3 Diary Excerpts

"So, here I am in a very smoky cafe in Vienna - my legs hurt - I jogged all morning to see what I could see.
Mariahilferstrasse - a young lady girl woman, probably 19 - approached me clipboard in hand singing 'Help I need somebody, help not just anybody. I need you!' My first thought was: 'She knew that I'm an English speaker.' But, of course, her little Beatles rendition spilled into very German pleas for help with the World Health Organization (?) I think...or was it something to do with animals? What's the AARP? ARP? So, I said, in a deeper more gruff tone than I had expected: "Actually, I'm American. I don't speak German." (I was shy about not speaking German when expected to.) "Oh!" She laughed and smiled (she was cute), I think in recognition that her little song fell on an English speaker's ears. And now I'm trying not to inhale. It's a good thing that I took Claritin D this morning. But, this food looks so good. 1/23/09

And now I'm waiting for opera tickets. My knees would be hurting but the bar on this second aisle of the standing room line is compatibly low. Some of the obvious old timers at the front of the line - and one young asian looking girl - have stools, collapsible, - they take them to work, I'm sure - but one man has a homemade wooden stool. He is very fun so far, saying things to his Austrian brother, on his collapsible metal stool, from different languages: 'Qu'est-ce que c'est?!' And I'm pretty sure he just said "Awesome!" I'm earlier than even they said to be at the ticket booth - there is only one curl to the line so far and I'm not at the end. I think I'll make it.
And now I'm in the Staatsoper Cafe. There is this strange ritual- People with standing tickets, after buying them, line up to claim their place in the hall by tying scarves or leaving something to the lower bar of the leaning bar. All this is administered by an authoritarian little woman with white cropped hair. I left my hat and now I have fifty minutes in the cafe to drink some peppermint tea and write in my 'drawing' book. The pies and mousses are tempting. 1/23

Well, this has been an evening of confusion. Here I am at the Volkstheatre, not the Volksoper, about to watch Die Fledermaus the play, neither of which I wanted to see. What substantial is there about Die Fledermaus other than Strauss's music?
I read on Wikipedia that Vienna is more than 99/98% Austrian. At one point, it had had numbers of Hungarians and Yugoslavians up to 12% or something like that - I'm making this up now.
I thought this would be a small attendance. When I first sat down, there were very few. The theatre will be filled!
Well, I got the last standing ticket, it would have been the first, but, in a communication deficient interchange with a sales lady earlier, I had been led to believe the standing room ticket door was outside. The hour and a half of waiting by myself was when I drew the Natural History Museum at the end of the book. Naturalisch. Wait, I'm hearing a trumpet! Maybe this is Strauss's opera after all?!
So far, it's an arrangement for band instruments - cabaret style. IS that a tango version of his music? 1/24

And now I'm in my host family's house - the Bernthaler-Garzuly's of Austro-Hungarian Imperial Descent. Large portraits of noblemen and noblewomen line the halls of this tall celing antique laden home - Franz Josef's childhood rocker sits next to the front door. He was Hannah's deceased husband's great-grandfather - so, that's big. They are a ball going family and very orderly and kind." 1/25

An American in Vienna

Sorry for the cheesy title, but I am in Vienna! For half a day now. Well, really a quarter day.

Vienna! Everything is placed: Billboards off the highway coming in from the airport were low and in the brush and trees. Tall tall industrial things: smokestacks and factories were married in village clusters with pastel colored tall European edifices and churches and such.

I got to the Westbanhauf station by bus and checked in to the Do Step Inn Hostel just around the corner. Alexandra, a lovely Romanian, welcomed me and spent quite a while showing me maps. In the bunk room I met a young Polish fellow dropping by Vienna on his way back to England where he works and an Australian college student backpacking around Europe during her summer break.

I felt stinky and tired so I decided to...run! I only saw one other jogger and he looked American - as I ran first to the address of the residence where I am to stay for the three months that I am here starting Sunday night. The street: Mariahilferstraße! This is like Canal Street in New York, in that it is a hip shopping district (have I told you that I don't know Manhattan that well?), with the big beautiful exception that the white ornately ornamented building in which I am to live is old and beautiful.



These two pictures came up when I googled my address for images. I think my residence was completely white, so these may not be right, but you get the idea.



Another picture of Mariahilferstraße.

This is very exciting. I ran around to the State Opera House - the Staatsoper - which is beautiful and around the corner and across the street from the school where must of my classes will be held. I returned from running to shower to enter my bunk room to four gruff looking, but jolly, Romanian men who asked me first for a cigarette and then asked me questions about where I come from and New York. I'm glad that I will be there to mitigate the fact that the sixth roommate is a helpless young Aussie girl.



The Staatsoper.

The city feels real to me. The lighting is different - I'm telling myself this to explain why I can't seem to orient myself coordinally. Much of what I ran through feels like a denser Washington D.C. maybe until I got to almost the very center with its cobblestones, churches, columns, and pubs. There is shadiness side by side with the beauty and interest and quaintness that I could see during my jog, but I can tell that the Viennese are careful and design oriented, smart and lyrical. All this from a first morning jog! And it is only noon. And I heard someone doing lip trills through her scarf and ear-muffed head as she entered the Staatsoper.

