Our Beloved Lena

Ocean Beach, San Francisco December 2010

Lena & Alex December 2010

Lena, part of our family for the last 10 years, passed away on Sunday March 20, 2011. She will be missed more than I can say.



Lena, Clay and Robin Bernal Hill Dec 2010



Lena w/ Buena Vista Elementary Soccer team 2001/02?

SPT's The Document: Field, Morrill, Cobb

Monday morning, quick, before work: Queen Helene’s “Energizing Avocado & Grapefruit” masque on face, steel cut oats with blueberries to the side of the keyboard, bites in between words and keyboard. The need to tell you about Friday night: Courtesy of Small Press Traffic, Thalia Field, Allison Cobb and Erin Morrill at Macky Hall, Oakland Campus of California College of the Arts

Miranda Mellis introduced Thalia Field, whose work I'd first heard about from Emily Abendroth. Earlier this year I checked out of the San Francisco Public Library, Field’s Bird Lovers, Backyard after having photocopied (sssh! )most of Point and Line (2000) last summer. Field is endlessly inventive. She re-enters and imagines the possibilities of form and formal investigation, producing playful crossings that revel in critical assessment and coagulate with linguistic and witty pleasures. Miranda has written a bright and insightful piece using one of Field's lines. It is called "Are you sure species exist?” Mellis writes:

Field’s book is, among other things, science translated into the discourses of poetry and theater. There is an ethical, interdisciplinary vision underlying the recursive image of a gang of students milling around Bird Lovers, Backyard, replete with notebooks and saddlebags, doing amateur science. They ask questions, connect dots—they’re a chorus. And Field’s books are staged as much as written.

You can read the full piece at the Brooklyn Rail here.


It was great to hear Field read several pieces I am familiar with from her Bird Lovers book and to hear a selection from A Prank of Georges, a collaborative piece she wrote with Abigail Lang, a product of Cole Swensen's Paris Translation workshop.

It was also eerie to be listening to Field read about Bikini island and to be thinking about toxicity and tragedy and the politics of it with the earthquake in Japan and its compromised nuclear facilities on all of our minds.

Field's "Apparatus for the Inscription of a Falling Body" from Bird Lovers, Backyard can be read here.

Here's a little snippet from her book Ululu Clown Shrapnel:

YOU'RE NOT MAKING THE MOST OF ME!
the audience grows intrigued: a husband making millions from selling copies and yet she critizes him for not making more? "You Warhol! You Apellos! You Kostabi!" What exactly is she after? His art factory already fakes her precious alchemy  To weakened knees a violin solo  more agonizing than a hyena screeching "Lap at  my genitals, lay in my lap"  "lapis"   "lazy she offers inspiration, not organization.  "This marriage be   this bondage   this border this lounge act"  "Here, drink!" ULULU says, "Drink this Elixir!"  And so many men turn their heads, mouths dry and they step over, cupping their imaginary hands on ULULU's bosom, despite themselves, liquid stone flows through the silk of breasts, one loud midday Hypatia feeding thoughts of immortality (despite the frigidity of the rage)

        ULULU: Now that's how to sell a painting.


                                Audience: Sold!(63)

Field was followed by Erin Morrill’s performative investigation of the archive, privacy and public space, a meditation on living and dying, travel and documentation, loss and accumulation. Her piece consisted of a slideshow of 260-some-odd images culled from her archive of daily photos. Morrill stood behind the screen, her body obscured from view, her voice rushing out as she told us she is an amateur photographer who has been taking pictures for some years now. The performance was simultaneously haunted by the loss of Morill’s archive of her personal and family life, once stored in a public storage facility, but now gone, I can’t remember why, something about payment of fees? Or did I just make that up??


Morrill began by announcing that her piece should not be documented or recorded in any way, expressing frustration about the public documentation of events and people’s lack of participation in the event itself. Like a good narcissist, I felt stung by this and immediately put down my pen and notebook, having been aware since the inception of xpoetics, that reporting on events in order to offer a bit of the event for those not present compromises me. I am an as-yet-again-split, split subject as I multi-task trying to be in the events and also recording some sort of “faithful” version of them, to be transcribed and re-envisioned later (as in right now--though "now" has now become evening, work and daily life intervening).

