Little Red's Recovery Room

A cruel, true cocktail from Josh this morning.

And then behind that inadequate sedative, there's a bridge over the Tigris, which has somehow been diverted into the Mississippi. I don't like it.

Tried to read all of Midwinter Day yesterday while going to class, taking Noah to the marina, buying fruit at the best produce market in the entire world, cooking dinner and avoiding the news. Had about twenty pages left this morning, and then typed up my presentation for Lyn Hejinian's course on the long poem. What an unbelievably vertiginous, pliant and commodious piece of writing, as close maybe as words can come to writing life as quickly as it happens, before while-it-happens happens. "Walk on water, daddy, walk on water!" he kept saying, while looking through the pier railings at the sharky, choppy baywaters. "Splash it!" In his uninflected pure grammar, the imperative slides into the indicative and back again. Every command is a description. Every description commands.

To my surprise, the shift from teacher to student hasn't resulted in awkward pridebound seat-squirming. I'm enjoying it. I might talk too much, but I've always done that.

This isn't school, really. More like advanced playtime. School was this rat's nest of breezeways and stucco bungalows and big haired boys and girls I occasionally saw flickering, miragelike, through purple bongplastic. I haven't been back since 1992.