Sunday, December 28, 2008
Friday, December 26, 2008
Yesterday and Today
This post needs pictures, but I am not going to upload them now. It is a miracle that I have even written this post.
Yesterday
I ate the last of the eggs in the fridge before heading to meet Tom in the Mission and go to Tartine, where I ate bread pudding and he had a croque monsieur. Someone offered us drugs almost immediately after we got out of the BART, which made me happy--no one has tried to sell me drugs in years! Then we walked around and went in many used clothing and consignment stores and bookshops. We bought some dust masks to wear to the SPT Poetry Spectacular event. I saw the SF branch of Yoga Kula, the Anusara yoga studio that I'd love to be taking classes at--but I can't do everything in one trip. Then we walked up Mission for a while and parted ways near where all the streets bend and run northeast-southeast instead of north-south. Tom went to Haight street and I kept walking up Market street all the way to the Embarcadero, which took a long time. I bought an actual mask for the reading. I bargained it from 26 to 5. It is an ok mask--but no one seems to be able to explain this supposed "San Francisco tradition." My plan is now to wear two masks and excessive eye make up.
At the embaracdero, I bought several olives stuffed with various cheeses and nuts and a roll, then I made a sort of sandwich out of all that and ate it for lunch while staring at Treasure Island and the bay. After some writing and some down time, I met Dodie at the Samovar Tea Lounge where she treated me to some chai and some soup and some excellent conversation. I felt relaxed, nourished, and warm. There's more to be said about our conversation but it will have to be said later, since I really just writing notes now of the days, not detailed reflections.
After dinner, we went to Dodie and Kevin's apartment and hung out a bit. I petted Sylvia, who was very friendly and out and about. Quincy was hiding, but I did say hello and she seemed pretty content. As most of you know, I live with a parrot, but I grew up with cats, so I always enjoy the chance to be around them.
Kevin and Dodie kindly drove me to Sara's apartment. Tom had been to Amoeba Records and had had a beer somewhere (maybe Pop's?). Anyway, we met in front of Sara's apartment building and went in together. I always feel like readings in SF are so...private...probably because many of them are in people's private homes. But Sara's apartment is nice. It is circular, so the socializing doesn't stagnate, and people, well, circulate around quite well. I was glad to see Tyrone Williams again and hear him read, and I was glad to meet Julian T. Brolaski, whose work I find I like quite a bit--it was very aural and watery, with plenty of energetic torque. It wasn't floating off the page.
Sara was there, of course, since she was host, and so was David Brazil. I met them very briefly in LA, but it was good to talk to them when I was a bit more sober and not competing with the intense coolness of the Mandrake in Culver City and an overly briny dirty martini. Erika Statie was there, and I was very glad to see her again, and I also met Cynthia Sailers, though I'm afraid I must have been a bit of a dork when she told me that she is a therapist. I said, "Oh. Um. Now I am going to be careful about my metaphors and word choice. What do people usually say to you when you tell them that you are a therapist?" She said that they usually either want to tell her about their problems or tell her about their therapists. A bit like how people behave if you tell them you're an editor. They want to show you their work or they want to complain about their editors and publishers.
I also met several people in person that I'd only known virtually-- François Luong and Johannes Göransson. Joyelle McSweeny was there, too. I've meet her in person before, and it was good to meet her in person again. I also met Anne Lesley Selcer. Anne and François were kind enough to show me how to get back across the bay from Haight street, so we chatted the whole time. More about that conversation later, too, which was fascinating, mostly because we all share similar interests in procedural and conceptual art. Etc.
Ashby is vaguely sketchy, but not nearly as sketchy as some places I've lived. I felt comfortable walking home. The racoon made another apperance, as it probably will tonight. I was so happy an hyper last night that I stayed up late and had to write and drink mint tea to calm down.
Today
Today began more calmly with coffee and morning buns from the Berkeley Bowl. I also bought a role which I brought home and made into a sandwhich with some cheese and leftover grilled vegetable tapenade to pack for lunch. Eventually, I wandered over to Juliana's place to visit with her, Bill, Charles, and Sasha. Sasha was in good spirits, running around and playing--he seems like a happy little boy. Patrick Durgin was there, too, looking very hip and wearing and especially cool tie. I don't think I'd seen Patrick since MLA was in DC. A long time ago.
I had to run back to the house to get something, but we all ended up on the same train across the bay. The Hilton was full of MLAers looking professional, frantic, and desperate. I called Lisa and Bill Howe's room and hung out with them for a while in the hotel. We ranted, we raved and we did yoga. I ate my sandwich for lunch. We weren't exactly relaxed, but it was great to see them. Tom came back from some museum excursions. We continued to rant and rave, but we also called everyone else we could think of.
Finally we left to get some dinner in the Tenderloin--Vietnamese. Yum! Then a brief stop at the Goodwill next door where I almost bought a Russian children's book with creepy illustrations but did not. Lisa got a very cool jacket, so the whole thing wasn't a waste of time. Tom had to head back home, but Lisa, Bill and I went in search of a bar. I vetoed the first one, which was too small and had no name. I liked it better than our second option, a Korean sports bar. If I were big or a man, I would have been all over it. But since I am neither, I was not. However, we did find a good medium. A very small Korean bar called "441 Cocktail Lounge." It was quiet and they had a pool table. Lisa ran back to the hotel and ended up meeting several people in the looby. Meanwhile, Bill and I played pool. Drinks were reasonable enough given that, well, even if it's the Tenderloin, it's still near MLA, and nothing is ever cheap near MLA.
After Bill and I played pool, then Lisa and I and Bill played pool, Bill played with some of the Spanish speaking guys at the bar. After two drinks, and with interviews tomorrow for some of us, we went home. We did not manage to meet Mr. Daniel Gutstein, but no doubt we will tomorrow.