After the event, I complimented Erin and assured her I would not document her piece at which point she said she did not mind people writing about it but had in mind friends who chose not to come to the event because they figured it would be recorded and they could experience it digitally. So, as I discovered, much of what we take to be directed at us (perhaps particularly a problem in the worlds of writers and artists, those worlds of fragile and soaring egos!), has nothing, or very little, to do with us-- often, anyway. And I’m in agreement with Erin in her frustration with people somehow equating the recorded event with the event itself. My friend Jim tells me that this is a huge issue in the world of performance and performance studies, particularly with dancers, who often do not want recordings of their performances, which can never capture an art absolutely predicated on three dimensional space, not to mention the depths of sound that porously enter our bodies during such a performance. I suppose there are also the facts of temperature and the olfactory to account for. The uncomfortable wooden or steel or cushy plush chairs we might be sitting in, the microscopic forms of life that might also inhabit those chairs, the carpeting...……Anyway, I enjoyed Merrill's performance which also acknowledged the recent death of Akilah Oliver.

Lastly, but not least Allison Cobb closed out the evening with a reading from her book Green-Wood, named after a 500-acre cemetery in Brooklyn. Cobb’s book is an investigation into history, etymology, poetry, landscape architecture, the dead. In a way, the cemetery and Cobb’s book is yet another take on the archive.


From Green-Wood

Author’s note: Green-Wood is named for a 478-acre Victorian cemetery across the street from me in Brooklyn, NY. It opened in 1838 as only the second “rural” cemetery in America, after Mt. Auburn in Boston. The piece is a poetic meditation on my experiences in the cemetery, and on the history surrounding it. *

** 

I walk through fall and winter. I walk through spring. I walk against the backdrop of war, the toppling of the Hussein statue, declaration of end of hostilities. Continued bombings. NAMES OF DEAD in paper. I walk by bulldozers, mowers, pesticide sprayers with yellow warning placards: KEEP OUT FOR 24 HOURS. 

                       Tree I trace 
                       from the root spelled "rot"     
                       to “worm” a proto-word 
                       subtracting wildness

let earth conceal them from our sight 

A few fine old Brooklyn families—the Lefferts, Schermerhorns, and Bergens—traced their title to land on the Gowanus Hills back to their Dutch ancestors. The depression of 1837 spurred them to sell out to the cemetery. 

Smaller landowners refused to relinquish their holdings, a vexation that kept the cemetery at first from deeding for burial a single rood. An echo of “wild wood” reduced to “twig” or “rod,” a measuring stick, a measure of land, then the cross, an instrument of execution. 

Weeping Beech 
London plane tree
Cedar of Lebanon
Austrian pine 
American holly, female
Yoshino cherry
Mulberry from China 

each tagged with a metal I.D. number 

You can read more from Allison's fine work here

Read more about these authors on SPT’s website:

.

from Sally Doyle's Kafka Psalms



Kafka's Butterfly
made out of paper and transparency  by Sally Doyle




DECIPHER THE SCRIPT WITH OUR WOUNDS

(On writing Kafka Psalms)

Recently in my struggle with illness and despair, I happened to take a book of Kafka’s journals off my bookshelf and I immediately became absorbed in this work in a different way than I had been in the past—I felt as though I was reading my own journals. My journal entries and Kafka’s journals and letters connected through the themes of abuse, illness, self-torture, writing, and a longing for love and an other in life.

Intuitively I began linking our voices together on the page. This manuscript is the result. Kafka’s words are italicized, and mine are not. I feel awe and wonder because the reading and writing happen together at the same time. This book is so much about reading. It is a testimony of the most intimate exchange a writer and reader share. Kafka’s words become my words, part of my text. His words tangle with mine, blossom in my poems, and cut into my poems. Sharing the page with Kafka has given me strength to write. Kafka has helped to carry the weight of my burdens.

This is the power of literature that I know he understood too. Writers “come to us” or we to them, at the times in our lives—when we need them. Kafka has come to me now, and somehow I think in our coming together we’ve made something different from our isolated, individual despair. This book is my testimony that finding the “other” through suffering is part of the “meaning” of suffering.

Scarlet Butterfly, Screen printed on xray by Sally Doyle

_______________________________________________
LITTLE FRIEND, POUR FORTH PSALM

Gradually my excitement underwent a transformation,
my thoughts turning to writing,
I felt myself up to it,
wanted nothing save the opportunity to write,
considered what nights in the future I could set aside for it,
with pains in my heart crossed the stone bridge at a run,
felt what I had already experienced so often,
the unhappy sense of a consuming fire inside me
that was not allowed to break out, made up a sentence—
‘Little friend, pour forth’—
incessantly sang it to a special tune,
and squeezed and released a handkerchief
in my pocket in accompaniment as if it were a bagpipe.
                        This inexhaustible running girl--
   physical sensations of hammering and sparks
linking brim to overflow,
ache of words refusing to cross
immensity of either way.

