Earthly Delights

drinks & poetry, Sun. Oct. 28 (Los Angeles)

MARTHA RONK DAVID MARRIOTT ALEX LANG WENDY C. ORTIZ ANDREA QUAID

Sunday, October 28, 2007
Doors open at 7:00 - Reading begins at 7:15pm
The Good Luck Bar, 1514 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles (east Hollywood/Silver Lake: corner of Hollywood & Hillhurst)
21 and over only.
RSVP at rhapsodomancyla@yahoo.com
$3 suggested donation at door; after expenses, a portion of the proceeds will benefit a nonprofit to be determined.
There will be a cash bar.
www.rhapsodomancy.org

Martha Ronk is the author most recently of Vertigo, selected for the National Poetry Series by C.D. Wright and published by Coffee House Press 2007; and of In a Landscape of Having to Repeat, published by Omnidawn Press and winner of the PEN USA award for a book of poetry 2005. She has published eight books and several chapbooks, has received residencies at Djerassi and MacDowell, and is the 2007 recipient of an NEA grant. She is professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

David Marriott currently teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Incognegro(Salt Publications, 2006) and Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (Rutgers, 2007). A new book of poetry, Hoodoo Voodoo, is forthcoming in 2008.

Alex Lang is a poet and lyricist living in Los Angeles. His poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, and his lyrics (written under the name Shuggie Love) can be found on Monkey Bars’ album Food Eating Food. For cash, Alex works as a television executive for a network no one has ever heard of.

Wendy C. Ortiz is co-curator of Rhapsodomancy. Recent or forthcoming publications include Blood Orange Review, Palabra: A Magazine of Chicano and Latino Literary Art, Cranky, and Eclipse, among others. She was awarded a writing residency from Hedgebrook in 2007. Wendy is currently a graduate student of psychology.

Andrea Quaid is co-curator of Rhapsodomancy. She currently attends UC Santa Cruz as a Ph.D. candidate in literature where she is the co-organizer of the Poetry and Politics Research Cluster and Reading Series.

::Sunday brunch::

My brunch destination the last two Sundays has been El Rincon Oaxaqueño. Each Sunday I have gone alone and had a table outside where I can watch the dance of liquor store patrons, the cigarette store hangers-on, the busy Sunday laundry folks and the secretive, covered Beirut Cafe.

On the table: coffee with cream, huevos a la mexicana con frijoles negros, corn tortillas wrapped in paper, and one of the weekly newspapers or this month's issue of Harper's. The server has hazel eyes and I tip her as grandly as I can. As with most things, if I do it twice, it becomes habit. So it is that I find myself coming back to my old neighborhood the last two Sundays, looking for something, and finding the same excellent food. Breakfast before 11:30am is $4.99. With coffee, your bill will come to under $7.00. Maravilloso.

El Rincon Oaxaqueño
1544 N. Western Ave.
Hollywood 90027
(323) 957-2293

Altered Menus

It's not as though I haven't been eating. Sometimes excellent food, sometimes the bits I find in the freezer at work that I've stowed there some time ago, sometimes decadent lunches, sometimes remnants of things from the refrigerator at home with a couple of bottles of Red Stripe after a long day.

The school/work dynamic alters things: less nights of homemade food, more nights out and about, sometimes involving Jameson's. Tonight was an evening of Mariela's, a journey I didn't have to make, as it was brought home to me. Their carne asada burritos, sans beans, added aguacate, and bright red salsa were my little beacon in the night after a long day of work meetings and frustrations. Last night: Rocco's, delivered long after we called, the pizza cooling off as I signed the receipt and walked barefoot back up into the apartment building, feeling the last of the Santa Ana's on my back, electrifying my hair. Who knows what tomorrow's menu will look like. I can only hope we make time for soup now that there's the slightest chill in the air.