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[personal profile] aslant
saturday we drove to salem, mass., to meet up with my friend raheli and two of her friends. we all went to the peabody essex museum. we saw the yin yu tang house, which was most fabulous and i think perhaps i am obsessed with it now. at least, i bought the glossy extensively-researched $35 book about it, and i was really upset when we got kicked out at the end of our allotted 20 minutes.

later we went on a tour of three early houses, 17th 18th and 19th century, restored to period style. i was really fascinated with the kitchens of all of them, which is where we spent most of the tours each time thankfully. there was an oven made from the belly of a cannon! and so many other different gadgets i wanted to get my hands on. i have decided that my dream job is to be a cook in a 17th or 18th century period reenactment kitchen. i even have the cookbooks already! i know i would be good at this.

.

raheli is leaving soon, to go work on a goat cheese farm in the south of france (what a brat), which is not all that surprising, coming from her. she always shows up out of nowhere and proposes last-minute trips, and they always turn out to be good fun.

although she came back with us from salem to boston (instead of staying in salem with her friends) thinking we were going to 'a night of decadence' at the goethe institut downtown (a free affair with live music, champagne, chocolate, and absurdist german poetry), we ended up staying home and making our own night of surrealism. i was a little nervous to begin with, at the prospect of hanging out with ze germans downtown, but the bigger problem was what in the world to wear? a moot point in itself, since nothing i have is clean OR well-suited to decadent poetry gatherings.

so instead we bought two bottles of champagne and made dessert wontons and a chocolate dip for margarite cookies. and we wrote a bunch of collaborative poems, too.


a note on how this was written: we passed three sheets around, each previous line folded over so what you added was blind. i announced various themes for each line, randomly. the titles were chosen at random from a dictionary of classic mythology. some lines had to include a word chosen at random from a chinese take-out menu, or other books we had lying around; some were meant to be expressionist descriptions of "something ending" or what you saw yesterday when you woke up. or a couplet. things like that.

of peculiar words and forms

architects, wisdom, toothless----insane all and
sweet & sour, chicken beyond and ai-ai-ai-ai
six little bunnys in six straight lines
(sung) eee-enn--aaaaa-eye-dee!

teetotaling and whaling, mother, her officer shot
her officer, there, pinned to the wall i shadow sleeve.
an itch to reach for the red,
a little dish on the Danube, lithe wine rabbit on, rabbit on.

asterisk semicolon period spacce
its vertically that I fell into this place
mounds of clothes, carelessly dropped the night before

o little dead doorbell sound, you are done, and so am i.

Date: 2004-03-15 06:45 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coast.livejournal.com
YOU DIDNT GO SEE NELLIE HOW DARE YOU!

Date: 2004-03-15 06:59 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] aslant.livejournal.com
we had to drive raheli back to salem on sunday, and we didn't get home until 6:30, at which point we were exhausted from a) driving, b) house guests, c) grocery shopping on the way home, and d) dealing with raheli's friends who were actually somewhat annoying. there was no way in hell i was schlepping all the way over to the ass end of the green line to see a concert in a bar. sorry. & i really didn't want to spend the last exhausting hours of my free weekend with a crowd of bu undergrads.

Date: 2004-03-15 07:05 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coast.livejournal.com
haha. i wasn't serious, it's all good.

exhausting weekends are not too shabby! sounds like you had a bit of fun. :)

Date: 2004-03-15 07:28 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] aslant.livejournal.com
we did have quite a bit of fun :)
i am horribly exhausted today, which is no good, and i am dreading the dentist appointment tomorrow. ugh. i want to go to sleep forever.

Date: 2004-03-15 09:00 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coast.livejournal.com
you should come on aim for a little

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