A Writer’s Diary Entries From Mid-August, 1986 | Thought Catalog

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Mid-August, 1986 | Thought Catalog

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late May, 1986 | Thought Catalog

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late May, 1986 | Thought Catalog

Saturday Morning in Crown Heights: Awaiting Hurricane Sandy at the President Street Subway Station

At 7 a.m., on our way to teach at the fabulous Fashion Institute of Technology, we saw that the New York City subway system is already awaiting the arrival of Hurricane Sandy.

Wednesday Afternoon in Tribeca: View of the Hudson River

On this warm, overcast early October afternoon, we traveled among some of the great colleges we're teaching at this semester: from the School of Visual Arts to Fashion Institute of Technology to Borough of Manhattan Community College, where we snapped this pic of the river from the third floor bridge at the 199 Chambers Street main building.

Tuesday Evening in Chelsea: Denise Duhamel and Amy Lemmon reading at Barnes and Noble at Fashion Institute of Technology

Early this evening we went over to the fabulous Fashion Institute of Technology's Barnes and Noble college bookstore to see two of our favorite poets, Denise Duhamel and Amy Lemmon, read from their collaborative books, ABBA: The Poems and the just-published Enjoy Hot or Iced: Poems in Conversation and a Conversation.

Denise Duhamel is an old friend, and we were glad to see her photo in the New York Times on Saturday although the story of her reading at Horace Mann with another old friend from Miami, Maureen Seaton, was a little discomfiting. It was great to see her in person again as well as hear her read. We've enjoyed Denise's poetry since the 1980s although we didn't meet her until November 1993, when we did a reading together, along with others, for the anthology Mondo Barbie (coincidentally, it got a nice writeup by Dave Housley at The Lit Pub just this past weekend) at the Miami Book Fair International. And it was great to see her with Amy Lemmon, whom we've had the pleasure of knowing since she hired us to teach business writing at FIT in the fall of 2006.

Their joint reading from their collaborative books was a terrific hour of poetry, probably the best reading we've gone to this year. It had an intimate feel, and the poets -- as they do in their texts -- play off one another expertly. Denise has done a great deal of collaborative work, and both the playful ABBA poems and the somewhat more elegant Enjoy Hot or Iced (beautifully designed by the publisher) gave us, and the others in the audience, a great deal of excitement and fun.

Take this collaboration, "Ex Post Facto":

"Remember me?" the subject line. My college beau
was now HUGGYBEAR3@yahoo.com and a VIP at Sysco.
He'd worn tie-dye and Birks on our first tryst. "Oh
you're in a sorority?" he'd said. I'd just made a pledge, though

I couldn't afford the dues. "Um, I joined Chi-O,"
I lied. "It's not Greek at all. We sit around and discuss Tao
and the benefits of soy." "Cool," he said. "Let's go
figure out our charts." I was a Gemini. He was a Leo.

Back at his place, he put on Elvis Costello,
lit vanilla candles, and unwrapped his Tarot
deck and ceramic bong. "In a past life, I was a Pharoah,"
I said, showing him my spread: a sword, a wand, and a fellow

with cups, dead ringer for Benny from ABBA. "Bingo!"
he teased until I became defensive. "Hey, I belong to the AFL-CIO
and NOW." "Not bad for a girl from Ohio,"
he whispered. He was from Miami, land of flamingo-

colored hotels and retirees in low-slung Speedos.
His kisses were sweet, a mixture of grass and Gallo.
In the mornings, we would eat marshmallow
clovers and hearts, Lucky Charms inciting our libidos

and sending us back to the lumpy futon. "Presto!"
I'd say, waving the sheets, beginning my strip show
to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon." Crypto-
karaoke was at the core of our love-manifesto,

"You Spin Me Round" by Dead or Alive. Ergo,
I traded in my shit-kickers for lime green stilettos
and my Tom Robbins novels for Brecht librettos.
Would he recognize me now? My clothes hamper so

clogged with black, my closet full of faux
Fendi and knock-off Manolo Blahniks? Apropos
or no, humming Schubert's allegro ma non troppo,
I typed "Refresh my memory!" and sipped Bordeaux.

