Zero Degree Writing Program

Check out the Zero Degree Writing Progam and Mr. Adam Good's Errationality.

I like / How old are we?

Eating food. I like to cook. I even enjoy grocery shopping. But I really don't like putting groceries away.

Actually, I don't like putting anything away. Some of you have seen my closet.

I tutored four papers today all about the same subject: "Why Community College X is So Great." It was depressing.

I ate chicken enchiladas before grocery shopping. That was great.

I've gotten a lot of cool stuff in the mail. I have to go to the post office.

My little sisters got their package. They loved it. But they are turning 7 and not 6. I just sent them a postcard confessing that in fact, I miscalculated my own age, and so miscalculated theirs. I feel like a jerk of course, but they promised to send me pictures of them in their tie dyes!

Slammed

with work. So no reading or trip report yet. Perhaps tomorrow or Friday.

Here's a picture I made:

I like LA and the people I met in LA. More pictures from the trip are here. I will write a reading report later. Now I must work work work because I did not work on Monday.

packed the poems and

the flask. We're taking the train to LA in the morning.

I'm reading with a lot of cool people in LA this weekend

Come and catch a gala reading at the the smell! The reading will begin at 6:30. The smell is at 247 South Main Street, between 2nd & 3rd Street in Downtown L.A. (enter through the alley). It's more or less behind Jalisco's.

Featuring:

Mark Wallace
K. Lorraine Graham
Wendy Walters
Mairead Byrne
James Thomas Stevens

MARK WALLACE is author of numerous books, including Temporary Worker Rides A Subway (Green Integer), Haze (Edge), Dead Carnival (Avec Books), and about 10 more. He edits Submodern Fiction , and co-edited Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s.

K. LORRAINE GRAHAM is the author of Terminal Humming (Slack Buddha) and Dear [Blank] I Believe in Other Worlds (Phylum). She has published poems in Rock Heals, No Tell Motel, Submodern Fiction, and Dusie.

JAMES THOMAS STEVENS is author of Combing the Snakes from His Hair (Michigan UP), (dis)Orient (Palm Press, 2005), Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations (Subpress), The Mutual Life (Plan B), and A Bridge Dead in the Water (Salt). He's a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation in Upstate New York.

MAIREAD BYRNE's publications include three chapbooks, An Educated Heart (Palm Press, 2005), Vivas (Wild Honey, 2005), and Kalends (Belladonna* 2005), as well as poems in 5AM, The Argotist Online, Conduit, The Denver Quarterly, The Drunken Boat, Free Verse, MiPOesias, and Volt.

WENDY S. WALTERS is author of Birds of Los Angeles (Palm Press). She teaches at RISD in Providence, RI.

Farm Loans! Poker!

Does anyone get traffic and referals from blogs like this one: Farm Loans? And then at the bottom of each post are links to poker websites. Some techie want to explain this one?

When Mark and Lester discourse

Lester makes a unique sound that he speaks only to Mark. It sounds kind of like "puh-choo puh-choo." Sometimes I hear Lester practicing this sound to himself, but only when I am not in the room.




Lester also enjoys sitting on Mark's knee, and also attacking his slippers.

When Mark moves boxes, Lester shrieks. I think Lester has separation anxiety.

Lester has also developed a new, joyful and shrieking call that he calls to the birds outside. As I've mentioned before, it's spring, and he's a young male bird with a full set of wing feathers.

Mail / I made this

Wow, ally'all I ordered from or wanted to trade with are so fast. I'll get to the post office in the next 7 days. Thus far I've recieved:

• Spell (March 2006)
• Small Town 6 & 7
• Effing Magazine No. 4

And the following Effing Press chapbooks:

• World Jelly, by Tony Tost
• Metaplasmic, by Anna Eyre
• Plots, by David Meikle John

Lots of good work in all of these, lots of west cost and no coast folks that I don't know well or am just learning about, so that's exciting.

Although I just unpacked more books and now I'm remembering all the ones I want to read. Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours, by Fredric L. Cheyette is singing to me. And also Frederic Ewen's Bertolt Brecht: his Life, his Art, his Times. I really like critical biographics and often read them in the summer.

Has anyone else had the experience of college kids yelling the color of their clothing at them?

Ah, I know places have their own flavor, especially relative to greetings. But I'm at my 2 month I hate everything phase, perhaps. It will pass.