_______________________________________

PSALM 1

This psalm begins with
the more delicate, more distracted, 
more hopeless noise
led by the voices of the 2 canaries.
I have lost in the mist of life
the hills I walked upon before waking.
[I have lost] the gleam of yellowish light 
around my body.

________________________________________


PSALM OF SAD INSTRUCTIONS

This is why I cringe before you
with sad requests…
 The debris from an ordinary day is enormous.

I want to give instructions to my sad body,
the thin breath of a page

                          From the dash on---


divine 
dirty little barefoot girl
running along in her shift 

____________________________________

PSALM 95

Under these diary pages
                  galoshes slosh.
A chill pursues me.
Whispering
A woman pulling me to school,
a hand pushing me through
the doorframe.
The round table of nervous people
Begins to tremble.
I have probably caused a disaster.
A car door slams.
Light comes too soon.

____________________________________

REFUSAL

The hole refuses the pin.
But it makes no difference—
                             this refusal—
pin pushes through anyway—
precise   careless 
 the suffering it causes.

_________________________________


ENCLOSED

Why have you enclosed butterflies 
with brackets and parenthesis?

[Complete standstill ] (Unending torments)

___________________________________

PATTERNS

Butterflies born  
in the dark poem,
if we could see,
we’d read patterns 

words 
opening 

then gone


]

_________________________________________


DIARY PSALM

It has become very necessary 
to keep a diary again.
The uncertainty of my thoughts,
 F.,
the ruin of the office,
 the physical impossibility of writing
 and the inner need for it--
Trying to push myself 
through the pen 
to the tip 
of existence.

_____________________________________________________



Sally Doyle and James Joyce



Sally Doyle is a poet living in San Francisco. She received her MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She teaches poetry through California Poets in the Schools. Her chapbook, Under the Neath was published by Leaf Books. She has also published her poetry in Temblor, Central Park, Avec, How(ever), O Anthology, five fingers review, Lipstick 11 and recently in Rattle. She is currently working on her manuscript, Kafka Psalms.

Having Missed David Wolach

When David was in the Bay Area recently, I was at home, on one side of the rainy traffic-jammed Bay Bridge and David was on the other reading for Small Press Traffic in Oakland, and then Saturday found me fielding questions on the reference desk at the library while he gave his nonsite talk, so alas, I missed him. Twice.

But I have his powerful book Occultations, and I am posting some excerpts of it here. Throughout this collection which consists of the following sections/poems: transit, riverfire, modular arterial cacophony, your nerve center taxonomy, book alter(ed), body maps & distraction zones, Wolach stages various experiments and interventions in language and action. His is an art of appropriation, material & social palimpsest, somatic experiments, archaeological & political excavation, performed remixes, embodied imaginative flourishing and decay, all in an astonishing variety of active poetic experiments. David's book strikes me as a primer on how to write, right now, in doubt and in common.

from transit

q:

who are you who embraces our poisons?

mouth stuffed nearly i can see the smoke

bracket evening were i to see you, who

with faith in the receding pines,

certain the wailing trees will

recuperate our gains and losses,

turn ash into act, you wishper i hear

you whisper, breath into breathe       (45)


from your nerve center taxonomy: eight staged distraction zones in miniature


Distraction Zone Staging: one person reads from two different texts; another person writes in response and reads what they are writing; a third person (me) writes in response to both audio inputs. Texts used: 1) Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and 2) leaked torture memorandum from Assistant A.G. Bybee, 2008.