There was a football game, so BART was full of drunk California Bears fans. We all survived, though.
Tomorrow is the big reading for out of town folks. We are also going out for Dim Sum.
I think someone should throw a party on Sunday or Monday night.
Yesterday
I ate the last of the eggs in the fridge before heading to meet Tom in the Mission and go to Tartine, where I ate bread pudding and he had a croque monsieur. Someone offered us drugs almost immediately after we got out of the BART, which made me happy--no one has tried to sell me drugs in years! Then we walked around and went in many used clothing and consignment stores and bookshops. We bought some dust masks to wear to the SPT Poetry Spectacular event. I saw the SF branch of Yoga Kula, the Anusara yoga studio that I'd love to be taking classes at--but I can't do everything in one trip. Then we walked up Mission for a while and parted ways near where all the streets bend and run northeast-southeast instead of north-south. Tom went to Haight street and I kept walking up Market street all the way to the Embarcadero, which took a long time. I bought an actual mask for the reading. I bargained it from 26 to 5. It is an ok mask--but no one seems to be able to explain this supposed "San Francisco tradition." My plan is now to wear two masks and excessive eye make up.
At the embaracdero, I bought several olives stuffed with various cheeses and nuts and a roll, then I made a sort of sandwich out of all that and ate it for lunch while staring at Treasure Island and the bay. After some writing and some down time, I met Dodie at the Samovar Tea Lounge where she treated me to some chai and some soup and some excellent conversation. I felt relaxed, nourished, and warm. There's more to be said about our conversation but it will have to be said later, since I really just writing notes now of the days, not detailed reflections.
After dinner, we went to Dodie and Kevin's apartment and hung out a bit. I petted Sylvia, who was very friendly and out and about. Quincy was hiding, but I did say hello and she seemed pretty content. As most of you know, I live with a parrot, but I grew up with cats, so I always enjoy the chance to be around them.
Kevin and Dodie kindly drove me to Sara's apartment. Tom had been to Amoeba Records and had had a beer somewhere (maybe Pop's?). Anyway, we met in front of Sara's apartment building and went in together. I always feel like readings in SF are so...private...probably because many of them are in people's private homes. But Sara's apartment is nice. It is circular, so the socializing doesn't stagnate, and people, well, circulate around quite well. I was glad to see Tyrone Williams again and hear him read, and I was glad to meet Julian T. Brolaski, whose work I find I like quite a bit--it was very aural and watery, with plenty of energetic torque. It wasn't floating off the page.
Sara was there, of course, since she was host, and so was David Brazil. I met them very briefly in LA, but it was good to talk to them when I was a bit more sober and not competing with the intense coolness of the Mandrake in Culver City and an overly briny dirty martini. Erika Statie was there, and I was very glad to see her again, and I also met Cynthia Sailers, though I'm afraid I must have been a bit of a dork when she told me that she is a therapist. I said, "Oh. Um. Now I am going to be careful about my metaphors and word choice. What do people usually say to you when you tell them that you are a therapist?" She said that they usually either want to tell her about their problems or tell her about their therapists. A bit like how people behave if you tell them you're an editor. They want to show you their work or they want to complain about their editors and publishers.
I also met several people in person that I'd only known virtually-- François Luong and Johannes Göransson. Joyelle McSweeny was there, too. I've meet her in person before, and it was good to meet her in person again. I also met Anne Lesley Selcer. Anne and François were kind enough to show me how to get back across the bay from Haight street, so we chatted the whole time. More about that conversation later, too, which was fascinating, mostly because we all share similar interests in procedural and conceptual art. Etc.
Ashby is vaguely sketchy, but not nearly as sketchy as some places I've lived. I felt comfortable walking home. The racoon made another apperance, as it probably will tonight. I was so happy an hyper last night that I stayed up late and had to write and drink mint tea to calm down.
Today
Today began more calmly with coffee and morning buns from the Berkeley Bowl. I also bought a role which I brought home and made into a sandwhich with some cheese and leftover grilled vegetable tapenade to pack for lunch. Eventually, I wandered over to Juliana's place to visit with her, Bill, Charles, and Sasha. Sasha was in good spirits, running around and playing--he seems like a happy little boy. Patrick Durgin was there, too, looking very hip and wearing and especially cool tie. I don't think I'd seen Patrick since MLA was in DC. A long time ago.
I had to run back to the house to get something, but we all ended up on the same train across the bay. The Hilton was full of MLAers looking professional, frantic, and desperate. I called Lisa and Bill Howe's room and hung out with them for a while in the hotel. We ranted, we raved and we did yoga. I ate my sandwich for lunch. We weren't exactly relaxed, but it was great to see them. Tom came back from some museum excursions. We continued to rant and rave, but we also called everyone else we could think of.
Finally we left to get some dinner in the Tenderloin--Vietnamese. Yum! Then a brief stop at the Goodwill next door where I almost bought a Russian children's book with creepy illustrations but did not. Lisa got a very cool jacket, so the whole thing wasn't a waste of time. Tom had to head back home, but Lisa, Bill and I went in search of a bar. I vetoed the first one, which was too small and had no name. I liked it better than our second option, a Korean sports bar. If I were big or a man, I would have been all over it. But since I am neither, I was not. However, we did find a good medium. A very small Korean bar called "441 Cocktail Lounge." It was quiet and they had a pool table. Lisa ran back to the hotel and ended up meeting several people in the looby. Meanwhile, Bill and I played pool. Drinks were reasonable enough given that, well, even if it's the Tenderloin, it's still near MLA, and nothing is ever cheap near MLA.