I know, I know. There are like, different cultures in the world and the United States. Everyone on the Blue Hill peninsula in Maine knows everyone else. When Mark and I spent a few days there two or three summers ago, I still ran into people I knew everywhere, even though I hadn't lived there since 1996, and I walked into the pizza place and there was Peter and he said "Hi, Lorraine, what can I get you." I smiled but was so shocked I had to say "I don't know," leave and then come back to place my order. Folks there greet. But that's actually because they know each other.

US Cultural differences have always freaked me out--not because of the fact of the differences but because I feel a greater pressure to fit in. Outside of the US, I can go back to being a foreigner and delight in the learning process.

It took me a good 4 or 5 years to get used to DC, which was the most culturally suburban place I'd ever lived, and it will take me a while to get used to here.

There's always the possibility that I'm just becoming more uptight, I suppose. Ach! Get me to Oman for a family visit, and quick!

I drove to Target over the weekend and bought a jelly roll pan.

Many of my ESOL students had trouble with the fact that no one in DC really greeted each other politely.

If I think clearly, I will remember that Carlsbad was actually not really a suburb and more of a real small town until 10 years ago. Hence the greeting.

And yes--it's true that many people who know me don't mean me any good either, I know.

Read work by Heriberto Yepez / Pedestrian angst

There's a review by Bill Marsh of Heriberto Yepez' book Babellebab (Duration, 2003) here, at Galatea Resurrects, the new magazine/blog edited by Eileen Tabios. The review, and the book are in English. I will order this when my next paycheck comes.

I still haven't ordered all of Heretical Texts, Vol 1. But I want to. Heretical Texts is going to publish another Yepez' book this fall. Who hoo!

~

Pedestrians

Many fellow pedestrians greeted me today as I returned movies to Blockbuster. I can't get used to these friendly greetings from strangers. This weekend someone handed me a business card that declared he was searching for his soulmate. (This is what prompted the rant I never blogged). The kids who yell at me from cars aren't always hostile. When It rained this weekend I passed only one other pedestrian with an umbrella and we smiled at each other. I understood the camaraderie of that.

It's not like the standard "Bonjour" or "Bonsoir" of France that you must say, especially to strangers, before any other conversation ensues. It's like they're telling me that I must act happy and gleeful. Kind of like the vaguely malicious guys in DC and, I suspect, in other urban areas, who say "smile miss," or "you should smile more." Except that they don't say that, they just greet. Endlessly. One guy waved to me three times from his bicycle and almost crashed into the curb because he kept looking back at me after he'd ridden past. When I realized what was happening, I waved. I don't want to smile at everyone. I don't know them. I feel like an insincere jerk when I return their greetings or engage in small talk.

I mean, this is not the way to meet people or forage connections or develop community. The way to have community is to be interested in things. But all this greeting feels like a response to a lack of all those things (human connection) here. The boys are often just goofy teenagers looking for a party...my running shirt is green, and some kids drove by me and yelled "greeeeeen!" out the window, very exuberantly.

But also. I'm still a stranger here, and super guarded. But still. I mean, most people I don't know who try to talk to me with no community context or no context of shared interest don't mean me any good. I'm right about that.

Sarah Campbell interviews Justin Sirois of Narrowhouse Recordings on WBFO. Have a listen-hear here!

The Verdant Braes of Skreen

Anyone know anything about a magazine called The Canary? I have heard tell of it but never seen it. And a quick web search doesn't pull up much. Rather, it pulls up a lot, just not what I'm looking for.

This weekend I noodled with recording software and a cheap microphone. If you really want to hear me sing all seven verses of "The Verdant Braes of Skreen" while another Lorraine reads from Dear [Blank] I Believe in Other Worlds, you are welcome to. It's best with headphones or on medium volume. The effect isn't so avant garde, but it is interesting.

If you're lucky I'll record "Dance 'Round the Maypole" next. Which I know how to do, by the way--I can weave a maypole real well. "Now is the Month of Maying" is also another strong candidate.

Ah, poor Lorraine, see what happens when you listen to John Renbourn, Richard Thompson, and the British Nuggets box set all weekend?

This post was really long and about pedestrians and how I loathe all talk of soulmates, but I'm not going to post it because

It snows in Tehran. Of course it snows.

