Continuing

...to work on my chapbook for the Dusie Kollectiv but have not gotten it quite together yet, though I am enjoying collecting bits for it and thinking about its design (which keeps changing as the content changes; if I had time I could do alternate versions).

Alternate versions are appealing, letting me slip out of (and into) certain choices. A branching sort of progression. Interesting to play around with if ultimately (probably) indecipherable to anybody other than myself (i.e. readers, who I very much do write for), or plain impossible to execute.

I've collected a stack of the chaps that have come in so far, but have decided *not* to read them until I'm finished, because I don't want to think of mine in that context yet. (Eh, that doesn't make any sense.)

*

I've been reading Alice Notley's Alma, or the Dead Women but it's been freaking me out. Despite the escape sought (dulling, desensitizing, distraction) of Alma shooting up directly into her forehead (significant there, of course), Notley's hiding nothing, letting nobody slide. Jen Benka wrote about it as a brutal indictment of the Bush administration in the PP newsletter (and it is) but Notley indicts not just THEM but also US. It's angry, but it's true. A wrecking wreck.

So I'm alternating it with Nada & Gary's Swoon--a story so irresistibly romantic and excessive that I can't put it down even when I've sunburned both legs and one arm OH MY. I read it before but was in a different place (headspace, age, physical location, season, year) then, and this time it's even more urgent, feels more inevitable. (Or course, now knowing them I also know how it will end, but that doesn't spoil anything. It actually makes it all even more fun.)

**

I'm in a boring meeting about winter accessories, gloves, scarves, hats, mufflers, wraps, no mittens this year. Where are the mittens?