Rae Armantrout

"There are two kinds
of choices,

pirate sources say:

unconscious
and desperate."

- "Procedures"

Me: And then I drove to his house and he was like, "When you ____, you look like ____" and I said, "I am ____," and then later he texted me to say I'm ____.
Julia: You two talk to each other like the characters in your book.
Me: We are the characters in my book.

* * *

Hattie: I didn't like Earth. Nature makes me sad, like animals eating other animals.
Me: So are you going to become a vegetarian?
Hattie: No, I just don't want to see the movie again.
Me: Oh.
Hattie: There was this scene with a polar bear trying to find ice, because all the ice is melted, and they were like "See how tired he is, he's so exhausted and hungry." And then he came across these walruses and a baby walrus. And usually if there's a baby who's about to get eaten, you feel sorry for the baby, but in this case, because you saw how exhausted the polar bear was, you wanted it to get the baby, but all the other walruses were protecting it.
Me: I don't think I can hear anymore. This is too upsetting.
Hattie: And then the polar bear fell over and died.

Wise Blood

Last weekend, I spent three days in Lombard, Illinois, where it takes two hours to get your nails done. Can you imagine such a thing? Probably not. They had the Indy 500 playing on huge televisions and Peabo Bryson coming in across the airwaves.

I danced at Katelin's wedding and sang the Hava Nagila, but no one lifted me up in a chair. I want to have a Jewish wedding for that reason alone.

Hattie said she wants to read Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. I said something like, "Oh, she's Kat's favorite--" and Hattie said, "SHE?!" and I was like, "She's a woman?" And then Hattie started crying and said she only likes men and only men are talented and I looked at my mom like, You're the feminist, you do something.

Tonight I need to make meerkat costumes. This may require divine intervention.

Interesting things you may or may not already be aware of

The Life Cycle of a Marriage

If I go to Indonesia, I may die in a volcanic eruption.

Ashley Farmer's elegy in Diagram

If I go to Indonesia, I may die in an earthquake.

When I was sent into yon forest by the incredibly sharp Annabelle Buck

If I go to Indonesia, I may die in a terroist attack.

I may die on the plane.

I may die tomorrow, crossing 42nd Street in front of a manic bicycle messenger. Calamities are so unpredictable, and this is one trigger for agoraphobics. See how I brought it all back to Mental Health Awareness Month?

Happy Mental Health Awareness Month, Everybody

DRUGSTORE by Joshua Bell

I finished the baggie of blue pills
that made the planets so tolerable.
The toy hula girl on top of my dresser

sends her regards, although she
doesn't dance until I touch her,

and Ramona, do you have any new pills
you're not using, any spare lows

for your only boy? I fell hard
for the mailbox, I sent flowers to

that mailbox, I went fishing
in the reservoir, but they'd drained it

twenty feet. Your lost lures glared
cheaply under the morning sun,

which was a plug in a reprobate
bathtub. Will we drain up

instead of down? If we go down
is that the first we're heard of?

Yes. I'm tired of the astrologies,
the icy pharmaceutical rites

that are enough for me. I grow old.
I encounter philosophy at night.

I’m concerned that what we have
is each other, for as long
as prescribed, and I can tell

by the skin beneath your eyes
that as far as I go, it's your word
against the universe and sleep.

Rejected from Breadloaf. Going to Bali.

The Circle of Life

E: Today we found a dead bird in the street. It was just a baby bird.

Me: Oh no! How did that make you feel?

E: I wanted to get a piece of paper.

Me: A piece of paper?

E: We found a dead bird at school and put it on a piece of paper and buried it.

E's Dad: E's a little scientist. She's very practical.

***

Me: What's "The Circle of Life" about?

S: Baby Simba being born.

Me: Okay, but I mean, what does that mean? What is the circle of life? What happens when something dies?

K: You're reincarnated?

Me: What about animals? What if an animal dies in the wild and there's no one to bury it?

K: It gets eaten.

Me: Right. And what happens to its bones? They go back into the earth, right? Into the ground? And then flowers come up. That's what it means, the circle of life.

Author Photos

That's right. A Lion King headdress. I'm wearing it right now. I think it's making me come up with more good ideas than usual. Speaking of, please click here and vote for Brooklyn Arts Exchange in Nickelodeon's Parents' Picks. Because, obviously, the best theater for kids is happening wherever this headdress goes, and it goes with me.

This is Sedona, but still.

I dreamed my dad was driving me through New Mexico, and wouldn't let me get out of the car. I had my hands pressed to the window like a child, and the car drove through all these anachronisms: palm trees, a heavy silver mist like out of a Lord of the Rings movie, children playing in a sprinkler in the middle of the desert. Then these brilliant red mesas appeared through the mist, and I was calling them mountains, and in my dream or in my real body, my heart got caught in my throat, like I missed them so much and I just wanted to get out of the car but I wasn't allowed.

Why take a Brecht class at the New School when you can just read this blog.

I am a fairly impatient person. I have a low tolerance for arrogance, and an equally low tolerance for ignorance without humility, so when I am in a room of arrogant people who have no idea how little they know and how incredibly stupid they sound, I want to throw chairs. Last night, we were treated to a performance of "She's Always a Woman" in sign language and song. This had nothing to do with Brecht, of course; this person just wanted to promote a performance on Friday night by his sign language class.