6. (under_standing abu ghraib purchasables_)

I

A photo isn't a leg blown off
a struggling contradiction isn't yr Adorno's dialectical acrobatics
A text working overtime isn't working overtime
A crystallized conundrum isn't yr deep painterly meditation
A language rammed up against silence isn't what I witnessed
A happy garden isn't yr flaunting the chrysanthemums between
misplaced have-to's
A replica of yr washing machine isn't the imagerie of this either/or
tea trade in failures

II

Cramped, we expectation
Cramped, we complicit our techniques in a
Cramped, we verb the stress
Stressed, as water needed
We grasped
We body-farmed
We faxed sea-collar mines
Cramped, we mouth-sounded alarms
Cramped, we spread fingers spread
Spread, we wall the nameless several laughter
Shuts off & this is guilt's mechanism
Cramped, we muscle fatigue so many nouns tonite
Cramped, we nounds our open-eyed apology posture
("The body" is defined by capture of an incommensurate
Absence, of the area not yet wounded)
Wound, an archive archived
Wound, a side effect
Cramped, we insect
Cramped, we redaction brackets the loudest in hiding
Cramped, we water the eyes
Water, the blood when red is read as dying
Water, we comply with incipient panic
Panic, we does not breathe for seconds need
Breathes, we lift
Lift, we repeat
Lift, we review a they in a warmth kitchen wrapped
Cramped, no harm resolute goes the written as times sinking alibi
Harmed, without incident
Harmed without pulsing his leave is our evening  (124-125)


about your nerve center taxonomy, David writes:

your nerve center taxonomy  is a series of "staged occultations," where, owing to somatic practices a la ca conrad and others, work here uses both filters--repeating phrases or, in this case, conceptual frames--and rituals--predetermined activities/procedures--in order to be(come). they are, like "modular arterial cacophony,' poets theater pieces, intended to be reciprocally performed by others. in contrast to some of conrad's (soma)tics, which belong to a hugely important lineage of embodiment writing practices most profoundly associated, i think, with hannah weiner's work, these poems desire to be occulted (punished?) along with/ as extensions of their bodily environments, to be partially drowned out by their rituals (or vice versa?), rather than to emerge from their rituals.

all movements here seek to remain partially occulted, and the poetic writing is part of the ritual itself--where the ritual, or activity, divides the poem-space's attention, such that one does not write from notes afterwards, but one's notes are the poem, and the poems are the notes of the body signing in space and time. unlike the transcription practices of williamson or goldsmith, these "notes" are not jottings, descriptions, or pure dictation, but are rather staged writing acts in which the body seeks articulation thru a poetic mode from the outset, the transcriber attempting to write the poem on the spot, to, in a sense, claim itself, as mediated by and contiguous with its environment. this is to say that though the poems in this section are transcriptions, the object was to create an environment, a "distraction zone in miniature," part of which would be the "subject-body" attempting to voice thru signing, thru lyric, thru direct address, its struggle to "enunciate" or "speak" or "articulate" its fractures, multiples, constrictions, and, it turns out under such circumstances, its univocality, not to compile or to shape what has been compiled.

 

**

I plan to carry this book around with me for some time.  You should too.  It is available, as are most books mentioned on this blog, at Small Press Distribution.

Glissant's Revelatory Wanderings

L'écrivain Édouard Glissant est mort. 

Édouard Glissant is dead. A great loss.

From Glissant's Poetics of Relations:

However, and this is an immense paradox, the great founding books of communities the Old Testament, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Chansons de Geste, the Islandic Sagas, the Aeneid, or the African epics, were all books about exile and often about errantry. This epic literature is amazingly prophetic. It tells of the community, but, through relating the community's apparent failure or in any case its being surpassed, it tells of errantry as a temptation (the desire to go against the root) and, frequently, actually experienced. Within the collective books concerning the sacred and the notion of history lies the germ of the exact opposite of what they so loudly proclaim. When the very idea of territory becomes relative, nuances appear in the legitimacy of territorial possession. These are books about the birth of collective consciousness, but they also introduce the unrest and suspense that allow the individual to discover himself there, whenever he himself becomes the issue. The Greek victory in the Iliad depends on trickery; Ulysses returns from his Odyssey and is recognized only by his dog; the Old Testament David bears the stain of adultery and murder; the Chanson de Roland is the  chronicle of a defeat; the characters in the Sagas are branded by an unstemmable fate, and so forth. These books are the beginning of something entirely different from massive, dogmatic, and totalitarian certainty (despite the religious uses to which they will be put). These books are of errantry, going beyond the pursuits and triumphs of rootedness required by the evolution of history.

Some of these books are devoted entirely to the supreme errantry, as in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The very book whose function is to consecrate an intransigent community is already a compromise, qualifying its triumph with revelatory wanderings.

In both L'Intention poétique (Poetic Invention) and Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse)--of which the present work is a reconstituted echo or a spiral retelling--I approached this dimension of epic literature. I began wondering if we did not still need such founding works today, ones that would use a similar dialectics of rerouting, asserting, for example, political strength but, simultaneously, the rhizome of a multiple relationship with the Other and basing every community's reasons for existence on a modern form of the sacred, which would be, all in all, a Poetics of Relation .