After Bill and I played pool, then Lisa and I and Bill played pool, Bill played with some of the Spanish speaking guys at the bar. After two drinks, and with interviews tomorrow for some of us, we went home. We did not manage to meet Mr. Daniel Gutstein, but no doubt we will tomorrow.
There was a football game, so BART was full of drunk California Bears fans. We all survived, though.
Tomorrow is the big reading for out of town folks. We are also going out for Dim Sum.
I think someone should throw a party on Sunday or Monday night.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
If I can't find a mask, maybe I can, I don't know, paint my face or just wear excessive eye make up.
I slept until 9:30. It was amazing. Once I settled down and checked the locks on all the doors, well, I won't say exactly how many times, but it was more than twice, I fell deeply asleep. Before I fell asleep I worked on my writing project that is loosely connected to this trip. Today I had some of the Christmas bread (like fruit cake, but nicer and less sweet) I brought with me for breakfast, spoke with people on the phone. The sun came out so I went for a walk up college and to the university and all around and around. I found a coffee shop and sat and wrote for nearly two hours. What resulted is the first draft of a story thing that is kind of ridiculous, but I think I like it. And anyway it doesn't matter if I like it or not. I just have to finish it.
Today certainly has been a strange day--first sleeping until I don't feel like sleeping anymore, then walking, lazing in a coffee shop, and writing energetically.
My original food plan for today was to find some ramen around the campus, but I ended up eating some really excellent shwarma with rice, salad and lentils at an Israeli restaurant before heading home. I just finished doing some yoga and I'm feeling mellow, rested, and excited.
Tomorrow, I'm going to head into Chinatown to try and find a (very inexpensive) mask for the SPD reading, and to look around the Embarcadero like I always do. At some point, I'll meet up with Tom and head down to the mission to see Julian T. Brolaski and Tyrone Williams read in the Earthworm Reading Series.
Today certainly has been a strange day--first sleeping until I don't feel like sleeping anymore, then walking, lazing in a coffee shop, and writing energetically.
My original food plan for today was to find some ramen around the campus, but I ended up eating some really excellent shwarma with rice, salad and lentils at an Israeli restaurant before heading home. I just finished doing some yoga and I'm feeling mellow, rested, and excited.
Tomorrow, I'm going to head into Chinatown to try and find a (very inexpensive) mask for the SPD reading, and to look around the Embarcadero like I always do. At some point, I'll meet up with Tom and head down to the mission to see Julian T. Brolaski and Tyrone Williams read in the Earthworm Reading Series.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
I'm watching the nutcracker on PBS
I arrived in Berkeley easily. I tried to go to the Berkeley Bowl to stock up on some food for this evening and tomorrow, but it had already closed by the time I got there. But there's a little Cameroonian restaurant around the corner, so I stopped in and got their vegetarian combo to go--rice, beans, okra, sweet potato, plantains, some kind of spinach dish, and then various sauces, including some very very spicy hot sauce. It was excellent, but they gave me so much I could barely eat a third of it, so I suspect I'll have the rest of it tomorrow.
Tomorrow I'm going to...I don't know. Probably do some yoga and read. Maybe go for a walk. Prepare to be social. Make a mask for the SPD/MLA reading.
Tomorrow I'm going to...I don't know. Probably do some yoga and read. Maybe go for a walk. Prepare to be social. Make a mask for the SPD/MLA reading.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
I'm off to SF tomorrow.
In between seeing friends and having various tasty things to eat, I'll be at these two events. I'm reading in the first event--and I'll keep to my two minute limit, I promise. In the meantime, I need to find a mask to wear. Something either very ornate and corny or very gruesome and corny.
SPD SF Poetry Spectacular
Sunday, Dec 28th at the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on 701 Mission Street between 3rd and 4th Streets in the San Francisco Poetry Spectacular, otherwise known as the MLA off-site reading. The event starts at 7:00 and will go until 10:00. The location is walking distance from the hotels. Attached are a map and poster for the event. Postcards with the map will be available at SPD booth #517. The list of readers is on our site http://www.spdbooks.org/root/pages/sfspectacular.asp.
In the spirit of San Francisco and for extra thrills, we ask that you wear a mask to the event. Of course, your own reading will be mask-optional.
We look forward to seeing & hearing you at the San Francisco Poetry Spectacular, sponsored by Small Press Distribution and the Poetry Foundation.
The Spectacular is free, ADA accessible, and open to the public. Please invite everyone!
~
Locals MLA Group Reading
For those of you San Francisco for the MLA, please come join us for this companion reading to the big MLA reading on the 28th, this one featuring over 30 Bay Area poets. The reading will start promptly at 7pm, at the nearby club Hotel Utah. Featuring: Melissa Benham, Alan Bernheimer, Brandon Brown, Xochi Candelaria, Norma Cole, Sarah Anne Cox, Del Ray Cross, Brent Cunningham, Donna de la Perrier, Steve Dickison, Stacy Doris, Steve Farmer, Gloria Frym, Susan Gevirtz, Javier Huerta, Scott Ignuito, Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson, Andrew Joron, David Lau, Joseph Lease, Dana Teen Lomax, Bill Luoma, Laura Moriarty, Stephen Ratcliffe, Barbara Jane Reyes, Cynthia Sailers, Leslie Scalapino, Lauren Shufran, giovanni singleton, Suzanne Stein, Chris Stroffolino, Stephen Vincent, Alli Warren, Chet Weiner, & more! hosted by David Buuck & Small Press Traffic.