~

Hippy thoughts:

Hopefully you people are socializing. I am socializing with my blog and Lester. I can't go out because if I did then people I don't really want to talk to would talk to me with the stupidest and most boring of intentions. But I went to yoga today. That was social. The workshop was fabulous. Michael Fukumura talked about yoga as a conversational and community-building practice. I think I've always thought of it as this but none of my teachers has ever phrased it this way: as dialogue and engagement/response both within a body and among/within the world.

~

Greetings good people. I have some work up at MiPoesias for your viewing and listening pleasure.

I'm going to a yoga workshop this afternoon with Michael Fukumura. I'm hopeful--he has integrated training in both ashtanga and anusara. I was happily spoiled by having such a fabulous teacher in DC, so my standards are high.

Submodern Fiction Reviewed in American Book Review

The March-April issue of American Book Review has a piece about Submodern Fiction by Chris Pusateri! I admit that I noticed it at first because he quotes from my piece And so for you there is no heartbreak, but he gives thoughtful attention to the whole magazine as well as to Linh Dinh, Ted Pelton, and others that appeared in the 3rd issue. So everyone go get a copy and read about us!

Mr. Pusateri is also now responsible for my awareness of Gong, the press out of Bainbridge Island, WA, which recently published his chapbook, VI Fictions. Gong looks like they have an interesting publication list, including what looks to be a collaboration between E. Tracy Grinnell & Paul Foster Johnson called Quadriga. I am now going to send Gong some money and some books to trade.

It also looks like I'll be taking on Submodern Fiction as a co-editor, and that the publication will move to the web. Anomaly Press has all these ISBN numbers just waiting to be used, so rest assured that there will be chapbooks when I have some money again. I'm considering a trip to a local paper store this weekend to sus out my options.

I am also in the midst of self-publishing something pretty to take to Ohio. Probably more of Some Epistles or else the procedural translation/response of/to Han Yu's "On the Festival of the Moon to Sub-Official Zhang." I love how lyric and bureaucracy are so painfully tangled up with each other in much of Classical Chinese poetry--especially Tang Dynasty poetry. It makes me want to go back and do more of that procedural work.

Recommend movies to me

Neighbour playing boring hostile music. I'm torn--it aggrivates me. I'm trying to work. Still, I'm glad that someone is blasting music. But c'mon. Most of the music that gets blasted is really lame, and there's a lot of good rap and hip hop.

~

I'm going to hang out with Lester this weekend and do yoga. I will also rent some movies. Ye who read this blog care more about movies than me, so what do you suggest I rent? Keep in mind I've seen almost nothing, so it 1) needn't be current but 2) can't be too obscure--I have only Blockbuster to rely on.

Mud Fetish

From now on any Flickr pictures of me are only going to be visible to friends and family. Some dude with a mud fetish took a liking to the ones of me in my face masks. Yikes. C'mon Lorraine, didn't you see that one coming?

~

Chris Funkhouser is writing a poem called Facts about Durians. I'm rather excited. Durian Palace can tell you more about this "King of the Fruits." Durians are not allowed on the subway in Singapore, because they are so pungent and because their spiny outsides are considered dangerous. They have a kind of cult following. I actually don't mind the smell, but I don't like the way they taste. Some baked goods made from durian are ok though. These images are from Wikipedia.

~

Tickets from San Diego to Muscat are $1104 per person. Taxes included. I mailed my little sisters' tie dye kit off yesterday and the guy at the post office asked for identification. I wish I could report that I said something bad ass like "you don't need to see my ID just because I'm mailing something to a Muslim country." I'm reading Spring and All. Thinking about lyric love triangles.No, I smiled nicely and said, "It's a birthday gift for my little sisters." That probably weirded him out even more.

Lester is overwrought: It's spring, and he's a young bird with a full set of wing feathers. This afternoon he's been obsessively preening my hair.

Kazim Ali & Mark Wallace at SPT this Friday, 7:30 PM

At Small Press Traffic
Friday, March 17, 2006 at 7:30 p.m.Kazim Ali & Mark Wallace
(that's THIS Friday!)

Kazim Ali & Mark Wallace

Note: Unless otherwise noted, events are $5-10, sliding scale, free to SPT members, and CCA faculty, staff, and students.Unless otherwise noted, our events are presented inTimken Lecture HallCalifornia College of the Arts1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th & Wisconsin)

Kazim Ali joins us in celebration of his first poetry collection, The Far Mosque, just out from Alice James Books. Publishers’ Weekly writes: “ Painterly minimalism, open-field technique and Near Eastern traditions together give Ali a neatly varied verbal palette for his smart, quietly attractive poems.” Ali is also the author of a novel, Quinn’s Passage, and his essays and poems have appeared in Five Fingers Review, Mirage #4/Period(ical), The Iowa Review , and elsewhere. He teaches at Shippensburg University, publishes Nightboat Books, and has a website at kazimali.com.