....Sometimes, by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find oneself (15-18).


....The horizon seaweed is interwoven in variations of gray tinged blue with black, where space increases. Their fern makes a rain that does not peel away from the heat of the sky. With the dove gray of thought you touch a tousle of vegetation, a cry of  morne and red earth. Glowing fires scarcely sparked by dizziness. Rainshower motionless. Dwindling echoses. A tree trunk silvers against the rim of the sun, stubbornness, stiff but melting. Call the keepers of silence with their feet in the river. Call the river that used to spill over the rocks.--As for myself, I have listened to the pulse of these hot spots. I have bathed there beside friends, attentive to the volcano's drums. We have stood bent against the wind without falling. One lone bay; whatever name it had evaporated. Also endeavouring to point out this blue tinge to everything...--Its sun strolls by, in the savanna's silver shuddering and the ocre smell of the hounded earth (209).

A video of a Glissant interview  ici: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x81q9n_edouard-glissant_news

Dear Reader

Check out a post on reading by moi on the Language and Thinking blog.....HERE

10th Annual Poets Theater Performances at Small Press Traffic

This weekend Small Press Traffic held it's Tenth Annual Poets Theater event.  While the dailiness of daily life and an attempt to put the lid on a cold kept me away from Friday night's events, I had the pleasure of selling tickets, pouring drinks, and enjoying the second evening's dynamic selection of performances. 

But first, here's the line-up for Friday January 28th:

ACT ONE

Episode One from "Feel Your Media--Bitch"
(four episodes for SPT Poets Theater 2011)
Written by Rodrigo Toscano
Directed by Sara Larsen & David Brazil
with technical assistance by Andrew Kenower
Featuring David Brazil (D), Sara Larsen (S), Taylor Brady (X), Erin Morril (Y), Zack tuck (Z)

"You wanna see Cultural Marketers--doing it?"

Draft 101: Puppet Opera
Written by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Directed by Lara Durback
with technical assistance by Lauren Shufran
Featuring Green Box (Marcel Duchamp), Alex Cruse/Kate Robinson (Hung/Suspend Woman), Leah Clark/Lara Durback (Another Puppet, Male), Loretta Clodfelter/Kate Robinsno (Lights)

Perhaps make
a hinge
picture.
(folding yardstick, book...)
develop
the principle of hinge
in the displacements
1st in the plane 2nd in space

find an automatic description
of the hings
___________________________________
perhaps introduce it
in the hung/suspended woman  ---Marcel Duchamp

Episode Two: "Feel Your Media-- Bitch"

INTERMISSION

ACT TWO
If You want to See Flying Go to the Circus

Written and directed by Brent Cunningham

The actors for this improvisatory play will be selected from the audience at the start of the evening by a chance procedure. It features plays-within-plays stacked like Russian nesting dolls. In the end, everyone dies.

Episode Three: "Feel Your Media--Bitch"

I Can See You but I Know You're There
Written and directed by Tom Comitta and Steven Trull
Featuring Samantha Boudrot, Ashley Brim, Tom Comitta, Jessamyn Cuneo, Paul Montes, Reece McGowen, Antonio Iannarone and Steven Trull

Timken is to Timpani as________is to________.


Episode Four: "Feel Your Media--Bitch"

Tell Only One
Written and directed by Corina Copp
featuring Corina Copp, Julia Jarcho, and Jacqueline Waters

Goethe wrote, "Tell it to no one, tell it only to the wise"--an admonition of sorts that is repeated via letters from squirrels to two doomed lovers in Ingeborg Bachmann's radio drama, "The Good God of Manhattan" (1958). This piece, "Tell Only One," should look like a curtain splashed in mauve variations and described many times, eventually uncovering a singular, bare face that is wise, if wise means hoping we won't expect it, it being what faces tell when they are reading messages that say don't tell anyone.

I believe that Carol Mirakove and Jen Benka provided crazy antics before the plays and at intermission!

On Saturday evening, January 29th, we were treated to the following:

ACT ONE

Ascidian Play
written by Laynie Browne
and directed by Erin Morrill
featuring Stephanie Young (Ascidian A),  Bill Luoma (Ascidian B), Davide Brazil (Ascidian C), Lindsey Bolt (Ascidian 1), Kevin Killian (Richard Foreman), Erin Morrill (Director of Play), Brandon Brown (Ernst Haeckel), Taylor Brady (Charles Darwin), Stacy Doris (Gertrude Stein), Erin Wilson (Seastar) and surprise guests! (one of whom was Denise Newman as a crab.)