Tues Dec 30, 7pm, $2
Hotel Utah
500 4th St. @ Bryant, SF
http://www.hotelutah.com/
SPD SF Poetry Spectacular
Sunday, Dec 28th at the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on 701 Mission Street between 3rd and 4th Streets in the San Francisco Poetry Spectacular, otherwise known as the MLA off-site reading. The event starts at 7:00 and will go until 10:00. The location is walking distance from the hotels. Attached are a map and poster for the event. Postcards with the map will be available at SPD booth #517. The list of readers is on our site http://www.spdbooks.org/root/pages/sfspectacular.asp.
In the spirit of San Francisco and for extra thrills, we ask that you wear a mask to the event. Of course, your own reading will be mask-optional.
We look forward to seeing & hearing you at the San Francisco Poetry Spectacular, sponsored by Small Press Distribution and the Poetry Foundation.
The Spectacular is free, ADA accessible, and open to the public. Please invite everyone!
~
Locals MLA Group Reading
For those of you San Francisco for the MLA, please come join us for this companion reading to the big MLA reading on the 28th, this one featuring over 30 Bay Area poets. The reading will start promptly at 7pm, at the nearby club Hotel Utah. Featuring: Melissa Benham, Alan Bernheimer, Brandon Brown, Xochi Candelaria, Norma Cole, Sarah Anne Cox, Del Ray Cross, Brent Cunningham, Donna de la Perrier, Steve Dickison, Stacy Doris, Steve Farmer, Gloria Frym, Susan Gevirtz, Javier Huerta, Scott Ignuito, Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson, Andrew Joron, David Lau, Joseph Lease, Dana Teen Lomax, Bill Luoma, Laura Moriarty, Stephen Ratcliffe, Barbara Jane Reyes, Cynthia Sailers, Leslie Scalapino, Lauren Shufran, giovanni singleton, Suzanne Stein, Chris Stroffolino, Stephen Vincent, Alli Warren, Chet Weiner, & more! hosted by David Buuck & Small Press Traffic.
Tues Dec 30, 7pm, $2
Hotel Utah
500 4th St. @ Bryant, SF
http://www.hotelutah.com/
But What Book Should I Take With Me?
I took Lester to the vet to be boarded this morning. He's boarded there plenty of times, but this was only the second time we'd made the trip via train and bicycle. He loves the train, and after about a minute of settling in on the bicycle, he seems to enjoy it--he sang most of the ride. There were two iguanas, two bunnies, one hamster, and five parrots (plus a lot of people) in the vet reception area, and Lester seemed to enjoy that, too. Everyone seemed nervous, and at one point there were two parrots flying around the room because they didn't want to step up onto the scale to be weighed. Lester, however, preened, ate some millet, and sang "Lester's a pretty bird" and "salt peanuts" over and over again, which got him a lot of attention. And, of course, he loves attention. When I'd finished putting all his favorite toys into his boarding cage, he willingly climbed off of my shoulder and got in. I'm glad that he's so well-adjusted and confident.
Today I need to:
1. Exercise
2. Clean
3. Pack
4. Print any remaining things for the trip
5. Go to Trader Joes to get something to eat tomorrow when I'm traveling
Today I need to:
1. Exercise
2. Clean
3. Pack
4. Print any remaining things for the trip
5. Go to Trader Joes to get something to eat tomorrow when I'm traveling
Saturday, December 20, 2008
SF countdown
I'm madly trying to finish all my work before I head off to the Bay Area for some quality time with friends, poetry, food, and plenty of MLA conference sadomasochism. I'm going to try and stay away from the actual conference and instead just go to the readings and other events in and around the conference. It's possible that one day I will have to attend and interview for a job at MLA, one day, but I'm in no rush. My work life is sustainable and tolerable, even in this economy.
But in between work this weekend, I've been doing plenty of yoga, dancing, and hooping. Tomorrow is the winter solstice here, but I've been thinking about my sisters in Adelaide, and how they're in the middle of the lightest time of year, not the darkest. Not that it's especially dark here in San Diego. Winter is my favorite time of year here. There's fewer tourists, and the weather is like the best kind of autumn day back east. This afternoon I saw migrating whales off shore at Swami's in Encinitas. I'd still trade all this beauty for a viable life in a city with a vibrant international art community, but I don't dislike my life here.
I arrived at Swami's late, so the class was more or less over, but Michelle and I played around for almost three hours. After the hoop jam, I watched the sunset (and the whales, dolphins, cormorants, and pelicans). There was an elderly couple hanging out with a very elderly woman in a wheelchair--either the woman or the man's mother. They kept joking with the woman in the wheelchair, asking her if she was warm enough, and telling her that eventually they would throw her into the water where she would be "nice and cool." This all seemed rather horrific and cruel, except that the very elderly woman/mother thought it was hilarious.
Tomorrow, more grading, web stuff, cleaning, yoga, and hooping.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Monday, December 15, 2008
Rain is good for San Diego
But not so good for hooping. The last time I tried to hoop inside, I nearly broke the lamp.
marriedtothesea.com
marriedtothesea.com
Friday, December 12, 2008
This week has been horrible
I love roasted cauliflower. It began with a cauliflower gratin several months ago. Then the roasted cauliflower soup on Thanksgiving. Now I want to make cauliflower everything--it's a winter vegetable, after all. I'm remembering, too, how much Indian food uses cauliflower, so tonight I'm making something vaguely Indian. It's a good excuse to use some of the mustard seeds I've been hoarding.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Reject me! Fund me! Accept me!
This is my statement of interest for UCSD. It's not the best thing that I've ever written, but it does a pretty good job of describing my current creative interests.
