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I continue to be unsettled by the House of Toast's ongoing influx of anorexic wannabes. It brings to mind that line from Eliot -- A crowd flowed over London Bridge today/I did not think death had undone so many. Or something like that. Unsettled. Creeped out. Disturbed.

It's icky. Louche. Crapulent, even.

I'm shuddering. It's like the word blog. Eructative. Anti-peristaltic.

Someone please make it stop.

***

One of us checked out the other day, the redoubtable Abdul Walid, the blogger formerly known as Elck, founder of the Laupe Movement, denouncing as he departed the trivial "entertainments" of Blogistan (much as Andrei Tarkovsky denounced the notion of film as "entertainment") and presumably moving on to graver texts and conversations.

I'll always remember the story he told about how he once attended a party after a deliberate vow of silence. How, spectacularly silent, he was as much the center of attention as he had been as a raconteur. He was eloquent even in his silences. I, the silent, invisible one, was deeply impressed. Secretly envious. Secretly pissed -- Hey, he's stealing my act, and they love him ! It seemed like some textual translation of passive aggression; an act of pure negative capability.

I'll miss his voice.

***

Voice. Vox.

There's a loaded word. I'm in one of my words, words, words phases. Filled with neo-Sartrean degout, diacritical marks be damned. Hence the photos. Weeds, weeds, weeds. Little, humble things that speak for themselves.

Welcome to the weedblog. Paula's House of Weeds.

Pushing up through the cracks of the sidewalk.

This weedophilia of mine -- oeedophilia !-- is no recent perversion. Viz. this poem, circa 1997.


Wheedle

Tenants of slits and cracks,
they insinuate, utilize.
They police the alleyways between events.
They drop into abandoned wells
to talk the fallen out of rescue.
On moonless nights
they stitch legerdemain.

Even the most magnificent garden --
renowned for its Aristotelian symmetries
the muted splendour of its colors
the elegant dialectics of its fountains
the tractability of its swans
and the sweet temper of its minotaur --
has them.
They crowd the narrowest interstices,
awaiting word.

But mainly
they token mourning.
In a hatband or a buttonhole,
they go from green to brown to dust
in a single afternoon.
You brush off your hat, your lapel.
You move on.


6.15.97