FRIDA, as a teenager

is in a terrible bus accident.
Surreal animation of hospital scenes.
A full body cast.

Her father buys her an easel and canvas.
While in bed, she paints herself and her sister.
Begins to walk with a cane.

“Do you believe that I should continue to paint?”
She asks Diego Rivera.
He says yes.

Eventually, they get married—-twice.
They visit New York.
“We’ll take Gringolandia by storm!”
But Frida has a miscarriage
and her mother dies.
God has a lot of explaining to do.

Trotsky and his wife Natalia
come to stay with Frida.
Frida and Trotsky make Diego jealous.
Trotsky leaves.

Frida wants a show in her own country.
“They will give you a show
once you are famous somewhere else.”
So Frida goes to Paris.

Meanwhile, Trotsky is assasinated.
Meanwhile, Diego wants a divorce.

When Frida returns she is interrogated and imprisoned.
She loses her toes on one foot to gangrene
and new body casts are made that torture her.
“At the end of the day,
we can endure
more than we think we can,” she says.

In the few years before her death,
she paints the works of her life.
The Two Fridas and The Little Deer, for example.

Frida Kahlo writes her dying wish in her journal:
“I hope the exit is joyful
and I hope never to return.”

***

Look at The Little Deer:
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/K/kahlo/kahlo_deer.jpg.html

I finished the Descent of Alette today.

To Summarize:

Alette goes into the underground subway.
She sees many Dante-esque sights.
She sees many souls in Purgatory.
She sees snakes and a headless woman.
She helps the headless woman reattach her head
after the woman tells her that gurus and holy men
and saints and wise menand heroes and poets are
like simple drunks, are cruel and frivolous.
The woman's voice has power, as words do.
The woman's baby was taken from her
to be trained as a warrior.
Alette goes into a lake of seeming universal consciousness
and becomes an owl so that she can defeat the Tyrant,
who happens to be a mild-mannered man
who wants to keep her underground.
She pierces the Tyrant with her talons
and tears a various-leaved bush out of the ground
by its roots and then he dies an imaginary death.
Alette drags him up, out of the subway
and displays him before a crowd.
He symbolizes the city, modern society
and his death allows the possibilityto make something new.***

Yesterday I watched the Transatlantic Howl Reading online here:

http://arts.internet2.edu/howl.html

I saw Joanne Kyger and Anne Waldman and Anne Carson
and the readers from England
and Pulitzer Prize Finalist ALICE NOTLEY! in Paris
and Ken Mikolowski and Amiri Baraka and Steven Taylor.
What a lovely voice Alice Notley has!
She swayed as she read the footnote to Howl and
"Holy Magnanimity!"
I saw most of the webcast and Anne Waldman
finished with Blake's "priests in black gowns
walking their rounds/ binding with briars
my joys and desires."
And Bob Rosenthal read the "Wichita Vortex Sutra"
and said, "Allen was a very bright chartreuse"
which is a brilliant yellow green color
(and reminds me of the word chanteuse
which is what Annie Hall was when she sang
It Had To Be You in the nightclub)...
And the Londoners teepeed themselves while chanting
"Leave my bones alone!"
And how stylish & chic Alice looked
& how warm Anne Waldman was.
I wish I could have been there.
Despite the wonderful technology, I think it was Great
in the flesh.

*

In other literary news...
Linguistic Philosopher Jacques Derrida
died at the age of 74.
Here is an article in the Times called
What Derrida Really Meant:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/opinion/14taylor.html