Image Store . . .  Ideal . . . Image . . . Store.")

11.  Wait, there's a snowstorm coming?

12.  Welcome to Buffalo.

November 22nd

Well, I skipped another day.

Today I went to Cobble Hill to go to BookCourt. 

On the way, I saw these solid gold shoes. 

After the bookstore, it was suddenly dark.

And I saw this sad rabbit.

So I bought these brownies.

They were pretty good. 

On the way home I talked to a woman with five kids who told my baby that all her problems began when she spilled tuna in her backpack.  And I asked another woman where she had gotten her shoes (tan oxfords).  Shoegasm, she said.  I hadn't even eaten a brownie yet, but somehow I was talking to all these (two) people.

November 20th

Occasional Poem for Wednesday

I wake up to someone in mid-conversation with me
about the conspiracy theories surrounding The Shining,
how Jack Torrance is the Minotaur and Kubrick reversed 
the carpet in some scenes and what about the moon landing?
If I had a nickel for every time someone close to me doubted
the moon landing, I'd have at least ten cents, and I'd put it
in the wobbly-looking handmade bowl on the kitchen counter
that I bought in Asheville.  "Wabi-sabi" is a term for that wobbly
kind of beauty or "I never know what to buy at craft fairs,
so I'll buy this."  I like the bowl, though, with its cream-colored
glaze, the slight jade-green tint.  And what if someone gave
you a green stone necklace in the shape of a heart when you
were, say, eight years old that you promptly lost because
you lost most jewelry given to you up until the age of
thirty-five?  Would you sometimes think of it and think
of the vibrations it emitted on your small little sternum,
which at the time was the only version of your sternum
you had ever known?  Would you wonder if it was buried
under a tree in your old apartment complex or buried in
the back of some strange person's drawer, and whether
it emits those vibes without you or needs your body
to activate them?  Would you then wonder why you're
thinking of "vibes" and "energies" and "emanations"
so much lately, wonder what kind of hippie you were
becoming?  There's too much wabi-sabi in any one
person's invented mythology, all wobbly and beautiful,
slipping on impermanence like ice, grasping at stars. 

November 19th

Today was cold and sunny, and Elias was in a good mood, except when he got his flu shot.  I'm thinking about how much of our discourse now is made up of little jokes and a sort of call and response.  I'll have to think more about how to describe the quality of that.  After the shots, we (well, mostly I) went for banh mi and bubble tea, and I had a long conversation with the pregnant woman sitting next to me, who said she's a singer and actress and sometimes a writer.  I didn't recognize her, but I think I've seen her husband before.  Or maybe not.  He's either this one actor or he isn't.  The woman, Adelaide, and I were given free chocolates by the guy behind the counter because "Happy Tuesday."

November 18th

Three from Monday.

It was unseasonably warm on Monday, and we went to the playground and went on the swings.  The sky was beautiful, and I took pictures of trees coming and going.  (The middle picture is not at the playground, obviously.  This guy is serious about his kitchen implements.)

November 17th

Today I met with two friends and did writing exercises, which was fun.  I get some good material for poems that way.  And some human contact, which is a good thing.  Today was cloudy and a little drizzly and oddly warm, but I didn't go out, even though Clif took the baby on two walks.  I ate cookies and drank tea.  I met with my friends.  Later I made some beans and rice and played with the baby and put him to bed. 

The exercise for the piece below was that we read a poem out loud and then had to incorporate some of the words into our own piece.  (For this one, the poem was from Notley's The Descent of Alette.) Here it is:

Attempted Dispatch 

I wish I had more to report, a dispatch back from my journey,
but I'm in it now and now hovering and now living it
but also an image of myself projected onto myself
by a movie camera, something from a Charlie Kaufman movie--
marionettes, tunnels, rebirths, dioramas, a warehouse containing
my life and all the paths I walk in Brooklyn with the baby
in the stroller or the baby in the Ergo carrier.  When I found out
I was pregnant, my mother remarked that we had embarked
on an alternate reality and we had.  We had all boarded a ship
or walked down into a narrow trench, or I had, walking willingly
and with interest and then with trepidation, and then it opened
out into a colossal cavern, and that was the night he was born,
when I floated there alone even though I wasn't alone,
eating pellets of ice and watching the window for some kind of sign
of attendant angels or of a soul cohering.  Really I was listening
to a comedian I don't know being interviewed on a podcast
I kind of like until they had to break my water and it was dirty
and they had to increase the pitocin to get him out, until I was vaguely
 threatened with a caesarean, until I began to complain of all
the pressure breaking through the epidural, until it was time to push. 

November 16th

Clay

Often I find myself longing to be another sort of artist, so that my thinking would happen while drawing or moving clay about with my fingers.  The other night I dreamed that I was helping excavate a trench that was had been dug into some clay ground.  Buried in the side of the trench, I found the perfect book.  But I don't remember what made this book perfect, just that suddenly there I was, holding this perfect book I had pulled out of this wall of clay while sitting in this hole in the ground.  It's all very Jungian, right?  (I'm sure we could make something Freudian out of the clay.  But whatever.)  Also, I read the James Joyce story "Clay" in ninth grade and didn't really get it, but then later I read that the clay was about mortality and that's why it was so cruel to play a trick on the aging woman involving clay.  Or what?  I need to read that again.  Clay is what we are and what we'll return to.  It's the muck and it's also what grounds us and proves we're both of the earth and humble.  There's this passage from Their Eyes Were Watching God: 

When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over.  Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed.  So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song.  So they covered each one over with mud.  And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb.  Like all the other tumbling mud-balls, Janie had tried to show her shine.     