Ron Sukenick commented that “Mark Wallace writes like John Hawkes dreaming of Paul Bowles having a gothic nightmare.” Wallace’s books include the poetry collections Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn’t There, Sonnets of a Penny-A-Liner , and Temporary Worker Rides A Subway. His multi-genre work Haze (Edge Books) appeared in 2004, as did his novel Dead Carnival (Avec Books). He is coeditor of Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s (University of Alabama Press) and A Poetics of Criticism (Leave Books). Wallace currently teaches at CSU San Marcos.

Only now realizing how much I love

Louise Bourgeois. Lost this then found it again:


And look at that drawing! How could I not. I know she's known as a sculptor, but I'm interested in her drawings.

~

Bessie Smith's version of St. Louis Blues is also really good.

~

Mondays and Wednesdays have become my speedwork/interval days.
G-d knows why. I don't need to be doing speedwork. I'm not trying to improve my mile time.

On my runs along the beach, I always see at least one couple making out and usually more, and I always smell pot. I find it all rather comforting.

~

The famous Alp now has a blog!

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Nina Simone's "Feeling Good" is a good song. Listen to it with the volume up while sitting down.

~

I wanted to watch the debut episode of Cheerleader Nation but it is on too late. I'll have to be satisfied with Design Her Galls.

~

Adorno loved furry animals. What about slimy ones and ones with feathers and ones with neither feathers nor slime?

~

Things I've unpacked (mostly books):

From the Country of Eight Islands (anthology of Japanese Poetry) Translated/Edited by Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson

An anthology of Club 8, a group of Romanian poets, including Radu Andriescu, who read at Unpleasant Event Schedule a while back. It's difficult for me to read these poems rationally. I think I like them, but the evening we spent at his house in Iasi was so out of control that I find myself thinking about that instead. Andriescu's poems certainly take issue with boundaries, and they're often interested in a kind of reckless, hyper masculinity. Here's a sample from "Bloody Bad Shit":

(Subject: here comes the nastiest part
Date: Fri, 06 Oct 200 16:53:26 +0000
From: Radu Andriescu
To: Dan Ursachi

Badge, last night really ate shit. I danced the manele with the
gypsies in my neighborhood at an Internet cafe, a huge
wolf almost bit off my balls, and
I sprained my other ankle. Today I've got to attend a memorial service.
Really bad shit, couldn't be worse, you can just about taste it.)

I also unpacked Naked, Poems by sundry Tanaka (Trans. by William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura). Here's "Train":

I hate crowded trains.
When this old man breathes on my neck
I fell like shoving him away
or else getting to be friends with him.
Since we stand so close together
we might at least be able to manage eye contact
and at least say good morning.
The old man is facing away
and I have no idea what he's thinking.
Though he looks like no one else
he has a mouth and nose like we all do
and he's breathing through them.
I breathe in the breath strangers breathe out.
All the passengers' breaths blend--
coffee breath, soup breath.
A hundred years from now
all these people'll be gone.
I hate crowded trains.
That's why I like them.

Jessica recognized the moment when she knew that she was an artist. Mark's always wanted to be a writer and from a young age he wrote and organized his life around writing. I never had that moment where I knew "this is what I'm going to do."

I've been writing stories since I was six, and poems since high school at least. The stories were all female-centered fantasy / sci-fi epics, or else they were about ghosts. [It only now occurs to me that this may be yet another reason why Mark and I get along so well]. But I'm good at a lot of things and in the habit of being overly accommodating and flexible. I also am good at figuring out exactly what others expect or want me to do and say. After a certain point, no one was expecting me to really take writing seriously, so I pretended not to and developed all sorts of professional skills. I studied Chinese and East Asian studies with the idea that I would be a journalist. But I didn't like most of the writing done by journalists, and so I abandoned that idea. And anyway, at this point in time, my favorite book was Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky, so I was already on my way.

Even though I no longer practice, I was raised as a Baha'i, and the first poems I ever loved were Baha'i prayers and the more mystical writings like The Hidden Words, The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys, and Epistle to the Son of the Wolf. All of these writings have a lot in common with the poetry and allegories of Hafiz, Rumi, and Attar. So that's where I went next. Then to Rilke, Lorca, Paz and Elliot.