Over the past two years, my writing has become increasingly interdisciplinary, borrowing from and integrating a variety of different genres and forms. With my first book coming out in March and several completed poetry manuscripts cluttering my desk, I am in a transitional moment. I am applying to the MFA program at UCSD to develop my creative work in a stimulating, interdisciplinary environment, participate in an expanded community of peers, and work closely with writers and scholars I respect. The MFA program at UCSD is of particular interest to me because it is one of the few programs in the country supportive of innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to literary art. I am also excited by the trans-cultural nature of the program.
I grew up mostly overseas in China, Papua New Guinea, Chile, and Mexico, and when I wasn’t overseas I lived in rural Maine, where many of my friends lived on communal farms. As an undergraduate, I studied Chinese and East Asian history and politics at George Washington University because I wanted to continue to travel in Asia, and I thought I wanted to be a journalist. Really, it was a way of concealing my interest in writing and making it seem professional and practical. During college, I spent between six and ten hours each week in various Chinese classes, and the rest of my courses were devoted to history, politics, and economics. I worked for various non-profit organizations during the school year, and spent most of my summers either Beijing or Singapore working, variously, as an English teacher, translator for a petrochemical company, and web designer.
.
After I graduated, I got a job working in the East Asian department of a non-partisan but mostly democratic public policy organization focused on international security. I spent a lot of time researching and explaining various plans for missile defense systems and going to meetings at the Pentagon where I would talk to Department of Defense bureaucrats about why the People’s Republic of China felt insulted and threatened by US plans for missile defense systems. These meetings typically took place in windowless internal offices decorated with artsy pictures of mushroom clouds, and I was usually the only woman in the room.
When I finally did start going to poetry readings and learning about contemporary poetry in English, I was drawn to the politically and socially engaged poetics of Language poets as well as writers affiliated with the Kootenay School of Writing. However, I was especially drawn to writers engaging issues of translation and gender.
Yunte Huang’s first book, Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry, as well as his critical work on the “transpacific displacement” of cultural meanings through twentieth-century America's imaging of Asia, was pivotal to me. In particular, it helped me rethink the problems and pleasures of translation from Chinese to English. A Xu Bing exhibition at the Sackler Gallery in 2001 was also important to my critical thinking about translation—I love his scrolls printed with thousands of imitation Chinese characters.
One of the first larger projects I worked on after college was a procedural translation of several classical Chinese poems, which attempts to highlight—through form and process—my anxious relationship to the creation of a poetic text that can be read as a kind of ethnography that maintains linguistic and cultural boundaries, even as it tries to subvert them. The translations were procedural because, in addition to Yunte Huang and Xu Bing, I’d also been studying Jackson MacLow and John Cage. The final manuscript, Large Waves to Large Obstacles, is coming out as a chapbook from Take Home Project in 2009, with the original Chinese on one side and my procedural translation on the other.
While I was busy investigating translation and conceptual art, I was simultaneously reading a lot of Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, and Kathy Acker. All of these writers challenged me to rethink the relationships between form, subjectivity, and materiality. These are the main concerns in my book, Terminal Humming, forthcoming from Edge Books in 2009.
While working on my MA in literature at Georgetown University, I continued to think about these concerns, but became particularly obsessed with the role of pain in the construction of subjectivity, and how the experience/articulation of suffering through sexual and romantic relationships comes to bear on representation and identification. I read Mayer and Acker within a continuum of writers who examine sexual relationships through experimental lyric and narrative forms as a way of highlighting material concerns, critiquing cultural representation, and renegotiating subjectivity. Working through the subject-subject oriented psychoanalytic theories of Jessica Benjamin and Elaine Scarry’s investigations into the experience of pain, My MA thesis brought these critical concerns to bear on Mina "Loy’s Songs to Joannes" and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood.
In retrospect, I see how my theoretical interests at Georgetown were an extension of the concerns in Terminal Humming. The poems in Terminal Humming oscillate between an insular rhetoric of lyric desire in stanzas and social rhetorics of love and sex, always in some combination of prose, stanzas, procedural pieces, and breath-based space on the page, with bits of narrative only occasionally appearing. My work has always been interdisciplinary, but recently I’ve been exploring and integrating new forms into my work. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the use of visual non-linguistic materials, narrative, and movement/gesture.
My first teaching job was at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, where many of my students were already accomplished visual artists. Teaching at an art school helped me see poetry as part of larger, more complicated, cultural, historical and multi-disciplinary frameworks. One of my students described drawing as “just making shapes that resemble real shapes.” I started drawing and making visual poems because I thought it would be interesting to attempt something I have no talent for and because I was looking for a way to critically and creatively respond to all the poetry readings I was attending. So, I started doodling during readings, and those were my first visual poems. At this point I have more than a hundred reading responses; if I could get away with it I’d publish them as a book of essays. A complete list of influences for my doodles would very long, but it includes Övind Fahlström, Louise Bourgeois, and bpNichol.
Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles are central to my understanding of narrative, but my more recent interest was prompted through exposure to various contemporary experimental fiction writers and through an ongoing exploration of New Narrative, which has only increased since I moved to California. In particular, I’ve been considering how New Narrative and Language poetry mutually inform each other’s concerns with narrative, gender, and identity. Several conversations with Kaplan Harris, as well as his recent scholarship on this subject, have deeply informed my thinking. Narrative strikes me not as incapable of mounting a materialist critique of language, but rather capable in a way different than poetry. In addition to New Narrative writers such as Robert Glück, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, and Camille Roy, I’m interested in works like Lyn Hejinian and Carla Harryman’s “The Wide Road,” The Transformation, by Juliana Spahr, Selah Saterstrom’s The Pink Institution, Stephanie Young’s most recent book, Picture Palace, and almost everything recently published by Les Figues Press.