Well, it isn't always easy to show one's shine.  But that's all we have, right?  There's something to the mud itself, though.  The mud is also home.   

This is what I was thinking when I was putting the baby down for a nap just now and trying to "sleep while the baby sleeps." 

November 15th

Oh, oh!  My blog-post-a-day project is getting away from me. 

Well, ok.  Here's Friday night:

November 13th

Oh!  I missed a day.  OK, this falling darkness in the afternoon isn't so cute anymore.  A friend wrote me this email:  "This darkness is unworkable."  My thought yesterday was, "I need a butler and a fireplace to get through this."  But instead I made my own cambric-- half Lady Grey tea, half almond milk, a few drops of vanilla extract.  That revived me somewhat, as in a Victorian novel when one finds oneself wandering the moor all night before seeing a lit window in a lone house and being taken in by one's long-lost cousins.  One is welcomed in and given a warm cup of tea, only to realize that tea assuages 60% of one's angst.  Maybe 70%.

(I should write tea blurbs for the J. Peterman catalog.)

And here is some art inspired by Jane Eyre by the artist Paula Rego.

November 12th

Tuning into Your Day in Almost Mid-November

What do you do with a wintry mix and a tiny human
who won't keep his socks on is a question your PhD
might help you with.  Gothic moments in American realism
is what your dissertation was on and also what happens when
you lean in at 4:30 a.m. to check on the baby and he's there
staring back at you with wide-open eyes.  Redeployment of Freud's
concept of the unheimlich is helpful in literary study and also
in thinking about how the baby looks when he's suddenly sitting
up looking around at the air above his head, when seconds before
he was deeply asleep.  Are families uncanny?  Only when
you can't fall back to sleep and start thinking about Salem witches
and spirit orbs and the job market. Whether you ever grew a small
human in your body or cared for one or regarded one with interest,
think about the strands of the Marvelous and the Real.  Think about
the cloud cover; the interplay of consciousness; the slowing down
which precedes a quickening of the imagination; a onesie made of stars.

November 11th

I'm looking at this European toy website and talking to Clif like I'm Rain Man.  "I like the Color Tower Stacking Game.  You can make a wish list.  I'm making a wish list.  You can even share it.  I put the Color Tower Stacking Game on the wish list." 

November 10th

Is it too soon to start playing holiday music?  This morning, I put on Pandora and realized I have an "indie holiday" station (which-- ha, but I kind of wanted to put it on).  What I played was Bach and then some jazz and then the Smiths and Duran Duran, in case any of that helped the baby organize his mind.  He hopped in his jumper along to "Girlfriend in a Coma."  Oh, gosh.  When he was a fetus, I played him Talking Heads and Erik Satie, and I played him some Satie again yesterday to see if he remembered it, which maybe he did.  I have this feeling he remembers me eating tomato sauce when he was a fetus.  I love spaghetti sauce and so does he.  When I give him tastes of it, he shouts for more and twirls one hand about in the air for emphasis.

Today I stayed inside mostly and ate different foods, like French toast, honey crisp apples, Bloomsday cheese from the farmer's market (which I guess is actually named after James Joyce).  Then I took a nap with the baby, and when I woke up, it was getting dark.  Now I'm at a cafe alone and darkness has fallen just like that.  I like the idea of darkness "falling."  How interesting to think about the original metaphorical impetus behind cliches, and to think about how the over-used language of one time and place might be novel to people in another time and place.  For example, near the poles, darkness does not suddenly "fall."  (I've been reading a book that mentions this, but I will have to go home and look at the author and title.  They are utterly escaping me.  "Escaping me.")

The older I get, the more interested in seasons I am?  (I just put a question mark there without thinking about it.  Because-- really?  Maybe.)  I will just come out and use the word "energies"-- I like watching and feeling the shift of seasonal energies.  This is the time of year when I like to think about and write drafts of poems about going underground.  In yoga yesterday, one thought that floated up was the time a massage therapist in Asheville told me that New York City was a vortex of weird energies.  This is for metaphysical reasons that again "escape me" . . .  I think it had something to do with the city being built on rock and with water running underground?  (Question mark.)  And how weird, she may have remarked, that people pack into subways and ride around under there, right where the strange energy is congregating.  Then, back in yoga, I started thinking about The Descent of Alette and how I would like to read it again.  Perhaps I think too much during yoga.  Or perhaps I pay too much attention to the thoughts.

Last night, we watched The Conjuring, which didn't scare me as much as it scared Liz!  This morning I was thinking that it was because I am tired of people blaming Salem witches and their sisters for everything.  It was scary, though.  I like how families are always moving into large old creepy houses in horror movies set in and/or made in the '70s.  And how either the father or the mother or the teenage daughter begins soaking up the bad vibes and showing the cracks in the shared dream of the Family Romance.  Perhaps soon I will listen to indie holiday music and write an essay called "Are Families Uncanny?"  But first I'll go home and make soup.   

November 9th

Two things from today:

1.  This morning I was having a dream that I found the perfect shoes.  They were like old-fashioned black leather men's shoes with laces and leather soles, and they fit me perfectly.  They completed my outfit.  They completed me.

2.  At Restorative Yoga class this afternoon, I was instructed to let go of any thoughts or emotions that arose as we did the poses.  What arose then was the sentence, "This aggression will not stand, man."  So, my inner yogi is the Dude from the Big Lebowski? 

November 8th

A walk at dusk.

A book I found on the sidewalk a couple weeks ago.

Something that was in the book.

Shadow puppets.