I wrote poems from about high school on. They were initially terrible love ballads in meter where things always turned out for the worst, or else they were imitations of T.S. Elliot's Preludes, or Octavio Paz. Often they were about, ahem, alienated young women in foreign places having moments of connection with an Other. Or else exotic rescue fantasies.


But I've always known that my center of gravity is not the United States. That I have no center. Being a foreigner contextualizes alienation and forces a constant reevaluation of self relative to world. Dislocation heightens texture, sensation, emotion. It changes the way one experiences time. Obviously, it's often unpleasant. And obviously, my stuggles with it aren't nearly the same as, say, a 12 year old from Honduras trying to make it across the Mexican border to rejoin her mother in LA.


But why, during my senior year of college, did I realize that I didn't love my boyfriend and didn't want to go back overseas again? In part because I met some actual writers that I liked. Staying in DC and being a writer seemed braver than either a) marrying someone and living in Virginia or 2) abusing myself in Sichuan.

Social stuff / bla bla bla / things I unpack

Alp has requested that I write more social things. Alas, Alp, my life is often very boring. Mostly I write, work, and hang out with Mark and Lester. When I'm not doing that I go running or do yoga. Or I watch the history channel. On the weekends I go for walks, grocery shopping, to brunch, or else to buy furniture such as the desk chair I mentioned below. We were going to buy some bookshelves but at the last minute we realized that they wouldn't fit in our car.

What else have I done? Uh. Unpacked. I also made some guacamole this afternoon. Tomorrow morning I will put together the chair and go for a walk to the donut shop.

~

Someone got to my blog by googling "Lorraine parrotlet" and also "Hash House Harriers Camp Pendleton."

It's raining. It hailed a while ago. Mark and I listened to Greenday on the radio sing "Jesus in Suburbia" and then sat quietly in our parked car until it let up a bit.

We got a desk chair today. A comfy one!

Things I unpack:

I unpacked my tarot cards and the recipe book my mom started for me. It includes recipes for the first Persian meal that she learned to prepare while my parents were living in Rafsanjan, Iran: Mast Va Khiar (the cucumber yogurt stuff), Salad Shirazi, and Persian rice. The best part about Persian rice is the potatoes that get crispy on the bottom of the pot. Mom made this meal for my birthday (and my brother's) many times.

To Stand To Sea

The Tangent Press has just published To Stand To Sea, by Susana Gardner, a fellow former DC poet and editor of Switzerland-based Dusie. Hooray!

~

My work is loose. It is not meticulous and not precise. Even after I edit it it is still loose. There's not a sense of "crafted" lyric. This is all fine with me. I'm just sayin'. I stop as soon as I can imagine the end of a project. I prefer implied endings. I stop before the end and go on to something else. In general, this involves spending a lot of time talking to people, reading, and looking at stuff.

I bought some girl scout cookies yesterday.

I shall have to use the word somatic a lot in my textural poems. Not a lot, but sometimes.

This is pretty.

Phenomenology, Tie Dye

Am interested in this poem and this poem from Tao Lin's this emotion was a little ebook.

~

The tickets to Miami of Ohio have just been booked! You cannot imagine how complicated it was. But we are going! Hooray!

I'm going to make one big poem or lots of poems together about texture and the experience of texture. Somehow it's not going to be about material and objects or materiality. Well, it will, but I'm not going to obsess very specifically about history or "the Body." Well, I will, but in some other interesting way. Say, how 'bout I get all phenomenological!?

• I guess it's time to read Spring and All again. This time with some actual focus.
• I guess it's time to read about group psychotherapy. I didn't like group therapy. I feel my own alienation and that of other people too much as it is.
• I guess it's time to read some Elizabeth Grosz.

I'm going to get my little sisters a tie dye kit for their birthdays. If anyone would like to get me a tie dye kit and some of these shirts in a size M, that would be ok with me. But I'll probably get those myself, eventually, and then you'll all get lots of tie dye gifts from me. Tie dye is cool.

Ok, I'm going to go back to being cool now, and to typesetting.