All of my work plays with an intense and even exaggerated exploration of life as a female body but also a rejection of that materiality (if that’s even possible). Before I became interested in incorporating gestural elements and movement into my work, I was drawn to writing grounded in voice—an actual, physical voice that forms the base of a line. So, that means I was reading a lot of Bernadette Mayer, whom I’ve already mentioned, and also Joanne Kyger and Eileen Myles. It wasn’t much of an intuitive leap for me to move from voice to movement. Speaking is physical.
With physical movement in mind, I’ve been studying the work of choreographers like Pina Bauch and Martha Graham, whose work emphasized emotion, spontaneity, the erotic, and an exploration of Jungian psychology. Modern dance is dominated by women and often grew out of a desire to thwart cultural control over female bodies—think of Isadora Duncan dancing uncorseted in a white tunic, for example, or Graham’s Greek mythological heroines. Theoretically, I’m opposed to Jungian psychology, and I remain postmodernly obsessed with the fact that our emotions and behavior are socially conditioned. There’s never a moment when we’re free from social constructions. Instead, we participate in and are constrained by an endless dialogue with them. However, I am interested in how stereotypes and mythologies about femininity and female bodies have been used by Feminist artists, and modern dance is a good place to explore that.
Tina Darragh’s work has become increasingly important to me as I consider these feminine stereotypes. Darragh’s work investigates such stereotypes in a hybrid, interdisciplinary way and demonstrates how materialist critique, Feminism, non-linguistic elements, and performance can successfully exist together—albeit with plenty of tension—in a text. Darragh is a poet I know from Washington, DC often associated with Language poetry. In 1999 she started working on a project that eventually became opposable dumbs, a multigenre piece that combines reportage, theater, letters of protest, visual pieces, and notes that examine and think about pain, hysteria, animal subjectivity, economics, labor unions, and Feminism. Even after years of hearing her perform different parts of this piece and now reading the 2007 “project report” I have trouble summarizing it. Her work has many possible sources that connect and expand into other possible sources. It’s investigative and process-oriented, but the process and investigation are always shifting.
In addition to modern dance choreographers and Tina Darragh, I am inspired by my peers and slightly older contemporaries, many of whom have been incorporating gestural elements and movement into their work—and here I am thinking especially of Laura Elrick and Rodrigo Toscano. Elrick’s recent performance pieces stem from, as she noted in her statement for the Positions Conference in Vancouver, August 2008, “a desire to elaborate a social poetics that does not rely exclusively on language operations to enact and continually ‘post’ its resistance to the hegemony.” I’m equally intrigued by Toscano’s idea of a performance text being, as he noted in his statement for the Positions Conference, “a semi-contained social-psychological crisis, a formalization of an incipient collective consciousness from the vantage point of the collapse of a previous collective consciousness.” At recent readings, I’ve been looking to their work as well as drawing on my own background in modern dance to incorporate movement and polyvocality into my performances. Quite frankly, I’m not sure how it’s working. Thus far, I’ve created musical and sound texts to accompany myself while reading, and I’ve performed both choreographed and improvised movement. Performing my poems while upside down in a handstand gives the performance a strange combination of camp and discomfort.
I want my poems and performances to highlight risk and vulnerability—aesthetically, politically, psychologically—and I want them to be a bit out of control. Extending poetic praxis into multigenre and non-linguistic forms feels risky and necessary. It’s also fun. As with any innovative art, there is always a danger that the reader/viewer will not be able to or not want to make the intuitive leaps offered, but playing with that danger is, to me, the point.
My creative interests are interdisciplinary and well suited to the resources of the MFA program at UCSD. The creative and critical work of Rae Armantrout, Eileen Myles and Michael Davidson is of immense interest to me given my work in avant-garde poetry and gender, and I am certain I would like to work with them. Anna Joy Springer’s own innovative fiction and interest in Kathy Acker and intermedia is also relevant to my own concerns, as is Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s work in innovative and speculative fiction. Moreover, Wai-lim Yip’s work in comparative poetics, modernism, and translation theory is also very relevant to my interests, and I would hope to study with him. Finally, the Archive for New Poetry is a major resource that I would be very glad to have regular have access to.
As I mentioned above, I can think of few MFA programs that could support the cultural, linguistic, aesthetic and theoretical concerns of my various creative projects. The interdisciplinary MFA program at UCSD has expertise in contemporary experimental poetry and fiction, feminism, and comparative modernism, and I would be excited to pursue my studies there.
Over the past two years, my writing has become increasingly interdisciplinary, borrowing from and integrating a variety of different genres and forms. With my first book coming out in March and several completed poetry manuscripts cluttering my desk, I am in a transitional moment. I am applying to the MFA program at UCSD to develop my creative work in a stimulating, interdisciplinary environment, participate in an expanded community of peers, and work closely with writers and scholars I respect. The MFA program at UCSD is of particular interest to me because it is one of the few programs in the country supportive of innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to literary art. I am also excited by the trans-cultural nature of the program.
I grew up mostly overseas in China, Papua New Guinea, Chile, and Mexico, and when I wasn’t overseas I lived in rural Maine, where many of my friends lived on communal farms. As an undergraduate, I studied Chinese and East Asian history and politics at George Washington University because I wanted to continue to travel in Asia, and I thought I wanted to be a journalist. Really, it was a way of concealing my interest in writing and making it seem professional and practical. During college, I spent between six and ten hours each week in various Chinese classes, and the rest of my courses were devoted to history, politics, and economics. I worked for various non-profit organizations during the school year, and spent most of my summers either Beijing or Singapore working, variously, as an English teacher, translator for a petrochemical company, and web designer.
