how dare one exploit Third World or foreign or exotic women;
my body is mostly skeleton and if anyone wants to write on
it, they must use the finest brush and write the simplest of
haiku; I have sex, I like sex, I am sex, and while being used
may of end me on principle or concretely, I will fight back by
manipulation and lies but deny it from kindergarten to the
grave; I have no sense of honor and, girls, if there’s one thing
you can count on, you can count on that. If this were not the
common, current practice - if triviality and deceit were not
the coin of the female realm - there would be nothing remarkable in who I am or how I got the way that I am.
It must be admit ed that those who want me to account for
myself are intrigued in hostile, voyeuristic ways, and their
projections of me are not the usual run-of-the-mill rudeness or
arrogance to which writers, especially women writers, become
accustomed. The work would be enough, even for the unfortunate sad sacks mentioned above. So here’s the deal as I see it: I am ambitious - God knows, not for money; in most
respects but not al I am honorable; and I wear overalls: kil
the bitch. But the bitch is not yet ready to die. Brava, she says,
alone in a small room.
Music 1
I studied music when I was a child, the piano as taught by
Mrs. Smith. She was old with white hair. She represented
culture with every gesture while I was just a plebe kid. But I
learned: discipline and patience from Czerny, the way ideas
can move through sound from Bach, how to say “Fuck you”
from Mozart. Mrs. Smith might have thought herself the
reigning sensibility, and she did get between the student and
the music with a stunning regularity, but if you could hear you
could learn and if you learned it in your body you knew it
forever. The fingers were the wells of musical memory, and
they provided a map for the cognitive faculties. I can remember writing out the notes and eventually grasping the nature of the piano, percussive and string, the richness and range of
the sound. I wanted music in writing but not the way Verlaine
did, not in the syllables themselves; anything pronounced
would have sound and most sound is musical; no, in a different
way. I recognized early on how the great classical composers,
but especially and always Bach, could convey ideas without
using any words at al . Repetition, variation, risk, originality,
and commitment created the piece and conveyed the ideas. I
wanted to do that with writing. I’d walk around with poems
by Rimbaud or Baudelaire in my pocket - bilingual, paperback books with the English translations reading like prose poems - and I'd recognize that the power of the poems was
not unlike the power of music. For a while, I hoped to be a
pianist, and my mother took me into Philadelphia, the big