I said, Is this going to be like Napoleon Dynamite?

Napoleon Dynamite?

You know, The Rose? Some say love it is a river?

After he was done, he showed us pictures from a production of Marat/Sade he'd been in fifteen years ago. Someone in the class asked if he'd looked at the original German version of the play, and if he knew anything about the quality of the translation.

This was a German play?, he said. I didn't know that until you said that.

THIS IS WHY EVERYONE THINKS ACTORS ARE SO STUPID. THIS IS WHY I AM ASHAMED TO TELL PEOPLE I WENT TO ACTING SCHOOL, BECAUSE THEY WILL ASSUME I HAVE THE INTELLIGENCE OF MENTALLY RETARDED COCKER SPANIEL.

A woman in the class who makes a point of telling everyone how she's non-credit, how she doesn't need to do the assignments, and how she thinks Al Pacino is untalented, then presented her final "scene" to be read aloud. The assignment was to write a scene in the style of one of the playwrights we studied. She wrote a movie script about three teenage girls doing speed with a cat. Was this in the style of Beckett, Pinter, Kane, anyone? No of course not.

Luckily, I made it out alive, without punching anyone in the face.

Open Letter

Dear New York Subway,

I WILL NOT "go green" and buy a Kindle. I WILL NOT accessorize or personalize my Kindle. Have you heard the robot man who lives inside them speak? They are pleasure-destroyers, the death of all things good and true.

Very sincerely,

Leigh Stein

"I'm feeling the word desire more than the feeling"

Yesterday I was mistaken for an Anthropologie employee. Then I saw Kendra, who makes everything better, not only because she shares my deep love for cheeseburgers, but also because she appreciates my command of the French word for squirrel. I maybe had too good of a time with Kendra because when I got home, I improperly set my alarm, and it didn't go off this morning, making me forty minutes late to work and leaving no time for bathing. THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED TO ME BEFORE I've heard of it happening to other people, but I've always thought, What kind of a person are you? You can't even set your alarm clock properly? And now I hang my head with humility. My dirty dirty head.

Overheard in Bryant Park: Well, I don't want her to become a golf widow.

Kathleen & Elisa know what's up.

May madness Part I

I wrote my Pinter play for class last night. I think it's pretty good. I put in a lot of bugs, because I think bugs add an essential level of paranoia and fear.

To do in the next eleven days: write a paper that compares something to something, I can't remember; buy a dress for Katelin's wedding (which I dreamed was a Russian circus); read in Bryant Park tomorrow in my mouse princess costume; read at Barnes and Noble in my mouse princess costume; introduce poets at a different Barnes and Noble in a normal costume; be filmed with my seven-year-olds, doing a play of a comic book (I play the men + the Brooklyn Bridge); read Marat/Sade.

I told Hattie last night I was going to download a bunch of Mariah Carey songs.

MARIAH CAREY?, she said.

Like old, good Mariah Carey.

Like Butterfly?

PRE-BUTTERFLY!

Pre-Butterfly?!!!?

"Always Be My Baby" I think goes down on my all-time favorite songs list. I listened to it repeatedly on the train from Brooklyn this morning. And by repeatedly I mean repeatedly. All those synthesizers really do me in. I want to throw a party, just so I can make a playlist with this song as centerpiece.

The first time the optometrist office called, they called me LAY. I said LEE. They said, oh LEE.

The second time they called, they called me LAY. I said LEE. They said, oh LEE. I thought, this is embarrassing, why don't they just write something phonetic in my file.

Today they called and asked for Laura.

LEIGH?

LAURA STEIN?

THIS IS LEIGH STEIN?

Your name's not Laura?

NO.

I've lost count of how many times I've read Angels in America. I saw a production in a church basement in Brooklyn Heights, and the HBO version twice. I played Harper in an acting class in high school, the scene in which Joe comes home from one of his walks, and she tells him she burned dinner and asks if he's a homo. If anyone ever said to me, Leigh, we know you haven't been in a play in five years, but you're our only hope for Harper, please let us know when you can make your snowsuit fitting?, I would probably jump up and down and become hysterical.

It's like singing hymns, reading plays you used to have memorized. The words just come back.

You heard it here.

I talked to Dan Clowes for the Book Bench.

//

My family is insane/I'm thinking of going to Bali.

histoire d'un écureuil

Went for a run around Prospect Park in the rain, practically deserted, tiny flower petals on the pavement, everything in bloom. I wish I knew the names of more flowering shrubs. On the way home, almost stepped on a squirrel, face down and dead on the sidewalk, like it had fallen from a tree. Maybe it was a suicide. I freaked out a little bit. Now I'm soaked. Oh man, you know what else is great? Jenny Holzer. And you know who I wish wasn't moving to Portland because she knows about all the great things and how will I find out about great things without her? Kat.

LEAST INHABITED ISLAND II

Written over nine months across four states and possibly the first e-book guide to moving to the desert and making choices you'll soon regret, the all Leigh Stein issue of Combatives has arrived.