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After I graduated, I got a job working in the East Asian department of a non-partisan but mostly democratic public policy organization focused on international security. I spent a lot of time researching and explaining various plans for missile defense systems and going to meetings at the Pentagon where I would talk to Department of Defense bureaucrats about why the People’s Republic of China felt insulted and threatened by US plans for missile defense systems. These meetings typically took place in windowless internal offices decorated with artsy pictures of mushroom clouds, and I was usually the only woman in the room.
When I finally did start going to poetry readings and learning about contemporary poetry in English, I was drawn to the politically and socially engaged poetics of Language poets as well as writers affiliated with the Kootenay School of Writing. However, I was especially drawn to writers engaging issues of translation and gender.
Yunte Huang’s first book, Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry, as well as his critical work on the “transpacific displacement” of cultural meanings through twentieth-century America's imaging of Asia, was pivotal to me. In particular, it helped me rethink the problems and pleasures of translation from Chinese to English. A Xu Bing exhibition at the Sackler Gallery in 2001 was also important to my critical thinking about translation—I love his scrolls printed with thousands of imitation Chinese characters.
One of the first larger projects I worked on after college was a procedural translation of several classical Chinese poems, which attempts to highlight—through form and process—my anxious relationship to the creation of a poetic text that can be read as a kind of ethnography that maintains linguistic and cultural boundaries, even as it tries to subvert them. The translations were procedural because, in addition to Yunte Huang and Xu Bing, I’d also been studying Jackson MacLow and John Cage. The final manuscript, Large Waves to Large Obstacles, is coming out as a chapbook from Take Home Project in 2009, with the original Chinese on one side and my procedural translation on the other.
While I was busy investigating translation and conceptual art, I was simultaneously reading a lot of Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, and Kathy Acker. All of these writers challenged me to rethink the relationships between form, subjectivity, and materiality. These are the main concerns in my book, Terminal Humming, forthcoming from Edge Books in 2009.
While working on my MA in literature at Georgetown University, I continued to think about these concerns, but became particularly obsessed with the role of pain in the construction of subjectivity, and how the experience/articulation of suffering through sexual and romantic relationships comes to bear on representation and identification. I read Mayer and Acker within a continuum of writers who examine sexual relationships through experimental lyric and narrative forms as a way of highlighting material concerns, critiquing cultural representation, and renegotiating subjectivity. Working through the subject-subject oriented psychoanalytic theories of Jessica Benjamin and Elaine Scarry’s investigations into the experience of pain, My MA thesis brought these critical concerns to bear on Mina "Loy’s Songs to Joannes" and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood.
In retrospect, I see how my theoretical interests at Georgetown were an extension of the concerns in Terminal Humming. The poems in Terminal Humming oscillate between an insular rhetoric of lyric desire in stanzas and social rhetorics of love and sex, always in some combination of prose, stanzas, procedural pieces, and breath-based space on the page, with bits of narrative only occasionally appearing. My work has always been interdisciplinary, but recently I’ve been exploring and integrating new forms into my work. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the use of visual non-linguistic materials, narrative, and movement/gesture.
My first teaching job was at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, where many of my students were already accomplished visual artists. Teaching at an art school helped me see poetry as part of larger, more complicated, cultural, historical and multi-disciplinary frameworks. One of my students described drawing as “just making shapes that resemble real shapes.” I started drawing and making visual poems because I thought it would be interesting to attempt something I have no talent for and because I was looking for a way to critically and creatively respond to all the poetry readings I was attending. So, I started doodling during readings, and those were my first visual poems. At this point I have more than a hundred reading responses; if I could get away with it I’d publish them as a book of essays. A complete list of influences for my doodles would very long, but it includes Övind Fahlström, Louise Bourgeois, and bpNichol.
Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles are central to my understanding of narrative, but my more recent interest was prompted through exposure to various contemporary experimental fiction writers and through an ongoing exploration of New Narrative, which has only increased since I moved to California. In particular, I’ve been considering how New Narrative and Language poetry mutually inform each other’s concerns with narrative, gender, and identity. Several conversations with Kaplan Harris, as well as his recent scholarship on this subject, have deeply informed my thinking. Narrative strikes me not as incapable of mounting a materialist critique of language, but rather capable in a way different than poetry. In addition to New Narrative writers such as Robert Glück, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, and Camille Roy, I’m interested in works like Lyn Hejinian and Carla Harryman’s “The Wide Road,” The Transformation, by Juliana Spahr, Selah Saterstrom’s The Pink Institution, Stephanie Young’s most recent book, Picture Palace, and almost everything recently published by Les Figues Press.
All of my work plays with an intense and even exaggerated exploration of life as a female body but also a rejection of that materiality (if that’s even possible). Before I became interested in incorporating gestural elements and movement into my work, I was drawn to writing grounded in voice—an actual, physical voice that forms the base of a line. So, that means I was reading a lot of Bernadette Mayer, whom I’ve already mentioned, and also Joanne Kyger and Eileen Myles. It wasn’t much of an intuitive leap for me to move from voice to movement. Speaking is physical.
With physical movement in mind, I’ve been studying the work of choreographers like Pina Bauch and Martha Graham, whose work emphasized emotion, spontaneity, the erotic, and an exploration of Jungian psychology. Modern dance is dominated by women and often grew out of a desire to thwart cultural control over female bodies—think of Isadora Duncan dancing uncorseted in a white tunic, for example, or Graham’s Greek mythological heroines. Theoretically, I’m opposed to Jungian psychology, and I remain postmodernly obsessed with the fact that our emotions and behavior are socially conditioned. There’s never a moment when we’re free from social constructions. Instead, we participate in and are constrained by an endless dialogue with them. However, I am interested in how stereotypes and mythologies about femininity and female bodies have been used by Feminist artists, and modern dance is a good place to explore that.