Anthology of Younger Poets

There's complete information on the anthology site. But:

The scene of young/emerging poets has reached critical mass. Thus, John Sakkis and Jessica Smith are editing an anthology of young poets who are working within a certain artistic sphere. Although, as you will see, the variety of aesthetic viewpoints is wide-ranging, the authors are loosely held together by social, academic, geographic, and historic commonalities. They influence each other without necessarily sharing specific formal traits. This plurality may result from the availability of the internet to these authors from an early age--geographical proximity is not as essential as it was for the SF Renaissance or New York School poets, for instance. The "politically correct" mantra of the 1990s almost certainly encourages the aesthetic diversity as well; poets can respect and be inspired by other poets who may seem to have nothing in common with them aesthetically. This scene is so diverse, geographically and aesthetically, that it requires rethinking the "anthology" as a genre. Our anthology will be a massive collection containing critical introductions, a sample poem from each author, and author biographies. It is not intended to familiarize a reader with the depth and breadth of any single author's work, but it is rather intended to provide a detailed record of the sheer magnitude, energy, and plurality of experimental poetry at the turn of the millennium.The anthology will be released at the turn of the New Year, 2008, by Outside Voices. Click here to email the editors and/or submit work.

I'm on the editorial board as the touchpoint for Southern California, so if you're a poet 25-35 interested in this or you know a really great poet whose work I should solicit, send me an email. But don't forget to read the FAQs.

Favorite moving walkways

Kaplan has a picture of my most favorite moving walkway in the whole world among his recent photos--the one between the National galleries in DC. It is my favorite because it's very long and the surface is like a grooved, rubberized track. It is possible to bounce (or hop) down this moving walkway and then use the momentum to leap off--landing several feet from the end.

Some of the moving walkways in the airport in Tokyo are pretty good, but they're not nearly as bouncy. And the ones at the Chicago airport have trippy lights. In fact, this is the only moving walkway I can think of in a museum. Am I forgetting any?

Blogger spell check prefers "Rumanian" / Alp and Ray at DADA

Only two dryers work. They are both in constant use. I check every 15 minutes. Now my laundry room key doesn't work. I hate doing laundry. Cooking--yes. Laundry--no.

I made banana bread! It is good! For eating!

!


Also. Some pictures from Ray & Alp's trip to the DADA show. Thanks for sending these! It's true I'm so so so very sad I cannot go. But I've been enjoying all the reports. So keep reportin'.

Still reading Waldman's Iovis and Benderson's The Romanian. Read them at the doctor today, where quite unexpectedly I qualified for free treatment. Free! I went to the doctor and 1) paid nothing and 2) was told that I'm in good health.

!

Blogger is being slow and won't let me upload the other pictures. But you can look at them on Flickr.

I didn't watch the Oscars

I kind of forgot. How could I forget while living in SoCal? Mark and I watched "The Sting" instead. It won Oscars in its day.

I'm building a web page. It is not done, but you will know when it is done.

Parrot Lineage / Studying Linebreaks

I understand linebreaks, but I don't get them emotionally. I mean that I think in sound, and I'm unsatisfied with my attempts to work with sound in terms of space. Therefore I am writing a lot of stuff like this, or else everything in prose.

I'm also concerned about all of my references to animals. It's partly because I'm not actually spending much time with people. But one must be wary of these things.

~


In Papua New Guinea I knew two sulfur crested cocaktoos--I think they were the first parrots I ever met. Surf lived in the house behind ours, but he flew around the neighborhood and would come hang out on our back porch. He liked our banana tree and marigold seeds. The other cockatoo was only semi-domesticated, and I don't think he had a name, but he would hang out in the neighborhood, sometimes on our porch, but then he'd disappear into the jungle for weeks at a time.

But those of you who know Mark know that he's lived with parrots a lot longer than I have--parakeets (budgies), conures, and cockatiels mostly. I believe he met his first parakeet in college--the bird was a jailbreaker and very intelligent. Mark had birds all through the cold of Buffalo--one of his roommates was crazy and convinced that the parakeets had it in for him. There was a Nanday (pronounced "nandee") Conure named Andy who would walk across the entire Buffalo-sized apartment just to snuggle.

When I met Mark, he had two parakeets--Mr. Billings and Sir Bayle. Billings was a tough guy and Bayle was sweet. I loved them both, obviously, but I bonded with Billings because he was more of a flirt and a meathead--although he grew wiser as he aged. I have good memories of sleeping in the afternoon sunshine while they sang.

I'm just saying: I didn't go bird crazy all on my own.