Here's Amy's title poem from Enjoy Hot or Iced:

You’ve brewed this stuff, now drink it—
these dreggy-dregs, this filter-silt,
the tiny bits that cling to tongue.
You always liked it strong and now
you’ve got it at its darkest, split
us at the core to brew a full bold flavor,
so each must shoulder/bear the double-weight
of everything except the other’s body.
I hope you have your fun and drink it, too,
iced now as much as it was hot. I don’t. I didn’t
order it this way. I wanted café au lait,
and when the waiter brought it and I asked for water,
he said flat “No” and mugged—a joke, I thought,
but sure enough, he never brought a glass, left me
to fend with froth and squeeze a dollar tip. He thought
he was funny. You think you’re kind, you think
you’re sensible, you think you’re something
I can’t quite imagine. What of the Monet’s
lily-pads of mold on Earl Grey cooling in the jar?
The brown scrub-nulling scum that clings
to the worn Picasso mug? The ghosts of shattered crockery,
the cartoon souls of slain French press carafes?
Yours, yours, mine, ours. It’s a tossup,
so you clay-pigeon it again and pull! Shoot! A hit!
My heart, I mean, that flat and battered thing
you had and lately thought so little of.

And Denise's "Boxed Set Sestina":

I hid my hopes in a cigar box on Christmas, but you gave them away on Boxing Day (in Canada). I clipped box tops for coupons while you gobbled an expensive Bento box lunch. You were a noshow as I waited in line at the box office in the satin pillbox hat I bought at the thrift shop. I collected hatboxes while you flew your box kite wearing only your boxers. Our lovemaking once wore out the box springs, but now you said you felt boxed in. I slumped in the last row while you glowed with someone else in our box seats. You slept in first class while I shivered in the boxcar. I never got your love letter because you forgot to put it in the mailbox. I felt so neglected I ate fistfuls of croutons right from the box in my boxy, unflattering housedress. My shadow box was filled with ceramic figurines of you. Your toolbox was as empty as our icebox. I stayed home, blaring my boom box, while you drank at the bar, wasting quarters on a dusty jukebox. You told me to get off my soapbox. Were our problems bigger than a breadbox? Yes! Especially when I caught you peeing in the sandbox or dipping into the cashbox while you thought I wasn’t looking. It’s true I was a chatterbox, but you can’t deny you put your affection in a lockbox while you played with your vintage Matchbox cars. It was up to me to open the fuse box and fix the problem—up to me to take kickboxing to defend myself. I thought outside the box when I played your favorite song, Daddy Cool’s “Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box,” on my squeezebox. I was hoping to win you back after our most vicious boxing match—thirtynine rounds of screaming that made the German boxer nextdoor growl. It had all started when your word “boxwallah” wasn’t in the Scrabble dictionary; then I won with “carboxyl.” You snatched up your ebony snuffbox while I tore the boxberries from our flowerbox. I stuffed a shoebox with regret. You packed up your Hot Wheels lunchbox and left.

After the reading, the poets signed our books. We're really grateful for the work of Amy Lemmon and Denise Duhamel, and even more grateful to have them as friends.

Sunday Evening in Williamsburg: Al Burian, Cassie J. Sneider & Cat Chow at Desert Island

Somewhat hobbled by tendinitis tibialis posterior for the past two weeks and awaiting our new orthotics from the great Dr. Meliso at Lorimer Foot Care, we were able to abandon our cam-walker boot today and finally go out and carry our laundry bags around the corner to Metro Community Laundromat. It was mild and sunny at 6 p.m. and as we cleaned our terminally unhip clothing, we jaywalked back and forth across Metropolitan Avenue to our favorite neighborhood comic store, Desert Island.

There was a nice-sized, friendly crowd in the store for a party (BYOB, whatever that means) and reading by comics creators, zinester icons and celebrated designers Al Burian, Cassie J. Sneider and Cat Chow. Though we had to go in and out due to laundry duties and podiatric problems that made standing on our feet uncomfortable and standing on our head impractical, we heard and saw enough of both the artists and their work to get us to buy their stuff and look for more. All are really talented, really weird, and really funny.

