&, just seeing your Learning from Detroit piece! i feel sure we were talking about ruin porn when i visited you & carla there, but perhaps a bit before you were at work on this. looking forward to reading it
This is a beautiful, wonderful post, Suzanne. I relate to so much of this. Thank you for opening the LMDM terms. I'm sorry about what you're going through with your mom, first off (my mother turns 85 in a couple of months). Our generation of Jewishness during these times, too. Also, it's such an overlooked, underappreciated aspect of life and our art that we need certain conditions to be favorable for us just to be able to work. My own writing on this platform started with the subheading "Works and Workings in Joy and Despair for Love of the World"... poetry has to be echoing inside you for it to quicken past the prosaic. Conditions need to be right. Love of the World doesn't come naturally, more of an aspirational way of orienting.
Did you know I grew up in L.A. and went to UCSD? I was there when Fanny Howe was teaching there. I read a recent interview with her where she expressed a sense of failure. Always surprising in such at-one practitioners. On the other hand, Miles Davis said there was no such thing as failure.
What quickening there is in the burial grounds, in the underworld. I'm working on an Orpheus story, btw.
thanks for this, & your kind words MM. I have a slight recollection that we may have talked about both our being from LA-ness, but I don't remember the details.
Fanny Howe is one of my very favorite writers, and I feel a little terrified by something in her, having never met her. (do you happen to have a link to the interview?) There's a gendered difference perhaps in the miles davis/fanny howe binary orientation to failure, both are useful frameworks!
"Poetry has to be echoing inside you for it to quicken past the prosaic" - yes.
& our generation of jewishness in these times, i've been thinking (without clarity) about the particularities of lapsed-ness or not in LA or perhaps NY jews of our generation, what allowed for that distancing, and the ways that shapes or doesn't shape experience of the present trauma
"a little terrified by something in her" - valid, and it has been so long irl, she was always a kind and generous teacher, congenial temperament, so that's a layer further in for subliminal perception, for her art (along the lines of doing it for herself), what's ultimately not for others at least on social terms...
You're a warm glowing light suzanne s
What a sudden sweet surprise!! ♥️ Brent
I’m aiming for total freedom of motivation by age 60
(!!!!!)
So say we all!
here here
Sounds like you've got a great doctor. DO IT FOR YOURSELF!
And thanks for the pearls!
1. All writing is fiction.
2. If you don't appreciate the veracities of Las Vegas, you're suspect to me.
thank you for reading, Chip!! I do have a great doctor, I'm gonna tell her you said so Ayurveda brings the wisdom along with the science
Oh! also, you’ve reminded me of this Alexis Lykiard statement I read the other day:
“books are not written specifically to please others; they are written, like it or not, to please oneself.”
yes. i feel i have to learn this lesson over and over and over, every time i make a sentence. you know what i mean?
Love your writing. Courage, friend
A lovely post, Suzanne. Thinking on similar imponderables today. Barrett
with you in the imponderables, barrett.
&, just seeing your Learning from Detroit piece! i feel sure we were talking about ruin porn when i visited you & carla there, but perhaps a bit before you were at work on this. looking forward to reading it
This is a beautiful, wonderful post, Suzanne. I relate to so much of this. Thank you for opening the LMDM terms. I'm sorry about what you're going through with your mom, first off (my mother turns 85 in a couple of months). Our generation of Jewishness during these times, too. Also, it's such an overlooked, underappreciated aspect of life and our art that we need certain conditions to be favorable for us just to be able to work. My own writing on this platform started with the subheading "Works and Workings in Joy and Despair for Love of the World"... poetry has to be echoing inside you for it to quicken past the prosaic. Conditions need to be right. Love of the World doesn't come naturally, more of an aspirational way of orienting.
Did you know I grew up in L.A. and went to UCSD? I was there when Fanny Howe was teaching there. I read a recent interview with her where she expressed a sense of failure. Always surprising in such at-one practitioners. On the other hand, Miles Davis said there was no such thing as failure.
What quickening there is in the burial grounds, in the underworld. I'm working on an Orpheus story, btw.
thanks for this, & your kind words MM. I have a slight recollection that we may have talked about both our being from LA-ness, but I don't remember the details.
Fanny Howe is one of my very favorite writers, and I feel a little terrified by something in her, having never met her. (do you happen to have a link to the interview?) There's a gendered difference perhaps in the miles davis/fanny howe binary orientation to failure, both are useful frameworks!
"Poetry has to be echoing inside you for it to quicken past the prosaic" - yes.
& our generation of jewishness in these times, i've been thinking (without clarity) about the particularities of lapsed-ness or not in LA or perhaps NY jews of our generation, what allowed for that distancing, and the ways that shapes or doesn't shape experience of the present trauma
I hope to read your orpheus story!
So glad to have been induced back to the interview. It's here: https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-fanny-howe/ here and there, today and yesterday, yours and hers, staying with the bewilderment and imponderables. An accidental dialogue.
"a little terrified by something in her" - valid, and it has been so long irl, she was always a kind and generous teacher, congenial temperament, so that's a layer further in for subliminal perception, for her art (along the lines of doing it for herself), what's ultimately not for others at least on social terms...
thank you again, and off to look at this interview! imponderables, bewilderment, terror kindness and all