And the little Brontosaurus moved through the swamp of yore

Went running this afternoon and passed a middle-aged Persian woman with a scarlet Macaw. I stopped and spoke to them. The Macaw's name was Zazu and I said "hello Zazu" and Zazu danced and said "pretty bird."

I also passed another middle-aged woman. She was running in a mustard yellow sweatsuit and had a pink headband worn Rambo-style and electric blue eyeshadow. She was carrying two large rocks in either hand.

~

Mark and I are going to an poetry / performance festival thing at Miami of Ohio in April! Hooray. I will tell you more about it when I know more about it.

~

I have some work up at MiPoesias, though I think you, dear readers, will have already read it before. I have to give them a sound file, too, but my mic hasn't arrived yet. Hence no recording.


Overheard at the coffee shop:

Woman 1: "There's a part of me that will always love him and that romance. And I think there's a part of him too that will always love me, as I was."

Woman 2: "What does that have to do with lipstick?"

~

I want:

• binoculars
• San Diego County Bird Atlas (at $80, it's a bit steep)--until I get it, this list is helpful.

I want lots of other things, but whatever. Desire is an interesting problem.

Jessica Smith and John Sakkis are editing a big anthology. Read the FAQs and then consider sending something.

I just woke up from a nap. Before the nap I went grocery shopping and to brunch. The brunch was big--an omelet called "Lorraine's Mile High." Before that, we went for a walk. We saw many birds--including herons. I am still sleepy.

It's cold and damp and overcast

Hey, no one gives a crap about dolphins swimming off shore! Am I the only one who cares? Anti-Dolphin blog readers! What do you want? Do you want me to write about poetry? Fine!

Mark and I are writing collaborative poem. It's a very negative poem because we like each other so much.

~

I came across a description of the dragonflies in Beijing from one of my old journals from 1997. Actually several repeated descriptions of dragonflies. I don't remember the dragonflies after the rain at all--but it sounds like it was beautiful. Maybe I came across it because I've just recently read Juliana Spahr's Unnamed Dragonfly Species. From my description, it seems like they were everywhere after a rain. I just remember riding my bike through nearly flooded streets and buying two of the largest, most beautiful and most delicious peaches I have ever known from a farmer waiting out the storm in an underpass.

But Beijing wasn't all great. There was the melon incident. The can of coconut incident, for example.

~

Doing headstands is my new favorite thing. Well, not my new favorite, but still. Sirsasana calms the brain--my head feels like it's floating off the top of my body afterwards. I've also been working on Ustrasana in an attempt to keep my shoulders from totally caving in on themselves.

Public Transport / Romania

Dear Romanians who keep clicking by this blog: are you writers?--do say hello!

~

Yesterday I researched how to get to Hollywood from Oceanside using public transportation. It's actually not that big a deal, even on Sunday and less so during the week. And for a DC-er like me, even the names are familiar: We can take the train to LA. The train station in LA is called Union Station. The subway system is called the Metro. The line from Union Station to Hollywood is the Red Line. The metrostop closest to Stan Apps house is Vermont Sunset Station. Doubtless it won't work as well as it would in DC, but at least we don't have to drive in.

Getting to Tijuana is also pretty easy: Train to the trolley, trolley to the border. Once in Tijuana, SignOnSanDiego suggests that I engage in some cheap but upscale shopping, dine at Senior Frogs, and visit the wax museum:

"Elvis has been sighted again. This time at the Tijuana Wax Museum with Marilyn Monroe, Christopher Columbus, Jack the Ripper, Pancho Villa, Laurel and Hardy, Dracula and the last of the Aztec emperors. Don't miss the gory, but authentic, Aztec human-sacrifice diorama. Adults will find it horrifying, and kids will love the fact that someone's heart is getting ripped out. "

Free audio track from Moving Walkways

So I didn't go with any of the original titles for the chapdisk I proposed, because actually all those titles were the tiles of other things, I just didn't know that then. The chapdisk will be out soon, but in the meantime:

A free audio track from K. Lorraine Graham's Moving Walkways is available in the in the catalog section of narrowhouserecordings.com or at

www.angelfire.com/poetry/thepixelplus/nhaudiofromitdoesnot.html


Moving Walkways is a new limited edition chapdisc signed by the poet in an edition of 100
by Newlights Press and Narrow House Recordings coming this spring.

http://www.narrowhouserecordings.com/

a record label primarily interested in contemporary writing, poetics and the political.