The city is more condensed than I thought, but still expansive enough to feel monumental and full. I think that I will be able to walk or jog most of the streets of downtown Vienna by the end of my stay here. Maybe I'll be able to show you my progress. Maybe I'll be boy-scoutish and mark off with a sharpie on my cool little tourist map all the streets I've explored. If I had a camera (!) I would already have uploaded pictoral details of my quarter-day adventure: my blue and yellow painted stucco hostel, my warm clean bed and shower, my Romanian bunkmates, my beautiful palacial residence starting this Sunday, the Staatsoper, and everything. I would have just kept clicking and then animated it stop-animation style. It would have been quick, because I was running.



Stephansplatz. That is Stephan's Place, not Stephan splatzes - a faux verb pronounced shpl-ah-ts. Du splatzt?

From here: I need to go exchange money, get a weeklong train pass, and then I am going to wander. I'll probably eat a mid-afternoon meal out somewhere and then try and get standing room tickets to Verdi's La Forza del Destino at the Staatsoper. Then I will come back to my little room at the Do Step Inn and sleep.

More to come!

Here I Go

Writing a blog post from scratch - not copied or pasted from an email or a scratch elsewhere - is new to me tonight.
I have been practicing stream of conscious writing. Doing it. Repeatedly.
Gobble cuisine to fullest extension of my nervous innard walking style. Did y'all grapple with the gimping gourd of crumpled tether ball beef wellington. If food news is new, I'll know it and then some. To boot your father incredible backwards typing I'll dream you one more sigh up and don't come back before it's more than alright and more than airtight to be you. Call! And finalize the motion. Jennifer deserves a break for once with her terra cotta infirmities to please the almost noxious waves of plaid verbage that racked her apple pie mocha latte glass to shingling dynasties or dinosaurs of inner wreckage to please and to beckon me. Indefinitely.

I have this theory. That to continue to do this will strain my writing to a fine pulp of beautiful condensation. Distillation. Reduced. Reused. Mounted on a chalky platter sky high and wishbone dancing crooked happiness walking. Loveliness drinking to all that want their there...

3 Food-imonies

I think about these stories often (and they are probably warped and folkloricly large from years of steeping in my mind not being told): An Apple Pie Story, A Brownie Story, and...there's a third...

First, The Apple Pie Story

Picture a thirty-ish year old mother of three, of supple strength and brown shoulder-length hair, and anxious over list-loads of plans, tasks, and ornate self-imposed expectations always. Three children. It is snowing outside hard.
It originated in her mind to make a pie. Two even. This is strange.
That second pie should go to ____, who we don't know so well, who lives behind our house. But, these wintry Salt Lake City blocks are big.
She bundles up her three not-so-bundly children, baby remains in one hand, pie in the other, and then she - in lieu of trekking with handcart and crew around the block, hoists herself, baby, and pie over tall white fence and lands at the back door of said neighbor-stranger woman pie recipient.
Answering the back door, ____ gives a strange face to thirty-ish year old mother with baby and pie at back door, but quickly gets over it in Mormon neighborly fashion. Mom-supple-strength says "I felt like I should bring you a pie." The pie is hot and _____ woman takes it quietly grateful and calmly quiet.
3 days.
"Julie, did you know that I had a miscarriage the morning that you brought that pie over?"
"No-"
"I had prayed for comfort from the Lord."

2nd story:

AND ONCE, my mom felt impressed to bring brownies to a sister in the branch. Not there, mom put the circle paper plate of brownies into the square mailbox. Sister X was in diabetic shock in the upstairs hallway inside above, groping down the stairs bannister holding, she felt God say "Go to the mailbox!" And stumbling reaching into the mailbox felt squishy soft brownieness to which she sucked inhaled sugary body freedom.

What is that third story? I think it has to do with pineapple. Pretty sure am I.

In response to http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,705260374,00.html we must acknowledge the weighty beautiful abstraction that is language. Like bombs, profanity can abstractly do real damage. Vague cloak-like bombs intended to suffocate, pummel, and damage, stunt, and whack, and murder: I believe language to be as powerful as the intention behind it. And this is not an individual arena. We agree that swear words are these wounding things. And that is enough for now.
Oh, the wonderful work that is word definition! To assign and attribute life, experience, and transcendent color to a word is to bless it as a little tool. The holy rite of word assignation sweeps blankets across the sky in which we recognize constellations. Together we shoot darts and pluck the same flowers orderly in one universe. I climb through your ear canal to know you and the wallpaper that you lick (anybody read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?)