Tina Darragh’s work has become increasingly important to me as I consider these feminine stereotypes. Darragh’s work investigates such stereotypes in a hybrid, interdisciplinary way and demonstrates how materialist critique, Feminism, non-linguistic elements, and performance can successfully exist together—albeit with plenty of tension—in a text. Darragh is a poet I know from Washington, DC often associated with Language poetry. In 1999 she started working on a project that eventually became opposable dumbs, a multigenre piece that combines reportage, theater, letters of protest, visual pieces, and notes that examine and think about pain, hysteria, animal subjectivity, economics, labor unions, and Feminism. Even after years of hearing her perform different parts of this piece and now reading the 2007 “project report” I have trouble summarizing it. Her work has many possible sources that connect and expand into other possible sources. It’s investigative and process-oriented, but the process and investigation are always shifting.
In addition to modern dance choreographers and Tina Darragh, I am inspired by my peers and slightly older contemporaries, many of whom have been incorporating gestural elements and movement into their work—and here I am thinking especially of Laura Elrick and Rodrigo Toscano. Elrick’s recent performance pieces stem from, as she noted in her statement for the Positions Conference in Vancouver, August 2008, “a desire to elaborate a social poetics that does not rely exclusively on language operations to enact and continually ‘post’ its resistance to the hegemony.” I’m equally intrigued by Toscano’s idea of a performance text being, as he noted in his statement for the Positions Conference, “a semi-contained social-psychological crisis, a formalization of an incipient collective consciousness from the vantage point of the collapse of a previous collective consciousness.” At recent readings, I’ve been looking to their work as well as drawing on my own background in modern dance to incorporate movement and polyvocality into my performances. Quite frankly, I’m not sure how it’s working. Thus far, I’ve created musical and sound texts to accompany myself while reading, and I’ve performed both choreographed and improvised movement. Performing my poems while upside down in a handstand gives the performance a strange combination of camp and discomfort.
I want my poems and performances to highlight risk and vulnerability—aesthetically, politically, psychologically—and I want them to be a bit out of control. Extending poetic praxis into multigenre and non-linguistic forms feels risky and necessary. It’s also fun. As with any innovative art, there is always a danger that the reader/viewer will not be able to or not want to make the intuitive leaps offered, but playing with that danger is, to me, the point.
My creative interests are interdisciplinary and well suited to the resources of the MFA program at UCSD. The creative and critical work of Rae Armantrout, Eileen Myles and Michael Davidson is of immense interest to me given my work in avant-garde poetry and gender, and I am certain I would like to work with them. Anna Joy Springer’s own innovative fiction and interest in Kathy Acker and intermedia is also relevant to my own concerns, as is Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s work in innovative and speculative fiction. Moreover, Wai-lim Yip’s work in comparative poetics, modernism, and translation theory is also very relevant to my interests, and I would hope to study with him. Finally, the Archive for New Poetry is a major resource that I would be very glad to have regular have access to.
As I mentioned above, I can think of few MFA programs that could support the cultural, linguistic, aesthetic and theoretical concerns of my various creative projects. The interdisciplinary MFA program at UCSD has expertise in contemporary experimental poetry and fiction, feminism, and comparative modernism, and I would be excited to pursue my studies there.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Cool White Girls
I'm taking a very brief break from alienation to write about cool white girls, er, I mean, women. I used to wonder if such a thing were possible.
Ever since Mark and I bought the Anita O'Day Mosaic box set, however, I've been hopeful about the possibility of cool white girls in the world. Anita O'Day is cool, especially when she sings "Let's Begin" but even when she's singing a song as ridiculous as "Harriet":
"all the cow hands wanna marry Harriet / Harriet's handy with a lariat / but she don't wanna marry it / she's having too much fun..." etc
When I talk about "cool," I don't mean interesting, Feminist, laudable, amazing, talented, original or inspiring--a lot of white girls are all those things and more, and sometimes cool white girls are also all those things. If you're cool, you're not easily upset, and problems slide off you--you're controlled, stable, and composed. Like Anita O'Day, you can live well into your 80s even though you did heroin for years while still recording and touring. I certainly am not a cool white girl, although I am fabulous--I am hyper, easily baited, and have terrible hangovers.
Anita O'Day is at the top of my cool white girl list. However, she shares the top with Mae West and Jean Rhys. After that though, the list becomes more difficult. Mina Loy, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Jane Bowles, you'll notice, are not on it--and they are some of my favorite white girls in the entire word. But they're not cool. Jane Bowles drank herself to death.
Here's my list--feel free to add to it and debate it:
Anita O'Day
Mae West
Jean Rhys
Wanda Jackson
Dusty Springfield
Mata Hari
Colette
Chrissie Hynde
Debbie Harry
Kim Novak
Simone de Beauvoir
Marlene Dietrich
Barbara Stanwyck
June Christy
Chris Connor
Emmylou Harris
Melba Montgomery
PJ Harvey
Bernadette Mayer
Lee Ann Brown
Eileen Myles
Kate Chopin
Ida Lupino
Bonnie Parker
Possibilities:
Djuna Barnes
Marie Curie
Jane Goodall
Lucile Ball
Carol Burnett
Eleanor Roosevelt
Mimi Eisenhower
Patsy Cline
Sorry, still alienated
And, like most of the people I've communicated with recently, overburdened with work. In my case though, the work isn't so bad, but there's a lot of it: 5 hours a day of teaching + several design contracts + MFA statement of interest. The design projects are fun, and I'll actually been playing with creating some nifty typeface effects, which means that the end result of both projects will, I hope, be some of the best work I've done yet.
I'll post my statement of interest after I send it off tomorrow. Only a deadline will prevent me from noodling with it further.
xo
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