Ascidian Play chronicles the existential preoccupations of three larval Ascidians contemplating what type of Ascidians they will become as they mature. This play is one in a collection of plays about the misadventures of marine invertebrates called Invertebrate Plays.

"Remember, we're still larval, be careful what you say!"

This play was finely staged with hippy VW bus-driving-guppy-gurgling larvae on the road.

The Photographers Photo Detritus Without a Camera
Written and directed by Ariel Goldberg
This is all for Sale with models Jackqueline Frost, Ted Rees, Matt Runkle, and Cassie Thornton

Immerse yourself in a fusion lecture liquidation of accessories that keep cameras and pictures flowing rapidly. What do photo objects become when accumulated and outdated--what do you become owning these objects?

The Salesperson/Models did the runway strut with their unwieldy collections of frames, packaging and other photographic detritus while Goldberg narrated the story of these materials. On screen, a slideshow. Remember, this is all for sale!

Ambergris Desktop Vocalist
Written and Directed by Christine Choi and Drew Fernando

This piece called for audience participation--prompts provided on-screen via the old-fashioned (!) technology of the overhead projector, drinks were requested and proffered, sonic pleasures and narrations passed back and forth.

INTERMISSION

Antics abounded: Zack Tuck provided tarot readings, (alas, I didn't have a chance to have my done!) and the lovely duo of Samantha Giles and Stephanie Young performed on-request interpretive dances, more like friezes, from various movies--Heathers, Flashdance, Annie Hall, etc. Food and drink.

ACT TWO

Lycanthropes/Entre Chien et Loup
written and directed by C.S. Giscombe
featuring Madison Hardy (as Marcella), Ryan Schaefer, George Spelvin, and Emmar Tome. Music by Anthony Bellow. Based on a true story.

From Naked Translations: "Entre chien et loup is a multi-layered expression. It is used to describe a specific time of day, just before night, when the light is so dim you can't distinguish a dog from a wolf. However, it's not all about levels of light. It also expresses that limit between the familiar, the comfortable versus the unknown and the dangerous (or between the domestic and the wild). It is an uncertain threshold between hope and fear."

Cecil's play featured excellent wolf masks and great atmosphere. Marcella, a white girl, had stories to tell, questions to ask, issues of race and gender to probe, while the wolves prowled and paced about a park-like setting (a park bench on stage). One of the wolves played a guitar and sang. A hapless, monotone man happens upon the scene and there is screaming. Loved it.

I Confess! An Adaptation of the Confessions of Saint Augustine
written and directed by David Brazil and Evan Kennedy
Costume Designer for Ms. Bellamy (who played an angel decked out in wings and halo courtesy of a shower head, pole, and toiletry container/apparatus ): Matt Gordon

featuring David Brazil (Good Augustine), Evan Kennedy (Bad Augustine), Monica Peck (Monica his mother), Lidsey Boldt, Jack Frost, Jenn Hoff, Erin Morill, Steve Orth, Ted Rees, John Sakkis (The Eversores), Taylor Brady (Pear Tree, Fig Tree), Ted Rees (Bishop), Brandon Brown (Alypius, Augustine's closest friend), Brent Cunningham (Faustus, a Manichee), Kevin Killian (Ambrose, Bishop of Milan), Bob Gluck (Ponticianus) and Dodie Bellamy (Continency, an angel).

An aging saint recounts his past life as a debauchee. Dramatic accompaniment will honor the chronology through its greatest hists: Infancy! The infamous pear theft from adolescence! Screwing around with a crew of horny debauchees! The life-altering break from the weirdo cult of Manichees! The caress of saving grace from Ambrose! A celestial vision and garden conversion! The death of a mother!

This play was a delight--the writing both funny and beautiful. The ensemble of actors really fed off of one another. I've just written a little short thing about Augustine's Confessions so it was fun to see what David did with the material. Brazil narrated Augustine's life while Kennedy in silver sneakers was dazzling as the Bad Augustine. Lindsey Boldt and others a great punky band of debauchees! Cunningham an excellent Manichean. Gluck a fabulously ponderous Ponticianus.

Poets Theater--always a fun evening out. Why would anyone miss it!