Chocolate Cake - Chapter I

At the edge of the grave Mara peered in. "Too deep," she said. "Too deep."
Moisture had collected the length of the dirt of the grave down. Worms from miles away knew about this deep grave and were coming.
Chocolate cake was Emiline's favorite; good chocolate cake: chocolate cake which bordered on pudding in its moistness. An icing which neither boasted nor distracted from the molecules beneath it - this was her cake.
Emiline neither knew nor cared about the funeral. Her heart had been startled by different affairs that night. Wind and rain had surely penetrated her feelings of safety. Water had trespassed, had snuck beneath the coatings of light blue paint of her shutters. How had she come to be baking loaves of peanut butter this night?
Bennett was in the basement sleeping - the thrashings of his dreams looming in the dark room above him: spatulas of chocolate, dogs, and Sheila mixed like the kneadings of dessert breads being made in the kitchen above.
Emiline wielded the metallic blades of her small white mixer.
Why had the grave been dug so deep? As if a perfect machine had extracted a slice of the earth so clean that ants were envious. It was not so deep that a cross section of the entire sphere of the earth at that place would have disclosed it or that looking down it one could not see its bottom or whether it was contained. A pure white light shone up a few dozen feet at the nethermost tip of this fine geometried hole; a pure white light.
Bennett was summoned and awakened. A perfect ding had sounded and a perfect cake in Bennett's eyes was lifted steaming from a tight experienced porcelain oven. Carving cross sections, the baby was lifted to its high chair next to the occasionally rattling window. Thomas, the two year old entered, rubbing his eye with a gentle fist. Dings had sounded in all their hearts. Red-eared aproned Emiline kissed them all with her mind.
It was as if the rain could not reach the extremity of the deep hole and it did not. It was even as if something happened between the knees of the girl named Mara at the border of the edge of the hole and the body of the space in the hole that marked not a rest but an immunity to the thrashings of the storm that even the worms in the ground (especially) knew of.
And the trees knew.
Murder does not factor into our story. Murder does not factor into our death. Unless the chocolate cake be murdered. Unless the dirt that Emiline trodded upon during her preparations to cook be part of the wrinkling of the boundaries of things that signals a murder.

Why "The Life and Times of Joseph?"

Originally, I wanted to post biographical sorts of things as they happened. However, I usually feel inspired only to place words carefully - a poetic sort of experience. Which is interesting, because I have been reading about Lev Vygotsky.
And also interesting because I picture myself with my chin upturned, my neck extended, and my chest out.
To accurately portray my thoughts is a great challenge and dilemma, even, to me. Why do I do it? To ordain my life with symbols possibly. I like this one. To allow others to join with me in this ordinance - excretion of syrupy...
I hate to censor.

Pivot/s
I have a pivot:
a probing orb
I send it up and along the seams of my knowledge:
the little boundaries
where glued up
and reduced
a ribbon refurls to
a point

It's All Me!

Something about the way he walked endeared me to him
the craning of the neck to look at the moon or
the way his knees jostled extra
like if you looked upside down from a ten-year-old's body on a slide
you would see how much he bounced

Don't you want a place, a school, a center where you can be the dostoevskyan idiot that you really are? Sometimes I feel so afraid of learning, of thinking. And sometimes I think that I'm in an institution of people afraid of this too. Many of them are my teachers.

NEW

I've been given a new idea, a new rubric,
standard,
principle:
Michel Gondrie and Osvaldo Golijov
and their childlikeness:
vibrant symbioticlosenesslove
children dancing

Upon Reading Wallace Stevens

Working for yourself,
self employed,
your own boss--
an evidence of and
movement toward
...
Utopia?

Left Behind

In the educational dialogues of our nation, there seems to be implicated a party that I am not aware of. Declarations of expectations are boldly enumerated; banners of standards waved; war cries issued; all directed to whom? There are the obvious players that I think of: students, teachers, their families, the community. In fact, these are the only players that I can think of.
The Bush administration, through No Child Left Behind, seems to be doing the best at making an attack: the schools themselves. This is a hazy opponent. "We want accountability from our schools!" From the buildings themselves? We are failing to address directly that which we need and from whom we need it.

His first year there, my cousin Anthony was regarded as one of the finest special education teachers the secondary educational institution employing him had ever seen. Now he’s working with his father-in-law contracting real estate. Some egregious secretarial error mis-sent him a pink slip? Nope. Anthony was not paid enough to comfortably support his wife and two children. He may not have been the primary casualty; Anthony left many children behind when he quit his teaching job this past year.
How could we have prevented that?

Color Theory

They invited.
the dryness in my mouth, I mean,
and
the distant shifting of the sky, uneven in the east

I did not wake any others
have I the right to invite, who am not host?
The sand warm underneath,
my arms inside my shirt,
I am ready
to begin my lesson.

A fifth of the horizon
touched-
two fingers on two hands on the lip of a glass,
moving slowly apart slowly
utmost flirtation

orange
Two thirds!
Three quarters!
The dome of the observatory closes
hiding the stars slowly and cooly

mauve and pink liquid
banners of brilliant luminous white,
fanfares of red,
are soon to be exchanged
for simpler fare:
checkered blue and white
a breakfast spread

Did I forget the King?
He was there;
A Distant Traveler, upwards
Social Climber!
Too Arrogant for practice rooms,
He chose to blow his trumpet on the highest mountain,
does that subtle dance of his
an african man in white
cool jazz
aloof and unaware
that some might not care
that
he is so beautiful.

4:17-6:35am, June 24th, 2006

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