As he says on his MySpace page (ours has been untouched since Hillary Clinton's presidency and tonight we discovered we have 1969 messages in our inbox) Al Burian, "Writer, Cartoonist, Lunatic and Enfant Terrible of the Northamerican Punk Scene, Writer of Burn Collector, Contributor of Punk Planet, Musician in bands like Milemarker, Challenger, Hellbender, Sterling, Nest of Ice, is serving you a mix of poetry, reading essays and short stories, portraying his and peoples daily struggle, playing songs and scaring people in the finest way of art."

After riffling through papers for like fifteen minutes, Al told some wonderfully cockeyed stories in a deadpan-exuberant manner. First he riffed on the topic of fame, which he thought was site-specific since everyone (but us) in Williamsburg pays so much in rent that they "can't just hang out" but need to keep trying to be rich and famous in order to afford living here. Or something like that.

Al rambled charmingly until getting to the heart of the heart of his true tale about waiting to get on a flight at JFK with Gwen Stefani and her husband whats-his-name, whose name Al actually can't believe he lets take up space in Al's brain without his paying rent. The story's moral was that you always should be thrilled when celebrities are on their flight because you know that in the event of a hijacking, you probably won't be the one selected to be taken hostage. Or something like that.

Another one of his stories was about the time his band was playing Northsix and in a very unoriginal onstage punk-rock gesture (did you know that musicians get laid 30% more?), Al threw his guitar up in the air and it fell on his head, leading to profuse bleeding, lots of high-fives and admiring shouts of "Duuuude!" and at least one charge of Krist Novoselic-copying before a trip to the ER.

Al pays $150 a month rent in Chicago. That's an even number. Cat Chow, the artist-designer-craftsperson-musician-performance artist whose little books of drawings and text rival her amazing three-dimensional creations in what we'd call whimsy if that were a word we ever wrote, said that she found it curious that people (we're not sure which ones) told her that even numbers like 150 are masculine while odd numbers like 69 were feminine since a man had only one of his most important masculine feature (guess!) but a woman had two of hers (breasts), two being even and one being odd and all.

But we don't find it odd that Cat Chow could make a perfectly wearable dress entirely out of one continuous zipper. We don't find it odd that Cat Chow's garments and performances have been praised even in Pittsburgh.

And we don't even find it odd that she has created exquisite garments entirely out of interwoven dollar bills, flat washers, rubber O-rings, twist ties, plastic hospital I.D. bracelets. Also, for good measure, out of measuring tape.

But then we grew up in a garment industry family and once sold leisure suits at Alexander's Department Store in Kings Plaza and we currently teach at Fashion Institute of Technology, where Cat Chow's creations have been displayed, so sometimes we think we've seen everything.

Tonight, at Desert Island, though, we saw everything but Cassie J. Sneider because we had to put our laundry in the dryer across the street. Well, actually, we did get to see Cassie J. Sneider the person and we did get to overhear a conversation she had with someone else that we are not at liberty to reveal and we did get to enjoy some of her little books in print.

But we missed her "act." (Note: that last word is meant in an entirely chaste context.) A smarter blogger said of Cassie,

Hearing her read from her zines was truly magic. This girl is hilarious and presents her life in the most interesting way possible. Her zines have pages of hand-written stories, funny scribbled drawings and best of all – moxie! This issue [Scrappy J - A Story About Fighting] takes a look at Cassie’s view of fighting - from a high-schooler wary of her ‘permanent record’ to a present day bar brawl - all told in a chatty/witty style. Cassie also read from another issue of her zine dealing with an odd job she picked up writing first-hand (ha!) reviews of sex toys.

On behalf of our injured feet and our dirty laundry, we would like to apologize to Cassie J. Sneider, and while we are at it to Al Burian (for having to go out and sit in front of Desert Island during his story about seeing an old girlfriend on his birthday in San Francisco instead of jumping off a bridge) and to Cat Chow (for until tonight associating her name with a product we fed our Gainesville pet Camelot that was specially formulated for her optimal health).

For your optimal health, you should visit the great Desert Island store and buy the work of these three brilliant people (or the work of other people who may be less brilliant but who need to pay the rent too.)

As for us, things could be worse. Like if we had dirty feet and injured laundry. Thanks, Desert Island!